Mining and Social Movements: Struggles Over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes

Social movements have been viewed as vehicles through which the concerns of poor and marginalized groups are given greater visibility within civil society, lauded for being the means to achieve local empowerment and citizen activism, and seen as essential in holding the state to account and constituting a grassroots mechanism for promoting democracy. However, within development studies little attention has been paid to understanding how social movements can affect trajectories of development and rural livelihood in given spaces, and how these effects are related to movements’ internal dynamics and their interaction with the broader environment within which they operate. This paper addresses this theme for the case of social movements protesting contemporary forms of mining investment in Latin America. On the basis of cases from Peru and Ecuador, the paper argues that the presence and nature of social movements has significant influences both on forms taken by extractive industries (in this case mining) and on the effects of this extraction on rural livelihoods. In this sense, one can usefully talk about rural development as being co-produced by movements, mining companies, and other actors, in particular the state. The terms of this co-production, however, vary greatly among different locations, reflecting the distinct geographies of social mobilization and of mineral investment, as well as the varying power relationships among the different actors involved.     

Demand for Childcare Services and Labour Supply in Australian Families

This article provides empirical findings on non-parental childcare use and simulates the effect of childcare costs on labour supply in Australia.     

Predicting UK Business Cycle Regimes

This paper uses logistic regression to construct a one‐quarter ahead prediction model for classical business cycle regimes in the UK. The binary dependent variable is obtained by applying simple mechanical rules to date turning points in quarterly real GDP data from 1963 to 1999. Using a range of real and financial leading indicators, several parsimonious one‐quarter‐ahead models are developed for the GDP regimes, with model selection based on the SIC criterion. A real M4 variable is consistently found to have predictive content. One model that performs well combines this with nominal UK and German short‐term interest rates. The role of the latter emphasises the open nature of the UK economy.     

Three Corrected Score Tests for Generalized Linear Models with Dispersion Covariates

We develop three corrected score tests for generalized linear models with dispersion covariates, thus generalizing the results of Cordeiro , Ferrari and Paula (1993) and Cribari-Neto and Ferrari (1995) . We present, in matrix notation, general formulae for the coefficients which define the corrected statistics. The formulae only require simple operations on matrices and can be used to obtain analytically closed-form corrections for score test statistics in a variety of special generalized linear models with dispersion covariates. They also have advantages for numerical purposes since our formulae are readily computable using a language supporting numerical linear algebra. Two examples, namely, iid sampling without covariates on the mean or dispersion parameter oand one-way classification models, are given. We also present some simulations where the three corrected tests perform better than the usual score test, the likelihood ratio test and its Bartlett corrected version. Finally, we present a numerical example for a data set discussed by Simonoff and Tsai (1994) .     

Ethical Decision-Making in Family Firms: The Role of Employee Identification

Journal of Business Ethics - The ethical behavior prevalent in an organization often determines business success or failure. Much research in the business context has scrutinized ethical behavior,...     

A Qualitative Analysis to Determine the Domains and Skills Necessary to Lead in Public Health

Leadership programs in public health have been declining in numbers since 2012. The decline in training programs could be due to the lack of outcome‐based results and the lack of a manageable set of standardized skills needed for public health leadership. A comprehensive study was completed in two phases to determine if the current model of public health leadership institutes is effective at generating outcome‐based results. The following paper will focus on the first phase of the study. The first phase included a qualitative analysis to determine the domains, definitions, and skills needed to lead. An analysis of the skills, domains, definitions, and traits included in five established and commonly used leadership models/theories in public health leadership development (Transformational, Servant, Appreciative, Collaborative, and Emotional Intelligence leadership) plus the National Public Health Leadership Development Network (NLN) Leadership for Community Health, Safety & Resilience Competency Framework was completed. Of the 161 different skills, definitions, traits, and/or competencies from the five leadership models and the NLN competency framework, 123 were determined to be related to one of six domains needed for leadership and were defined into 21 skills. The findings could lead to more uniformity in public health leadership development and evaluation.     

Chinese multinationals on the New Silk Route: Managing political risk by branding the nation

Though Chinese multinational enterprises (CMNEs) have brought investment and opportunities to countries along the Belt and Road Initiative, there has been scepticism regarding the content and context of their investment. On the one hand, infrastructural development contributes to GDP formation and enhances the efficiency of productive inputs where international trade enhances technology and export development, which jointly provides a path to economic growth. On the other hand, critical issues such as debt sustainability and national sovereignty among countries that have gone through the decolonization process mean that CMNEs need to grasp the implication of political risk when investing. This article focuses on South and Southeast Asia, where China has historical socio‐economic relationship, and proposes a nation branding model combining tradition and modernity which can be the way forward for CMNEs to mitigate political risk in relation to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) investment. Nation branding of BRI could be seen as a continuity of China's unfinished business in globalization that has preceded the modern polity; nevertheless, there is a need to communicate a coherent and authentic message that reflects the reality of business operations.     

Trade Liberalization in Egypt

A computable general equilibrium model of Egypt is developed to analyze proposed reforms in its trade policies, including a partnership agreement with the European Union. The model has multiple trading regions and allows for administrative trade barriers and tariffs. The paper reports computations of the revenue impacts of trade liberalization and the required changes in distortionary commodity taxes to maintain a fixed real government budget. Egypt's greatest potential gains come from removing its administrative trade barriers while adopting globally free trade. The partnership agreement with the EU could lower or raise Egypt's welfare, depending on prior trade reform.     

Comparing Compliance Behaviour of Students and Farmers. An Extra-laboratory Experiment in the Context of Agri-environmental Nudges in Germany

Increasing popularity of economic experiments for policy impact analysis has led to an on-going debate about the suitability of students to substitute professionals as experimental subjects. To date, subject pool effects in agricultural and resource economics experiments have not been sufficiently studied. In order to identify differences and similarities between students and non-students, we carry out an experiment in the form of a multi-period business management game that is adapted to an agri-environmental context. We compare the compliance behaviour of German agricultural students and German farmers with regard to water protection rules and analyse their responses to two different green nudge interventions. The experimental results reveal that the direction of the response to the policy treatments is similar. Even unexpected behaviour could be reproduced by the student sample. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the treatment effects differed between the two samples. This implies that experimenters in the field of agricultural and resource economics could use the subject pool of students to analyse the direction of nudge policies. If predictions should be made about the magnitude effects, we suggest using a professional subject pool.     

Decomposing growth in the gender wage gap in urban China: 1989–2011

This paper examines trends in the gender wage gap observed in urban China during the post‐reform era. Using China Health and Nutrition Survey data, changes to the gap between 1989 and 2011 are analyzed using the Wellington decomposition method. While women's gains in observed characteristics have narrowed the wage gap, they are more than offset by changes in the returns to these characteristics. Men's returns to potential labour market experience have grown particularly rapidly, relative to women's, and this represents the single largest contributing factor towards the widening of the gender wage gap. Further investigation explores gender wage patterns through the dimensions of occupation, ownership sector and birth cohort. Taken together, my results raise concerns that China's urban labour market may increasingly disincentivize women's long‐term labour force attachments.