Privatization in China's industry

This paper adopts property rights and organization theory perspectives to analyze the process of privatization of state enterprises and performance of newly created shareholding corporations in China. Relying on case study information, the paper concludes that although the shareholding corporations have contributed, to a certain extent, to better performance, their potentials have not been fully realized due to various economic environmental and ideological constraints.     

A Note on Laurence Seidman’s Article

Mihail Manoilescu was among the foremost intellectual figures of the interwar period in Romania. He was known as a politician and central banker, as well as an economist. From the very beginning of his theoretical and practical career, or at least from the late 1920s onward, Manoilescu’s ideas and theories (especially his corporatist theory) were marked by clear continuity and consistency based on the theory of protectionism grounded on productivity differences. By developing his model — an alternative to the theory of comparative advantage — Manoilescu endeavored to show the need for protectionist measures to promote the development of peripheral countries. His defense of protectionism is usually presented as clumsy and founded on an incorrect method, even if he is often recognized as the forerunner of the theory of unequal exchange and the dependency theory. Few scholars note the similarity of Manoilescu’s theory with Karl Marx’s labor theory. This paper contributes to validating Manoilescu’s conclusions, the soundness of which we test here by reconstructing the theory from a Marxian perspective. A reconstruction of this type offers new possibilities of evaluating his theory and a better understanding of its contributions and limitations.     

HOW TO VALUE THE POORER PROSPECTS OF YOUTH IN THE EARLY 1990s?

Young workers in the 1990s can expect greater economic insecurity, as well as lower average earnings, compared to older workers, or compared to the youth of previous decades. The cost of greater insecurity depends upon an individual's probability of unemployment, marginal utility of income gains/losses and the extent to which individuals can smooth consumption over time by borrowing and drawing down assets. Since unemployment insurance cutbacks and higher unemployment have increased the risk exposure of youth, changes in the expected value of their income may understate utility losses as measured by the change in certainty equivalent income.
This paper uses a behavioural microsimulation model to compare the impacts of 1971 and 1994 unemployment insurance legislation and unemployment rates in Canada. It calculates both the expected value of income changes and, using a Stone-Geary utility function, the change in inequality of well-being (as measured by certainty equivalent income) for youth and for prime age workers. Both calculations reveal that youth were disproportionately affected by Canada's changing labour market environment. Very few youth have enough assets to finance consumption during spells of unemployment.     

Further evidence regarding nonlinear trend reversion of real GDP and the CPI

This paper examines whether the CPI and real GDP for the US exhibit nonlinear reversion to trend as recently concluded by Beechey and Österholm [Beechey, M. and Österholm, P., 2008. Revisiting the uncertain unit root in GDP and CPI: testing for nonlinear trend reversion. Economics Letters 100, 221-223]. The wild bootstrap is used to correct for non-normality and heteroscedasticity in a nonlinear unit root test. The use of ‘wild bootstrapped’ critical values affects test conclusions in some cases. Results also are sensitive to the sample period examined.     

Unequal opportunities and public policy: The impact of parental disability benefits on child postsecondary attendance

This paper uses Canada's National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth to examine whether greater cash transfers available to parents with disabilities when their child was aged 5 to 15 increase the chances that the child will attend postsecondary education (PSE) as a young adult. We exploit differences across provinces and over time in the generosity of provincial disability benefits programs in Canada and find that higher disability benefits when the child was aged 5 to 15 years increase the probability that he or she will have attended or be attending PSE by age 19 to 25. The estimated effect size increases with the severity of the parental disability and the number of disabled parents. Because lower disability benefits significantly worsen performance of public school aged children on standardized math tests and elevate anxiety symptoms, one plausible pathway from disability benefit levels to PSE attendance may be through the cognitive and non‐cognitive skills children acquire by the age of 15. We conclude that the level of disability transfers available early in a child's life mitigates the impact of having a parent with a disability as a source of inequality of opportunity and of unequal probability of PSE participation.     

A Hausman-type test to detect the presence of influential outliers in regression analysis

In regression analysis, classical estimations may be excessively influenced by a few atypical observations. We propose a Hausman-type test to balance robustness and efficiency and to check whether a robust method should be implemented. An economic application is presented.     

End-of-life care in nursing homes: the high cost of staff turnover

Nursing home staff turnover results in high cost--both economic and personal--and has a negative impact on the quality of care provided to residents at the end of life. Reducing staff turnover in nursing homes would benefit both the cost to the U.S. health care system, and, most importantly, the care residents receive in the vulnerable period leading to death. There is rising pressure on nursing homes to improve their palliative and end-of-life care practices and reduce transfers to hospital for situations and conditions that can be safely managed on site. Nursing care staff deserve an investment in the specific training necessary for them to give the highest quality care to dying residents. This training should be multifaceted and include the physiological, psychological, spiritual, interpersonal, and cultural (including ethnic) aspects of dying. Empowerment with these necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes will not only result in better care for residents but likely also will reduce the burnout and frustration staff experience in caring for residents near death.     

FAMILIES, TIME AND MONEY IN CANADA, GERMANY, SWEDEN, THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THE UNITED STATES

Using microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study, we assess "time crunch" for families with children in Canada, Germany, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S. Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that both time and money are important inputs to the well-being of parents and children. We present cross-country comparisons of "total available adult hours" under different assumptions about the varying time needs of families of different size. We also present estimates of "time shortages." In all cases, we provide separate estimates for families located at different points in the country income distributions, since being short of both time and money is likely to be particularly problematic. Although paid work hours are highest for high-income families, we nonetheless find significant numbers of lower-income families in which parents work very long hours in the paid labor market; this is particularly the case in the U.S.     

The Well–Being of Young Canadian Children in International Perspective: A Functionings Approach

The goal of this paper is to compare the well–being of young children in Canada, Norway and the United States using Sen's (1992) "functionings" perspective. We compare children cross–nationally in terms of ten "functionings" (low birth–weight; asthma; accidents; activity limitation; trouble concentrating; disobedience at school; bullying; anxiety; lying; hyperactivity). If we compare young children in Canada and the U.S. in terms of their functionings, there is not a clear ranking overall. Canadian children are better off for four of nine comparable outcomes; U.S. children are better off for two outcomes; Canadian and U.S. children are statistically indistinguishable for three outcomes. If we compare child functionings in Canada or the U.S. with those experienced in Norway, it is clear that Norwegian children fare better. There is not a single case in which children in either Canada or the U.S. have better outcomes than Norwegian children.