Meaningful Measures: Indicators on Progress, Progress on Indicators

This article reviews the international debate on statistical indicators. It describes historical backgrounds, as well as the present chaotic situation. It discusses what statistical indicators are and what they are for, as well as criteria for the choice of indicators, designed to monitor the achievement of economic, social, demographic, environmental and other goals set by United Nations conferences. Some suggestions for future work are made.     

The System of Rice Intensification (SRI): a challenge for science,and an opportunity for farmer empowerment towards sustainable agriculture

Increasing demand for cereals produced from limited natural resources stimulated the Green Revolution in grain crops like wheat and rice. But the gap between potential and actual production continues. Concerns about sustainability, and the social and technical shortcomings of the Green Revolution, have triggered a number of alternative crop production strategies. One, in particular, the so-called System of Rice Intensification (SRI), is attracting attention by governments, civil society organizations and farmers in Asia and elsewhere.     

A portfolio approach to a cross-sectoral and cross-national investment strategy in transition economies

This paper takes a systematic look at the portfolio choice problem faced by Investment Banks or Funds investing in transition economies. We relate the performance of projects in the transition economies to the broader macroeconomic and international environments, which affect the project through their input-output structures and financial balance sheets. Among the macroeconomic determinanst of enterprise behaviour are productivity growth, real wage growth, movements in the international terms of trade, shocks to the relative price of traded and non-traded goods, domestic and foreign interest rates, currency depreciation and the rate of inflaction. We evaluate the attractiveness of alternative investment strategies and provisioning rules from the perspective of portfoio theory.     

Time dependency of trade union membership

Event-history analysis is used to model the time dependency of two decisions: the decision to join a trade union, and the decision to leave a trade union. We formulate two hypotheses with regard to these two decisions and parametric regression models are used to investigate these hypotheses. The process of joining a trade union can be described by a decreasing rate, using a Weibull. For the process of leaving a trade union, we suggest an increasing rate that decreases after several years, a process best described by a log-logistic model.     

Networked innovation and coalition formation: the effect of group-based social preferences

In this paper, we study the production and dissemination of public knowledge goods, such as technological knowledge, generated by a network of voluntarily cooperating innovators. We develop a private-collective model of public knowledge production in networked innovation systems, where group-based social preferences have an impact on the coalition formation of developers. Our model builds on the large empirical literature on voluntary production of pooled public knowledge goods, including source code in communities of software developers or data provided to open access data repositories. Our analysis shows under which conditions social preferences, such as ‘group belonging’ or ‘peer approval’, influence the stable coalition size, as such rationalising several stylized facts emerging from large-scale surveys of open-source software developers, previously unaccounted for. Furthermore, heterogeneity of social preferences is added to the model to study the formation of stable but mixed coalitions.     

Credit Constraints in Manufacturing Enterprises in Africa

We investigate the question of whether firms in Africa's manufacturingsector are credit constrained. The fact that few firms obtaincredit is not sufficient to prove constraints, since certainfirms may not have a demand for credit while others may be refusedcredit as part of profit maximising behaviour by banks. To investigatethis question, we use direct evidence on whether firms had ademand of credit and whether their demand was satisfied in theformal credit market, based on panel data on firms in the manufacturingsector from six African countries. Of those firms with a demandfor credit, only a quarter obtained a formal sector loan. Ouranalysis suggests that while banks allocate credit on the basisof expected profits, micro or small firms are much less likelyto get a loan than large firms. We also find that outstandingdebt is positively related with obtaining further lending. Therole of outstanding debt is likely to be a reflection of inefficiencyin credit markets, while the fact that size matters is consistentwith a bias as well, although we cannot totally exclude thatthey reflect transactions costs on the part of banks. We presentan analysis showing how much more profitable small firms mustbe to obtain a loan than large firms.     

A new measurement procedure for attitudinal research. Analysis of its psychometric and informational properties

Since measurement errors have strong effects in all relationships (statistical or otherwise) studied, there is an increasing interest in the data quality, which is the major justification for this research. This paper aims to present a new measurement procedure, the letter scale, which avoids many of the problems connected with the response modalities traditionally used in attitudinal research, especially the ordinal categorical scales. This paper analyzes the error composition of the scores obtained with this new measurement procedure. The validity of the procedure is also analyzed and the observed variance is assessed to determine which part of the observed variance is “valid”, which part is random error (attenuating relationships) and which is correlated error (magnifying relationships). Structural equation models will be used to provide estimates of the measurement quality: (i) Reliability, (ii) Construct validity, method effect and residual variance. In addition, this letter scale is evaluated under another different perspective, Information Theory measures are also used to assess the amount of information transmitted. The relative merits of this new measurement procedure as opposed to other common response modalities will be discussed in both cases.