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.     

A model depicting the relations among perceived stressors,role conflict and organizational commitment: A comparative analysis of Hong Kong and the United States

As managers and employees from different cultures begin to encounter one another in the workplace, the need arises to understand how organizational variables relate differentially based on one's culture. This study attempts to provide a preliminary examination of the relationship between stressors, sources of conflict and job commitment across two differing cultures, specifically the United States and Hong Kong. Although more similarities than differences between the two cultures were found, this study provides at least preliminary evidence that members of different cultures may perceive some stressors differently and exhibit different relationships between stressors and work attitudes.     

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) .     

Anxiety of dependency in international joint ventures? An empirical study of drivers and consequences of relationship insecurity

This research introduces and delineates the concept of insecurity in IJV relationships. We define relationship insecurity as a parent firm's concerns about the continuance of the alliance arrangement and its partner's future provision of need satisfaction. According to interdependence theory, exchange partners that experience high dependence inevitably experience this ‘anxiety of dependency’, and the emergence of insecurity can destabilize the working relationship from within. We develop a conceptual model of the drivers and consequences of relationship insecurity in IJVs. Our survey results from 125 IJVs indicate that focal firm dependence and partner firm dependence both negatively affect insecurity, though the former is the dominant predictor. This surprising finding implies IJV partners experience ‘anxiety of low dependency’. The results suggest insecurity not only reduces directly IJV performance, but also lowers the quality of interpartner communication, which in turn dampens performance. Implications of these results are discussed.