Veld products and income generation in the southern Cape Strandveld

Only marginal farming activities take place in the Cape Strandveld area south of Alber‐tinia. While income from farming and wages are low, coloured families in the district are still making a living from traditional, informal occupations. Over a period of one year the activities of roughly fifty coloured families in the Albertinia Strandveld area were studied. These people being mostly illiterate, no formal questionnaire was used, but the author directly participated in their various activities and asked informal questions about their occupations. A questionnaire was sent out by Du Preez (1988) to about 150 white landowners in the area and we discussed these findings in relation to the informal sector study. Activities included thatch reed cutting, mole catching, honey collecting, aloe juice tapping, firewood cutting, hunting, fishing, breaking in horses, picking wild flowers and collecting sour figs. Higher incomes would be generated by improved techniques and expanded markets, but these activities should not be absorbed into the modern and formal economic system.     

Trade liberalization, foreign ownership, and the environment in a small open economy

This paper examines the effects of trade liberalization on firm ownership and the environment for a small open economy. It is found that trade liberalization via tariff reductions can result in a dramatic switch in firm ownership from domestic to foreign, coupled with a lower pollution tax.     

A Formal Study of Distributed Meeting Scheduling

Automating routine organizational tasks, such as meeting scheduling, requires a careful balance between the individual (respecting his or her privacy and personal preferences) and the organization (making efficient use of time and other resources). We argue that meeting scheduling is an inherently distributed process, and that negotiating over meetings can be viewed as a distributed search process. Keeping the process tractable requires introducing heuristics to guide distributed schedulers' decisions about what information to exchange and whether or not to propose the same tentative time for several meetings. While we have intuitions about how such heuristics could affect scheduling performance and efficiency, verifying these intuitions requires a more formal model of the meeting schedule problem and process. We present our preliminary work toward this goal, as well as experimental results that validate some of the predictions of our formal model. We also investigate scheduling in overconstrained situations, namely, scheduling of high priority meetings at short notice, which requires cancellation and rescheduling of previously scheduled meetings. Our model provides a springboard into deeper investigations of important issues in distributed artificial intelligence as well, and we outline our ongoing work in this direction.     

Negative nominal interest rates: Three ways to overcome the zero lower bound

The paper considers three methods for eliminating the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates and thus for restoring symmetry to the domain over which the Central Bank can vary its official policy rate. They are: (1) abolishing currency (which would also be a useful crime-fighting measure); (2) paying negative interest on currency by taxing currency; and (3) decoupling the numéraire from the currency/medium of exchange/means of payment and introducing an exchange rate between the numéraire and the currency; this exchange rate can be set over time to achieve a forward discount (expected depreciation) of the currency vis-à-vis the numéraire when the nominal interest rate in terms of the numéraire is set at a negative level for monetary policy purposes.     

Gender and ethnic differences in factors that influence food intake

Abstract The objective of this research was to ascertain the gender-and ethnic-related factors that influence what one eats. This survey was conducted using a validated, pilot-tested questionnaire in 11 states and the District of Columbia, which were participating in the W-182 Western Regional Research project. The results indicated that the factors that influence what one eats differ by gender and ethnicity. Men were very much influenced by likes and dislikes, and by their spouse or significant other. Women were influenced by likes and dislikes, and health. Food likes/dislikes and concerns about health and weight were among the leading four factors for all ethnic groups. Food likes/dislikes were the top factor influencing what is eaten by 51% or more of Asians, Pacific Islanders, Caucasians and Hispanics. Concern about health was the top factor for 62% and 58%, respectively, of African Americans and Native Americans.     

A Meta-Analysis of Achievement Motivation Differences between Entrepreneurs and Managers*

As a result of conflicting conclusions in primary studies, most narrative reviews have questioned the role of personality in explaining entrepreneurial behavior. We examine one stream of this research by conducting a meta-analysis of studies that contrast the achievement motivation of entrepreneurs and managers. The results indicate that entrepreneurs exhibit higher achievement motivation than managers and that these differences are influenced by the entrepreneur's venture goals, by the use of U.S. or foreign samples, and, to a less clear extent, by projective or objective instrumentation. Moreover, when the analysis is restricted to venture founders, the difference between entrepreneurs and managers on achievement motivation is substantially larger and the credibility intervals do not include zero.