Socioeconomic Determinants of Child Health: Empirical Evidence from Indonesia

This paper characterizes the socioeconomic determinants of child health using height‐for‐age z‐score (HAZ), a long‐run measure of chronic nutritional deficiency. We construct a panel data that follows children between ages 3 and 59 months in 1993 through the 1997 and 2000 waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey. We use this data to identify the various child‐level, household‐level and community‐level factors that affect children's health. Our findings indicate that household income has a large and statistically significant role in explaining improvements in HAZ. We also find a strong positive association between parental height and HAZ. At the community level, we find that provision of electricity and the availability of paved roads are positively associated with improvements in HAZ. Finally, in comparison to community‐level factors, household‐level characteristics play a large role in explaining the variation in HAZ. These findings suggest that policies that address the demand‐side constraints have greater potential to improve children's health outcomes in the future.     

Long-term impact of investments in early schooling — Empirical evidence from rural Ethiopia

We examine the cumulative impact of early schooling investments on later schooling outcomes using enrollment status and relative grade attainment as short-run and long-run measures of schooling. Using a child-level longitudinal data set from rural Ethiopia, we estimate a dynamic conditional schooling demand function where the coefficient estimate on the lagged dependent variable captures the impact of all previous period schooling inputs and resources. We find that a child who is enrolled in the prior period is 33 percentage points more likely to be enrolled currently. These lagged effects are stronger for girls and for children from higher income households.     

Economic and Environmental Benefits of Eliminating Log Export Bans – The Case of Costa Rica

An increasing number of tropical timber‐producing nations have enacted bans on export of logs arguing that this will reduce deforestation, expand downstream wood processing and improve the scale efficiency of domestic processing, create jobs and retain more value‐added nationally. The theoretical literature is clear that trade restrictions are generally welfare reducing (except in special cases such as when there is a potential for an optimal export tax). At best, a log export ban is a second‐best policy tool for reducing deforestation and addressing the associated environmental externalities. In overall terms, the suggestion that log export bans can achieve the objectives expected of them is dubious. However, very little quantitative evidence exists to demonstrate this claim and the paper attempts to address this gap by looking at the economic and environmental impacts of eliminating a log export ban in Costa Rica. The authors argue that eliminating the export ban is Pareto improving and could generate economic gains as high as $14 million per annum with the possibility of relatively modest environmental benefits.     

Democracy,visibility and public good provision

We examine the role of visibility in influencing government resource allocation across a multiplicity of public goods. We show that a “visibility effect” distorts governmental resource allocation such that it helps explain why governments neglect provision of essential public goods, despite their considerable benefits. We show that greater democratization widens the gap in resource allocation between more visible (such as famine prevention) versus less visible (such as malnutrition prevention) public goods, up to an intermediate level of democracy. Beyond this level, this gap decreases. Furthermore, public goods with low visibility are prone to multiple equilibria in resource allocation, with voter expectations being shown to be important.     

Impact of privacy concerns on resistance to smart services: does the ‘Big Brother effect’ matter?

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study is to provide a better understanding of the factors that explain consumer resistance to smart services from a privacy perspective. To this end, an exploratory qualitative study and a quantitative study were carried out. 653 French consumers answered an online questionnaire regarding smart services in the banking sector. Structural equation modelling was used to test the conceptual model. The findings show that information privacy, the unauthorised secondary use of personal information and perceived intrusion have an impact on consumer resistance to smart services. Moreover, our research highlights the major role of the ‘Big Brother effect’ as an antecedent to these various privacy concerns.     

我国城市垃圾现状与可持续发展研究

首先分析我国城市垃圾问题的现状,介绍了我国目前城市垃圾处理技术,并对城市可持续发展垃圾治理问题进行了探讨。     

Entry mode and equity level: A multilevel examination of foreign direct investment ownership structure

Over the last two decades, strategy researchers have sought to understand the ownership structure of firms' foreign direct investments (FDI) as reflected in entry mode and equity level. However, prior FDI research has ignored the interrelated nature of these key FDI decisions. In addition, prior research does not fully account for the fact that individual ownership structure decisions occur within the context of a firm's broader FDI portfolio, and thus reflect a wide and frequently unobserved range of parent firm and host nation effects. Our research seeks to address both of these limitations. Using a rich dataset of 4,459 subsidiaries established by 858 Japanese firms across 38 countries over a 9‐year period, we specify a conditional bivariate, cross‐classified multilevel model of FDI ownership structure. Our model enables the joint estimation of entry mode and equity level, accounts for the portfolio nature of FDI, and compares the relative predictive power of transaction cost‐ and experience‐based explanatory variables across both facets of ownership structure. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Book reviews

Conclusion This book argues convincingly that the history of technologies play a major part in current economic evolution. It provides data, figures and explanations related to public policies but does not take into account domestic industrial dynamics and does not explain how national leaders have emerged in high tech industries. Intuitively, one can imagine that the history of firms and industries play a part as well as the history of public policies.European data relate at the best up to 1988 and are scarce relative to the detailed presentation of American public policies (see for examples the data related to basic research between 1975 and 1988 (p. 131).The book aims very clearly to suggest guidelines to the American administration public policies devoted to technologies in order to maintain the leadership of US firms in high tech industries. Unfortunately, the conclusions are not very clear-cut and it is difficult to draw lesson for European countries or for the NICs as the authors themselves think these conclusions are hazardous even in the US case.