Economic development is increasingly used by state DOT'S as a criterion in arriving at highway funding decisions. However, there exists little evidence in the literature justifying the use of such a criterion, especially since existing techniques only determine correlations between highways and development. In this paper a time-series methodology is developed to differentiate the effects of highways on development from the effects of development on highways. This methodology includes structural plot analysis and causality tests and is based on pooled time-series and cross-sectional data on highway construction expenditures and county employment. The results indicate that increases in highway expenditures do not, in general, lead to statewide increases in employment other than temporary increases in the year of construction. However, in counties that are economic centers of the state, highway expenditures do have a positive long-term effect, i.e. employment increases above the normal trend of the economy. Such gains are apparently counterbalanced by employment losses in counties adjacent to the economic centers.
Cassava is an important crop in sub-Saharan Africa for food security, income generation, and industrial development. Business-oriented production systems require reliable supplies of high-quality seed. Major initiatives in Nigeria and Tanzania have sought to establish sustainable cassava seed systems. These include the deployment of new technologies for early generation seed (EGS) production; the promotion of new high-yielding and disease-resistant varieties; the updating of government seed policy to facilitate enabling certification guidelines; the application of ICT tools, Seed Tracker and Nuru AI, to simplify seed system management; and the establishment of networks of cassava seed entrepreneurs (CSEs). CSEs have been able to make profits in both Nigeria (US$ 551–988/ha) and Tanzania (US$ 1,000 1,500/ha). In Nigeria, the critical demand driver for cassava seed businesses is the provision of new varieties. Contrastingly, in Tanzania, high incidences of cassava brown streak disease mean that there is a strong demand for the provision of healthy seed that has been certified by regulators. These models for sustainable cassava seed system development offer great promise for scaling to other cassava-producing countries in Africa where there is strong government support for the commercialization of the cassava sector.
Inflation-indexed bonds, such as the UK's indexed-linked gilts and Canada's real return bonds, are hailed by economists for reducing inflation risk to both borrowers and lenders. However, we find that fixed-rate bonds have an advantage over inflation-indexed bonds by providing borrowers with a hedge against aggregate-supply shocks. National governments would benefit from this in the event of a major catastrophe that substantially reduces aggregate supply. To retain this hedge and still provide indexing for aggregate-demand-caused inflation, we propose a financial innovation called quasi-real bonds which are indexed to nominal GDP growth.
Using data on state highway expenditures and employment from 30 Minnesota non-metropolitan counties over a 25-year period, possible interactions between transportation and employment are investigated. While crosssectional analysis suggests no significant interactions, causality tests and timeseries analyses indicate that highway expenditures affect manufacturing and retail employment, and employment influences expenditures. Although expenditure increases cause employment improvements in the short-term, long-term effects are less favorable. Highway expenditures respond quickly to increased needs caused by retail improvements.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.