IUJ Repository (International Univ. of Japan)
Not a member yet
645 research outputs found
Sort by
Regional Income Inequality in China : A Two-Stage Nested Inequality Decomposition Analysis
Get PDFThis study estimates regional income inequality in China over the 1995-1998 period using a Theil index based upon district-level GDP and population data, and conducts a two-stage nested inequality decomposition analysis to explore the factors of regional income inequality. It also performs a regression analysis to explore the possible determinants of within-province income inequality. The decomposition analysis shows that the within-province inequality component accounted for 62 % of overall regional income inequality in 1998, while the between-region component contributed 27 %. According to the regression analysis, cumulative per capita FDI and a dummy variable designating inland border provinces are found to be significant in explaining within-province inequality. It is also found that economic dualism, as denoted by a low ratio of agricultural labor productivity to labor productivity in non-agricultural sectors, is another significant factor contributing to within-province inequality.departmental bulletin pape
The Spatial Dimension of Welfare and Poverty : Lessons from a Regional Targeting Program in Indonesia
Get PDFdepartmental bulletin pape
Speaking to solve and solving to speak: Motives in tasks
Get PDFThis paper utilizes the Vygotskian concept of activity to analyze task-based conversations between native and non-native speakers of English. The analysis is in the form of discourse analysis of selected excerpts from conversational data. The paper highlights interlocutors' motives as important in task performance. By doing so, it emphasizes that conversational interactions are not just transfer or exchange of meanings; the attitudes and feelings of the participants towards tasks are more crucial.departmental bulletin pape
Public Policy Planning in the Interregnum
Get PDFPublic policy planning may be in a problematic interregnum partially characterized by an onto-epistemological incongruity between two referent images of reality (Stokes, 1996) where, to paraphrase the Tao Te Ching, "those who know cannot say: those who say do not know. So be it." This response, of course, is seen as wholly unsatisfactory to many. We are in an interregnum of public policy planning; between approaches characterized by Newtonian models and ideas―that the public policy domain is best modeled as a linear mechanical system―and new approaches drawn from the sciences of complexity. The interregnum corresponds to a period of incomparable deliberation upon the onto-epistemplogy that has sustained positivistic public policy planning. Cybernetics, chaos theory, complexity tehory and the theory of dissipative structures suggest that the public policy domain is an open nonlinear dynamical system, punctuated by emergent phenomena and characterized by richly integrated yet often-ambiguous, feedback relationships. Sustained by the onto-epistemological convention, the continued use of conventional models, though not without occasional successes, will serve to increase the risk and failure rate of public policy initiatives, which in a Panglossian manner, will encourage a greater demand for the ever more rigorous application of conventional thinking, leading to another round of failure. The emerging insights from the sciences of complexity need to be complemented by a major methodological initiative. This is needed to formalize new models and operationalize public policy planning in pursuit of constructive social change.departmental bulletin pape
The Economic Crisis and Regional Income Inequality in Indonesia
Get PDFThis paper estimates regional income inequality in Indonesia during 1993-1998 using a Theil index based upon district- level GDP and population data. The overall regional income inequality increased significantly over the 1993-1997 period (from 0.262 to 0.287), during which Indonesia achieved an annual average growth rate of more than 7%. According to the two-stage nested inequality decomposition analysis, the increase is due mostly to the increase in the within-province inequality component, especially in the provinces of Riau, Jakarta, West Java, and East Java. In 1997, the within-province inequality component accounted for about a half of overall regional income inequality. In terms of per capita GDP, the economic crisis caused the Indonesian economy to revert to the 1995 level. The impact was, however, very uneven across provinces and districts. The overall regional income inequality declined to 0.266 in 1998, which corresponded to the level prevailing in 1993-94. Contrary to the 1993-1997 period, about three-quarters of the decline was due to the decrease in the between-province inequality component, in which the Java-Bali region played a prominent role through a significant decrease in its between-province inequality. The economic crisis appears to have been a crisis afflicting urban Java and urban Sumatra.departmental bulletin pape
Lexical richness and success in a standardized academic English writing test
Get PDFThis article investigates the degree to which raters of essays written for a standardized English academic writing test take into account lexical richness when assigning a quality score. It utilizes a relatively new lexical richness measure, the Lexical Frequency Profile, which has been demonstrated to be stable across compositions on different topics written by the same author provided that there is some control over genre. While previous studies of lexical richness have mostly focused on free writing produced within particular EFL and ESL institutional settings by writers with low to high intermediate levels of linguistic proficiency, this study gathered its data from free writing produced within the public domain of a well-known standardized test, the Analytical Writing Assessment component of the GMAT, by writers whose linguistic proficiencies range from intermediate to native speaker levels. In this study, considerable support was found for Laufer and Nation's (1995) prediction that the Lexical Frequency Profile would be useful for helping to determine the factors that affect judgments of quality in writing. The study's main findings were that (a) at the lower to middle levels, the Profile's lexical richness statistics correlated significantly with holistic score ratings of writing quality and discriminated clearly among writers of differing language proficiency, and (b) at the highest levels of writing quality, these statistics suggested strongly that there exists a threshold level beyond which the trend for lexical sophistication to increase in tandem with writing quality is no longer self-evident.departmental bulletin pape
Addressing curricular innovation in a multi-stakeholder environment: Planning to change
Get PDFAs language innovations move outside the boundaries of autonomous departmental units, the process of change through the planning, design and implementation phases become more complex. Therefore, there is a greater need for awareness of the steps in the innovation process. This is especially true for the planning process since the adoption decision is divided amongst potentially numerous potential adopters. This paper will present a case study of curricular innovation, a move from an EAP to an EBP class, to highlight and discuss the necessary process with initiating curricular innovation in a diverse adoption decision-making environment. The initial planning stage of the innovation process is often a top-down model for managing change that tends to deemphasize the planning process. A different model for planning change is needed for this diverse context. While this case study is content specific, a general framework for managing the planning process will be applicable to various contexts.departmental bulletin pape
Changes in China's Electricity Industry Governance: Implications for Energy Cooperation in Northeast Asia
Get PDFdepartmental bulletin pape
Assessing the Significance of Telecommunication Deregulation on the Growth of Japan's Mobile Phone Market
Get PDFThis paper analyzes the development of Japan's mobile phone market. Specifically, it focuses on the regulatory reforms of Japan's mobile communication sector and their impact on the growth of the market. The analysis based on a monopolistic competition model shows that the deregulation policies perform an essential role in fostering the rapid expansion of Japan's mobile phone market. Using quarterly data from 1991 to 1999, the paper tests the significance of the telecommunication deregulation on both the price and the demand of mobile phone services. The empirical results suggest that the significant price declination and the rapid growth of mobile phone market in the last decade were largely attributed to the regulatory reforms, which abolished the entry barriers, phased out the mobile phone rental system, and simplified the mobile communication rate setting procedure. In addition, the demand curve of model phone service was estimated. The estimated demand function indicates that the demand for mobile phone service is highly price elastic. The price elasticity was as high as 6.4 and decreased to 2.1 by 1999 as the market became saturated.departmental bulletin pape