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Impact of a Shade Coffee Certification Program on Forest Conservation:A Case Study from a Wild Coffee Forest in Ethiopia
Get PDFIn recent years, shade coffee certification programs have attracted increased attention from conservation and development organizations. The certification programs offer an opportunity to link environmental and economic goals by providing a premium price to producers and thereby contribute to forest conservation. However, the significance of the certification program’s conservation efforts is still unclear because of the lack of empirical evidence. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the shade coffee certification program on forest conservation. The study was carried out at the Belete-Gera Regional Forest Priority Area in Ethiopia, and remote sensing data from 2005 and 2010 was used to gauge the change of the forest area. Employing the propensity score matching estimation, we found that forests under the coffee certification were less likely to be deforested than forests without forest coffee. By contrast, the difference in the degree of deforestation between forests with forest coffee but not under the certification program and forests with no forest coffee is statistically insignificant. These results suggest that the certification program had a large impact on forest protection, decreasing the probability of deforestation by 1.7 percentage points.research repor
A Tale of Two Crises: Indonesia’s Political Economy
Get PDFThe global financial crisis caused major economic problems in many countries. Indonesia was obviously affected by this crisis; its export growth declined significantly. Nevertheless, the impact of the crisis on the Indonesian economy was relatively limited compared to other countries in the region, including Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. This situation leads to the question of why was the impact of the global crisis on the Indonesian economy relatively limited? This was, after all, not the first time that Indonesia had experienced a financial crisis. In 1998, the Asian financial crisis had a very bad effect on Indonesia. An interesting question to ask is why the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis, which in terms of magnitude was much larger than the 1998 crisis, were relatively limited? This paper argues there are, at least, four differences between the 1998 crisis and the 2008 crisis: the origin of the crisis, the exchange rate regime, policy responses and the overall political economy situation. In addition, this paper argues that the structure of trade played an important role in the 2008 crisis. Indonesia survived the global financial crisis thanks to two factors: good policy and good luck. While highlighting these factors, this paper focuses primarily on the role of Indonesia’s domestic political economy during these two crises. Lest it leaves an unduly optimistic picture of Indonesia’s economic future, the paper closes with an assessment of several major hurdles that Indonesia must deal with in the coming years.research repor
Working for Human Security:JICA’s Experience
Get PDFThis paper reviews the experiences of the government of Japan to incorporate the human security concept as one of basic principles of its ODA policy, and JICA’s activities to operationalize the human security principle. It then examines the challenges and problems JICA has faced in its human-security-oriented field operations. More specifically, it analyzes four cases – Myanmar, the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Sudan – by focusing on the two major challenges: (1) possible contradictions between state security and human security, and (2) special difficulties in the pursuit of comprehensive empowerment to cope with downside risks. On the first point, JICA has tried to persuade the reluctant governments to accept human-security-oriented activities as measures that can eventually contribute to strengthening state security. To cope with down side risks, JICA has supported comprehensive empowerment of individuals, communities, and public organizations to enhance their preparedness against various risks, but there still remains a challenge because comprehensive empowerment is a formidable task that requires cooperative efforts by many actors. To do so, shaping a common understanding of the human security agenda will be necessary.research repor
INDUSTRIAL AND TRADE POLICIES IN AFRICA: From unproductive rents to learning and accumulation
Get PDFThe resumption of growth in Sub-Saharan Africa though impressive has yet to translate into the economic transformation that provides the basis for sustained, rapid growth. The shares of manufacturing and formal sector employment have still not recovered to 1980 levels. Governance concerns have unduly inhibited emulation of successful trade and related policies that have worked elsewhere and can work in Africa. Many of the liberalization policies not so much reduce rents and corruption as divert them into unproductive activities and capital flight. Africa can choose selectively from lessons of successes and failures in trade and industrialization policies, including in institution building. A carefully crafted system of protection can help to divert rents to productive activities and learning that are the basis for sustained growth. The neglect of the need for appropriate protection and finance needs to be rectified.departmental bulletin pape
Measurements and Determinants of Multifaceted Poverty:Absolute, Relative, and Subjective Poverty in Indonesia
Get PDFThe notion of ‘poverty’ is diversified and dynamic. It varies across countries with different socio-economic norms. It may also change over time even in the same society, with different stages of social and economic development. A country may be struggling with absolute poverty at the early stages of development, while it may well be more concerned with relative and/or subjective poverty as its average per-capita income increases. This article intends to conduct an exploration of multiple poverty measures by looking into the absolute, relative and subjective poverty incidence in Indonesia. Using the 2005 National Socio-Economic Survey (Susenas), we observed that there was a roughly 28 percentage-point difference in the poverty headcount ratios computed by applying absolute (14.47%) and subjective (42.03%) poverty. There were virtually no correlations among the poverty rankings in the provinces of Indonesia obtained by five poverty metrics. Results of logit model and ordered logit model estimations of the possible determinants of poverty indicate that the main determinants of poverty are educational attainment, number of household members, physical assets (land and house ownership), existence of migrant workers (possible remittances), negative shocks of layoffs and/or health problems, development of public services, and the availability of road infrastructure. A higher educational attainment increases the probability of never being poor in any of the five poverty metrics by almost 11 percentage points. This study also confirmed that households having less than society’s averages in terms of the physical asset of land and consumption of durable goods and fashion tended to subjectively asses themselves as poor. The study suggests that any poverty alleviation programs should consider relative impacts among beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries within each locality and across provinces.research repor
Tackling Global Challenges Through Triangular Cooperation: Achieving Sustainable Development and Eradicating Poverty Through the Green Economy
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GROWTH STRATEGIES FOR AFRICA IN A CHANGING GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT: Policy observations for sustainable and shared growth
Get PDFFollowing decolonization, growth accelerated in the leading African economies with the emergence of industrial activity, the modernization of physical infrastructure, and the quickening of urbanization. However, by the mid-1970s this initial phase of catching up had run out of steam, and African countries entered a long economic twilight that extended through the mid-1990s. Since then, and for over a decade, Africa, has benefitted from a widely shared revival of economic activity. Some reasons for this revival are shared worldwide, including globalization, innovations triggered by the advent of the Internet and advances in semiconductor/digital technologies, expansionary monetary policies, and by the growth of Asian countries that accelerated industrialization and trade volume. Other causes are internal to Africa, such as greater stability, better-managed macroeconomic policy, more open economies, and improved human development indicators. But this new-found momentum cannot be taken for granted. In particular, the financial crisis of 2008–09 has weakened Africa’s principal Western trading partners. Export-led growth is no longer the recipe for all seasons. This paper sketches a strategy for African late starters that identifies the key objectives and policy initiatives appropriate for a post-financial-crisis environment where South-South trade and capital flows are taking on a greater salience.departmental bulletin pape
Institutional Development of Cross-Border Higher Education:The Case of an Evolving Malaysia-Japan Project
Get PDFThis paper examines institutional governance for a cross-border higher education program, focusing on the effects of introducing a new form of program. The paper analyzes the case of the Higher Education Loan Fund Project between Malaysia and Japan, in which the form of cross-border higher education has evolved from student mobility to program mobility through a twinning arrangement. Although academic staff sent from Japanese universities continued to play important roles and be involved in decision-making, the partner institution in Malaysia began to replace some of them with Malaysian teaching staff, had their initial part of the twinning program accredited as a diploma course, and used this experience to develop a fresh diploma course for engineering. Japanese universities successfully responded to the evolution of the project by adapting the existing curriculum, transferring credits and students, and developing new systems of staff training and quality assurance. By creating a consortium which has gradually become more formalized, the Japanese universities followed common procedures for placement and student support, thus reducing transaction costs. Certain universities have developed new cross-border programs by themselves. A program mobility model of cross-bordering is strengthening the governance and capacity of participating higher education institutions, but the sustainability of the program will depend on the commitment of the institutions and continued financial support by governments.research repor
China and the Two Crises: From 1997 to 2009
Get PDFChina appears to have successfully weathered the worst impact of both the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-98) and the Global Financial Crisis (2008-2009). Chinese leaders did respond quickly, and on occasion massively, to the challenge of external crisis. In retrospect, however, each crisis response can be seen to have involved an element of over-shooting, which was followed by domestic reformulation and retrenchment. This paper will track commonalities and differences of the two crises in three dimensions: immediate macroeconomic crisis response; institutional adaptations; and trade and exchange rate policies. The discussion will clarify that the very “success” of the response to the AFC laid the foundation for deeper economic problems relating to the GFC. In turn, the response to the GFC gave government officials and state-owned enterprises control over an even larger volume of resources, and reduced the accountability of both officials and financial institutions, changes that inevitably have softened budget constraints, reduced individual risk, and encouraged even larger investments. In consequence, the Chinese economy now faces accumulating problems from the maladaptation of domestic institutions, a maladaptation that is not unrelated to the crisis response.research repor