‘Benchmarking’ and Participatory Development: The Case of Fiji’s Sugar Industry Reforms

Since the mid‐1970s, opposition has grown within developing countries to the use of ‘top‐down’ development approaches by foreign consultants. Disenchantment with these development strategies, it is often claimed, has led to the current incorporation of participation in consultants’ development practices. This study is concerned with the practice and methods of participatory development planning. It evaluates the Strategic Plan adopted by the Fiji sugar industry in 1997 in response to challenges that are attributed to the pressures of globalization and international competitiveness. The authors assess the external consultant’s self‐proclaimed ‘participatory methods’ in the articulation of these challenges, in the design of restructuring programmes, and in shaping the discourses of reform more generally. The consultant’s use of the fashionable ‘benchmarking’ methodology is seen to be one of the most problematic features of the ‘participatory’ process.     

Estimating Spatial Models Within A Disequilibrium Framework

Modeling demand in a spatial context requires careful handling of regional interactions. In situations where there are constraints in some markets that lead to spillovers to others it is useful to build this explicitly into the model. In this paper I present a theoretical model that is related to the disequilibrium and the spatial econometric literature. Under certain conditions the model may be estimable and an appropriate estimation technique that uses the EM algorithm, is put forward. A data set from the U.K. market for secondary school places provides a test for the procedure.