1,721,027 research outputs found
Was growth in Egypt between 2005 and 2008 pro-poor? : from static to dynamic poverty profile
No full textDaniela Marotta; Ruslan Yemtsov; Heba El-Laithy; Hala Abou-Ali; Sherine Al-Shawarb
Costs and benefits of debt and debt service reduction
Full text linkThe author evaluates the costs and benefits of debt and debt service reduction (DDSR) from the point of view of five countries that have concluded Brady deals: Costa Rica, Mexico, the Philippines, Uruguay, and Venezuela. He concludes that, contrary to widely held views, commercial banks have probably benefited from the operations. Commercial bank participation in DDSR is voluntary, so direct financial savings to the country are probably negative at present values. The benefit from DDSR is not that debt is bought at"bargain prices"at the expense of commercial banks. It appears difficult to justify a DDSR operation on purely financial grounds. A more realistic way to look at a DDSR operation is to view it as a"project"that involves a certain financial cost. The return on such a project is how the DDSR operation improves the macroeconomy, or contributes to development. The main purpose of DDSR is to establish a more efficient arrangement between debtor countries and commercial banks, leading to improved conditions for development. A DDSR operation that does not help development is costly and should not be undertaken. The impact of DDSR on development is usually measured by the increase in the growth rate of GDP, but it is too soon to measure that for these five countries. A suitable alternative is to look at the change in investment patterns. A strong policy framework is needed if debt and debt service reduction are to significantly improve development. In Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Venezuela, improved and sustained strong adjustment policies have generated the greatest development benefits. Gains have been less in smaller countries where policies were not as supportive. The author concludes that for a country to benefit from DDSR, it needs significant indirect benefits (such as increased domestic and foreign savings). Direct benefits are likely to be negative because of the commercial banks'financial gains and because DDSR operations are frontloaded. DDSR operations cannot be justified solely by direct benefits and savings in cash flow.Strategic Debt Management,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Financial Intermediation
Access to water, women's work and child outcomes
Full text linkPoor rural women in the developing world spend considerable time collecting water. How then do they respond to improved access to water infrastructure? Does it increase their participation in income earning market-based activities? Does it improve the health and education outcomes of their children? To help address these questions, a new approach for dealing with the endogeneity of infrastructure placement in cross-sectional surveysis proposed and implemented using data for nine developing countries. The paper does not find that access to water comes with greater off-farm work for women, although in countries where substantial gender gaps in schooling exist, both boys'and girls'enrollments improve with better access to water. There are also some signs of impacts on child health as measured by anthropometric z-scores.Gender, Water Supply and Sanitation,Rural Labor Markets,Rural Water Supply and Sanitation,Access&Equity in Basic Education,Early Child and Children's Health
Unemployment and labor market dynamics in Russia
Full text linkThe past 15 months have seen the beginning of structural change in Russia but a failure of the economy to stabilize. The balance sheet, conclude the authors suggests that a return to centralized control remain almost impossible, but the dencentralization that has occurred contain many undesirable features. In framing their analysis, the authors draw on aggregate data and firm-level data from the first-round results of a 1992 survey covering 41 firms in the Moscow region. The survey results suggest that the greater autonomy of firms has facilitated the exploitation of market power while failing to dampen the demand for easy credit from the budget or banking system. For the most part, demand has been satisfied, enabling firms to meet current wage claims and, to a lesser degree, sustain output levels. Buoyant nominal profits can be traced either to pricing behavior derived from market power or to transfers or subsidies channeled through the fiscal monetary system. This in turn has artificially sustained the revenue side of the government accounts. Official employment was no more than 1 percent of the labor force by the end of 1992, but evidence on the importance of marginal unemployment indicates that the underlying pass-through into open unemployment will be great. By the third quarter of 1992, this"augmented"unemployment rate approached 4 percent of the labor force. Even so, the authors observe non-trivial outflows from unemployment to jobs and in some regions to jobs in the private or collective sector. In Russia, outflows to state sector jobs dominate. Survey evidence shows considerable turnover in the state sector and resilient hiring. Much of the churning in labor markets seems to be through voluntary separations and job transitions. Net changes to employment have been limited, and have involved mostly ancillary or clerical staff. The authors discern a core or membership rule dominating Russian firms'decisions which it would be dangerous to assume will be maintained. They interpret it as a holding strategy in a complex game the firms have been playing with government. Lack of a credible reform program has weakened any impulse toward large-scale restructuring of firms. Wages have been more volatile and have regional dispersion, but the authors predict no large consistent shift in relative wages. Rather the wage path has probably been governed by current streams and additional transfers, and then set consistent with the stable employment rule. The path of wages over 1992 is clearly associated with changes in Russia's monetary and fiscal stance and allied institutional features.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets
Japanese foreign direct investment : recent trends, determinants, and prospects
Full text linkIn the late 1980s, Japan became the biggest source of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the world. The main beneficiaries of the rapid increase in investment flows were industrial countries, but the developing world (especially East Asia and Latin America) also received substantial inflows. In East Asia, the newly industrial economies (NIEs) of Hong Kong, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China) were, at first, production bases for Japanese manufacturing in the 1970s and early 1980s. But in the late 1980s, these countries became new, expanding consumer markets, attracting huge Japanese investments in the tertiary (service) sector, while investments in manufacturing shrank rapidly because of rising labor costs. The Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN) and China became Japan's new production base. In Latin America (mostly small Caribbean countries) Japan's focus is almost exclusively on tax havens. Globally, Japan's investments in the secondary (manufacturing) and service sectors of the major Latin American nations are only marginal. Japanese investment flows declined drastically after 1989, mostly because of the depressed global and domestic economy, after rapid asset price deflation in Japan. Hardest hit by the decline were the United States and Europe. Japanese FDI flows to developing countries also declined, but less. The biggest losers were the NIEs and the Caribbean tax havens. The biggest losers were the NIEs and the Caribbean tax havens. Japanese investments continued to grow in other Latin American countries and, even more, in the ASEAN and China. Japanese investors sharply reduced tertiary sector investments, primarily geared to maintaining or expanding markets. Investments in the secondary sector, making use of low-cost production, continued to expand. This trend is expected to continue in the near future, with FDI flows declining further, albeit more slowly. Low-wage production countries such as China and Indonesia will attract an increasing share. Investment to expand markets in the industrial countries and the NIEs are likely to decline. But medium-term prospects for Japanese FDI in developing countries are brighter, as economic recovery and continuing current account surpluses in Japan will lead to a resumption of active foreign investment by Japanese multinational corporations.Foreign Direct Investment,Environmental Economics&Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Trade and Regional Integration
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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