Women's participation in housing delivery: the case of Ezilweleni,South Africa

As part of a study on housing delivery in post-apartheid South Africa, research was conducted to explore women's participation. The interest in women was based on the assumption that their involvement would contribute to greater equity in the residential construction sector. Focus group discussions and a household survey were conducted. Participants were asked about their income sources and their involvement in various phases of housing delivery such as securing tenure, planning, procuring materials and building. The findings indicate that women influenced decisions about the level of infrastructural services in Ezilweleni. They participated in housing delivery but reverted to informal sector activities despite training in building. Both formal and informal education are necessary if greater equity is to be achieved in the construction sector.     

Portfolio optimization using dynamic factor and stochastic volatility: evidence on Fat‐tailed errors and leverage

The portfolio optimization problem is investigated using a multivariate stochastic volatility model with factor dynamics, fat‐tailed errors and leverage effects. The efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo method is used to estimate model parameters, and the Rao–Blackwellized auxiliary particle filter is used to compute the likelihood and to predict conditional means and covariances. The proposed models are applied to sector indices of the Tokyo Stock Price Index (TOPIX), which consists of 33 stock market indices classified by industrial sectors. The portfolio is dynamically optimized under several expected utilities and two additional static strategies are considered as benchmarks. An extensive empirical study indicates that our proposed dynamic factor model with leverage or fat‐tailed errors significantly improves the predictions of the conditional mean and covariances, as well as various measures of portfolio performance.     

ASIAN DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES: CHINA AND INDONESIA COMPARED

China's and Indonesia's development strategies have been compared with others, but rarely with each other. Radically different political contexts have produced both similar and distinctly different development patterns. Each using formal planning, Indonesia spurred radical reforms to promote growth, whereas China opted for incremental reforms to ‘grow out of the Plan’, as a political device and to discover what policies and institutions worked. Both strategies produced environments largely conducive to rapid development. Indonesia relied on a few economic technocrats to oversee development; China used decentralisation and party reforms to create a credible environment for non-state investment. Both shared concern for agricultural reform and food security; both opted to open up for trade—China gradually, Indonesia radically. Both did well in growth and poverty reduction following reform. China's growth performance is in a league of its own, especially since Indonesia's Asian crisis setback, but Indonesia had more equitable growth and survived a difficult political transition with, in hindsight, modest costs.     

Existence of a continuum of equilibria in a monetary random-matching model

In this paper, we study a monetary random-matching model where both goods and money are perfectly divisible, production is costly, and there is no exogenous upper bound on agents' money holdings, information on which is private to the agent. We show that there is a continuum of stationary equilibria where agents have either no money or a set amount, and buyers spend all their money. As in the previous studies, the equilibrium value function is step-like, which emerges as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The endogenous upper bound on agents' money holdings is the result of private information on agents' money holdings. Buyers post an offer that is accepted only by sellers without money, who set a higher value on money.     

Carl Menger's theory of the evolution of money: some problems

The Austrian economist Carl Menger suggested that money, law and language may all evolve without state intervention. A preliminary task of this article is to clarify what is meant by ‘evolve’ in this context. It is further argued that there is a gap in the Mengerian argument: a neglect of potential quality variation in the emerging monetary unit. Attention to this factor suggests a role for intervention in the monetary system, by the state or another overarching authority such as a central bank, to police the currency against debasement, and to legitimate its value. Furthermore, the argument suggests why law is not an entirely spontaneous institution and may require state sanction that is not generally necessary in the case of language.     

Economic Democracy: Solution or New Challenge ∗

Abstract Kaleckians and partisans of the capital monopoly approach have argued that additional outlays on unproductive labor increase economic activity under three conditions: investment is sensitive to realized rates of capacity utilization; savings out of wages and salaries are assumed away; prices are fixed by a markup over unit direct costs. The present model examines what happens when the last hypothesis is modified, i.e., when megacorps are assumed to fix prices on the basis of total unit costs, more specifically on the basis of target-return pricing procedures. Because higher costs are shifted on to productive labor, through higher prices and a reduction in their real wages, additional unproductive outlays may have a negative impact on economic activity. It turns out, in addition, that one must carefully distinguish between unproductive labor outlays and unproductive capital outlays when firms are assumed to shift these additional costs to consumers, on the basis of target-return pricing procedures.     

GLOBAL MARKETS,FARMERS AND THE STATE: SUSTAINING PROFITS IN THE INDONESIAN COCOA SECTOR

The rapid expansion of cocoa farming among Sulawesi smallholders since 1980 has transformed the island into a hub within the global cocoa industry. It hosts a number of multinational trading firms and has an expanding grinding sector. In recent years, however, the cocoa sector has been struck by severe pest, disease and quality problems, which are undermining the long-term sustainability of one of Eastern Indonesia's most important rural industries. Some form of intervention is needed if the cocoa industry is to avoid steady decline. This paper examines the role of informal institutions, cocoa multinationals and government in attempts to maintain farm profits in Sulawesi.     

People-centred environmental management and municipal commonage in the Nama Karoo

This paper examines the problem of managing municipal commonage land in the Nama Karoo, which is increasingly being used by black or coloured emergent farmers. Many of these live in the towns and have very little agricultural experience or knowledge, and some are unemployed farmworkers. The paper presents findings from a survey of emergent farmers who use municipal commonage in Philippolis in the southern Free State. It uses the sustainable livelihoods approach to suggest that environmental knowledge is a key asset for small farmers, and that suitable approaches to agricultural extension need to be adopted to promote ecological knowledge. It suggests that ecological knowledge needs to play a more prominent role in people-centred, participatory developmental approaches so as to strengthen municipal commonage management and prevent the rapid desertification of commonage land.     

The CEO endorser and message source credibility: an empirical investigation of antecedents and consequences

This article investigates the antecedents and consequences of source credibility within the context of the relatively new but growing phenomenon of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) endorsers. The study results indicate that source credibility is a central determinant of a CEO endorsers' ability to effect desired outcome states. Results also indicate that the effect of message source credibility on purchase intentions, though strong, is not direct because beliefs about critical product attributes mediate the effect of a message source's credibility on behavioural intentions. The results of the study also indicate that models of source credibility derived from the celebrity endorser literature do not generalize to the CEO endorser context. Specifically, the attractiveness and expertise of the message source had no significant impact on receivers' perceptions of credibility.