The purpose of the study was to develop guidelines and specific recommendations for financing construction of primary school facilities in the Republic of Kenya. Due to implementation of universal primary school education in Kenya, there was need to accelerate construction of primary school facilities. Based on resources and procedures utilized for raising money for financing school construction, it was determined there would not be enough funds available to meet the increasing demand for primary school facilities.To develop guidelines and recommendations, two instruments in the form of questionnaires were designed and sent to selected District Commissioners and Headmasters involved in construction of primary school facilities in Kenya. The responses recorded on the questionnaires returned to the United States were analyzed.Another source of information were the Annual Reports from District Education Officers compiled by the Ministry of Education in Kenya. Three volumes of the Annual Reports were mailed to the United States and were analyzed.In the review of related literature, the methods and procedures for financing public school facilities in eleven countries across the continents of Africa, Asia, North and South America were analyzed.The major findings of the study were:1. Seventy-four per cent of the families with children en rolled in primary schools paid the cost of the construction of primary schools.2. Eighty-four per: cent of the Headmasters reported children of primary school age were not in school because parents were unable to pay fees.3. Forty-eight per cent of the Headmasters reported that all school age children in the district could not be in existing school facilities.4. Finance, labor, and transportation were listed as major problems encountered in the construction of primary school buildings.5. Headmasters in 10 of the 19 primary schools suggested taxation as a means for securing additional revenue for the construction of primary school buildings.6. Fifty-nine per cent of the District Education Officers in 1970; 83 per cent of the District Education Officers in 1971; and, 66 per cent of the District Education officers in 1972 reported school buildings and classrooms were inadequate.7. The national government of each of the 5 African countries was listed as a source of financing school construction.8. State or provincial governments provided some form of financial aid for school construction in the United States, the Republic of China, and Mexico.9. National governments provided for school construction in Egypt and Israel.10. The national government of New Zealand paid the total cost of school construction in local districts.11. Ninety-eight per cent of school building construction in the United States has been financed by the taxation of property in the local school district.12. The issuance of bonds, by local school districts for school construction in the United States, has been universal in 49 of the 50 states.The major conclusions were:1. Universal primary education has been accepted as a goal to be achieved in many of the developing nations of the world.2. It is essential that the national legislative body pass appropriate measures or laws which commit the nation and its resources to achieving universal primary education.3. Sufficient money must be appropriated by the national government to provide substantial assistance to local school communities in need of new primary school facilities.4. An equitable taxing structure must be established so that regional, district or local school community taxpayers will provide some funds to help finance needed school building programs.5. The establishment of a system which would permit regional areas, districts, or communities to issue general obligation bonds against the taxable wealth of the unit is needed in order to secure local share of funds to finance needed primary schools.

The objective of this thesis is to understand how poor farm households in developing countries are affected by and cope with the legacy of internal war. The theoretical analysis is based on a peasant household model for land abundant countries as war can be shown to weaken markets, re-enforce household subsistence and increase overall land abundance. The empirical analysis uses regression techniques and a household survey from post-war northern Mozambique to assess the implications of the war legacy for land access, coping strategies, and household welfare. The key findings include that war can enhance the degree of land abundance while also creating barriers to land access for some households, thus re-defining land abundance as a household-level concept. Land emerges as the least war vulnerable asset thus encouraging households to shift to land-based subsistence activities during the war. The experience of war increases the number of endogenously determined land variables, which should therefore be reflected in models of African land use. The thesis advances the literature of household coping strategies by focussing on little researched post-disaster and war-induced strategies. Households are found to respond to indirect war effects and thus to rely on subsistence and non-market activities and to make selective use of markets. Surprisingly, social exchange does not play a large role for insuring incomes. Finally, the thesis finds that the war legacy continues to depress household welfare for many years after the end of the conflict, which is attributed to a variety of poverty traps. Importantly, and in contrast to other studies of post-war Mozambique, education and cotton adoption are not found to enhance household welfare significantly but a larger area farmed does. The findings indicate that post-war reconstruction policy should re-capitalise household endowments and stimulate rural markets as part of a broadly based programme of rural development.

This thesis studies the role of learning as a mechanism of economic change. Two areas are considered where this would seem to be important. First, how firms learn about new technology; and secondly, how agents learn to behave in interactive situations. A model of research and development is presented which models the process by which firms solve specific design problems. This may be by individual experimental search or by partial imitation. In the latter case, a close parallel is drawn between biological evolution, based on genetic reproduction, and technological evolution, based on firms blending existing technologies. Some economic implications of these processes are explored, including their application to stochastic learning curves, patent design and the transfer of technology to developing countries. The thesis continues by critically assessing the analogy between biological and cultural evolution often used to model how agents learn to behave in interactive situations. It is argued that the methods used by economists exploiting this analogy are often ill-suited to an economic context. Models are presented which deal with specific issues in the transition from a biological context to an economic context, including models of partnership formation, models of imperfect imitation, and models without payoff-monotonic dynamics. The issue of imperfect imitation is expanded upon in an evolutionary model of the infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma, where it is shown that the problem of inter-generational copying fidelity may allow one to restrict attention to strategies with a very simple stochastic structure.

Smallholder tree cultivation and management is a common form of land-use in high potential areas of Kenya. Some practices, such as the planting of trees on field boundaries are strongly rooted in customary notions of land and tree tenure. Others, such as the planting of black wattle (Acacia mearnsii) woodlots, are more recent innovations, introduced to produce commodities for domestic and export markets. This thesis explores the historic, cultural, and economic dimensions of tree growing in Kenya, using archival and ethnographic data, land-use surveys, and results from a survey of 123 households in the upper coffee/lower tea zone of Murang'a District. The household survey was designed to explore the hypothesis that tree growing complements formal employment as a strategy for overcoming poorly operating factor markets and helps to ease land-use constraints imposed by labour migration. Tree planting is favored because of its low capital and recurrent costs and when farmers are unable to plant other more resource-intensive crops. The survey focused on households which currently maintain a black wattle woodlot and on households which operate parcels which were used for growing black wattle in 1967, but which have since been cleared and are being used for growing something else. The survey showed that woodlot growing households operate larger parcels, are older, support fewer residents, and have more non-resident relatives than other households in the survey. Woodlot growing parcels are also at a lower altitude and are more steeply sloping than other parcels. Patterns of resource allocation suggest that woodlot growing households are more risk averse. Logistic regression (logit) modeling explored causal relationships, suggesting woodlots are indeed more likely to be established as households age and as labour becomes scarce, and that woodlot clearance takes place when labour is more available to cultivate the holding.

This thesis analyses technical efficiency of local electricity distribution in Italy (1994, 1996) by using both econometric (deterministic frontier, stochastic frontier) and linear programming (Data Envelopment Analysis) tools. Cross-sectional data was examined with respect to (a) ENEL - the Italian electricity monopolist whose restructuring and privatisation is now under way - and its local distribution branches (Chapters 2, 3, and 5); (b) municipal authorities (MUNIs), i.e. town-based electric utilities which sometimes hold franchises for electricity distribution within city limits (Chapters 4 and 5). Estimation results from Chapters 2 and 3 highlighted non-exhaustion of scale economies at sample-mean values. Scope economies between medium and low-voltage distribution were also detected (Ch. 2). Efficiency score series stemming from both econometric and linear programming techniques in Chapters 3 and 5 showed that Southern distributors were relatively under-represented among top units even after allowing for several exogenous environmental variables. The external effects which proved to influence technical efficiency in electricity distribution were consumer density, the percentage of industrial customers, the geographical nature of areas served (metropolitan areas, mountains, etc.), and the interaction between ENEL's units and municipal utilities in those towns featuring ENEL and MUNIs bordering each other. Pooled ENEL-MUNI analysis from Chapter 4 failed to spot any systematic superiority of ENEL's units over municipalities. Generalisation on the ENEL-MUNI efficiency dispute was then discarded, in favour of case-by-case comparison. Paired-samples statistical testing (both parametric and non-parametric) from Chapter 5 showed limited agreement between Stochastic Frontier Estimation (SFE) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) efficiency outcomes. Statistical concordance was more often found when comparing SFE and DEA models sharing the same input-output specification. Again, no apparent superiority of ENEL over MUNIs was found out by DEA linear programs. One-to-one comparisons confirmed that the outcomes were mixed, with ENEL's local branches outperforming MUNIs in metropolitan and (sometimes) rural areas, and MUNIs faring better in medium-sized, Po Valley towns (Northern Italy). Results were not clear-cut for Alpine and rural distributors. The latter however - should be considered on a separate basis in that they will probably need permanent subsidies to meet universal service obligations, irrespective of the future structure of electricity distribution in Italy. Comparable (e.g., urban) units might - on the other hand - be subject to yardstick regulation based upon DEA's 'efficient peer' outcomes. Apart from the main empirical work, this thesis also features institutional and theoretical overviews (Chapters 2 to 5) with relevant literature surveys, a DEA Numerical Appendix (Chapter 5), and a regional map of the Italian territory (end of thesis).

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Graduation date: 1978