3,336 research outputs found
Informal Insurance in the Presence of Poverty Traps: Evidence from Southern Ethiopia
No full textFieldwork for this paper was conducted under the Pastoral Risk Management (PARIMA) project of the Global Livestock Collaborative Research Support Program (GL CRSP), funded by the Office of Agriculture and Food Security, Global Bureau, USAID, under grant number DAN-1328-G-00-0046-00, and analysis was underwritten by the USAID SAGA cooperative agreement, grant number HFM-A-00-01-00132-00. Financial support was also provided by the Social Science Research Council's Program in Applied Economics on Risk and Development (through a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation), The Pew Charitable Trusts (through the Christian Scholars Program of the University of Notre Dame), the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal), and the Graduate School of Cornell University. Thanks are due to ILRI - Ethiopia for their hospitality and support and to Action for Development (Yabello) for logistical support. We thank Getachew Gebru and our field assistants, Ahmed Ibrahim and Mohammed Ibrahim, for their invaluable assistance in data collection. This is a much revised version of an earlier paper that circulated under the title: "Safety nets or social insurance in the presence of poverty traps? Evidence from southern Ethiopia". We thank Michael Carter, Stefan Dercon, Andrew Foster, Vivian Hoffman, Dhushyanth Raju, Steve Younger and participants at various conferences and seminars for comments that greatly improved this paper. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent any official agency. Any remaining errors are our own.risk, informal insurance, social networks, poverty traps, Ethiopia, Risk and Uncertainty, Z13, I3, O13,
THE DYNAMIC EFFECTS OF U.S. FOOD AID
No full textFood Security and Poverty, International Development,
Community-based risk management arrangements : an overview and implications for social fund programs
No full textRisk and its consequences pose a formidable threat to poverty reduction efforts. This study reviews a plethora of community-based risk management arrangements across the developing world. These types of arrangements are garnering greater interest in light of the growing recognition of the relative prominence of household or individual-specific idiosyncratic risk as well as the increasing shift towards community-based development funding. The study discusses potential advantages (such as targeting, cost, and informational) and disadvantages (such as exclusion and inability to manage correlated risk) of these arrangements, and their implications for the design of innovative social fund programs.Rural Poverty Reduction,Labor Policies,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Currencies and Exchange Rates,Debt Markets
Panel D: Pushing Boundaries
No full textSlide presentations that have been made available by the panelists are linked from the Description.This panel discussion, "Pushing Boundaries," included the following presentations: Diagnosing the Invisible: Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles and the Ontology of Graphic Medicine, Christopher McGunnigle (Seton Hall University) Humanism and the Premedical Realm: An Exercise in Graphic Medical Education, Ian Sampson (for Barrett Michalec and Frederic W. Hafferty
Beyond the "input-output" approach to assessing determinants of student performance in university economics : implications from student learning centred research
No full textShanahan, Martin; Findlay, Christopher Charles; Cowie, Judy; Round, David; McIver, Ron; Barrett, Steve
FOOD AID EFFECTIVENESS: "IT'S THE TARGETING, STUPID!"
No full textIn the 1992 United States presidential campaign, Bill Clinton and his staff regularly invoked the forceful reminder "It's the economy, stupid!" in order to maintain a tight focus on the core issue that would ultimately decide their electoral success or failure. This initially seemed reductionist to many observers, because a presidential campaign is a complex affair, with myriad issues and pressures confronting the candidate every day. But Clinton and his staff were ultimately proved correct. Most of the important issues that could ignite or derail their campaign did boil down to the economy, and their famous, ruthless focus proved highly successful. This paper advances the argument that similar focus on issues of targeting are essential if food aid is to succeed in its core mission to contribute to human development by providing temporary relief of food insecurity among poor peoples in the world. The issue of "targeting" concerns the who, the when, the what and the how questions surrounding transfers: is aid reaching people who need it (and not flowing to people who do not need it), when they need it, in appropriate form, and through effective modalities? There has been considerable research in recent years on targeting transfers generally, much of it motivated by the search for effective targeting mechanisms that do not require costly administrative screening. Targeting is of special importance in food aid for two basic reasons. First, food is a critical resource. People who go without enough and appropriate food for even a relatively short period of time can suffer irreversible health effects of undernutrition and related diseases and injuries. Therefore, reaching beneficiaries who would otherwise suffer undernutrition, in a timely manner, and in an appropriate form is especially important for the effectiveness of food transfers. And if done right, food transfers can be fundamental to effective development strategy, by safeguarding the most valuable asset of the poor: the human capital embodied in their health and education. Second, the key alleged problems surrounding food aid - displaced international trade, depressed producer prices in recipient countries, labor supply disincentives, delivery delays, misuse by intermediaries, diversion to resale or feeding livestock or alcohol brewing, dependency, inattention to beneficiaries' micronutrient needs, etc. - all revolve ultimately around questions of targeting. If the donor community could improve the targeting of food aid, it could improve the effectiveness of food aid in accomplishing its primary humanitarian and development aim - the maintenance of valuable human capital - and reduce many of the errors that sometimes make food aid controversial, ineffective, or both. A limited amount of descriptive research has explored ex post whether food aid has reached intended beneficiaries, and has found considerable targeting errors of inclusion (providing aid to the non-needy) and exclusion (failure to reach the needy) at both macro and micro levels. There have also been considerable efforts at improving ex ante food aid targeting through the development and refinement of early warning systems, vulnerability mapping, and similar tools, so that aid might reach needy people in a more reliable and timely fashion. This paper offers a brief interpretive review of this evidence. Section I summarizes the empirical evidence on food aid targeting at both macro- and micro- levels, emphasizing the inherent tradeoff between errors of exclusion (missing intended beneficiaries) and errors of inclusion (providing transfers to the non-needy). Section II then discusses the consequences of targeting errors, again looking at both errors of exclusion and inclusion and at micro- as well as macro- levels. Section III reviews some of the options available for improving targeting. Section IV concludes.Food Security and Poverty, Q18, O1, I1,
Dysplasia in Barrett esophagus
No full textBACKGROUND Dysplasia in Barrett esophagus is a premalignant condition that is associated with an increased risk of developing esophageal adenocarcinoma. Unfortunately, clinical investigation aimed at prevention of progression to malignant disease has been hampered by the variable prevalence of dysplasia reported in the literature. The objective of the current study was to more accurately determine the prevalence of dysplasia among individuals with Barrett esophagus who would be available for enrollment in a chemoprevention trial. METHODS The pathology archives of 3 institutions were reviewed over a 5-year period for all reports of diagnoses of Barrett esophagus. Surgical cases, malignancies, and duplicate or referral cases were excluded from the analysis. RESULTS A total of 790 cases of Barrett esophagus were identified. Of these, 37 (4.7%) were cases of low-grade dysplasia (LGD), and 20 (2.5%) were cases of high-grade dysplasia. The University of Michigan Medical Center (Ann Arbor, MI) diagnosed 18 cases of LGD, Henry Ford Hospital (Detroit, MI) diagnosed 15 cases of LGD, and Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston, MA) diagnosed 4 cases of LGD in patients with Barrett esophagus over the 5-year study period. CONCLUSIONS The confirmed low prevalence of cases of LGD will affect the design of future clinical trials of chemopreventive interventions for Barrett esophagus. Cancer 2004. © 2004 American Cancer Society.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/34387/1/20149_ftp.pd
Supplemental Material - The Effect of Preoperative Marijuana Use on Surgical Outcomes, Patient-Reported Outcomes, and Opioid Consumption Following Lumbar Fusion
No full textSupplemental Material for The Effect of Preoperative Marijuana Use on Surgical Outcomes, Patient-Reported Outcomes, and Opioid Consumption Following Lumbar Fusion by Nicholas D. D’Antonio, Mark J. Lambrechts, Jeremy C. Heard, Nicholas Siegel, Brian A. Karamian, Angela Huang, Jose A. Canseco, Barrett Woods, Ian David Kaye, Alan S. Hilibrand, Christopher K. Kepler, Alexander R. Vaccaro, and Gregory D. Schroeder in Global Spine Journal</p
The construction of Karen Karnak: The multi-author-function
No full textThis thesis is situated within the comparatively recent developments of Web 2.0 and the emergence of interactive WikiMedia, and explores the mode of authorship within a Read/Write culture compared to that of a Read/Only tradition. The hypothesis of this study is that the role of the audience has become merged with the author, and as such, represents new functions and attributes, distinct from a more conventional concept of authorship, in which the roles of audience and author are more separate. Read/Write and participatory culture, as defined by this study, is focused on collaboration, and includes the influences of D.I.Y. culture, Open-Source practices and the production of text by multiple authors. Multi-authorship presents a re-thinking of several concepts which support the notion of the individual author, since the focus of multi-authorship is not on attribution and ownership of a finished text, but on the continued malleability of a text. Modes of multi-authorship, demonstrated in the use of the pseudonyms Alan Smithee and Karen Eliot, represent declarative authors whose names signify multiple origins, whilst concurrently indicating a distinct body of work. The function of these names form an important context to this study, since primary research involves the construction of an experimental mode of multi-authorship utilising WikiMedia technology and the interaction of thirty nine participants, who are invited to create a body of work under the collective pseudonym Karen Karnak. The data generated by this experiment is analysed using aspects of Michel Foucault's author-function to identify and determine power structures inherent in the WikiMedia context. The interplay of power structures, including concepts such as identity, ownership and the body of work, affect the resulting mode of authorship and contribute to the construction of Karen Karnak, suggesting further areas of research into the emerging multi-author
Dual-biomimetic meroterpenoid syntheses. A study of acetylenic terpenes in polyene cyclizations applied to the synthesis of resorcylate natural products
No full textMeroterpenoids are a class of natural products derived from a mixed biosynthetic origin, with an arene entity originating from the polyketide pathway and the polyene unit originating from the terpene pathway. These natural
products display a multitude of biological activities. The Barrett group has reported successful syntheses of meroterpenoid natural products, including those derived from polyene cyclizations. The first part of this thesis studied the chemical space around non-natural acetylenic polyene resorcylates for their reactivity in biomimetic polyene cyclizations, which were synthesized
by means of remote terpene functionalization, acetylene installation with in situ deprotection and established biomimetic polyketide aromatization procedures developed within the Barrett group. The results should be of interest for structure-activity-relationship (SAR) studies and enable future derivatization studies. The second part of this thesis concerns the synthesis of amorfrutin natural products, which was done in collaboration with a final year undergraduate student. Natural products isolated from Amorpha fruticosa display a range of bioactivities with unusual specificity. For SAR purposes, a unified approach was designed to synthesize these natural products. The syntheses followed a biosynthetic proposal of interconversion between the amorfrutins. Thus, the biomimetic strategy of polyketide aromatization enabled the synthesis of amorfrutin B, which in turn displays the core structure of (S)- and (R)-amorfrutin D. Amorfrutin A to amorfrutin C conversion and the synthesis of C5 analogs are described.Open Acces
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