Seminar by Kathy Baylis: "Bridging vs. Bonding Social Capital"

Dr. Kathy Baylis will give a seminar entitled "Bridging vs. Bonding Social Capital and the Firewood Commons" on March 1 at OzU.

Most papers assume that social capital is good: it enables growth, it facilitates cooperation in the use of a common pool resource (CPR) and investment in public goods.  But not all social capital is alike.  In this paper, we compare the effect of bridging and bonding social capital on the management of a CPR: firewood in rural China. 

As in many developing regions, firewood is the primary source of fuel for heating and cooking in Yunnan, and demand for firewood has caused deforestation.  The mountains in Yunnan have been deemed a ‘biological hotspot’ by Conservation International, and firewood collection, along with illegal logging, has destroyed habitat for endangered species, such as the red panda (Conservation International 2008, Xu and Wilkes 2004).  Because much rural land is held collectively, village forests are common pool resources, where it is difficult, if not impossible, to exclude use, but consumption of one villager affects another.  Thus, firewood is non-excludable and rival, making it a common pool good (CPR) and subject to the issues of free-riding, mismanagement and overuse.

In this research, social capital was modeled as a form of insurance, where social sanction removed insurance from the individual. Bonding social capital was assumed to facilitate transfers within the community (Carter and Maluccio 2003), while bridging social capital was modeled as the possibility of a family gaining income from outside the community.  The model was used to solve for the effect of these two types of social capital on CPR management.

Date: 01 Mart 2010, Monday
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Venue: Oditoryum 1

Seminar will be in English.

Who is Kathy Baylis?

Kathy Baylis is an assistant professor in Agriculture and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois. She joined the department after several years as an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia where she is still an adjunct.

She earned her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003, where she specialized in agriculture and trade issues. Kathy has worked in agricultural policy in both Canada and the United States. In 2001/02, she was the staff economist in charge of agriculture for the Council of Economic Advisors in the White House, and in the mid-1990s, she worked as executive secretary with the National Farmers Union in Canada. She has published a number of journal articles on agricultural trade and environmental policy and has coauthored a textbook on Canadian-U.S. agricultural policy.