Bar talk in Bali with (s)expat residential tourists

Bali, Indonesia, is a popular destination for retiree migrants. Most people who settle there have experienced Bali as holiday makers. It is this lifestyle mode they hope to continue in their later years, with little concern about impacts on the local culture. For this project, the goal was to investigate various aspects of their new lives: their decisions to relocate, their daily activities, finding and participating in a new community, engagement with local people, and how their personal happiness had changed through the move. This paper focuses on just one group of residential retirees, single Australian men. During fieldwork, it quickly became apparent that the ‘official’ personal stories the respondents recounted excluded some of their actual agendas and activities in Bali. The face-to-face interviews with a female researcher did not comfortably facilitate this. In ‘unofficial’ bar conversations, another layer of narrative took place, excluding the researcher and giving rise to ethical considerations regarding the use of those unsolicited commentaries, often about sex tourism. The inclusion of those tales and explicit dialogues into this account of expats in Bali is not merely incidental, but pivotal to understanding this category of residential tourist. This study responds to calls for research into the nature and impact of privileged mobility in the age of globalization. It contributes an investigation of both macro and micro issues regarding the growing practice of residential tourism for retirees in Bali. At the same time, it highlights the limitations of fieldwork interviews; far more revealing material was collected informally. This gives rise to considerations of ethical issues when undertaking such research.     

Do Politics or Mayors' Demographics Matter for Municipal Revenue Expansion?

Abstract

This study examines whether political factors and mayors' demographics influence municipal success in expanding revenue. Data from forty Colombian municipalities over a 7-year period (1999–2005) are used to explore the relationship between mayoral demographics (age, sectorial experience and education level and type) and revenue expansion through state and national grants. Results reveal that the factors affecting approval of state grants differ from those influencing approval of national grants. When a mayor's political party is aligned with that of the governor, municipalities tend to secure more state, but not national, grants. Municipal features, such as population, local revenues and divided government, positively influence national, but not state grants. Not surprisingly, the stressful municipal context (presence of illegally armed guerrillas) negatively moderates the impact of mayors' demographics on approval of grants. If obtaining greater revenues implies greater social investment, this study suggests the importance of candidates' backgrounds when electing mayors, at least in the Colombian context.     

Comonotone Pareto optimal allocations for law invariant robust utilities on L 1

We prove the existence of comonotone Pareto optimal allocations satisfying utility constraints when decision makers have probabilistic sophisticated variational preferences and thus representing criteria in the class of law invariant robust utilities. The total endowment is only required to be integrable.     

Response of Tax Credit Claims to Tax Enforcement: Evidence from a Quasi‐Experiment in Chile

Diesel in Chile receives different tax treatments depending on its use. If diesel is used in industrial activities, the diesel taxes paid can be fully used as a credit against VAT, but if it is used in freight or public transportation – basically trucks and buses – only a fraction of diesel taxes paid can be claimed as a tax credit for VAT payments. As a result of this different tax treatment, firms have incentives to use ‘tax‐exempted’ diesel in activities requiring ‘non‐tax‐exempted’ diesel. This tax wedge therefore generates an opportunity for tax evasion, especially for firms with multiple economic activities, one of them being transport. In this paper, we analyse the impact of a tax enforcement programme implemented by the Chilean Internal Revenue Service (IRS), where letters requiring information about diesel purchases and use and vehicle ownership were sent to around 200 firms in 2003. Using different empirical strategies to consider the non‐randomness of the selection of firms, the empirical results show consistently that firms receiving a letter decreased their diesel tax credits by around 10 per cent.     

Institutional dimensions and entrepreneurial activity: an international study

The purpose of this article is to examine the influence of institutional dimensions (regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive) on the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. The main findings demonstrate, through logistic regression, that a favourable regulative dimension (fewer procedures to start a business), normative dimension (higher media attention for new business) and cultural-cognitive dimension (better entrepreneurial skills, less fear of business failure and better knowing of entrepreneurs) increase the probability of being an entrepreneur. Data were obtained from both the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and the International Institute for Management and Development for the year 2008, considering a sample of 30 countries and 36,525 individuals. The study advances the literature by providing new information on the environmental factors that affect entrepreneurial activity in the light of institutional economics. Also, the research could be useful for designing policies to foster entrepreneurship in different environments.     

A simple and effective misspecification test for the double-hurdle model

The commonly-used version of the double-hurdle model rests on a rather restrictive set of statistical assumptions, which are very seldom tested by practitioners, mainly because of the lack of a standard procedure for doing so, although violation of such assumptions can lead to serious modelling flaws. We propose here a bootstrap-corrected conditional moment portmanteau test which is simple to implement and has good size and power properties.     

Reverse causality in the R&D–patents relationship: an interpretation of the innovation persistence

Starting from the failure of the R&D–patents traditional relationship, when time-series and/or within-industry dimensions are included in the empirical analysis, the present work tries to contribute to the empirical literature from two directions. First, it performs a Granger causality test based on the theoretical presumption of a reverse patents→R&D link as an explanation for the failure of the traditional relationship. Second, assuming the reverse patents–R&D causality, we test and interpret the lag structure of such a relationship which shows the effective patent life that firms can expect within the two Schumpeterian patterns of innovations they belong to. In the light of the effective patent life, we offer a further explanation of innovation persistence which overturns the findings of the existing literature on persistence.     

"MISSING WOMEN": REVISITING THE DEBATE

In a series of papers in the late 1980s, Amartya Sen claimed that about 100 million women were "missing," referring to the number of females who had died as a result of unequal access to resources in parts of the developing world. A subsequent debate has refined these estimates using different demographic techniques. In this paper, we review this debate, provide an update on the number of "missing women," and investigate the determinants of current trends in gender bias in mortality. We find that the number of "missing women" has increased in absolute terms, but fallen as a share of the number of women alive. There have been improvements for women's relative survival in most of South Asia and the Middle East, but deteriorations in China. Improving female education and employment opportunities has helped to reduce gender bias, while the increasing recourse to sex-selective abortions has worsened it.