Note on theKolmogorov statistic for a general discontinuous variable

Summary A simple demonstration of the conservative character of theKolmogorov test in the case of general discontinuous distributions is given.

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Zusammenfassung Ein einfacher Beweis des konservativen Charakters desKolmogoroffschen Tests bei allgemeinen unstetigen Verteilungen wird gebracht.

     

Determinants of pollution abatement in developing countries: Evidence from South and Southeast Asia

Developing countries, pa?ticularly those in Asia, are fast adopting industrial pollution control standards similar to those in developed countries. Formal regulation has been greatly hampered, however, by the absence of clear and legally binding regulations; limited institutional capacity; lack of appropriate equipment and trained personnel; and inadequate information on emissions. One would predict highly pollution-intensive production under such conditions. Our research, however, has uncovered strongly contradictory evidence. Despite weak or nonexistent formal regulation, there are many clean plants in the developing countries of South and Southeast Asia. Of course, there are also many plants which are among the world's most serious polluters. What explains such extreme interplant variation? This paper reviews evidence drawn from three empirical studies of plant-level abatement practices conducted 1992–1994.The analyses test the importance of plant characteristics, economic considerations and external pressure in determining environmental performance. The results consistently show that pollution intensity is negatively associated with scale, productive efficiency, and the use of new process technology. It is strongly and positively associated with public ownership, but foreign ownership has no significant effect once other plant characteristics are taken into account. Among external sources of pressure, community action, or informal regulation, emerges as a clear source of interplant differences in all three studies. The results suggest that local income and education are powerful predictors of the effectiveness of informal regulation. They also show that existing formal regulation has measurably beneficial effects, even when it is quite weakly developed.     

Money,income, and exchange rate regimes: Evidence from the U.K.

This study examines the money-income correlation in the U.K. using monthly data over both fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes. Most previous studies find unidirectional causality running from income to money. The results presented here indicate that money and income are independent over the fixed rate period, while unidirectional causality runs from money to income over the flexible rate period. There are two major reasons for the difference between the results reported here and those provided by other studies. First, unlike the current study, previous studies employing U.K. data have tested for Granger causality using bivariate or trivariate tests which suffer from an omitted variables bias. Second, unlike many previous studies, the current study does not mix data from different exchange rate regimes.