Australian Labor Relations Through American Eyes

This article describes how Australia's conciliation and arbitration system emerged in the eighteen nineties and the key role it still plays in that county's labor relations. The respective roles of unions, management, and conciliation and arbitration are discussed, as are dispute resolution procedures at the national, industry-occupational, company, and plant levels. The functions of strikes and other forms of "industrial action" are examined.     

TRADE DIVERSIFICATION,INCOME, AND GROWTH: WHAT DO WE KNOW?

This paper surveys the empirical literature on export and import diversification and its linkages with growth. We review widely used measures of diversification and the evidence about their evolution focusing on how export diversification relates to trade liberalization and economic development. We also discuss the linkages between trade diversification and productivity at the firm and industry level, highlighting new advances on the linkages between import diversification and productivity.     

Delphi,political philosophy and the future

Based on the Delphi technique, the project described in this article seeks to integrate the teaching of classical political science with the analysis of problems facing contemporary and future society. Experts on particular political philosophers of the past were asked to imagine how those men would have viewed and solved present political problems, and thus to use their knowledge to develop a new approach to policy analysis.     

Relative Price Determination in the Medium Run: The Influence of Wages,Productivity, and International Prices

This work explores three critical assumptions of the Balassa-Samuelson productivity differential model for the short and medium run: wage equalization, competitive labor markets, and purchasing power parity. The data reveal violations in these assumptions for France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. Significant wage and unit labor cost differentials exist across industries, and traded and nontraded sectors and these differentials do not diminish over time. The findings are consistent with the presence of industry and/or sectoral-specific human capital.     

An analytic method for longitudinal mortality studies

Our knowledge of mortality risks comes largely from longitudinal (cohort) studies. The most commonly used analytic tool is the Cox proportional hazards model for survival analysis. An alternative approach is a simple cross-sectional analysis of person-years. The key to the method is logistic regression, where the outcome variable is lived/died in the given year and the explanatory variables are age, sex, and other potential risk factors. This approach can be used to model any dichotomous outcome and has several important advantages over the more traditional survival analysis. As an example, we compare the two methods using a large data base of patients with spinal cord injury.     

Comparative mortality of adults with traumatic brain injury in California, 1988--97

We studied mortality rates of people with traumatic brain injury using the extensive California Department of Developmental Services database. The data provide mortality rates by age, gender, severity, cause, and associated conditions on 2629 subjects older than 15 years during 1988--97. Increased mortality was observed, particularly among patients with diminished mobility.     

Child survival,height for age and household characteristics in Brazil

"The impact of household characteristics on child survival and height, conditional on age, is examined using household survey data from Brazil. Parental education is found to have a very strong positive effect on both outcomes and this is robust to the inclusion of household income and also parental heights, which partly proxy for unobserved family background characteristics. We find that income effects are significant and positive for child survival but insignificant for for child height although the latter depends on identification assumptions. Parental height has a large positive impact on child height and on survival rates even after controlling for all other observable characteristics."