commercial interests as being promised by the EU, lessons for the relations between central and local government to be learnt from Aus- tralia and New Zealand, the creation of a Food Agency in Denmark but its location within the Ministry of Food rather than Health. the sep- aration of review from sponsorship in Ger- many but the unsatisfactory spread of responsibility across different government arms with similar problems for Ireland despite its move to establish an independent Food Board, Sweden is commended I'or separating regulation from commerce as a way of mak- ing overt the conflict of interests involved. and there is admiration for the US freedom of information and scrutiny by courts and Con- gress.

The fourteen questions around which the booklet is organised are concerned with what changes should take place i n food regulation. with what processes, and the distribution of functions and powers between different insti- tutions whether old or to be newly created. Answers are given in terms of a White Paper. the separation of powers from MAFF and their reallocation to Health, the formation of a new agency primarily but not exclusively with advisory powers, the careful coordination of implementation between the various tiers of government from local to EU. the removal of those with vested interests from advisory or other positions, and the allocation of responsibilities at a Cabinet level.

This is all eminently sensible. My only res- ervation concerns the extent to which food regulation, in the sense of safety and stan- dards, is being pushed to the tbrefront in view of its recent prominence at the expense of. and without integration, with other food issues of a less acute variety. What will materialise is another matter since commonsense and demo- cratic participation at the expense of vested interests is notable for its absence in British institutions, not least in food. And if New Labour is prepared to let the Bank of England make its own monetary policy. why should the captains of the collective food basket be

treated any differently from those of finance? This booklet is admirable in providing an answer that is far from academic but which speaks to the needs of the day.

BEN FINE Department of Economic5

School of Oriental and African Studies Univer5ity of London

PII: S0306-9192(98)00011-6

Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Developing Countries: Methods, Models, and Policy Edited by Lawrence Haddad. John Hoddinott. and Harold Alderman B(iltirnore, Maryland: Thr Johns Hopkins U~~ivers i ty Prrss, lY97, rii + 341 pp.. ISBN 0-8018-5571 -I, f45.50 hartk,o~,~t..

This book is about the economics of intra- household relationships, including theoretical approaches, methods of empirical investi- gation, and implications for policies that try to improve the welfare of individual household members such as women and children rather than the welfare of the household as an undif- ferentiated unit. The book has been fairly long in gestation. It originates from a conference jointly organised by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the World Bank in 1992. The intervening period has allowed many newer theoretical and empirical developments to be incorporated in revised versions of the conference papers, as well as including chapters written since that time.

The book is structured in three parts. The first part contains six chapters dealing with theoretical economic models of intrahouse- hold decision making. Non-economists should be warned that this is fairly difficult stuff, and, indeed only one chapter in this part. a contri- bution by Jane Guyer on links between anthropology and economics in the study of intrahousehold allocation is truly accessible to non-economists or general practitioners. For

~ o o k review.\ 563

development economists, this part of the book provides an unrivalled collection of material on alternative specifications of models that 'unpack' the household. These models are referred to generally throughout the book as 'collective' models of the household, meaning that the household is treated as a collection of individuals requiring consideration of individ- ual welfare and decision-making, in contrast to 'unitary' household models that pose the household as a single decision-making unit. Collective models based on income sharing rules, bargaining, cooperation and conflict are specified and discussed in this part of the book, and a useful overview is given by the editors in Chapter 1.

The second part of the book contains 6 chapters that explore the effects of intrahouse- hold resource allocation through empirical studies. Again, this part benefits from a read- able overview and summary chapter written by the editors. These chapters are mainly con- cerned with the outcomes of intrahousehold allocations for food and nutrition. The chap- ters are generally more accessible to the non- econon~ist than the preceding part of the book, and several of them do not require technical knowledge of economics at all to follow the argument and evidence being presented. Included here is a chapter on anthropological methods for investigating intrahousehold allo- cation, as well as an interesting review of the conflicting evidence from studies of gender bias in nutritional allocations in South India. This part of the book ends with a chapter that questions the validity of the residential house- hold as the boundary around which family resources and incomes can be examined; the main point being that the residential house- hold typically obtains a considerable pro- portion of its livelihood from family members that reside elsewhere.

The third part of the book contains 4 chap- ters on policy, included amongst which is the concluding summary by the editors. This is in some ways the weakest part of the book, since it fails to demonstrate convincingly, at least

from within its own material, the different ways that knowledge of intrahousehold allo- cation might improve the delivery of policy and services in order to improve the welfare and status of individuals differentiated by gen- der, age and so on. The few chapters here are written in entirely different styles, with quite distinct purposes, and do not add up to any systematic effort to link the theoretical advances described in Part 1 and the empirical insights of Part I1 to the range of policies such as poverty, farm technology, gender and the environment which might be usefully informed by them.

Some important points are made, however, in the final chapter, not the least being the indirect and contingent ways that policy initiatives eventually result in changes in indi- vidual welfare. It is superficial to assume that a policy aimed, for example, at raising farm productivity in a crop typically grown by women will necessarily reach its intended beneficiaries in linear fashion. It is precisely the social and institutional relations of opport- unity, obligation and resource access between men and women that intervene to set in train unintended and unenvisaged processes fol- lowing from the initial disturbance. The well known example of the women's irrigated rice project in the Gambia in the 1980s. which is mentioned in the final chapter of the book, is a cautionary tale in this respect.

The editors of this volume make the argu- ment that knowledge of intrahousehold resource allocation could substantially improve the likelihood that policies reach the individuals or social groups that they are intended to benefit. This may be so, but one is left wondering after reading this book whether this may occur more from the trial- and-error of learning by doing. for different policies, in different settings, than from the theoretical economic niceties that preoccupy the bulk of the book. There are quite a few asides to the effect that the predictive capa- bility of collective models is often indis- tinguishable from that of unitary models when

564 Book reviews

it comes to explaining household responses to changing labour, resource and output markets. Likewise, the empirical chapters reveal the apparent impossibility of deriving generalised results concerning links between individual incomes, distribution and nutrition in the fam- ily.

The book is an important one, not only for its exposition of the models, but precisely because it raises and stimulates discussion on these ambiguities.

Frank Ellis School of Development Studies

University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ

email: Jellis@uea.ac.uk

PII: SO306-9192(98)00008-6

Agricultural Restructuring and Sus- tainability: A Geographical Perspective, Wallingford: Cab International, 1997 Eds., B. Ilbery, Q. Chiotti and T. Rickard

Among the concerns capturing the attention of scholars and political leaders alike are the restructuring of the global economy and the sustainability of various economic activities. The two are related. of course, but each also has forces at work that affect one much more than the other. Their convergence seems especially apparent with respect to agricul- ture. Many question whether new industrial forms of farm enterprise are sustainable econ- omically and environmentally. Because of the fundamental importance of this question to our well-being, one welcomes a geographical perspective on agricultural restructuring and sustainability.

The pages in this volume originated in a conference convened in North Carolina during the summer of 1995. It grew out of a meeting of the participants in the United Kingdom four years earlier. The results so far suggest i t would be highly useful for the group to con- tinue convening and considering rural issues. The focus here is on restructuring and sus- tainability in developed market economies with papers reporting on conditions in Can-

ada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

It is usual to say of an edited volume of conference papers that the contributions are uneven in quality and that no central focus exists. I am happy to say all papers here are worth reading, with some being very interest- ing, and that the sense of restructuring and sustainability remains reasonably clear throughout.

Let me comment first on several of the chapters and then offer a critique of the whole. The three editors offer a nine page introduction that sets the stage for what fol- lows, identifying both the dynamics of agri- cultural restructuring and the concept of sus- tainable agriculture. Much is said about the postproductivist transition (PPT), a term describing the current processes at work in agriculture. One of the key forces behind the change is identified as the liberalization of trade and concomitant pressure to reduce pub- lic expenditures on agriculture. The editors also consider the uneven development of agri- cultural restructuring and provide an overview of the book and its 2 1 individual chapters.

The single chapter on New Zealand pro- vides an informative look at sustainability, spatial hierarchies, and land based production. In it, Cocklin, Blunden, and Moran discuss literature examining sustainability and scale to include the interdependencies between geo- graphic scales. Their review relating regu- lation to scale is particularly useful. Morris and Andrews insightfully report on the "farm- ing culture" in the UK and its implications for agrienvironmental research and adoption of environmentally sensitive methods. In an investigation of conventional and alternative agriculture, Duram offers a suggestive analy- sis of the adoption of organic farming and Holistic Resource Management (HR5) ranch- ing by farmers in the US Great Plains. These studies reveal meaningful differences between farmers and policy makers and the perceptions among farmers themselves.

Chiotti, Johnston, Smit, and Ebel consider another important facet of sustainability and