No abstract

A national rice r.-search program adapted and developed modem rice varieties for irrigated culture. Their rapid and widespread adoption led 2o substantial increases in production, and a concomitant fall in the price of rice. This paper examines the incidence of both the gross benefits and the costs of the research program, by income level. As rice is a principal foodstuff, the net benefits, both absolute and relative, accrued disproportionately to the poorest households.

As the population ages there will be potentially significant implications for a wide range of economic variables, including in particular the fiscal costs of social expenditures. Long-term fiscal planning requires estimates of the possible future path of public spending. This article presents projections for 14 categories of social spending. These projections are based on detailed demographic estimates covering fertility, migration and mortality. Distributional parameters are incorporated for all of the major variables, and are used to build up probabilistic projections for social expenditure as a share of gross domestic product using simulation. Attention is focused on health expenditures which are disaggregated into seven broad classes. In addition, we explore the impacts of alternative hypotheses about future health costs. While it can be predicted with some confidence that overall social expenditures will rise, the results suggest that longterm planning would be enriched by recognising the distributions around point estimates of projected social costs.

Bargaining models of household wealth accumulation point to a potential conflict of interest between husbands and wives. Wives are typically younger than their husbands and have longer life expectancy, so they must expect to finance a longer retirement period. Therefore, when they have greater relative bargaining power, households will accumulate more wealth. There is some weak evidence for this in the United States, but this article finds the opposite pattern in New Zealand, where women's greater bargaining power results in a lower net worth in the pre-retirement cohort of couples. In New Zealand, where public pensions are more generous than in the US and are not affected by holdings of private wealth or income, it may not be rational for women with greater relative bargaining power than their spouses to favor wealth accumulation. These results indicate the importance of the policy context when considering household bargaining models.Bargaining, intrahousehold, pensions, retirement, wealth, JEL Codes: D31, J16, J26,