1,720,982 research outputs found
Income inequality and the composition of public debt
Get PDFPurpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the redistributive effect of domestic public debt: lenders to the government lie on the higher end of the income distribution, but the burden of debt financing falls on the entire tax base, to the extent that taxes are used to service debt. Because domestic debt is typically held by domestic lenders, this involves a redistribution of resources. Design/methodology/approach – The author uses cross-country panel data on debt composition, and run regressions of income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, using various specifications, controlling for a variety of macroeconomic, fiscal and political variables. Findings – The author finds that the composition of public debt is consistently a significant determinant of income inequality: the domestic share of public debt is regressive and significant across all specifications, even controlling for total and external debt servicing, political conflict, corruption and a variety of government spending variables. Research limitations/implications – The data span 18 years (1990-2007) which means that long-run effects are hard to track. While the author has a good mix in the sample of observations from low-, middle- and high-income countries, the author is constrained in the choice of countries by the availability of data on inequality and on the composition of public debt. Originality/value – This is the first paper to examine the composition of public debt in terms of domestic and external debt, and any bearing it may have on income inequality. The finding is also new for both the public debt and income inequality literatures: cross-country panel data are consistent with the belief that domestic debt redistributes resources from the entire tax base to wealthy holders of government debt in a way that external debt does not. © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Relative deprivation and mortality in South Africa
No full textThis paper tests the relative income hypothesis by considering the relationship between mortality, income and relative deprivation in South Africa using individual-level data on income and five measures of relative deprivation each with a different reference group. We find that income tends to be protective of, and relative deprivation detrimental to health, but the latter often gives a better account of mortality than does income alone. For some population groups the fit is improved in specifications which include both income and relative deprivation. Overall, there seems to be solid evidence in support of the relative income hypothesis, particularly for the more economically disadvantaged population groups. Relative deprivation is especially significant when age is the reference group, suggesting that the comparison of socio-economic standing that has an impact on health tends to happen within cohorts. The results are robust to splitting the sample into urban/rural subsamples and to looking at the incidence of illness as the health outcome rather than mortality. While little is known about the mechanisms underlying the effect of relative deprivation on health and mortality, the consistent evidence in favor of age as a reference group, particularly in a context like South Africa's suggests that intra-cohort comparisons should be an avenue for more in depth investigation.South Africa Relative deprivation Income inequality Mortality Age cohorts Race
The relationship between relative deprivation and self-rated health among Palestinian women in refugee camps in Lebanon
Get PDFAbstractBackgroundRelative deprivation (RD) has been advanced as a theory to explain the relationship between income inequality and health in high-income countries. In this study, we tested the theory in a low-income protracted refugee setting in a middle-income country.MethodsUsing data from the 2010 Socioeconomic Survey of Palestine Refugees in Lebanon, we examined the relationship between RD and health among a representative sample of Palestinian refugee women (N=1047). Data were gathered utilizing a household questionnaire with information on socio-demographics and an individual-level questionnaire with information on the health of each respondent. We examined self-rated health (SRH) as the main health measure but also checked the sensitivity of our results using self-reported chronic conditions. We used two measures for absolute SES: total household monthly expenditures on non-food goods and services and total household monthly expenditures on non-health goods and services. With refugee camp as a reference group, we measured a household’s RD as a household’s rank of absolute SES within the reference group, multiplied by the distance between its absolute SES and the average absolute SES of all households ranked above it. We investigated the robustness of the RD–SRH relationship using these two alternative measures of absolute SES.ResultsOur findings show that, controlling for absolute SES and other possible confounders, women report significantly poorer health when they live in households with a higher score on our RD measure (because of either lower relative rank or lower relative SES compared to households better off in the reference group which we take to be the refugee camp). While RD is always significant as a determinant of SRH under a variety of specifications, absolute SES is not consistently significant. These findings persist when we use self-reported chronic conditions as our measure of health instead of SRH, suggesting that the relationship between health and RD may be operating through a psychosocial mechanism.DiscussionOur findings underscore the importance of examining RD under conditions of poverty and in diverse socio-cultural contexts. They also highlight that public health approaches should be concerned with reducing social inequalities in low-income settings in addition to alleviating poverty
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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