Library: Economics

In the last two decades, a concern on how federal forests in the United States are managed has provoked concerns among different stakeholders, including NGOs. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of NGO influence on forest management legislation. Eight aspects were selected and compared in different study cases referring to legislative proposals dealing with forest management in order to define success criteria for a legislative initiative. The study indicates that the following criteria are particularly important to fulfill in order to influence forest management l...

This study attempts to examine the impact of a trade decontrol policy on food output within the Nigerian macroeconomic context. In other words, the study relates trade liberalization to the national food security situation between 1970 and 2000, by employing descriptive statistics and error correction model (ECM) as the research methodologies. Regional and multilateral trade agreements seem to reduce barriers to the flow of commodities across borders, thus fostering a more efficient allocation of scarce resources as well as raising gross output with positive implications for food security at ...

This dissertation will discuss the uncertainty encountered in the daily operations of businesses. The concepts will be developed by first giving an overview of probability and statistics as used in our everyday activities, such as the basic principles of probability, univariate and multivariate statistics, data clustering and mapping, as well as time sequence and spectral analysis. The examples used will be from the oil and gas exploration industry because the risks taken in this industry are normally quite large and are ideal for showing the application of the various techniques for minimizi...

The Committee on Financial System (CFS), popularly known as Narasimham Committee, was set up in 1991 to make recommendations for bringing about the necessary reforms in the financial sector. Narasimham Committee appraised and acknowledged the success and progress of Indian banks since the major banks were nationalized on 19 July 1969. Unfortunately, the developments were witnessed only in the field of expansion and spread of bank branches, generation of huge employment and mobilization of savings rather than also in improvement in efficiency. Besides, corruption, fraud, misutilization in publi...

A significant volume of literature has been developed that seeks to provide an explanation for the growth of FDI and its impact on less developed countries. The literature is characterized by diversity and controversy. Based on it, a range of reasons for encouraging investment have been proposed including its favorable effects on employment levels, the balance of payments and balance of trade of the host country and also the potential for acquisition of technology and skills (Cave: 1982 and Dunning: 1993). Equally, the potentially negative effects of growing levels of foreign investment on dom...

This paper deploys a risk-based approach to analyse the development of the government bond market in Mexico. This paper determines that the development of a market for local-currency government bonds has allowed the Mexican government to significantly enhance its debt profile by reducing and rebalancing the risk factors that contributed to previous crises, containing the possibility of future crises and slashing its debt costs. While this process of bond market development requires the government to develop the institutions that support the market, other factors such as the size of the economy...

In as much as trade fosters economic development, it also exacerbates poverty, especially in the sub Saharan African (SSA) countries. Against this backdrop, this study will increase our understanding of the estimation of non-oil commodity trade flows between Nigeria and the U.S. More specifically, the study aims to analysing the impact of African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) on the U.S. imports of non-oil products from Nigeria. The research objectives are woven around the following questions: - What is the nature of Nigeria's and the U.S.'s foreign trade policies with particular reference to...

In economic experiments decisions often differ from game-theoretic predictions. Why are people generous in one-shot ultimatum games with strangers? Is there a benefit to generosity toward strangers? Research on the neural substrates of decisions suggests that some choices are hormone-dependent. By artificially stimulating subjects with neuroactive hormones, we can identify which hormones and brain regions participate in decision-making, to what degree and in what direction. Can a hormone make a person generous while another stingy? In this paper, two laboratory experiments are described using ...

In the field of antitrust, the freedoms to contract and compete can and do contradict. Profit-maximizing companies desire perfectly competitive input markets to minimize their costs, but want monopolistic markets for their outputs to maximize their profits. Consequently, they have strong incentives to undermine competition in their output markets. In a world without antitrust laws, many companies would thus eliminate competition by using their freedom to contract, either by entering into legally enforceable agreements which fix prices or divide up markets, or by merging and acquiring rivals to...

The book aims to quantify and analyze how two water scarce but ideologically different Middle Eastern political economies, Saudi Arabia and Syria, addressed water sector investment between 1980 and 2000. The study examines how narrow-coalitions of decision-makers obsessed by impossible-to-achieve food self-sufficiency goals, lacking environmental consideration and safe political processes contributed to massively waste scarce resources and unsustainable water policies. The book shows that of Saudi Arabia’s US$1,034 billion in oil revenues (1974-2001), 48% was spent on security, plus 10% on th...