The problems of supplying water to third world cities: Bulawayo's water crisis

The current drought in central and southern Africa has focused attention on issues relating to the provision and supply of potable water. In the case of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, there is the very real prospect that water supplies may be exhausted before the onset of the next rainy season. This paper explores the background to this problem and shows how poor planning, financial constraints, and political intransigence have failed to keep pace with a policy aimed at the provision of water to the inhabitants in this expanding urban environment Alternative sources of supply. in particular a pipeline to the Zambezi River, are also investigated.     

Mode of payment in household expenditures

Summary We have studied the choice of mode of payment from a 1987 Dutch household survey. The institutional arrangements of a transaction are a major determinant for the mode of payment, and so is the amount involved. A 10% increase in the sum paid usually leads to a reduction of about 1.3% to 2.3% in the incidence of currency use.Based on De keuze van een betaalmiddel (The Choice of Mode of Payment), (SEO, Amsterdam, 1989), which reports research commissioned by the Postbank, Amsterdam.     

Should multivariate early warning systems for banking crises pool across regions?

Most extant work on prediction of banking crises has utilised global samples, which are in turn dominated by observations from middle-income countries, and rely on a single estimator. However, economic and financial structures as well as the pattern of shocks may differ substantially across regions, while a range of specifications is desirable to check robustness. Accordingly, in this paper we test the implicit pooling assumption in earlier multivariate work on Early Warning Systems using both logit and binary recursive tree specifications separately for crises in Asia and Latin America, as well as the pooled sample. Results suggest markedly different crisis determinants across regions, implying global samples are inappropriate.     

Socio-demographic risks of the long-term development of the Russian economy

Key risks and threats of the long-term development of the Russian economy, originating from the social sphere, are revealed and analyzed. The article focuses on human capital development and replenishment problems, as well as on the social effects of these problems on education, health conditions, labor migration, and pension provision.     

Transparency and the regulatory process in Europe and the United States: two research priorities

Transparency research related to the regulatory process would benefit most from two types of empirical studies. One batch of studies, described in the fifth section of this essay, would focus on the American states and the member states of the European Union to identify the factors that determine whether regulatory processes are more transparent and whether transparency is successful in improving regulations and the regulatory process. In other words, we need comparative state (for the US) and member state (for the EU) studies to develop metrics for the quality of regulations and the role of transparency is advancing or weakening the quality of regulations at the state (for the US) and member state (for the EU) level. The second batch of studies, described in the sixth section of this essay, would explore who uses the information currently provided at the levels of transparency currently available in regulatory processes at the European Union and federal government of the United States. Who benefits from transparency and how are they using the available transparency mechanisms?