A White Paper issued by the Labour government--under Prime Minister Tony Blair--in January 2003 outlines potentially sweeping changes in how British universities might be funded and regulated. These changes would build on three major paradigm shifts and experiments in system building in higher education in the United Kingdom since World War II: the creation and subsequent collapse of a binary system of higher education that included both universities and polytechnics; a decrease in governmental funding and an increase in regulations; and the introduction of student fees into the previously exclusively government-funded higher education sector. The Labour government's new White Paper proposes both to increase funding and to diversify the sources, and more controversially, to allow universities to set their own fees. At the same time, it continues to rely on an accountability and regulatory bureaucracy, and incentive funding, to encourage enrollment growth and to expand access to underserved populations.

We analyze the expansion of non-agricultural rural employment in manufacture and services in Mexican municipalities during the 1990s and explore the role of geographical features in explaining the local and regional supply of non-agricultural rural employment opportunities. We identify the presence of positive externalities from non-agricultural rural employment expansion in nearby areas. In addition, we find that proximity to urban centers with large services or manufacturing sectors is important in explaining rural employment growth outcomes. Alternatively, for municipalities faraway from urban centers, a larger proportion of the growth in non-agricultural employment (in particular in manufacture) comes from the interaction between a high-value agriculture and availability of roads.

The CGIAR Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) is being transformed into a Science Council. This paper is about the role of the CGIAR Science Council in enhancing and guarding the relevance and quality of science in the CGIAR. In carrying out this role, the Science Council must act in a strategic advisory role, basing its advice on: planning and strategy development in the context of CGIAR goals; internal self-assessments and independent external monitoring and evaluation; and on impact assessments. The paper elaborates these three main functions of the Science Council to facilitate the transformation of TAC into a full Science Council.

At its International Centres Week in October 2000 (ICW2000), the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) adopted a new Vision and Strategy. This papert is about Plank 4 of the CGIAR’s Vision and Strategy that calls for the adoption, in collaboration with national and regional partners, of a regional approach to research planning, priority setting and implementation. Given the poverty and impact focus of international public goods research, both NARS (national agricultural research systems) and the CGIAR have advantages in pursuing a regional approach as a component of their respective activities. For the NARS in the region, this means seeking at the regional level advantages that they could not derive solely from a national-level approach, thus complementing and supplementing the national approach. For the CGIAR, this means seeking complementary gains that it could not achieve exclusively through a global or ecoregional approach. These mutual advantages open the door for partnerships in regional research between NARS and their regional organizations, and the CGIAR. The paper highlights the advantages as well as risks and limitations of a regional approach to research. Since ICW2000, all regional and sub-regional organizations and CGIAR Centres have taken action to facilitate regional consultation processes that could eventually lead to establishing a regional approach to research for the CGIAR and NARS. The paper notes some emerging lessons, and takes a forward look.

ARE Update is a bimonthly magazine published by the University of California Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics for the purpose of providing wide dissemination of research results and expert opinion from faculty and graduate students in agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis and UC Berkeley. Update targets a lay audience of policy makers, Cooperative Extension advisors, agribusiness managers, and other professionals interested in agricultural, resource, environmental, and development economics.

A distinguishing feature of recent changes to the US system of public assistance is its increasing focus onworking families and reliance on the tax system to transfer dollars to needy families. After a decade in near total obscurity, the earned income tax credit (EITC) was expanded to become the largest cash-transfer program for lower-income families with children. Advocates of the EITC argue that, unlike traditional welfare, the credit helps ‘‘promote both the values of family and work’’. Indeed, empirical evidence consistent with economic theory suggests that the EITC promotes employment among eligible unmarried women with children. To target benefits to lower-income families, however, the EITC is based on family income, leading to traditional welfare-type disincentives for most eligible secondary earners. In fact, the EITC is likely to reduce overall family labor supply among married couples. This paper examines the labor force participation response of married couples to EITC expansions between 1984 and 1996. The effect of the credit is estimated using both quasiexperimental and traditional reduced-form labor supply models. Results from both models show the same qualitative conclusion, that the EITC expansions reduced total family labor supply of married couples. In all cases, we find a decline in labor force participation by married women that more than offsets any rise in participation by their spouses. While the labor force participation rate of married men increased by about 0.2 percentage points, that of married women decreased by just over a full percentage point. These aggregate effects mask substantial heterogeneity in the population. Women facing the strongest disincentives were more than 2 percentage points less likely to work after the expansions. These findings imply that the EITC is effectively subsidizing married mothers to stay home, and therefore, have implications for the design of the program.