A note on the economic control of black popular music

We didn’t have writers, but we did have music, and the music was the vehicle to carry the remnants of Black history. The true history of Blacks is not in our history books, but in the music. The only blacks I ever heard of in school were Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. It was like nobody else existed. We had no folk heroes in books, ever. Our history is all locked in the music and is passed down in its different forms through that music.     

Domestic tourist spending and economic development: The case of the North West Province

Globally, tourism is the largest and fastest growing industry, outpacing all other industries. In South Africa, tourism is widely regarded as a growth catalyst, able to generate much-needed income and employment opportunities. The market potential of domestic tourism has, however, been downplayed in favour of international tourism. This research argues that tourism – especially domestic tourism – can contribute significantly to regional growth and development in South Africa. A survey was carried out among domestic tourists in the North West Province, one of the poorest provinces in South Africa. This survey was used to draw up a demographic and spending profile of the average domestic tourist in the province, and to determine the possible implications of this spending on different macroeconomic variables in the province.     

Black economic well-being since the 1950s

Conclusion Industrial cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh that once offered manufacturing jobs as a route to economic advancement no longer provide an economic environment conducive to long-run gains in black incomes. Faced with massive losses in blue-collar manufacturing jobs in the 1970s and 1980s — as well as growing local government fiscal difficulties — these cities are changing rapidly in character. Administration and management are more and more the dynamic, expanding sector, and the resultant demands for workers have been concentrated in the white-collar fields. Highly educated blacks benefit from these trends in job availability; the less educated lose ground economically. The swing between widespread progress (as in World War II) and widespread regression in relative economic status (as in the 1930s) was the traditional cyclical fate of the overall urban black population. Today the smaller white-collar group prospers while the larger blue-collar urban black work force is undermined, except in periods of labor shortage.     

Aggregation of economic relations: A note

Summary This note considers aggregation of economic relations over individuals, where individual behavior differs according to individual characteristics, such as income, wealth and tastes. Assuming a multivariate distribution of these characteristics among individuals, aggregate per capita behavior is approximated in terms of the behavior of the average individual, plus a term depending on the nonlinearity of the relation and the covariance matrix of the distribution of the characteristics.Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics. This note was written while the author was at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Comments by B. M. Balk, T. Kloek, D. Sikkel and the referee are gratefully acknowledged.     

A note on why more West than East German firms export

Germany is one of the most important exporters of manufacturing goods in the world, but by far not all manufacturing firms in Germany are exporters, and there is a remarkable gap between the share of exporters in all manufacturing firms between West Germany and East Germany. While in West Germany in 2004 about two in three manufacturing plants were exporters, fourteen years after re-unification this share was less than fifty percent in the former communist East Germany. Given that exports play a key role in shaping business cycles and growth in Germany, and the much higher unemployment in East compared to West Germany, promotion of exports by East German firms figure prominently on the policy agenda. However, the reasons for the large difference in the propensity to export between East and West German firms are not yet well understood, not least due to a lack of comprehensive micro data. Using unique new data and a recently introduced non-linear decomposition technique this paper shows that the huge difference in the propensity to export between West and East German plants can only partly be explained by differences in firm size, productivity, and technology intensity.

Right-to-work legislation and the economic position of black workers

Recent empirical analysis of state right-to-work legislation indicates that a negative wage effect may result as a consequence of banning union shop contracts. It has been previously shown that industrial unionism tends to improve the relative wage position of black workers. Thus, it is hypothesized that if state right-to-work laws weaken the economic power of unions to raise wages, black workers will experience a disproportionate decline in their relative wage position. Black workers in right-to-work states would therefore experience a reduction in their relative economic position unless a strong positive relative employment effect occurs in response to the decline in wages. Using a cross-sectional regression model this article examines the relative employment effect due to right-to-work legislation. The results indicate that black workers experience a statistically significant decline in their relative employment rate within right-to-work states. When this finding is coupled with the hypothesized negative wage effect, it is concluded that right-to-work legislation results in a worsening of the net economic position of black workers.