Money, income, and prices are important macroeconomic variables that play a crucial roles in an economy. The trends in money supply, movements in prices, changes in nominal and real income, as well as their interrelationships affect the economic life and well-being of a nation. The compilation of data on these magnitudes over long periods of time along with the supporting analysis is what constitutes monetary history. The present book by P. R. Brahmananda has carried out such an exercise for India. In presenting the monetary history of India, the author has kept the pioneering work of Milton Friedman and Anna Shwartz as a model for his work, and has comprehensively treated the 19th century events and experiences of the then Indian Subcontinent in the monetary and related areas. In the process, more than 200 time series of different variables have been brought together. The book not only contains a narrative account including the summary of the various viewpoints before the currency committees, and a detailed chronology of the period, but also examines the pros and cons of the various controversies of that period. Moreover, it subjects the empirical evidence to econometric testing of several important hypotheses of the modern-day monetary theory.
This study is an econometric systems approach to modeling the factors and linkages affecting risk perceptions toward agricultural biotechnology, self‐protection actions, and food demand. This model is applied to milk in the United States, but it can be adapted to other products as well as other categories of risk perceptions. The contribution of this formulation is the ability to examine how explanatory factors influence risk perceptions and whether they translate into behavior and ultimately what impact this has on aggregate markets. Hadden's outrage factors on heightening risk perceptions are among the factors examined. In particular, the article examines the role of labeling as a means of permitting informed consent to mitigate outrage factors. The effects of attitudinal, economic, and demographic factors on risk perceptions are also explored, as well as the linkage between risk perceptions, consumer behavior, and food demand. Because risk perceptions and self‐protection actions are categorical variables and demand is a continuous variable, the model is estimated as a two‐stage mixed system with a covariance correction procedure suggested by Amemiya. The findings indicate that it is the availability of labeling, not the price difference, between that labeled milk and milk produced with recombinant bovine Somatotropin (rbST) that significantly affects consumer's selection of rbST‐free milk. The results indicate that greater availability of labeled milk would not only significantly increase the proportion of consumers who purchased labeled milk, its availability would also reduce the perception of risk associated with rbST, whether consumers purchase it or not. In other words, availability of rbST‐free milk translates into lower risk perceptions toward milk produced with rbST.
AbstractThe Department of the Army must provide its personnel with acceptable housing within the vicinity of military installations. To achieve this housing goal, the Army must often enter into agreements for the construction of housing or for leasing of existing housing. Any housing construction or leasing request must be accompanied by a Segmented Housing Market Analysis (SHMA), a time‐consuming and costly forecasting process that requires many manual labor tasks. As described elsewhere, a Housing Analysis System (HANS) was developed to support these tasks on a micro computer with very user‐friendly computer programs. Recently, the original version of HANS has been modified and incorporated into a larger computer system now under development. At the heart of both the original and modified systems is a set of econometric and heuristic programming models that deliver the required analyses and evaluations. This paper describes these models, explains how they drive the modified HANS, and presents the results and benefits of the use of the modified computer system.Biographical Sketch — Guisseppi A. Forgionne is Professor of Information Systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). Professor Forgionne holds a B.S. in Commerce and Finance, an M.A. in Econometrics, an M.B.A., and a Ph.D. in Management Science and Econometrics. He has published 16 books and approximately 70 research articles and consulted for a variety of public and private organizations on decision support systems theory and applications. Dr. Forgionne has also served as department chair at UMBC, Mount Vernon College, and Cal Poly Pomona. He has received several national and international awards for his work.
In the early 1970s, Emile Benoit shocked development economists by presenting positive cross-country correlations between military expenditure rates and economic growth rates in less developed countries (LDCs). This article reviews the long debate that has followed. While the studies surveyed here differ widely in method and focus, the empirical results point to similar conclusions. First, efforts at re-estimating Benoit's correlation coefficients for different samples and different time periods all fail to reproduce Benoit's results. Second, while some studies uncover evidence of positive effects of military spending through human capital formation and technological "spin-off" effects, models that allow military spending to affect growth through multiple channels find that, while military spending may stimulate growth through some channels, it retards it through others, and the net effect is negative. The most important negative effect is that higher military spending reduces national saving rates, thereby reducing rates of capital accumulation. The existence of positive effects of military spending on economic growth, as conjectured by Benoit, still cannot be ruled out. However, the recent econometric evidence points to the conclusion that these positive effects, if they exist, are small relative to the negative effects, and that, overall, military spending has a weak but adverse impact on economic growth in developing countries.
Liberation of Prices : a Solution for Employment ? Eric Bleuze, Michel Gilles, Thierry Pujol The article analyzes first the consequences of the liberation of the prices of the services most affected by international competition, and then analyses the macroeconomic impact of that liberation using both a neokeynesian model and the OFCE quarterly model. The restoration of margins following the total liberation of prices in services improved the profitability of this sector, which for several years had been declining. But, taking into consideration the behaviour of consumption, it seems unlikely to induce producers to increase capacity and employment very much. An econometric estimate suggests an increase of 10 000 in the number of jobs in catering and car repairing in 1987 following the liberation of prices. In the short term the impact on the consumer price index is limited (0.3 to 0.5 of a percentage point in 1987) and the transfer is mainly from households to the service producers. Over the medium term, developments will depend on several factors. With widespread indexation, as in France, where salaries follow prices and companies' prices are indexed on costs, the initial advantage obtained by services is slowly disappearing, unless there should be a break in indexation or a continuing increase in the prices of services. In this case the inflation rate would definitely increase. On the assumption of an initial shock to prices in services and close indexation of salaries to production prices, the liberation of prices in services would be likely to exert a depressive effect, the more so if the exchange rate is fixed (26 000 jobs lost at the dawn of 1990). Greater flexibility in the exchange rate would moderate this depressive impact of the decrease in competitiveness, but with more inflation.
AbstractThe segmentation of the labour market is one of the most striking characteristics of the transition process in Central and Eastern European countries. Not only do the young, unskilled workers and women face a high risk of unemployment, but joblessness also varies significantly geographically. This paper sheds some light on labour market segmentation in transition countries by analysing individual records of individuals registered at the labour offices of two Polish regions (Warsaw and Ciechanov and two Bulgarian regions (Sofia and Botevgrad) over the initial three to four years of the transition to a market economy. The empirical results confirm the existence of highly selective firing and hiring processes in the Polish and Bulgarian labour markets. Overall, unskilled or poorly educated workers have the highest probability of becoming unemployed and remaining without a job for a long period of time. We also analysed the determinants of unemployment duration across regions and over time using a piece‐wise constant hazard model with multiple destinations, i.e. employment and exit from the labour force. The results suggest that the unemployed with a high education and previous experience in the private sector have a higher probability of getting a new job, especially in the more dynamic labour markets, while those without previous work experience tend to stay unemployed for a longer period of time and often leave the labour market. The econometric results also suggest that the reforms of the unemployment benefit systems have produced important effects on unemployment flows.
In 1972 the United Nations Fund for Population Activities initiated support for a programme of research within the International Labour Organization on population and employment. Determinants of fertility have been a major theme in this research programme, as is evident in an earlier Progress Report on the programme [3]. The book here reviewed is an attempt to distil some general conclusions from this research, and to present ideas and evidence not included in the 1982 publication. The first section of the book contains a summary of theories of fertility determination; a brief description of the findings of empirical research on fertility, and of the problems of empirical research on the economics of fertility; some comments on the relevance for policy of research on the economics of fertility; and some suggestions for more fruitful research strategies. The second part deals with selected methodological problems: the definition and measurement of fertility; econometric problems of analysing cross-sectional and time-series data; estimation and interpretation of aggregate data; specification and estimation of models fertility; and the uses of simulation techniques in studying the effects of economic policy on fertility. As this list of topics indicates, the emphasis in this section (and in most of the book) is on research on fertility by economists. The last chapter in the second section, however, describes anthropological approaches to the study of fertility. The final section contains six case studies on Kenya, Nigeria, rural India, rural Turkey, Yugoslavia, and a comparative study of Costa Rica and Mexico.
In: Kyklos: international review for social sciences, Volume 38, Issue 2, p. 276-314
ISSN: 1467-6435
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