The Hadendowa Salif: Successes and failures of indigenous cultural institutions in managing the food system
The Hadendowa's customary law code, the Salif, used to regulate the social and economic behaviour of the Hadendowa, as well as their rational utilization of resources. Since the outbreak of the 1984 famine, however, the Hadendova have been depending on relief food, which has disrupted their Salif and rendered it uncapable of helping the Hadendowa to to cope with the current stress situation.
Are There Customary Rights to Plants? An Inquiry Among the Baganda (Uganda), with Special Attention to Gender
"Debates around Common Property Resources and Intellectual Property Rights fail to consider traditional and indigenous rights regimes that regulate plant resource exploitation, establish bundles of powers and obligations for heterogeneous groups of users, and create differential entitlements to benefits that are related to social structures. Such rights regimes are important to maintaining biodiversity and to human welfare; failing to recognize them presents dangers. The case study investigates the gendered nature of informal rights to selected tree and plant species that are distinct from, but related to, customary rights to land and trees, and are embedded in cosmology and social norms. from Author's Abstract
Speci fi cation Test for Panel Data Models with Interactive Fixed E ff ects ∗
In this paper, we propose a consistent nonparametric test for linearity in a large dimensional panel data model with interactive fixed effects. Both lagged dependent variables and conditional heteroskedasticity of unknown form are allowed in the model. We estimate the model under the null hypothesis of linearity to obtain the restricted residuals which are then used to construct the test statistic. We show that after being appropriately centered and standardized, the test statistic is asymptotically normally distributed under both the null hypothesis and a sequence of Pitman local alternatives by using the concept of conditional strong mixing that was recently introduced by Prakasa Rao (2009). To improve the finite sample performance, we propose a bootstrap procedure to obtain the bootstrap -value. A small set of Monte Carlo simulations illustrates that our test performs well in finite samples. An application to an economic growth panel dataset indicates significant nonlinear relationships between economic growth, initial income level and capital accumulation.