Technology,community and water supply: Case studies in KwaZulu and Transkei

The collection of water for domestic use In rural areas is a critical problem throughout the underdeveloped world. Traditional surface water sources are often far from the household, provide poor quality water and are susceptible to the effects of drought or dry periods. Village water supply schemes that have been implemented in KwaZulu and Transkei are evaluated according to their ability to provide an adequate and reliable supply of good quality water and reduce the burden of water collection. It is concluded that the inadequacy and unreliability of handpump schemes in KwaZulu, and the unreliability of windpump schemes in Transkei is due to inappropriate technology choices and the failure of water supply planners in these areas to address the community context of water supply schemes. The community considerations that must be taken into account include the establishment of communication links between villages and administrative services, the water needs of the community and the provision of village level servicing and maintenance facilities for appropriate water supply technologies.     

The impact of Czech privatization methods on enterprise performance incorporating initial selection-bias correction1

Governments with transitional economies have applied different privatization methods, from an almost free distribution to the direct sale of state assets. While a free distribution was believed to ensure the political feasibility of the programme and its fairness, direct sales, (or more generally, standard privatization methods) had a significant advantage in creating concentrated ownership structures as the prerequisite to corporate control and restructuring. Many economists believe that the two goals of mass privatization, political feasibility and the creation of proper ownership incentives, contradict each other and recent empirical comparisons of enterprises seem to support this view. However, all empirical works have been based on the weak assumption that privatization methods were applied on a randomly selected sample of enterprises, which then allowed for a direct comparison between these enterprises. Our main claim is that governments actually selected enterprises non-randomly and therefore, the resulting selection-bias must be incorporated into the analyses. To show this, we apply a Heckman two-step regression method on a sample of 559 Czech enterprises. The main point of this paper then is that performance is influenced by the selection process and that the combination of vouchers with outsider owners is preferred over 100 per cent voucherization.     

I. Allgemeine Wirstchaftslehre

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Effects of research experience of respondents

Unfavorable past experience as participant in social research may lead subjects to refuse to participate in subsequent investigations or to respond in a biased way. The results indicate that persons with multiple research experience either do participate early in the survey campaign, or probably not at all. Respondents without research experience or without recent research experience are more prone to refuse and need the encouragement of follow-up contacts. Although research experience (as measured by the number of times one has previously participated in research) was related with responses on substantial items significantly more than chance, and thus may cause response bias, the extent of the bias was not large.     

III. Weltwirtschaft und wirtschaft einzlner länderund und gebiete

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Staatslexikon

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Staatslexikon

     

How ongoing structural change creates a double dividend: outdating of technologies and green growth

Portuguese Economic Journal - In this paper we study how the ongoing transition to newer technologies, what we refer to as dynamic structural change, in a doubly-differentiated R&D-based...