The Swedish nonprofit sector in international comparison

The previous picture of the nonprofit sector in Sweden has been biased by a narrow US perspective. Mainstream nonprofit literature seems to neglect work carried out in the important but more complex tradition of the civil society. In this article, recent cross-national data reflecting both these paradigms are presented. This gives us a better picture of the Swedish sector and highlights limitations of earlier approaches, not only for our understanding of the Swedish sector but also of the sector elsewhere. To continue the quest for the raison d'être of the sector, not only are more cross-national data needed but we must also develop a multidisciplinary framework in which to understand the data.     

Financial liberalization: The case of Sri Lanka

Empirical Economics - According to the advocates of financial liberalization in less developed countries (LDCs), a rise in the real interest rates is essential to stimulate savings, investment and...     

The nonprofit sector and industry performance

Despite the importance of nonprofit industries in the economy, little analysis has been conducted as to whether the behavior of such industries differs from that of for-profit industries. Extending previous firm-level analyses, we propose a neoclassical theory with an endogenous nonprofit sector. Our analysis implies that nonprofit firms have a competitive advantage over for-profit firms, so that marginal changes in the industry operate through the for-profit sector. As such, marginal industry behavior is identical to that of a for-profit industry and nonprofit regulations may have a limited impact or even no impact on overall industry performance. Our theory has the methodological advantage that standard for-profit analysis applies directly to nonprofit firms, because they can be analyzed as for-profit firms with lower costs. We discuss aspects of the empirical literature that test this theory of nonprofit activity.     

Schooling and household welfare: The case of Sri Lanka from 1990 to 2006

This paper looks at the effect schooling has had on household welfare in Sri Lanka during the 1990–2006 period, on average and across the welfare distribution. We account for the endogeneity of schooling using quantile instrumental variable estimation as developed in Chernozhukov, Fernández‐Val, and Kowalski ( 2015 ). We use pooled data from four cross‐sectional Household Income Expenditure Surveys. The results show that an extra year of schooling on the part of the most educated adult member in the household can increase welfare (proxied by real per capita consumption expenditure) by 3.8 percent on average. However, the effect varies considerably across the welfare distribution: At the lower end, around the 20th and 25th quantiles, an extra year of education increases welfare by 6 and 5 percent, respectively, while at the median it is around 3.5 percent. At the higher, 90th quantile it is much less, at 1 percent. Thus the marginal effect of schooling on welfare is significant and positive at all levels of the welfare distribution, but highest at the lower and middle quartiles. This result is different from findings in the literature that tend to show larger effects at higher quantiles, when endogeneity is uncorrected.     

The scarring effects of youth joblessness in Sri Lanka

Retrospective data on labor market spells for successive cohorts of youth in the school‐to‐work transition in Sri Lanka are used to examine whether early spells of joblessness lead to subsequent difficulty in finding or keeping a job. A balancing score approach is used to generate pairs of youth in the school‐to‐work transition who have similar expected levels of joblessness but who differ in realized levels of joblessness. Assuming that youth are not able to perfectly control whether they are employed or not employed, we argue that marginal differences in joblessness among otherwise observationally equivalent youth can be viewed similarly to a regression discontinuity in experienced joblessness. We find evidence of scarring in that spending the first year after leaving school without a job or training increases subsequent share of time spent jobless by 23–31 percentage points and lowers subsequent wages by 5.5%–7.5%.     

Consumption patterns in Sri Lanka: a decomposition analysis

Knowing consumer reaction to changes in prices and income is important in formulating microeconomic policies, such as public utility prices and commodity taxation. This paper analyses the consumption patterns of consumer goods grouped into eight broad commodities in Sri Lanka during the period 1975–2016, using a system-wide framework. The analysis indicates that Sri Lankan consumers allocate more than half of their income to food and nearly four fifths of their income to food, housing, and transport combined. The estimated income and own-price elasticities reveal that food, housing, medical care, and transport are necessities; clothing, durables and recreation are luxuries; and demand for all commodities is price inelastic except for recreation. To investigate the consumption growth pattern, we decomposed the growth in consumption and change in budget shares of the eight commodities into income, relative price, and change in taste. We also simulated per capita consumption expenditure of the eight commodities under various policy scenarios and found that income growth has played a significant role in Sri Lankan consumption patterns.     

The effects of climatic variation on rice production in Sri Lanka

We study the responsiveness of rice production to climatic variation using a recent pseudo-panel data set from Sri Lanka. Output per farm is modelled as a non-linear function of temperature and rainfall (and other standard controls) using fixed effects regressions. We find that both climatic variables have concave, non-monotonic effects upon production, and that output is close to maximized at current climatic values. This implies that variations in growing conditions are likely to have negative effects upon production. Random simulations are used to model these impacts under various climate change scenarios, and we find that increasing temperatures will adversely affect rice production much more than varying rainfall, although the effects of a small ceteris paribus rise in temperature are positive. As rice production is a key component in economic output for Sri Lanka and other developing countries, our results have implications for food policy and poverty management in the future.     

斯里兰卡投资环境和立法

投资环境斯里兰卡是印度洋中的一个岛国,由锡兰本岛和若干小岛组成,位于印巴次大陆的南端,北部与印度只有一水之隔,最近处仅３５公里。国土面积为６３６１０平方公里。斯里兰卡现有人口１８００万,６７．３%的居民信仰佛教,其余信仰印度教、伊斯兰教和基督教,僧伽罗语为国语。斯里兰卡的气候属湿热带气候,具有炎热、潮湿、多雨和受季节风影响等特点。由于四面环海,雨量充沛,适合植物生长,森林覆盖面积占总面积的４５%。茶叶、橡胶、椰子、稻谷是斯里兰卡的主要农产品,前三项是斯里兰卡的主要出口产品,是国民经济的支柱。斯里兰卡提供亚洲地…     

斯里兰卡的外债状况与发展

吸引国外资金用于国内经济建设,是与国外进行经济技术合作、发展对外经济关系、实行对外开放的重要内容。实现斯里兰卡经济社会发展的战略目标,必须同时利用国际国内两个市场、两种资源。既要立足于国内,又要进上步扩大对外开放,充分利用国外主管理经验。     

Coexistence of nonprofit, for-profit and public sector institutions

If nonprofit organizations are superior institutions in resolving informational asymmetry and resulting contract failure, why do nonprofit (NPs), for-profit (FPs) and government/public institutions (GPs) survive in the same industry? This article explicitly models the nonconvex budget set for the consumer that arises through the juxtaposition of the inefficiencies and contract failures that occur in the three sectors. Because the consumer is willing to trade quality for efficiency and price, varying market shares for NPs, FPs and GPs can exist in the same industry. The theory offered complements the functionalist explanation of the existence of nonprofits advanced by Weisbrod and Hansmann using a micro-analysis.     

Strategic troping in Sri Lanka: September eleventh and the consolidation of political position

This essay investigates the deployment of the trope of September eleventh in Sri Lanka from 11 September 2001 until Sri Lanka's parliamentary elections and change of government on 5 December 2001. The essay argues that September eleventh in the tropic form of synecdoche performed political work for both parties to Sri Lanka's long-running conflict – the People's Alliance Government and the Tamil Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and demonstrates how each belligerent used September eleventh and the lexicon associated with the US attacks and early global response to brand their adversary as terrorist, to recode political and conflict narratives in September eleventh terms, and to indicate the appropriate scale and scope of the war. The article raises important questions about the translation of geopolitical events from one domestic context to another, the representation of political violence as global terror, and the strategic power of narrative.     

Unemployment In Developing Countries: Economist's Models in Light of Evidence From Sri Lanka

Observation of open unemployment in developing countries has lead some economist to formulate models which seek to explain this phenomenon. This paper examines unemployment in Sri Lanka in detail to see whether the assumptions and conclusions of economists' models are consistent with empirical data. In the case of Sri Lanka, these models provide a useful starting point but miss some of the essential details. Until one examines how the unemployed support themselves and how they spend their time, one's understanding of this phenomenon, as well as one's suggestions for policy changes, is necessarily incomplete. [820]     

The shifting boundaries of the mixed economy and the future of the nonprofit sector

The nonprofit sector exists because it can solve better than for-profit firms problems associated with the provision of products with publicness (nonrivalry or nonexcludability) attributes, or those affected by asymmetric information between providers and customers. This advantage is likely to be eroded in the future by various technological advances, particularly in the area of information transmission, analysis, storage and retrieval, and by the increase in the effective size of markets. Consequently, the demand for nonprofit organizations will possibly decline in the future. On the other hand, the operational efficiency of nonprofit organizations is likely to improve due to possibilities of stricter audit of and control over management made possible by enhanced access by nonprofit stakeholders to budgetary and operational information. This will help nonprofit organizations respond better to various failures of for-profit firms and to the insufficiency of government correctives. It is difficult to forecast the net effect of the myriad factors that work in opposite directions on the demand for and supply of nonprofit organizations, although it appears to this author that the economic weight of nonprofit organizations and their distinctive features will wane.     

Determinants of youth not in education,employment or training: Evidence from Sri Lanka

The presence of a large proportion of youth neither in education, employment, or training (NEET) signals problems in a country’s education and labor market systems, and has wide‐ranging negative consequences, extending beyond the individual to the economy and society. Using Sri Lankan Labour Force Survey data for the year 2016 and binomial and multinomial logistic regression models, in this paper we provide the first estimates of NEET‐related risk factors in Sri Lanka. Key risk factors of becoming NEET include being female, being of ethnic and religious minorities, belonging to the older 20 to 24 age group, having very low or very high levels of education, being illiterate in English, belonging to a low‐income household or one headed by a male, having young children, and living in more remote areas. Our findings hold several important policy implications for reducing the NEET rate in Sri Lanka and engaging more youth in education and in the labor force.     

Domestic technology,consumption economies of scale and poverty: evidence from Sri Lanka

While it is well known that new technologies enhance consumer welfare, the manner in which these technologies impact the ability to realize economies of scale in consumption is not well understood. We use Sri Lankan household data to examine how the adoption of new technologies by households positively impacts their ability to achieve household economies of scale. This suggests that new technologies not only deliver a greater variety of consumption goods to consumers, but they may also play an important role in enabling large households to escape poverty by lowering the per-capita costs of maintaining a given standard of living. Given the importance of consumption economies of scale in the measurement of poverty, this study provides some insights on the extent to which the number of poor households changes when food consumption scale economies due to technology adoption in the domestic sphere are incorporated.     

Demand for Piped and Non-piped Water Supply Services: Evidence from Southwest Sri Lanka

In many countries water supply is a service that is seriously underpriced, especially for residential consumers. This has led to a call for setting cost recovery policies to ensure that the tariffs charged for water supply cover the full cost of service provision. Identification of factors driving piped and non-piped water demand is a necessary prerequisite for predicting how consumers will react to such price increases. Using cross-sectional data of 1,800 households from Southwest Sri Lanka, we estimate water demand functions for piped and non-piped households using appropriate econometric techniques. The (marginal) price elasticity is estimated at  − 0.15 for households exclusively relying on piped water, and at  − 0.37 for households using piped water but supplementing their supply with other water sources. The time cost elasticity for households relying on non-piped water only is estimated at  − 0.06 on average, but varying across sources. For both piped and non-piped households, we find evidence of substitutability between water from different sources. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of pricing policy.     

Mundane heroines: Conflict,Ethnicity, Gender,and Female Headship in Eastern Sri Lanka

For the last twenty years, eastern Sri Lanka has witnessed a bitter and bloody civil conflict. This paper explores the experience of female-headed households in the region. Only partially the product of war, such households cannot be bundled together as a social problem with a single solution. Our study endorses the feminist suspicion of falsely homogenizing accounts of women's lives and suggests instead an alternative emphasis on the many ways in which gendered relations of dominance and subordination are maintained. With its co-existing Muslim, Tamil, and Sinhala groups, eastern Sri Lanka facilitates the exploration of ethnicity as a source of variation. The households included in this study share a common structure and face the same economic problems, yet ethnic differences divide them. The paper charts the problems, strategies, and partial triumphs of these lone mothers and proposes policies to help them in their mundane but heroic struggle.     

An intertemporal analysis of expenditure elasticities under three expenditure specifications for Sri Lanka

Household income has been identified as one of the major determinants of demand for household goods. In addition, other household characteristics, such as household size and composition are also found to be important factors that influence household consumption decisions. This study, using four waves (2006/07, 2009/10, 2012/13 and 2016) of Sri Lankan Household Income and Expenditure Survey data, estimates three different specifications (namely, household expenditure, per-capita expenditure and expenditure per equivalent adult) of a complete system of Box-Cox Engel curves to incorporate household size and compositional differences into the model specification. A comparison of elasticity estimates across the three specifications indicates that amongst the three, the best performing model is the one utilizing household expenditure. An intertemporal analysis of expenditure elasticities indicates that although the magnitude of expenditure elasticities has changed, the necessity or luxury classification of household commodities has mostly remained unchanged for the period 2006 ? 2016 in Sri Lanka.     

The state's role and position in international trade: A complex network perspective

Based on statistical physics and graph theory, the research paradigm of a complex network, which has sprung up in the last decade, provides us with new global perspective to discuss the topic of international trade. In this paper, we engage in the issue of countries' roles and positions in international trade using the latest complex network theories. On a mid-level structure, countries are classified into three communities that reflect the structure of the “core/periphery” using the weighted extremal optimisation algorithm and the coarse graining process. On a micro-level, countries' rankings are provided with the aid of network's node centralities, which presents world trade as a closed, imbalanced, diversified and multi-polar development. Further, we firstly introduce the improved bootstrap percolation to simulate cascading influences following the breaking down of bilateral trade relations. We find that the breakdown of EU's export relations can more easily form a cascading reaction, which would result in a global collapse of world trade. All the results highlight the important positions of the EU, USA and Japan in the international trade system, which plays a positive role in promoting the world economy.