Poverty,HIV/AIDS and the old age pension in Bhambayi,Kwazulu-Natal,South Africa

To date the international community has tended to direct HIV prevention programmes, treatment, care and supportive services to young adults and children, with little concern about the impact on older people. Since empirical evidence on the socioeconomic impact of HIV/AIDS on households with older persons is lacking, this paper attempts to fill this gap, using data from a household-based survey conducted in Bhambayi, a mixed formal and informal settlement north of eThekwini, KwaZulu-Natal. The findings highlight the links between the uptake of the South African old age pension, poverty and HIV/AIDS in households with older persons. The paper makes recommendations for both government and non-governmental organisations in respect of community-based support systems for such households affected by HIV/AIDS.     

Rural telework: case studies from the Australian outback

This paper examines the effects of infrastructure and isolation on rural telework, and the potential of telework for rural communities. It draws on findings from two Australian case studies: a government initiative and a community-initiated training project. Differences between the experiences of rural and urban teleworkers are highlighted.     

Foreign Ownership and Productivity: New Evidence from the Service Sector and the R&D Lab

This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownershipand productivity, paying particular attention to two issuesneglected in the existing literature—the role of multinationalsin service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conductedby foreign multinationals. We review existing theoretical andempirical work, which largely focuses on manufacturing, beforepresenting new evidence using establishment-level data on production,service, and R&D activity for Great Britain. We find thatmultinationals play an important role in service sectors andthat entry of foreign multinationals by takeover is more prevalentthan greenfield investment. We find that British multinationalshave lower levels of labour productivity than foreign multinationals,but the difference is less stark in the service sector thanin the production sector, and that British multinationals havelower levels of investment and intermediate use per employee.We also find that foreign-owned multinationals conduct a substantialamount of British R&D. We discuss the implications of theseand other findings for the policy debate on incentives to influencemultinational firms' location choices.     

Concentrated poverty and neighbourhood effects: youth marginalisation in Buenos Aires’ informal settlements

This paper provides evidence for the relationship between concentrated poverty as manifested in the informal settlements and the labour market in the city of Buenos Aires. It also examines the consequences that these have on the social marginalisation of young people. First, it analyses the effects of residential location in informal settlements on labour market access. Secondly, it examines the results of multivariate analyses which measure the net effect of living in informal settlements on key indicators of youth marginalisation, as well as the interrelation of the effects of family educational and occupational status. The results demonstrate that the spatial concentration of poverty in informal settlements is linked to labour market segmentation, and is a central determinant of urban marginality. For young people, the very fact of living in informal settlements, in households with highly precarious employment status, significantly increases their risk of marginalisation in a cumulative manner. These findings point to the importance of adopting an integral approach that addresses the dynamics of deprivation in a multi-dimensional and multi-level setting.     

Migration,remittances and human capital investment in Kenya

This paper investigates the relationship between international migration, remittances, and human capital investment in Kenya. We use household‐level data from the 2009 Kenya Migration Household Survey (which was part of the Africa Migration Project) to test our hypothesis and uncover a positive and significant relationship between the amount of international remittances a household receives and the amount of expenditures allocated to education (for all levels of education). We consider various robustness checks and find that our results hold up to various specifications, including an instrumental variable approach.     

The makings of an information leader: the intraday price discovery process for individual stocks in the DJIA

The main purpose of this paper is to construct an intraday arbitrage price series for each stock in the DJIA using information in the Diamond Trust Fund ETF. We then compute the information shares (Hasbrouck in J Finan 50(4):1175–1199, 1995) for the actual versus the arbitrage prices for each stock. While previous literature documents that ETFs lead stock indices in information origination, we find that some firms are “information leaders” in that the information share that comes from the stock price is larger than that which comes from the ETF-related arbitrage price. Further analysis is conducted to uncover the firm-specific factors that are related to a stock’s role in information generation.     

An evaluation of the equilibrium value of the euro,its predecessors and their constituent currencies based on economic fundamentals

This study presents constructed equilibrium exchange rates (EERs) of the euro and its predecessors the European Unit of Account and the European Currency Unit, as well as the euro’s member states using a relative version of purchasing power parity (PPP) equilibrium. The revealed patterns of over- and undervaluation demonstrate how well suited the northern member states, in contrast to the southern states, were for the monetary union. Moreover, a relative persistent overvaluation for Greece and Portugal suggests that their ambition to join the euro reduced their competitiveness. The constructed EERs of the euro suggest the European Commission was able to set the initial value of the euro with a high degree of accuracy. Furthermore, the EERs indicate a successive strengthening of the fundamental value of the euro versus the U.S. dollar from 1999 to 2015. The analysis shows a close correlation between the deviations from equilibrium and the events of Greece’s sovereign debt crisis. In addition, the presented graphs show strong support for the PPP hypothesis. The results are robust to different constructed EERs and offer a guide to international market participants interested in the general equilibrium path of the euro and its predecessors.     

Product quality or market regulation? Explaining the slow growth of Europe's wine cooperatives, 1880–1980

Wine cooperatives were relatively scarce in Europe before the Second World War, but by the 1980s accounted for more than half of all wines made in France, Italy, and Spain, the three major producer countries. Unlike Danish dairy cooperatives, whose success before the First World War was linked to their ability to improve product quality and compete in high‐value niche markets, wine cooperatives are often associated with the production of large volumes of low‐quality products. This article argues that the initial slow diffusion of wine cooperatives was caused by the difficulties of improving quality due to environmental conditions in European vineyards (‘terroir’) and measurement problems, rather than institutional shortcomings. Cooperatives only became widespread when the state found them a useful instrument to regulate markets, especially after 1950. The problems associated with poor wine quality were never resolved, and cooperatives have become increasingly uncompetitive in the market place, especially following the major decline in per capita consumption and shift towards premium wines from the 1980s.     

Perceived travel risks: the traveller perspective and manageability

Although a large number of studies both in and out of the tourism literature have examined perceived risk, the risk categories utilized are often too broad and are not generated from the perspective of current and potential travellers. This deficiency in the travel research is addressed in this study by asking more than 2,000 respondents to identify their concerns when travelling. All respondent concerns were content analyzed to derive ten travel‐specific risks and the relationship of the identified risks with demographic characteristics of the respondents was examined. The identification of these potential and actual traveller‐driven travel‐risks allows tourism officials to better understand how to respond to alleviate traveller concerns and encourage travel. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The question of land access and the Spanish land reform of 1932

Spanish land reform, involving the breakup of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century, and was justified on economic and political grounds. This article employs new provincial data on landless workers, land prices, and agrarian wages to consider whether government intervention was needed because of the failure of the free action of markets to redistribute land. Our evidence shows that the relative number of landless workers decreased significantly from 1860 to 1930, before the approval of the 1932 Land reform during the Second Republic (1931–6). This was due to two interrelated market forces: the falling ratio between land prices and rural wages, which made plots of land cheaper for landless workers to rent and buy; and structural change that drained the rural population from the countryside Given that shifts in factor prices were already helping workers gain access to land by the 1930s, the economic arguments for introducing reform at that time remain unclear.