Though cotton only represents a very small share in world merchandise trade, it is an indispensable commodity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Productivity and profitability of cotton production and processing are key determinants of growth in cotton producing countries. This study analyses the SSA cotton sector. The first section will use value chain analysis to trace the value creation process from the raw material stage to final retail products. The second section analyses the sector from an industrial organizational perspective, highlighting how the sector’s specific features have influenced reforms outcomes and comparing experiences to other reformed SSA crop sectors. The purpose of section three is to shed light on Research and Development in cotton in SSA, framed in a broader picture of agricultural research in SSA. The final section analyses the issue of quality in cotton and tests the assertion that fully implemented reforms have undermined quality performance of the cotton sector in SSA. Keywords sub-Saharan Africa Cotton Sector, Cotton Liberalization, Cotton R&D, Cotton Quality

The main purpose of this thesis is to identify the role of sustainable development in Laos, based on the integration of three factors, economic growth, social development, and the environmental dimension. Annual time series data are used for the period 1980-2010. In order to generate the most appropriate regression, relevant theoretical and empirical studies are reviewed. This thesis contributes to the on-going research issue about key determinants influencing sustainable development in developing countries. Firstly, this study uses the first different of logarithm form to identify the determinants of economic growth, the impacts of growth on poverty and environmental conditions in Laos. However, using the multiple regressions, serious problems of multicollinearity were encountered and those results became less reliable. Principal components analysis (PCA) is a technique to handle the problem of multicollinearity and produce stable and meaningful estimates for regression coefficients. This thesis concludes that there are several variables, both internal and external factors, which have influenced the current economic growth of Laos. Particularly the internal factors (domestic investment, government expenditure, and industry) show their strong correlation with economic growth, while the external factor (participation in ASEAN) also plays an important role in economic growth. On the other hand, the other external factors (FDI, AID and OPEN) show a weaker link to domestic growth of Laos. In the long run, to ensure the effectiveness of external factors on domestic growth, this research suggests exploiting more effectively the opportunities provided by foreign direct investment, through the openness of the system to globalization and international trade, together with better management of aid allocation. The impacts of economic growth on poverty and environmental conditions are then considered, questioning whether economic growth leads to the reduction of poverty and whether it produces a pressure on environmental conditions. This study found that those determinants not only have been dominant in economic growth, but they do indeed correlate with a reduction in the level of poverty. On the other hand, the increase in economic activities leads to increased environmental damage. This research supports continuing the adjustment of domestic activity investment, government expenditure, improving trade openness system, foreign direct investment, aid allocation, ASEAN, and so on. These factors can help the country to grow and poverty to diminish but we have also to pay attention to their impacts on the environment. Sustainable development would achieve its goal only if these internal and external factors contribute to economic growth, where this growth is distributed across the entire population, together with environmental protection conditions. In order to attain the goal of sustainable development, strong environmental and natural resource protection policies are suggested. To maintain a high rate of economic growth, this study suggests considering the natural resources and the areas with the greatest potential to be utilized for growth; such as tourism sustainability, human resource improvement and trade policy improvement. To improve social development, reduce the development gap and eradicate extreme poverty, it is suggested that community participation development, gender promotion, and investment in social services be increased especially in rural areas.

Chapter II: No extant study addresses the persistent detrimental effect of in utero exposure to conflict in countries experiencing protracted conflict. I therefore estimate the impact of in utero conflict exposure on weight-for-age z-score (WAZ) by applying instrumental variable regression to information on Afghan children aged 0-59 months merged with data on district-level fatalities during the intrauterine period. Although like previous research, I find an overall negative effect of violence on WAZ, the effect is stronger for children born in districts where long-term conflict is on average comparatively lower. I attribute these heterogeneous effects to the fact that households living in environments of constant conflict have developed more effective coping strategies. I support this result by showing that physical insecurity in districts in which opium poppy is cultivated, a coping strategy for rural farmers, has a comparatively smaller negative effect on household wealth because of the lower risk of eradication. Chapter III: Although Afghanistan experienced a slight rise in female literacy and some decline in female and infant mortality between 2000 and 2015, these improvements were not great enough to explain the simultaneous dramatic drop in total fertility, from 7.5 to 4.6. In this study, therefore, I test the previously unverified hypothesis that long-term conflict has a negative causal impact on both fertility outcomes and fertility preferences. More specifically, by applying 2SRI GLM Poisson regressions to cross-sectional data for a subsample of ever-married women of reproductive age (15-49) combined with georeferenced information on district level conflict from 1979 to 2015, I estimate the causal impact on fertility of conflict experienced since the time of first union. I find that although long-term conflict does indeed reduce the number of pregnancies and living children, when a woman’s ideal number of children desired over the lifetime is used as the dependent variable, conflict is a relatively small (albeit still statistically significant) determinant of fertility preferences. This finding implies that, given the only modest improvements in women’s health and development, the drop in Afghanistan’s total fertility rate would slow down if the conflict were to cease. Chapter IV (a joint work with Peng Nie and Alfonso Sousa-Poza): This study uses biomarker information from the 2013 National Nutrition Survey Afghanistan and satellite precipitation driven modeling results from the Global Flood Monitoring System to analyze how floods affect the probability of anemia in Afghan women of reproductive age (15–49). In addition to establishing a causal relation between the two by exploiting the quasi-random variation of floods in different districts and periods, the analysis demonstrates that floods have a significant positive effect on the probability of anemia through two possible transmission mechanisms. The first is a significant effect on inflammation, probably related to water borne diseases carried by unsafe drinking water, and the second is a significant negative effect on retinol concentrations. Because the effect of floods on anemia remains significant even after we control for anemia’s most common causes, we argue that the condition may also be affected by elevated levels of psychological stress.

Il mio lavoro analizza empiricamente la relazione fra IDE (stock e flussi in uscita) ed esportazioni per 75 paesi fra il 2001 e il 2012. Nel primo capitolo vengono esaminate la letteratura economica sulle determinanti degli IDE e la questione della complementarità o sostituibilità fra IDE e commercio internazionale; nel secondo capitolo vengono descritti alcuni elementi di Analisi Reticolare (AR) e, infine, il terzo e quarto capitolo, analizzano empiricamente l’evoluzione delle strutture di IDE e delle esportazioni e le loro determinanti. I risultati confermano che (1) solo una piccola parte degli IDE e delle esportazioni possibili è in atto. Questa circostanza rende il fenomeno della globalizzazione poco realistico, facendo emergere alcuni attori centrali (i.e. US, China; Germany); (2) tradizionali fattori gravitazionali, come il PIL e la distanza, determinano significativamente gli IDE; la lingua comune è anche significativamente correlata agli IDE; i coefficienti delle altre variabili sono meno stabili; (3) le esportazioni e gli IDE sono strutturalmente simili e livelli precedenti di esportazioni sono negativamente correlati con gli IDE. I risultati suggeriscono sostituibilità fra le esportazioni e gli IDE confermando la contraddittorietà della questione. / My thesis deals with the empirical analysis of the relationship between FDI (outflows and outstocks) and exports for 75 countries between 2001 and 2012. In the first chapter I review the economic literature on FDI determinants, hence I detail the complementarity/substitutability between FDI and trade; in the second chapter I describe some Social Network Analysis tools and finally in the third and fourth chapters I investigate empirically the evolution of the structures of FDI and exports and their determinants. Results show that (1) a large part of world FDI and exports is excluding all “potential” FDI flows and a small quota of all possible links has taken place, making the globalisation phenomenon far away to be realistic with few central players (i.e. US, China, Germany); (2) traditional gravity factors, such as GDP and distance, significantly determine FDI; common language is also significantly related to FDI; the coefficients for the other variables are less stable; (3) exports and FDI are similarly structured and previous levels of exports negatively affect FDI, suggesting the substitutability between FDI and exports and the puzzling issue of FDI and trade relationship.

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Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Sócio-Econômico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Economia / Made available in DSpace on 2012-10-22T10:28:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0Bitstream added on 2013-07-16T19:54:06Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 242240.pdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5)

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Sociologia Política, Florianópolis, 2014 / Made available in DSpace on 2015-02-05T21:20:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 332110.pdf: 3194539 bytes, checksum: feecb0cef093bd62d9d75c236f2f4157 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Discuto nesta pesquisa a Economia Solidária e as Finanças Solidárias no Brasil, propondo um estudo de caso do Banco Comunitário União Sampaio e da Agência Popular Solano Trindade, localizados na periferia da zona sul da cidade de São Paulo, bairro Jardim Maria Sampaio, mais especificamente no interior da Associação de Mulheres do Campo Limpo e Adjacências, ou União Popular de Mulheres do Campo Limpo (UPM), como também é conhecida. Exponho as estratégias da comunidade diante das dificuldades no acesso a determinados serviços da rede bancária convencional e a subsídios de produtoras artísticas comerciais, além dos impactos que tais estratégias promovem na vida dos moradores da região. Assim sendo, o objetivo geral desta pesquisa é investigar e analisar o alcance e os limites de um banco comunitário e de uma agência popular, mais especificamente a experiência supracitada, no que tange às transformações na vida privada e comunitária dos moradores do bairro Jardim Maria Sampaio, à formação de uma identidade de grupo e de classe e à articulação de ações coletivas e formativas. De modo geral, para contextualizar a problemática desta pesquisa, recupero, brevemente, o panorama brasileiro e internacional de crise do sistema financeiro, no início do século XXI, e suas implicações na relação entre centro e periferia da economia mundial. Descrevo as ações do governo brasileiro contra a estagnação econômica, envolvendo o sistema bancário público e privado, e reflito sobre as últimas reformas bancárias brasileiras. Abordo a maneira como projetos de bancos comunitários e moedas sociais podem devolver liquidez e estimular a circulação de capital nas regiões periféricas empobrecidas, potencializando o desenvolvimento local. Sob esta reflexão e diante do atual contexto de crise, reflito sobre duas possíveis alternativas à atual crise do capital: reformar as políticas econômicas existentes, oportunizando a recuperação do atual sistema dominante, ou investigar e aplicar projetos que promovam a transição da velha para uma nova forma de sociedade, entendendo a transição como o processo em que uma sociedade, com uma nova forma de ser social, se constitui a partir da sociedade anterior, carregando, contudo, o peso do passado ainda não totalmente superado (MARX, 2011). A premissa que coloca a Economia Solidária e as Finanças Solidárias como projetos de superação não é unânime. Acreditar que elas, por si só, podem transformar o atual sistema é tropeçar em barreiras, dispostas nos campos teórico, metodológico e político, que ainda necessitam ser superadas. No entanto, considero que tanto a Economia Solidária quanto as Finanças Solidárias podem contribuir para a reflexão acerca do projeto de sociedade que queremos defender e implementar neste processo de transição, agregando-o, inclusive, à disputa por hegemonia.<br> / Abstract: I discuss in this research Solidarity Economics and Solidarity Finances in Brazil, through a case study of the Community Bank Sampaio Union and the People's Agency Solano Trindade, located on the outskirts of the southern region of the city of São Paulo, in the neighborhood Jardim Maria Sampaio, specifically in the Women's Association of Campo Limpo and adjacencies, or Popular Union of Women in Campo Limpo (UPM), as it is also known. I expose the strategies of the community in the face of difficulties in accessing certain services of the conventional banking system and subsidies of commercial artistic producers, in addition to the impacts that these strategies promote to the lives of local residents. Therefore, the objective of this research is to investigate and analyze the scope and limits of a community bank and a popular agency, specifically the aforementioned experience, regarding changes in the private and community life of the residents of the neighborhood of Jardim Maria Sampaio, the construction of a group and class identities and the articulation of collective and formation actions. To contextualize the problematic of this research, I expose, briefly, the Brazilian and international panorama of the financial system crisis in the early twenty-first century and its implications on the relationship between center and periphery of the world's economy. I describe the Brazilian government's actions against economic stagnation, involving its public and private banking system, and reflect on the latest Brazilian banking reforms. I discuss how projects of community banks and social currencies may return liquidity and stimulate the circulation of capital in impoverished outlying regions, enhancing local development. Through the discussion outlined above, and given the current context of crisis, I reflect on two possible alternatives to the current crisis of the capitalist system: reforming the existing economic policies, providing opportunities for the recovery of the current dominant system, or investigating and implementing projects that promote the transition from the old to a new form of society, understanding the transition as a process in which a society, with a new way of social being, constitutes itself from the previous society, carrying, however, the weight of the past not yet fully overcome (Marx, 2011). The premise that puts Solidarity Economics and Solidarity Finances as projects for overcoming capitalism is not unanimous. Believing that they, alone, can transform the current system is tripping over barriers - theoretical, methodological and political - that still need to be overcome. I conclude, however, that both Solidarity Economics and Solidarity Finances can contribute to our reflections on the design of society we want to defend and implement in this transition process, aggregating it to the dispute for hegemony.

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Sócio-Econômico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Economia / Made available in DSpace on 2013-07-15T23:59:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Produção. / Made available in DSpace on 2012-10-22T05:34:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 225263.pdf: 1815933 bytes, checksum: 67c25801b35a1aa2fc8d16d309b3705b (MD5) / O objetivo deste trabalho consistiu em analisar o efeito da distribuição de proventos em dinheiro, incluindo dividendos e juros sobre capital próprio, no retorno das ações do mercado acionário brasileiro. Formaram-se então, carteiras ativas com ações do Ibovespa 2000. Para isto, utilizou-se os Dividend Yields das ações, formando-se assim duas carteiras teóricas de ações por ano, uma contendo as 12 ações de maiores Yields e a segunda com os menores e/ou nulos Yields. A pesquisa foi realizada à partir de janeiro de 2000 à dezembro de 2003, sendo formadas portanto, 8 carteiras de ações. Os retornos foram calculados e comparados entre si, bem como com o Ibovespa, índice representativo do mercado. O resultado apresentado pelas carteiras com ações de Maiores Yields foi superior ao retorno das carteiras com baixo e/ou zero Yield em todos os períodos e ainda superior ao retorno do Ibovespa. Portanto, dentro das delimitações do trabalho, há evidências de que o mercado tende a precificar melhor aquelas ações que representam as empresas com maior distribuição de proventos, indicando a relevância da política de dividendos no Brasil. The objective of this paper was to analyze the effects of dividends share on stock prices value. Were formed portfolios at two different levels of Yield. The portfolios were changed every year. The first portfolio contains 12 highest Yields and the second portfolio contains the 12 lowers Yields. The investigation was realized since 2000 January until 2003 December. Were formed 8 portfolios and the results were compared. The results of high Dividend Yield portfolio were higher than low and zero Dividend Yield portfolio and Ibovespa. Than, since this is a delimited investigation, the stock market tends to value the companies that pay more dividends.