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.     

关于公证赔偿制度的探讨

《中华人民共和国公证法》首次以法律的形式将赔偿制度引入我国公证领域,建立中国特色的公证赔偿制度是推动我国公证事业发展的客观要求,需要在公证工作的实践中不断探索完善.文章对我国公证赔偿的法律属性、公证赔偿的构成要件、公证赔偿的方式及公证赔偿的举证责任问题进行了探讨.     

论我国中小企业技术创新网络的建设

大量研究表明中小企业的发展需要一个完善的技术创新网络,所以建立完善的技术创新网络对我国中小企业的发展是至关重要的。文章分析了技术创新网络的概念及特征,分析了技术创新网络对中小企业发展的作用,指出了我国目前中小企业技术创新网络建设存在的问题,最后,就如何培育技术创新网络,促进我国中小企业发展提出了建议。     

The Impact of Cannabis Use on Health

Summary Chronic daily cannabis use has been shown to have long term harmful health effects, which in turn is expected to reduce labour market productivity. The evidence is less clear on the health impact of less frequent consumption, which is the more typical mode of use, and previous empirical studies fail to find robust evidence of an adverse impact of these modes of use on labour market productivity. This paper attempts to shed some light on this issue by directly estimating the impact of cannabis consumption in the past week and past year on health status using information on prime age individuals living in Australia. We find that cannabis use does reduce self-assessed health status, with the effect of weekly use being of a similar magnitude as smoking cigarettes daily. Moreover, we find evidence of a dose-response relationship in the health impact of cannabis use, with annual use having roughly half the impact of weekly use.Helpful comments on an earlier draft were received from Jan van Ours, Rosalie Pacula, two anonymous referees and participants at the 81st Annual Conference of the Western Economic Association International.     

Earnings on the Information Technology Roller Coaster: Insight from Matched Employer-Employee Data

This article uses matched employer-employee data for the State of Georgia to examine workers' earnings experience through the information technology (IT) sector's employment boom of the mid-1990s and bust in the early 2000s. The results show that even after controlling for pre-boom individual characteristics, transitioning out of the IT sector to a non-IT industry generally resulted in a large wage penalty. However, IT service workers who transitioned to a non-IT industry still fared better than workers who took a non-IT employment path. For IT manufacturing workers, there is no benefit to having been touched by technology, likely because of the nontransferability of manufacturing experience to other industries.