The Middle East will continue to play the dominant role of a petroleum supplier in the world oil market in the year 2000, according to business-as-usual forecasts published by the US Department of Energy. However, interesting trade patterns will emerge as a result of the democratization in the...

Smallholder farmers all over the world, particularly in regions of rich agro-biodiversity contribute to on-farm conservation. Past and present agricultural progress could not have happened neither without these genetic resources nor the associated farmer knowledge. Six species of minor millets...

Smallholder farmers all over the world, particularly in regions of rich agro-biodiversity contribute to on-farm conservation. Past and present agricultural progress could not have happened neither without these genetic resources nor the associated farmer knowledge. Six species of minor millets...

Credit CDS contracts were originally designed to transfer and disperse default risk within the capital markets to strengthen the resilience of financial institutions. The Global Financial Crisis has revealed that CDS contracts may not in fact achieve these objectives and may in fact increase the...

In a general class of discrete optimization problems, some of the elements mayhave random costs associated with them. In such a situation, the notion of optimalityneeds to be suitably modified. In this work we define an optimal solutionto be a feasible solution with the minimum risk. We focus on...

Some studies on child labor have shown that greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the missing ingredient is an explicit modeling of the labor market. We develop a simple model which...

"We use a proprietary data set on the floor-level operations at the Bhilai Rail and Structural Mill in India to understand the determinants of changes in plant productivity in 2000-2003. During this period there was a 35 percent increase in output with minimal changes in factors of production,...