The Costing Adaptation through Local Institutions (CALI) study aims to highlight how adaptation by households to climate change and climate variability is shaped by institutions, and how governments, through local institutions, can support adaptation that addresses the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable households. The main objective of the study is to provide recommendations regarding adaptation options for households in rural regions and facilitate the necessary institutional support. The methodology of the study draws on past adaptation experiences, particularly for vulnerable groups in different fragile ecological contexts. It uses participatory approaches to assess the costs of different adaptation strategies used by such groups. In this synthesis report, the analytical results from the three country case studies are presented and compared. Among the adopted strategies in the three cases, some were similar, while others were country-specific. The report describes some of the institutional, socioeconomic, and political differences that contributed to the individual or communal adaptation strategies among the countries. These country comparisons make it possible to present a number of policy recommendations that provide a better insight on how future interventions might be more effectively targeted. The results of this study confirm the view that it is important to place greater emphasis on integrated approaches to development. A focus on only a single issue will most likely not have the envisaged results and will in the end lead to higher costs. Several constraints ranging from constraints on a household, village, regional, or national level prevent households from successfully improving their livelihoods and preparing adequately for changing climate variability.
This paper empirically explores the political-economic determinants of why governments choose to tax or subsidize trade in agriculture. The authors use a new data set on nominal rates of assistance (NRA) across a number of commodities spanning the last five decades for 64 countries. NRAs measure the effect on domestic (relative to world) price of the quantitative and price-based instruments used to regulate agricultural markets. The data set admits consideration of both taxes and subsidies on exports and imports. The authors find that both economic and political variables play important roles in determining the within-variation in the NRA data. Based on results the authors offer a number of data-driven exploratory hypotheses that can inform future theoretical and empirical research on why governments choose to tax or subsidize agricultural products an important policy question that is also one of the least understood by scholars.
This chapter begins with a brief summary of economic growth and structural changes in the region since the 1950s and of agricultural and other economic policies as they affected agriculture before and after the various reforms, and in several cases fundamental regime changes, of the past half-century. It then summarizes new estimates of the nominal rate of assistance (NRA) and the relative rate of assistance (RRA) to farmers delivered by national farm and nonfarm policies over the past several decades (depending on data availability), and of those policies' impacts on consumer prices of farm products. Both farmer assistance and consumer taxation is negative in periods where there is an anti-agricultural, pro-urban consumer bias in a country's policy regime. The final sections summarize what the author have learned and draw out implications of the findings, including for poverty and inequality and for possible future directions of policies affecting agricultural incentives in this part of Asia.
Climate-related hazards have adverse effects on national growth and poverty reduction, affecting the poor and several sectors of the economy simultaneously. At its current rate of growth, Vietnam will become a major global greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter. The Government of Vietnam initiated the Climate Public Expenditure and Investment Review (CPEIR) to advance an understanding of the current policy and institutional architecture as well as to assess current spending on its climate change response to help guide future climate change-related expenditures and policy implementation. The report has three components: (i) a policy, institutional and methodological review; (ii) an analysis of climate change response (CC-response) spending in five line ministries and three provinces; and (iii) recommendations and an action plan. The main goal of the CPEIR is to provide an overview of the current CC-response activities and formulate recommendations for how to improve priority setting, capacity building, coordination, expenditure management, and mainstreaming of CC-response strategies into socio-economic development plans.
In this paper, the authors discuss the ways in which national governments, firms, and individuals respond to policy related to food safety, environmental protection, and trade. These responses must be considered in the development of policy to ensure the best possible outcomes. It accounts for uncertainty about policy impacts and scientific knowledge and incorporates stochastic environmental factors. The authors argue use of such a model in the development of health and environmental policy can overcome capture by domestic forces opposed to trade liberalization. The effectiveness of policy, of course, is dependent upon firm and consumer response to policy. Section one describes the impacts of international transfer of species and genetic material, paying particular attention to the introduction of alien invasive species. Section two discusses issues surrounding trade in environmental amenities. Food safety and environmental regulations are reviewed in section three, along with mechanisms by which such policy can serve as a proxy for protectionists. Section four develops a risk assessment model that can be used in policy design. Section five considers the role of institutional, firm and individual behavior in the development and effectiveness of policy. Section six summarizes our analysis in offering an agenda for trade talks.
Part one of an interview with Julia Casey. Topics include: Julia's service as a clerk stenographer in the Civil Service Commission. Family history. Her parents came from Italy; her father was from Crenna and her mother was from Milan. The arranged marriage between her parents and their immigration to the United States. Her grandfather's work at a gas company in Italy. Her relatives worked in an embroidery business in Massachusetts. What it was like for Julia to grow up in Boston. Speaking proper Italian. What their neighborhood in Boston was like. The social club nearby. The foods people cooked and ate. The Christmas traditions of her family. How to prepare and serve polenta. Celebrations for patron saints. ; 1 LINDA: Okay. JULIA: All right. LINDA: So why don't I just start by saying this is Linda Rosenlund with the Center for Italian Culture at Fitchburg State College. It's Wednesday, November 16th, 2002. We're at the home of Julia Casey at 700 Pearl Street in Fitchburg. And Julia is just filling out the biographical information sheet, but I decided to turn the recorder on because she has some interesting anecdotes while she is writing. So she was just about to fill out the work history portion, and she began telling me that she worked for the War Department Chemical Warfare Services in Washington, DC, and you started 10 days after Pearl Harbor. JULIA: Yes. I had -- after high school, I had gone—and it's not noted here—to the stenotype school in Boston. And in the course of learning, they sent us to take a Civil Service Examination since [stenotypee] is a type, is machine shorthand. And in October, I took the [unintelligible - 00:01:13] Civil Service Examination in Boston, and then when the war broke out, I received a telegram to report to Washington by the 17th of December. And so 10 days after Pearl Harbor, I found myself at the War Department for assignment in the Civil Service Commission and the War Department. They sent me there, and then they assigned me to the Chemical Warfare Service as a clerk stenographer. LINDA: Does that mean it wasn't a choice? JULIA: No. No. There was no choice. They assigned you -- thousands of girls were pouring in from all over the country to, to man the increased offices for the War Department. The war was on, and every department in the government needed extra help, and so they took Civil Service Exams all over the country and the girls that were registered were sent telegrams to come in, and then they sent you wherever they needed you. So I worked there until I think October of 1944, and then I was transferred back to the Boston Procurement Office for the Chemical Warfare Service. LINDA: -kinds of things did you learn? 2 JULIA: It was straight stenographic work—filing, clerical, and stenographic work. I worked for a number of different people who dictated letters, and we typed them up and did general office work. LINDA: Were you ever learning anything interesting? JULIA: No. No, except the names of the various gases that they were using at the time, which was still pretty much what they had from World War I—mustard gas and things like that I haven't thought about it in years—but they had arsenals of gases all over the country. And so the correspondence mainly had to do with shipments and [unintelligible - 00:03:30] get into any of the research part at all. Men from major chemical corporations around the country came in to handle the government's program. Beyond that, we have no way of knowing. Things were either stamped secret or confidential. But the correspondence was so voluminous that things that came in, the regulations from the government had to all be filed and none of us did that and read anything like that. It was secret confidential, general -- you just filed it or you did whatever clerical work was assigned. LINDA: Obviously, war is such an uneasy time anyway. It must have been… JULIA: It was very exciting because we were young, and I eventually lived with four roommates in an apartment, and we worked almost six days a week. And because of the wartime, you didn't have as many things open to you. You couldn't visit the White House. For a long time, I never even got to see the Houses of Congress. We lived a very good life. We took care of our apartment. Each of the girls that I lived with, with whom I'm still closed friends, came from the different parts of the country except one who came from my own neighborhood. She lived with us. I lived with the girl from [unintelligible - 00:05:10], Missouri and a girl from Sunnyvale, California, and a girl that had come from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and we kept house, we shopped, we did laundry and we wanted to work in a 3 different agency and went to work with public transportation. We lived in Washington, and then we lived in Arlington, Virginia in an apartment. And we all came back to Boston together. We all arranged for transfers to various agencies in Boston. LINDA: Were you ever questioned about your Italian background? JULIA: No. I never was questioned. The questioning had to do with various organizations that you might have belonged to where they found your name. I mean, I was 18 years old when I left, so… And then I continued my Federal Civil Service until about seven months after I was married. LINDA: And that was in 1951? JULIA: 1950, yes. In April, I think I left my job, and I didn't work just for Chemical Warfare Service because after the war, they had what they call Reduction in Force, RIF. In other words, all the people that had been hired for the war were then let go, but you could go to other agencies that were getting rid of all of the stuff that the government had bought during the war, and one of the agencies I went to was the War Assets Administration in Boston. I forgot the name of the original name of the agency. They are in charge of reselling all of the machine tools that had been bought for the war plants, and New England was a very heavy industrial area for machine tools and machine and all kinds of things. So I went to work for the War Assets Administration, and then I think I put in sometime with one of the Air Force for terminal agencies here at the army base in Boston. And I was pregnant almost immediately after I was married, so I left in April of 1952. My first child was born in June of '52. LINDA: Are you okay? JULIA: Excuse me. I have a dry cough. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: [Unintelligible - 00:08:17] administration. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: I'll put CWS. That's the Chemical Warfare Service. LINDA: Okay.4 JULIA: And then War Assets Administration… and the Air Force. I still have all my papers, so I can check if we have to. And then I left in April. Our church, Catholic. That's all you want, isn't it? Or do you want… LINDA: Well, why don't you tell me where you go now? JULIA: All right. LINDA: -instead of Boston. JULIA: Okay, St. Camillus. LINDA: Okay. You have lived in Fitchburg since '68? JULIA: Yes. I've lived in Fitchburg since -- we moved here because my husband obtained the position of Director of the Library at Fitchburg State College in 1967, and he commuted about a year, and it was too much for him to commute to Boston. So, we had to sell -- we decided to sell our home, and we've lived here since March of 1968. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: Okay. Social clubs, wow. All right, I was a member, and still am, actually, of the League of Women Voters. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: Boston and Fitchburg. [Unintelligible - 00:10:07] Garden Club, where I was president for about four years. It's 1963, 1993, the June of [unintelligible - 00:10:30] Club. LINDA: I'm not familiar with that. JULIA: It's a Catholic layman's organization. I was actually the first woman admitted in the Fitchburg area. Would you mind opening the door? Letting the dog… LINDA: Oh okay. The dog is going to be [unintelligible - 00:10:48] with me now? JULIA: It's cold. She might just -- come on, sweetheart. Come, darling. Come on, Sasha. What a good [unintelligible - 00:10:59]. What a lovely dog! That would be on the tape. LINDA: That's okay. JULIA: All right. Let me…5 LINDA: What's that? JULIA: It's very cold in here because I turned down the heat, and the stove is not on. Let me just turn the heat up. Okay. Hold on. LINDA: Okay. What's the… JULIA: [Unintelligible - 00:11:24]. Ooh, my kids are [unintelligible - 00:11:29]. LINDA: Say what? JULIA: My [unintelligible - 00:11:33]. LINDA: Oh, who cares about things like that? Thanks for showing me all of the photographs. Julia just showed me the photographs that had been in her family since your mother passed away, I guess. What year was that? JULIA: My mother died in 1989 in Windsor, Vermont, because my sister owns a nursing home there and my mother went to live with her. But my mother lived alone on 11 and 13th Pompeii Street in Roxbury until she was 89 years old. My father had bought a six-family house on Pompeii Street, which originally was Lansdowne Street, and she lived in that house until she was 89 years old. Then she came to live with me for a year, and my sister took her up with her right after my son Steven's funeral in August of 1985. I treasure the artifacts, the furniture, and the pictures that I have. I have a whole collection of photographs from Italy which I'm hoping to organize before I die and so that the descendants will have some idea of who they came from. LINDA: Well, tell me a little bit about your parents. Were they born…? JULIA: My father was born in Crenna, Gallarate, C-R-E-N-N-A. It's a small town or village, and it's right above the city of Gallarate, G-A-L-L-A-R-A-T-E, which is a part of the Malpensa Airport in Milan. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: They are Lombards. My mother was born -- Lombardi is the province. My mother was born in Milan on December 5th, 1893. My father was born in Crenna, Gallarate on January 30th, 1891. And the family had lived there for a number of generations, and there are records in the church in Crenna. 6 LINDA: And their last names? Your father's last name is… JULIA: [Tomasine]. LINDA: Tomasine. JULIA: Yeah. LINDA: Mother's? JULIA: Seminario, and it was an arranged marriage. LINDA: So tell me a little bit about that. Did your mother tell you that was an arranged marriage, or…? JULIA: Most Italian women had to have the approval of their families before they married. It's a little complicated. When my father was an infant, a young girl baby was… I do not know the circumstances. She was assigned, she was asked -- no, that's wrong. She was given to my grandmother in Crenna, who was at the time nursing my papa. In other words, she was a nursing mother. And oftentimes when babies were either abandoned or the mother died or was too ill to take care of them, they were given to a nursing mother, who brought that child up along with the child she was nursing. In other words, she became a wet nurse. And if she had sufficient milk—since there were no formulas or bottles at the time—then she nursed both children. And this little girl, whose name was Carolina, she was brought up with my father until she was 18 years old. And then she was given her freedom, her choice to do whatever she wished, and at that time of course, girls, they went to work or they married. And she went to Milan to work, and she met one of my mother's uncles and married him, and as a result of this marriage, the two families were connected, not by blood, but because this girl had been raised with my father. And they have a child of their own, a little girl. And when the little girl was 9 years old, when [unintelligible - 00:17:15] was 9 years old, Carolina, her mother, died. And at the funeral, 7 which was during World War I, my mother went and my father went, because they were from the two families. My father went because she was called his sister of the milk, [foreign language - 00:17:45] de latte. That means that his mother nursed the two of them together, [unintelligible - 00:17:52] de latte. It was quite common, if there was no other way for these little babies to survive. Many women didn't have enough milk to feed their children, and my mother told me that in Milan, there were professionals wet nurses, and they used to come into the city on trams from the surrounding villages, and they wore special headdresses so they were recognized as women who were going to nurse babies in private homes. And this was their profession as long as they could. They would go to the home of somebody who could afford it and nurse a child whose mother is not able to feed a child, and they were honored. They were very respected women, recognized. They used to come in on the trolley cars into the city. And so I thought that was a very interesting thing. I have never heard of it myself. But I know I had another aunt on my father's side who went to South America and who could not nurse her first child and took her to a wet nurse in the country to nurse, to be fed. So it was not an uncommon situation at all. LINDA: So now your parents got connected at the… JULIA: They're only connected -- it's not a blood relationship. LINDA: Right. JULIA: It was marriage. And… LINDA: So you were telling me that it was arranged. JULIA: Yes. When my father came, my father came to America in 1912 with two brothers, two brothers were here, but America was a very tough place to be if you didn't speak English, and he didn't have any high skills. My father was trained as an embroiderer, because that was his father's cottage 8 industry in my [unintelligible - 00:20:23] in Crenna. But he couldn't get that kind of work in America, and so he did heavy laboring, washed dishes and did anything he could. And being the oldest son, when the family in Italy needed him, he went back, but he went back unfortunately in 1914. I think he told me that he went back in April, and in August the war broke out. And his youngest brothers were taught in the Italian army, and his two brothers in America joined the American army. So there were two brothers in the Italian army in the infantry and two boys who had a wonderful time in the American army and never was sent overseas. So when his sister of the milk died, then he met my mother at that funeral, but right after the war's conditions in Italy were very bad, he came back to America in 1919. And he felt that he was then about 26, 27 years old, and he felt that it was time to settle down, and he wrote to his mother. And his mother arranged with my mother's father and asked my mother if she would like to go to America to marry her son. And my mother agreed even though she didn't know him and had only met him at that one time, and so she came to America. LINDA: Did she come by herself? JULIA: No. Italian women did not come by themselves, unlike the Irish, who did. She came with -- by this time, the two boys, Vincent and Peter Tomasine, who were in the United States, decided that they wanted their mother to come. My grandparents were separated at that time, and so they made arrangements. One son Vincent had a girlfriend in Italy that he had more or less grown up with, and he sent for her. And then my uncle Peter and -- let's see, my grandmother came. They sent for their mother and Maria [unintelligible - 00:23:12], who married Vincent, and then my grandmother brought her youngest daughter, Mary, who was not married, and she brought her son-in-law, Angelo [unintelligible - 00:23:25], who 9 was married to my father's sister and had gone back to Italy from South America during the war. And after the war, he wanted to come to America. But the men always came first. So he came with his mother-in-law, who was my grandmother. LINDA: So your father returned in 1919. How long did he take him to save enough money to send for these? JULIA: Well, he worked very hard and the passage was very cheap, and so he sent money for them and sponsored my mother. And when she came here, they were married. There wasn't any big ceremony or anything like that. They lived with his mother and Maria [unintelligible - 00:24:24], who then married my uncle Vincent, and my father's youngest sister, Mary, Maria, and his brother-in-law until they all got settled. They lived in Roxbury in a flat. And then… LINDA: And what year was this that your mother came over JULIA: It was 1920 and '21, 1921. She arrived on October 12th in New York the same day, because she always said she came the same time as Christopher Columbus, on October 12th, 1921. By the way, I have a tape here that I -- of a family history that I wrote up in 1981, and we played it at Christmastime. And the whole story is on this tape. LINDA: Oh, interesting. JULIA: As far as I can remember—and I don't vouch for extreme accuracy in anything, because by that time, my mother was pretty well along in years in the late '70s. And she was 80. My mother and I, I went to Italy for the first time when I was 50 years old in August -- September of 1973. I went back with my mother, and I was in time to meet her brother, Raymundo Clemente, her brother, Umberto. His name was Umberto Seminario, the father of the boy who was lost in the Second World War, and his wife Osana, and my mother's half sister, Anna. And I say half sister because my mother's mother died at the age of 25 from consumption, when my mother was only four years old and her brother was two. And my grandfather, Raymundo Seminario had to remarry. He married within six 10 months so that he could keep his two children. Then there were two girls born of that marriage. LINDA: Did you mention the name Clemente? JULIA: Clemente was my grandfather, Raymundo Clemente Juliano Seminario. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: Yeah, three names. And sometimes they call him Clemente. Sometimes they call him Raymundo. But I was named for him, and my brother was named for him. LINDA: Well, that brings up an interesting point. I see that your name is spelled J-U-L-I-A, and Italian… JULIA: They Americanized it. LINDA: … didn't have J. JULIA: Yes. They don't have a J. LINDA: So when did that happen? JULIA: Probably when the birth certificate was sent into city hall. I was born at home, and the doctors who came in attendance didn't speak any Italian, and so they just put down what they heard phonetically. My brother and sister, all of us were born at home. So the records at city hall were just deplorable. They're awful. Then, of course, when we were baptized, then the names were different even on those baptismal records, which I have, because then we were baptized in the Italian churches in Boston. LINDA: So let me get back to the birth certificate. It's been my experience where the birth certificate actually has the Italian name, but it's later in school. Not yours? JULIA: No. I'd have to look it up, and you know, I'd have to look it up. But I think that the birth certificate -- it might be. LINDA: Well, it's just interesting that you [unintelligible - 00:28:52] change. JULIA: I also have my mother's, her brother's, and their half sister's report cards from their Italian elementary school in Milan, Italy, all signed by their father, my grandfather. I have it right around the corner. They're in the back.11 LINDA: Very interesting. JULIA: I went to visit the schools that they attended when I went to Milan. LINDA: So now your experience seems very different from many of the Italian Americans that I have, and their family is situated [unintelligible - 00:29:33] north. JULIA: Yes. Yes. Most of the Italian immigrants were from the central and southern part of Italy. From the north, the population there was more educated, and there was more industry, so jobs were plentiful unless, like in my grandfather's case, you had an industry where he was an embroiderer at many areas that have cottage industries. He worked out of his own home, and he was not a particularly good business man. So when the wars came along and he lost a lot of money, building an apartment house, so the boys decided that they would all come to America. LINDA: But they actually left the first time before the war. JULIA: Yes. Three of them came before the war, and my father was the only one that went back because he was the oldest son, and he must received word that things were not going well at home. And so he went back to help out for a time, but then after the -- he had to go into combat. Then when he came back after the war, things were not much better, and he joined his brothers in America again. LINDA: What did your mother's people do for…? JULIA: My grandfather started at the age of eight carrying bricks. He came from a large family in [unintelligible - 00:31:20], which is in Lombardi. It's the same town where Mother Cabrini was born. She was a modern Italian saint. And because child labor was very common, he went to school to learn to read and write, but then he got a job carrying bricks to build the gas company, and I just recently found out that the gas company in Milan was built by a French firm. 12 And so after the building was built, he got a job in the company. I don't know what he was doing, but he probably started out by shoveling coal or whatever. They made gas out of burning coal. And eventually, he worked his way up in the company until at the age of 54, he was in charge of sending out the gas to the entire city of Milan. They had huge gasometers in which they stored the prepared gas, and it's very strange because when my mother and father bought their house in Roxbury right across Massachusetts Avenue, which was the main street outside—their street connected to Massachusetts Avenue—there was a huge gasometer meter that was owned by the Boston Gas Company. And so all of my early life, I saw the same huge gasometer that my grandfather was a part of in Milan. LINDA: Interesting. JULIA: Right. It's gone now, as they put in the southeast expressway. They took it away, and they have different -- now they bring the gas in by pipeline, so they don't store it. LINDA: Did you ever have any discussions with your parents about the fact that it was an arranged marriage, or was it just so common then? JULIA: It was very common. You married people that you were introduced to, or there wasn't any of this thing of going out on dates. The expression in Northern Italy for a couple who were interested in each other was [foreign language - 00:34:04], meaning they speak to each other. That was the expression. They stayed in groups. They're amongst the families, and a gentleman, once a young man was interested in a girl, his only access was through her family. LINDA: Now, what brought your father to Boston? JULIA: Because his brothers were here and he figured he could -- he was very, very nervous. After the war, he came back in a very light post -- what do they call it? LINDA: Post-traumatic syndrome? JULIA: Post-traumatic… LINDA: Syndrome, I think.13 JULIA: They didn't call it that at the time, but he couldn't stay at home. And so, he came here and he did mostly have [unintelligible - 00:35:04] for the rest of his life. LINDA: But initially, when he came in 1912 with his brothers, what brought them to Boston? JULIA: Because they -- the Italians had started coming to America around 1890, 1888-1890, and the word got back that you could earn a living, and his brothers happened to be there. They had an aunt, their father's sister, Luisa Milani, came around 1880 or 1890, and she was married to a man who was a stonecutter, and of course, marble and granite. They have quarries in Massachusetts and Vermont, and her husband was a stonecutter. In fact, he died of silicosis. And these men were skilled laborers, and they worked in -- where they made cemetery monuments and they carved, they quarried stone for buildings. So their aunt was here, and they have to have someone to sponsor them. So my first two uncles came under her sponsorship, and so did my father under her sponsorship. Then a younger brother came around 1928. He had remained in Italy after the war. He was the youngest, and he came later than they did. And he became an automobile mechanic, a very skilled one. So that's right. And then my father, he bought these two houses for $1,700 apiece, and his brother Vincent gave him a down payment to put down so he could get settled. They bought homes almost immediately after they arrived. LINDA: Is this on Lansdowne, which later became Pompeii Street? JULIA: Yes. Well, my father did, and then his two brothers bought homes in other places. And his brother Vincent started up the same family embroidery business that he was -- that was his trade the rest of his life. He had a factory in [unintelligible - 00:37:36] where he did a great deal of 14 [wobbler], the embroidered patches that they used to distinguish outfits and military units and all types of things like that. LINDA: What's the name of that company? Do you know? JULIA: It was Vincent Tomasine Embroideries. And in fact later, after the war, long after the war, he sold it to someone else. LINDA: I'm wondering why your father didn't… JULIA: He couldn't stand it. After the way, he couldn't stand indoor work. He just couldn't. He was too nervous, and the business of course was run very differently from what his father had run in Italy, a one-man shop, whereas my uncle, all of my aunts went to work for my uncle, and they would get contracts. Say, women will embroidered slips and embroidered underwear, and the manufacturers in Boston that were making rayon, nylons, shorts would send -- they would stitch up the fronts of the slips, then they would send them by the box-loads to my uncle, who would put them on frames and do the embroideries on the front, then they went back to the factories to be re-stitched, to be stitched and completed. So he did all the embroidery, work whether it was blouses, whether it was slips, whether it was anything else that had to be done. As I said, during the war, it was military patches. LINDA: Now, about your mantle, you have a beautiful piece of embroidery. Who did that? JULIA: My mother. Because her mother had died so young from consumption, my grandfather refused to allow his daughters to work in large factories, in a factory. He didn't want them to do factory work. And so at that time, clothing was made almost custom. They didn't have huge factories that churned them all by the thousands, and fine clothing for girl who was going to be married, her [foreign language - 00:40:00] was made out of fine cloth and linen. And there were many, many -- again, it's a type of cottage industry, but small shops that were girls that were hired for this skill in stitching and 15 attaching tucking, attaching waist, and my mother worked in a place where they made shirts, and all kinds of skilled work was done by hand on single machines. And then every year for the month, they were allowed to vacation. My grandfather took them to the mountains, and that's still customary today. Every summer, most of the Italians go off to the mountains of the seashore for vacation. They believe in that. Most of them can afford to do that. If they can't, then they go away for a week or two. LINDA: So let's talk more about Boston. What was it like living on Lansdowne Street? JULIA: We loved it. It was a good street, and the same people that lived there when I was a child, the girls that grew up with me, other than one or two who have died, are still my friends. I still maintain contact even though they might have been a year or two younger or older, that contact with those families have never really been broken. There were about 60 families on two streets in a very -- they were part of [war day], but they were off of Massachusetts Avenue near the south end of Boston, although it was officially Roxbury. And all of the landlords on those two streets were Italian, and they came from all parts of Italy from the Piedmont to Lombardi down to Abruzzo down to the southern part all the way to Sicily. LINDA: Yeah. JULIA: So I grew up learning many dialects, hearing many dialects, and my mother kept in touch. She wrote letters to her family and friends in Italy and relatives until she couldn't see anymore 65 years later. So I would see my mother sitting there late at night, midnight, writing to Italy, and then the letters would come back and… LINDA: Did she save those?16 JULIA: No. I did it. She didn't. I saved quite a few. I have quite a lot, and as a matter of fact, one of my mother's girlfriends, [unintelligible - 00:43:10], I think, married a man named [unintelligible - 00:43:18], and her descendants lived in a part of Milan, and our children, which would represent the fourth generation, this lady's grandfather worked with my grandfather at the Milan Gasworks. And my mother kept in touch all those years with his daughter, with her friend, because they were neighbors. LINDA: Let me just slide you hand through here. Okay. JULIA: And my daughters and my sister's daughters had gone to Italy after college and met them and stayed with them. So there were four generations whose friendship has stood the test of time. LINDA: That's remarkable. JULIA: They came to visit two years ago, and I've been there to visit twice with my mother. LINDA: So what was it like when you went back? JULIA: It was like déjà vu. I knew everyone that my mother introduced me to. I'm very fluent in the dialect, which is very seldom spoken now anymore, because after Mussolini came in, one of the ways that he tried to unify the country of Italy was to insist that they all speak proper Italian, whereas everyone who came to America during the '20s and before spoke the dialect of their own region, or their own village. In fact, many people on Pompeii Street could not understand my parents. No one could if they spoke in the Lombard dialect, because it was so different. LINDA: How did they communicate? JULIA: Because they did have a common -- they could speak in proper Italian. Many of them had gone to school. And I mean, they could -- if they went to school in Italy, then they could read Italian, but there was a common thread. It was very difficult though, because they usually never spoke in proper Italian. But the southern Italian spoke closer to the proper language.17 LINDA: The southern? JULIA: Yeah. The southern and central ones, they spoke in a manner that was a little bit closer, closer to proper Italian. And my mother wrote in proper Italian, and most of them have had elementary school educations so that they could communicate with their families in Italy. LINDA: Did your parents learn English? JULIA: Yes, they did. My father could read the American paper. They listened to the news on the radio, and of course, we grew up and went to school in America. And my mother was forced. It was very, very difficult adjustment because she frequently misunderstood what I said in English, and it made for a great deal of friction until enough years went by that my youngest sister came along 13 years after I did. By that time, my sister came to understand the Italian because in the family, my mother and father still spoke in dialect and all of my aunts and uncles, the same dialect. So we got it through hearing it. It wasn't until I went back to Italy the first time in 1973 that we went back for three or four weeks, and it was the first time that I had what you call an immersion, where everybody spoke proper Italian and I suddenly understood. Like a person who plays the piano by ear, I understood the Italian. And then, when I went back in '76 with my mother and sister, again I was exposed to about three weeks or so, or a month, of everyone speaking proper Italian, except in mountain villages, where I visited with my mother—they still spoke dialect. And of course, I was fluent, and I still am. LINDA: So let me see though. Do I understand this correctly? Your mother spoke the dialect, but she came to… JULIA: But she could read and write proper Italian. LINDA: Right. So when she returned, and people were speaking more proper…18 JULIA: Right. But we only did family visiting. LINDA: Okay. JULIA: And so everyone she could understand because she could write and she had learned proper Italian. And my mother remembered the lyrics, the words to the songs she had learned from nursery school. She was sent to nursery school. Remember, my grandfather remarried, and his second wife had two babies. And nursery school, [foreign language - 00:49:00], it was called. [Foreign language - 00:49:04] is the proper Italian word. And they had very fine nursery school for children, and so my mother and her brother and sister were sent to nursery school, and -- my mother told me a very interesting thing. Up until she was 15 years old and went to this private Catholic school that was run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Milan, even then, they had a woman who was referred to as [foreign language - 00:49:43]. And I haven't exactly known how to spell it, but a woman accompanied all these children to all their homes. The school was not far from their homes, but the children were accompanied to their homes by a lady. Even when she was 15 years old, someone accompanied all these students to their homes. LINDA: So when they walked home… JULIA: Right. Unless the parents came to get them; and if they couldn't, then somebody took them home. LINDA: Wow. So getting back to Boston, do you have all of these different regions where they are different Italians… from different regions is what I mean… JULIA: And all we young girls, all of us, we would play together, and then we would compare how our mother said things, how we would, you know, be there laughing, and then we [unintelligible - 00:50:48]. My mother said it like this. My mother said it like that. And all of us learned the different dialects, or they understood them even if they didn't try to speak them. 19 We had an awful lot of fun. We played on the street. We played street games. We learned to dance on the street. Our mothers taught us to crochet and embroider. That was another way that we passed the time. And the mothers, because this was small street, when the housework was done or the middle of the day, they came out, and when they weren't arms akimbo leaning out of their windows, they were down in the doorways, and we were watched all our lives, all of those young years. Somebody was always watching and looking out on the street, so nobody got away with anything. LINDA: Now, do the mothers socialize together? JULIA: Yes, they visited each other's little lots. As I said, I think I counted one time; there might have been 60 flats. It's still in existence, that neighborhood. But it's been bought by a developer. In fact, my brother still owns my father's house. He doesn't live there, but he still owns it. LINDA: So you had all different kinds of generations… JULIA: And all different kinds of cooking and all different generations; and when they died, they were waked in the apartments. They were not waked in funeral homes. Many children were born on the street, so we saw it all. We experienced it all. And young people died. I had two friends who were wonderful, lost a sister. Both of them lost sisters at 21 years old, and the whole street was born. It was complete support from everyone, because these girls had been -- one died in childbirth at 21 years old, and the other one died from apparently a blood clot just after some surgery. And everyone went to Boston City Hospital because we were only five minutes away from it. LINDA: Were the mourning traditions different between different regions? JULIA: They wore black. Some of them never took off that black. Even in the north end, most women who lost their husbands would wear black for the rest of their lives unless they remarried. Some of them did the same thing 20 on my street; if they lost their husbands they wore black housedresses. It was just the custom. But several children died, two of them from spinal meningitis, which at that time was fatal. And I think one was nine and one was 14. And of course, women, they mourned. They wept. They cried. That was a terrible thing. It was a part of life, and they didn't try to gloss over it. They lost a child in childbirth. You could hear them sometimes screaming from the pain even though doctor might come, an intern might come from Boston City Hospital. I remember that one of my friends' mother gave birth, and she lived on the third floor across the street. It must have been an extremely painful experience. My mother was marking the floor gray-faced, remembering her own. LINDA: So there was very little privacy. JULIA: The flat was small, and there was very little privacy. We knew who got along, who didn't get along. And some of them, even though they came from the old country, if things got too bad, they will separate. But for the most -- and the women as they got older, our parents, not my mother -- my mother went to work during the Depression when my father had an accident and broke his leg. He couldn't go to work. My mother went to work at the army base stitching uniforms. But it was only for a short time. As soon as my father was well enough to go back to work, then she had to stay home. LINDA: … in that area generally help each other? JULIA: To some extent. I will say this. When the Depression came, even though we lived in an industrial neighborhood, there were many pieces of vacant land. We have no idea who belonged to them, whether they were city owned land or belong to the neighboring factories. We had two very huge laundries which are still in existence. They were linen services. They 21 serviced hotels, restaurants. They did that kind of thing, places that used a lot of uniforms. So the girls who were brought up just ahead of me, many of them went to work in the laundry. I did too for a short time, while I went to night school after high school, and then as I said, when I passed the civil service exam, then I went to Washington. And after that, I did office work. But as the women grew older and their children were out of high school, many of them went to work either in the laundry or in a box factory. But during the Depression, every family sectioned off some small piece of these vacant lots and grew gardens. That was natural for them; even my father had an enormous garden from a piece of land that was vacant near our home. And according to my sister—this was while I was in Washington—and my mother, he just grew marvelous vegetables. Everybody grew, even in their backyards. No piece of land went to waste. So I never knew anyone who went hungry during the Depression. They would find jobs for each other. You just have to let -- they worked for private contractors, and Italian contractors were making their way up succeeding the Irish. So if my father was out of a job, he would notify the Italian men in the neighborhood and somebody would find him a job. LINDA: Now, did you notice that these people from different regions, did they kind of stick together? JULIA: Yes, they did. They [unintelligible - 00:58:30] somebody bought houses close together and lived in -- and people from the Piedmont occupied apartments kind of close together. But it was a tiny street. It was very small. So you were all -- you just grew up together. And as the women, as the families lived there longer 22 and longer, they got closer to each other, so they learned to respect each other. LINDA: What do you think the unifying factor would be, would have been? JULIA: The fact that they were all immigrants, and that they were locked into these -- they were a part of this small neighborhood. So you have to get -- men played bocce at the end of the street. Then they set up a social club. A few of the men from Abruzzo belonged to the Sons of Italy. And in the summertime, they would have a bus come to the street, and all the Italians who wanted to would bring watermelons and macaroni and meatballs and Italian bread and cheese and salami. If you want to tour, you can get on the bus and they would go to public parks where the Sons of Italy would have a big day. There would be a dance pavilion. They would dance to all this Italian music and have picnics, and the young kids would let them go [unintelligible - 01:00:15]. LINDA: Now, did people growing up here, did they begin their own social clubs depending on regions? JULIA: No. There was just one, and most of them were… I think the ones that belong to it mostly were from the Abruzzo. My father belonged to it a little while, but he wasn't really active. But there were quite a few families from the Abruzzo region of Italy and they belong. And they drank wine; they made wine in the house. The grapes would come into Charlestown, Massachusetts on the trains, and every October they would go to Charlestown and they would order a truckload of grapes. Then they would borrow grinders—my father did too—and grind the grapes. They might make a [unintelligible - 01:01:08] with boxes of grapes and make wine. So whenever you went to visit then [unintelligible - 01:01:16] you were an adult, they always offer you a glass of wine. Everybody's cooking was different because they came from different regions. My mother never learned to make what we refer to at the time as pasta [foreign language -23 01:01:33]. But today it's knows as spaghetti and meatballs. My mother had to learn after she came to America. That was not part of our Italian food culture at all. My mother came -- Milan is near a rice-growing area. So in Northern Italy, you eat cornmeal, polenta, and rice were the staples, soups. But in Southern Italy, they were used to for special occasions, they would -- it was always with tomato sauce that was the standard pasta with tomato sauce. Very seldom, they eat rice. None of us ate much meat. Meat was eaten very sparingly. In the Lombard region, the main dish which is now becoming, and again, has become very, very popular is called risotto. That was one of the staples that I grew up with. And the holidays, we had -- at that time, some of the delicacies that are important today were not important. Things like [foreign language - 01:03:10] was not important, but my mother told us about the Christmas customs in her home. She always mentioned this [foreign language - 01:03:19]. Now you can buy it anywhere. They import it, because the fly it in, and we had special things that we ate on holidays. And my mother told us about the Christmas customs of her family. LINDA: So was that a strong tradition on Christmas Eve celebration? JULIA: Christmas Eve was considered even by the Church as a day of fasting and abstinence. Christmas Eve, when I was growing up, was a non-meat day, and amongst the Italians, who were not accustomed to dairy anyway, they use cheese. But on Christmas Eve, you ate neither milk products nor meat. You ate fish. Now, the southern and central Italians would celebrate. They might cook six or seven, in some families, 12 different kinds of fish dishes. In my family, we observe Christmas Eve very quietly with no kind of celebration at all. The next day on Christmas, then we would have -- we might have polenta, which I made this Christmas, by the way. 24 LINDA: Oh, you did. JULIA: Yes. LINDA: Now, how did you serve it? JULIA: I plugged in? LINDA: You are. Just having system -- hang on. Okay. JULIA: Polenta is made—and I can assure you because I still have a package of flour there. You can buy it today under the Goya brand; it's the only place I find it. But in my father's day, you went to the various Italian markets and they would have barrels of it, and you bought course ground corn flour, cornmeal, and then you just put it into -- I still have my parents' cup of polenta pot. Everybody brought their polenta pot from Italy. It was called, in the dialect, the parieu. LINDA: How do you spell it? Do you know? JULIA: Parieu, P-A-R-I-E-U. It's how you pronounced it. That's in Lombard dialect. LINDA: And that's the polenta pot. JULIA: Right. Let's see, how did they say it in Italy? Paiolo is the proper Italian word, I think, if I can find it in here. Paiolo, P-A-I-O-L-O or P-A-I-U-O-L-O; it's a boiler, a copper, a cauldron, a kettle, that they used for polenta. LINDA: So how did your family used to serve the polenta? JULIA: The polenta was made in this copper pot that had a rounded bottom designed to hang from a crane on a fireplace. Because in Italy, they didn't have stoves, not even my mother's family, who lived in an apartment in the city, had a stove; they had small gas light burners. But if you have -- we have kitchen rangers, black iron ranges, and they would remove the round top on one section of it in the front where the fire was farthest, and boil a certain amount of water when you have much water to boil. And then you very, very slowly added the cornmeal. You added salt, maybe a little piece of garlic, and you slowly add in the cornmeal. 25 Now, one person has to hold the pot so it wouldn't tip over. And my father, that was my father's job, to stir that cornmeal until it was very thick and firm, and used an old piece of broomstick to do this, a [canalla], a piece of stick, like a piece of broomstick. Then when it was very firm, they would put down a cutting board, a piece of board on the table, cover it with a flour sack that had been -- a clean dishcloth. They used to make dishcloths out of flour sacks, the women, unbleached muslin. And my father would take that big kettle of polenta and dump it over on top of this cloth and then cover it. Then they use the string to cut it. You cut it because it would slice down with the string. And I've met many people in Fitchburg who remembered that same system of cooking polenta and cutting it with the string and dumping it over onto something. And we served it with various kinds of stew. Now, the southern and central Italians would most likely serve it with a meat ragout or Italian tomato sauce that they might use for any pasta dish. We served it with a stew that was called cassoeula, very difficult to spell, C-A-S-S-O-E-U-L-A. It was made from savoy cabbage, Italian sausages, spare ribs, and cooked with carrots and onions and garlic into light -- but no tomatoes, celery, into this wonderful stew, and I made it this Christmas. So from now on, as long as I'm alive, that's what we'll have for Christmas, and that's what we ate. Or they would make a rabbit… make a stew out of rabbit or chicken. But that's how we ate it. Then my father would eat it with gorgonzola cheese. And the next day, you sliced it and cut it and fried it with eggs for lunch or supper. I had an uncle, an old uncle, who lived with me after he was widowed, and he used to slice it the next day and layer it with milk and onions and bake it. And you can use polenta like you can use potatoes or rice with anything. It's delicious. My Irish husband loves it. Right, the kids love it. And you can make it out of a Quaker oats cornmeal too, but I don't like it as well as I 26 do the coarse meal. It has become quite popular again in upscale restaurants. LINDA: Now, when your mother would serve it on the board at the table, did… JULIA: Yeah. Put your dish there, and my father would take the string and the slice would fall on to the dish, then she'd serve the stew from the bowl or the pan. LINDA: I've also heard of people in Fitchburg, their mother would lay it out on the board, and then everyone would kind of eat it… JULIA: I have all that. Now, the first one I met since I've been here that tells me that, but I have a very close friend whose parents have 13 children, and the father made a big, long table to accommodate them. They lived in my father's, one of my father's flats, and when they made the polenta and the tomato sauce, he would lay it out on this table, and every child would have, every person would have a section and would eat with his fork or spoon, then they would put the tomato sauce over it. Right. LINDA: That's interesting. JULIA: Right. LINDA: So now, living with all these different regions or people from regions, were there different patron saints or celebrations? JULIA: A lot of them had relatives in the north end, and the north end was really the center of the Italian religious community, and so some of them would visit their relatives on feast days. Some of the Sicilian women who had relatives in the north end, they would go to the north on feast days. But we didn't do that. They would celebrate the feast days now that I think of it by cooking special foods, and a lot of them have like little [plaster] saints, and they would always keep votive candles, which was strange. They were little wicks that floated, little wicks, and you lit the wick, and they'd have like some kind of maybe a little asbestos washer, some little washer. I haven't seen those for 50-60 years. I haven't seen them. But I remembered the women used to keep -- a lot of the Southern Italian 27 women would keep votive lights. They would pray for their families and pray for good health, and they were attached to devotions to these different saints, or St. Joseph or the Virgin Mary, and they would keep little votive lights. I'm trying to think what -- they didn't have racks in them, but I don't know what the liquid was in these -- I mean, they still have the same candleholders. I got them on my dining room table right there, but they didn't have -- I don't remember the candles. I remember these little wicks./AT/jf/lk/es
Upon request of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Principals at their meeting on December 11, 2015, the World Bank agreed to coordinate a process of reviewing key issues and options for significantly scaling up the use of multipurpose cash transfers (MPCTs; including digital cash and vouchers) in the humanitarian space. This note lays out the main findings and options emerging from the process. The main text is complemented by a set of seven appendixes, detailing the process and feedback received, as well as presenting a thorough review of the evidence and evidence gaps in the comparative effectiveness of cash and in-kind programs across humanitarian objectives. This note synthesizes main issues and findings from the process, including defining overarching issues (section 2), setting out the overall context in which a wider use of cash should be considered (section 3), and identifying the specific areas to help unleash a wider use of cash transfers when and where appropriate (section 4).
Modifying the national poverty line to the context of observed consumption patterns of the poor is becoming popular. A context-specific poverty line would be more consistent with preferences. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence that the contrary holds and that the national poverty line is more appropriate for comparing living standards among the poor, at least under prevailing conditions in Mozambique and Ghana. The problem lies in the risk of downscaling the burden associated with cheap-calorie diets and the low nonfood component of the rural poor. The paper illustrates how observed behavior may neither reveal preferences nor detect heterogeneous preferences among the poor. Rather, the consumption pattern is the upshot of the poverty condition itself. Poverty is confused with preferences if observed cheap-calorie diets are seen as a matter of taste, whereas in fact they reflect a lack of means to consume a preferred diet of higher quality, as food Engel curve estimates indicate. Likewise, a smaller nonfood component is not a matter of a particular distaste, but an adaptation to the fact that various nonfood items (such as transport) and basic services (such as electricity and health) are simply absent in rural areas.
In a recent survey of European economic growth since 1950, Crafts and Toniolo (2008) conclude that incentive structures are a crucial explanator of comparative growth rates of the economies of east and west Europe. Pre-empting that, a 2006 report on trade performance and policies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia included as one of its key recommendations the need to reduce the mean and variance of the tariff equivalents of trade barriers, and in particular to reduce unilaterally the policy regimes' anti-export bias, especially in countries exporting primary products (Broadman 2006). To progress such reform in Europe's transition economies efficiently and effectively, and to see how recent policies line up with those of the European Union (EU), requires better information on the extent of reform during the past two decades and of current policy influences on incentives within and between sectors. Immediately prior to their transition to market economies, policies in the region greatly distorted producer and consumer incentives, especially for agricultural products. Those distortions have been reduced substantially in several countries, but large variations remain across the region and distortions appear to be growing again in some countries. Now is thus an opportune time to examine how policies affecting agriculture are evolving in this region, including as part of the adjustment to EU accession for ten of the transition economies in the region.
Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow geographic or economic base, such as oil and minerals) and plantation crops are predisposed to heightened economic and social divisions and weakened institutional capacity. This in turn impedes their ability to respond effectively to shocks, which previous studies have shown to be essential for sustaining rising levels of prosperity. Analysis of data on classifications of export structure, controlling for a wide array of other potential determinants of governance, shows that point source and coffee and cocoa exporting countries do relatively poorly across an array of governance indicators. These governance effects are not associated simply with being a natural resource exporter. Countries with natural resource exports that are diffuse relying primarily on livestock and agricultural produce from small family farms do not show the same strong effects and have had more robust growth recoveries.
President Tyler talks about the state of the union including the annexation of Texas and protests by the Mexican government regarding annexation ; The U.S. Serial set is a specially bound, consecutively numbered version of all House and Senate reports and documents. Many of the government documents in the Americas archive come originally from the U.S. Serial set, although were bound together at some later point into the collection that is now represented in this collection.
Circulating autoantibodies (auto-Abs) neutralizing high concentrations (10 ng/ml; in plasma diluted 1:10) of IFN-α and/or IFN-ω are found in about 10% of patients with critical COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pneumonia but not in individuals with asymptomatic infections. We detect auto-Abs neutralizing 100-fold lower, more physiological, concentrations of IFN-α and/or IFN-ω (100 pg/ml; in 1:10 dilutions of plasma) in 13.6% of 3595 patients with critical COVID-19, including 21% of 374 patients >80 years, and 6.5% of 522 patients with severe COVID-19. These antibodies are also detected in 18% of the 1124 deceased patients (aged 20 days to 99 years; mean: 70 years). Moreover, another 1.3% of patients with critical COVID-19 and 0.9% of the deceased patients have auto-Abs neutralizing high concentrations of IFN-β. We also show, in a sample of 34,159 uninfected individuals from the general population, that auto-Abs neutralizing high concentrations of IFN-α and/or IFN-ω are present in 0.18% of individuals between 18 and 69 years, 1.1% between 70 and 79 years, and 3.4% >80 years. Moreover, the proportion of individuals carrying auto-Abs neutralizing lower concentrations is greater in a subsample of 10,778 uninfected individuals: 1% of individuals 80 years. By contrast, auto-Abs neutralizing IFN-β do not become more frequent with age. Auto-Abs neutralizing type I IFNs predate SARS-CoV-2 infection and sharply increase in prevalence after the age of 70 years. They account for about 20% of both critical COVID-19 cases in the over 80s and total fatal COVID-19 cases. ; The Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Rockefeller University, the St. Giles Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (R01AI088364), the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program (UL1 TR001866), a Fast Grant from Emergent Ventures, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the Yale Center for Mendelian Genomics and the GSP Coordinating Center funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) (UM1HG006504 and U24HG008956), the Yale High Performance Computing Center (S10OD018521), the Fisher Center for Alzheimer's Research Foundation, the Meyer Foundation, the JPB Foundation, the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the "Investments for the Future" program (ANR-10-IAHU-01), the Integrative Biology of Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory of Excellence (ANR-10-LABX-62-IBEID), the French Foundation for Medical Research (FRM) (EQU201903007798), the FRM and ANR GENCOVID project (ANR-20-COVI-0003), ANRS Nord-Sud (ANRS-COV05), ANR GENVIR (ANR-20-CE93-003) and ANR AABIFNCOV (ANR-20-CO11-0001) projects, the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 824110 (EASI-Genomics), the Square Foundation, Grandir–Fonds de solidarité pour l'Enfance, the Fondation du Souffle, the SCOR Corporate Foundation for Science, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), REACTing-INSERM; and the University of Paris. P.B. was supported by the FRM (EA20170638020). P.B., J.R., and T.L.V. were supported by the MD-PhD program of the Imagine Institute (with the support of the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller). Work in the Laboratory of Virology and Infectious Disease was supported by the NIH (P01AI138398-S1, 2U19AI111825, and R01AI091707-10S1), a George Mason University Fast Grant, and the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Charitable Foundation. The French COVID Cohort study group was sponsored by INSERM and supported by the REACTing consortium and by a grant from the French Ministry of Health (PHRC 20-0424). The Cov-Contact Cohort was supported by the REACTing consortium, the French Ministry of Health, and the European Commission (RECOVER WP 6). This work was also partly supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIAID and NIDCR, NIH (grants ZIA AI001270 to L.D.N. and 1ZIAAI001265 to H.C.S.). This program is supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (reference ANR-10-LABX-69-01). K.K.'s group was supported by the Estonian Research Council grants PRG117 and PRG377. R.H. was supported by an Al Jalila Foundation Seed Grant (AJF202019), Dubai, UAE, and a COVID-19 research grant (CoV19-0307) from the University of Sharjah, UAE. S.G.T. is supported by Investigator and Program Grants awarded by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia and a UNSW Sydney COVID Rapid Response Initiative Grant. L.I. reported funding from Regione Lombardia, Italy (project "Risposta immune in pazienti con COVID-19 e co-morbidità"). L.I. and G. L. Marseglia reported funding from Regione Lombardia, Italy (project Risposta immune in pazienti con COVID-19 e co-morbidità). This research was partially supported by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (COV20/0968). J.R.H. reported funding from Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority HHSO10201600031C. S.O. reports funding Research Program on Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases from Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, AMED (grant number JP20fk0108531). G.G. was supported by ANR Flash COVID-19 program and SARS-CoV-2 Program of the Faculty of Medicine from Sorbonne University iCOVID programs. The Three-City (3C) Study was conducted under a partnership agreement among the INSERM, the Victor Segalen Bordeaux 2 University, and Sanofi-Aventis. The Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale funded the preparation and initiation of the study. The 3C Study was also supported by the Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Maladie des Travailleurs Salariés, Direction générale de la Santé, Mutuelle Générale de l'Education Nationale (MGEN), Institut de la Longévité, Conseils Régionaux of Aquitaine and Bourgogne, Fondation de France, and Ministry of Research–INSERM Programme "Cohortes et collections de données biologiques". S. Debette was supported by the University of Bordeaux Initiative of Excellence. P.K.G. reports funding from the National Cancer Institute, NIH, under contract no. 75N91019D00024, task order no. 75N91021F00001. J.W. is supported by an FWO Fundamental Clinical Mandate (1833317N). Sample processing at IrsiCaixa was possible thanks to the crowdfunding initiative YoMeCorono. Work at Vall d'Hebron was also partly supported by research funding from Instituto de Salud Carlos III grant PI17/00660 cofinanced by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). C.R.-G. and colleagues of the Canarian Health System Sequencing Hub were supported by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (COV20_01333 and COV20_01334, Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation RTC-2017-6471-1; AEI/FEDER, UE), Fundación DISA (OA18/017 and OA20/024), and Cabildo Insular de Tenerife (CGIEU0000219140 and "Apuestas científicas del ITER para colaborar en la lucha contra la COVID-19"). C.M.B. is supported by a MSFHR Health Professional-Investigator Award. P.Q.H. and L.H. were funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (ATAC, 101003650). Work at Y.-L.L.'s laboratory in the University of Hong Kong (HKU) was supported by the Society for the Relief of Disabled Children. MBBS/PhD study of D.L. in HKU was supported by the Croucher Foundation. J.L.F. was supported in part by the Coopération Scientifique France-Colciencias (ECOS-Nord/COLCIENCIAS/MEN/ICETEX (806-2018) and Colciencias contract 713-2016 (code 111574455633)]. A.K. was in part supported by grants NU20-05-00282 and NV18-05-00162 issued by the Czech Health Research Council and Ministry of Health, Czech Republic. L.P. was funded by Program Project COVID-19 OSR-UniSR and Ministero della Salute (COVID-2020-12371617). I.M. is a Senior Clinical Investigator at the Research Foundation–Flanders and is supported by the CSL Behring Chair of Primary Immunodeficiencies; by the KU Leuven C1 grant C16/18/007; by a VIB-GC PID grant; by the FWO frants G0C8517N, G0B5120N, and G0E8420N; and by the Jeffrey Modell Foundation. I.M. has received funding under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 948959). E.A. received funding from the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (INTERFLU, no. 1574). M.Vi received funding from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) (grant number 2020/09702-1) and JBS SA (grant number 69004). The NH-COVAIR study group consortium was supported by a grant from the Meath Foundation ; Peer reviewed
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 100 genetic variants contributing to BMI, a measure of body size, or waist-to-hip ratio (adjusted for BMI, WHRadjBMI), a measure of body shape. Body size and shape change as people grow older and these changes differ substantially between men and women. To systematically screen for age-and/or sex-specific effects of genetic variants on BMI and WHRadjBMI, we performed meta-analyses of 114 studies (up to 320,485 individuals of European descent) with genome-wide chip and/or Metabochip data by the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits (GIANT) Consortium. Each study tested the association of up to similar to 2.8M SNPs with BMI and WHRadjBMI in four strata (men 50y, women 50y) and summary statistics were combined in stratum-specific meta-analyses. We then screened for variants that showed age-specific effects (G x AGE), sex-specific effects (G x SEX) or age-specific effects that differed between men and women (G x AGE x SEX). For BMI, we identified 15 loci (11 previously established for main effects, four novel) that showed significant (FDR= 50y). No sex-dependent effects were identified for BMI. For WHRadjBMI, we identified 44 loci (27 previously established for main effects, 17 novel) with sex-specific effects, of which 28 showed larger effects in women than in men, five showed larger effects in men than in women, and 11 showed opposite effects between sexes. No age-dependent effects were identified for WHRadjBMI. This is the first genome-wide interaction meta-analysis to report convincing evidence of age-dependent genetic effects on BMI. In addition, we confirm the sex-specificity of genetic effects on WHRadjBMI. These results may providefurther insights into the biology that underlies weight change with age or the sexually dimorphism of body shape. ; Funding: Funding for this study was provided by the Aarne Koskelo Foundation; the Aase and Ejner Danielsens Foundation; the Academy of Finland (40758, 41071, 77299, 102318, 104781, 117787, 117844, 118590, 120315, 121584, 123885, 124243, 124282, 126925, 129269, 129293, 129378, 130326, 134309, 134791, 136895, 139635, 211497, 263836, 263924, 1114194, 24300796); the Agency for Health Care Policy Research (HS06516); the Agency for Science, Technology and Research of Singapore (A*STAR); the Ahokas Foundation; the ALF/LUA research grant in Gothenburg; the ALK-Abello A/S (Horsholm, Denmark), Timber Merchant Vilhelm Bangs Foundation, MEKOS Laboratories Denmark; the Althingi (the Icelandic Parliament); the American Heart Association (AHA; 13POST16500011); the ANR ("Agence Nationale de la 359 Recherche"); the Ark (NHMRC Enabling Facility); the Arthritis Research UK (19542, 18030); the AstraZeneca; the Augustinus Foundation; the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC; 241944, 389875, 389891, 389892, 389938, 442915, 442981, 496739, 496688, 552485, 613672, 613601 and 1011506); the Australian Research Council (ARC; DP0770096 and DP1093502); the Becket Foundation; the bi-national BMBF/ANR funded project CARDomics (01KU0908A); the Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (BBMRINL; 184.021.007, CP 32); the Biocentrum Helsinki; the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation; the British Heart Foundation (RG/10/12/28456, SP/04/ 002); the Canadian Institutes for Health Reseaerch (FRCN-CCT-83028); the Cancer Research UK (C490/A10124, C490/A10119); the Center for Medical Systems Biology (CMSB; NWO Genomics); the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Association of Schools of Public Health (1734, S043, S3486); the Centre of Excellence Baden-Wurttemberg Metabolic Disorders; the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government; the Clinical Research Facility at Guys & St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust; the Contrat de Projets Etat-Region (CPER); the Croatian Science Council (Grant no. 8875); the CVON (GENIUS); the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation; the Danish Centre for Health Technology Assessment, Novo Nordisk Inc.; the Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF 1333-00124); the Danish Diabetes Association; Danish Heart Foundation; the Danish Medical Research Council; the Danish Ministry of Internal Affairs and Health; the Danish National Research Foundation; the Danish Pharmaceutical Association; Danish Pharmacists Fund; the Danish Research Council; the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; the Diabetes Hilfs-und Forschungsfonds Deutschland (DHFD); the Dr. Robert Pfleger-Stiftung; the Dresden University of Technology Funding Grant, Med Drive; the Dutch Brain Foundation; the Dutch Diabetes Research Foundation; the Dutch Economic Structure Enhancing Fund (FES); the Dutch Kidney Foundation; the Dutch Ministry for Health, Welfare and Sports; the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs; the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; the Egmont Foundation; the Else Kraner-Fresenius Stiftung (2012_A147, P48/08//A11/08); the Emil Aaltonen Foundation; the Erasmus Medical Center and Erasmus University, Rotterdam; the Estonian Ministry of Science and Education (SF0180142s08); the European Commission (223004, 2004310, DGXII, FP6-EUROSPAN, FP6-EXGENESIS, FP6-LSHG-CT2006-018947, FP6-LSHG-CT-2006-01947, FP6-LSHM- CT-2004-503485, FP6-LSHM-CT-2006037593, FP6-LSHM-CT-2007-037273, FP7-201379, FP7-201668, FP7-279143, FP7-305739, FP7313010, FP7-ENGAGE-HEALTH-F4-2007-201413, FP7-EurHEALTHAgeing-277849, FP7-HEALTH-F42007-201550, HEALTH-2011.2.4.2-2-EU-MASCARA, HEALTH-F2-2008-201865-GEFOS, HEALTH-F7305507 HOMAGE, LSHM-CT-2006-037593, QLG1CT-2001-01252, QLG1-CT-2002-00896, QLG2-CT2002-01254); the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Wissenschaftsoffensive TMO; the European Regional Development Fund to the Centre of Excellence in Genomics (EXCEGEN; 3.2.0304.11-0312); the European Research Council (ERC; 2011-StG-280559-SEPI, 2011-294713-EPLORE, 230374); the European Science Foundation (ESF; EU/QLRT-2001-01254); the EuroSTRESS project FP-006; the Finlands Slottery Machine Association; the Finnish Centre for Pensions (ETK); the Finnish Cultural Foundation; the Finnish Diabetes Association; the Finnish Diabetes Research Foundation; the Finnish Foundation for Cardiovascular Research; the Finnish Foundation for Pediatric Research; the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (40058/07); the Finnish Medical Society; the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture (627; 2004-2011); the Finnish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs (5254); the Finnish National Public Health Institute (current National Institute for Health and Welfare); the Finnish Special Governmental Subsidy for Health Sciences; the Finska Lakaresallskapet, Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation; the Flemish League against Cancer, ITEA2 (project Care4Me); the Folkhalsan Research Foundation; the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) Vlaanderen; the Foundation for Life and Health in Finland; the Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) and the Stockholm County Council (560283); the G. Ph. Verhagen Foundation; the Gene-diet Interactions in Obesity' project (GENDINOB); the Genetic Association Information Network (GAIN); the GENEVA Coordinating Center (U01 HG 004446); the GenomEUtwin (EU/QLRT2001-01254; QLG2-CT-2002-01254); the German Bundesministerium fuer Forschung und Technology (01 AK 803 A-H, 01 IG 07015 G); the German Diabetes Association; the German Ministry of Cultural Affairs; the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF; 03IS2061A, 03ZIK012, 01ZZ9603, 01ZZ0103, 01ZZ0403); the German National Genome Research Network (NGFN-2 and NGFN-plus); the German Research Council (SFB1052 "Obesity mechanisms"); the Great Wine Estates of the Margaret River region of Western Australia; the Greek General Secretary of Research and Technology research grant (PENED 2003); the Gyllenberg Foundation; the Health Care Centers in Vasa, Narpes and Korsholm; the Health Fund of the Danish Health Insurance Societies; the Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen-German Research Center for Environmental Health; the Helsinki University Central Hospital special government funds (EVO #TYH7215, #TKK2012005, #TYH2012209); the Hjartavernd (the Icelandic Heart Association); the Ib Henriksen Foundation; the Illinois Department of Public Health, and the Translational Genomics Research Institute; the INTERREG IV Oberrhein Program (Project A28); the Interuniversity Cardiology Institute of the Netherlands (ICIN; 09.001); the Italian Ministry of Health "targeted project" (ICS110.1/RF97.71); the Italian National Centre of Research InterOmics PB05_ SP3; the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Research Networks on Successful Midlife Development and Socio-economic Status and Health; the Johns Hopkins University Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR); the Joint grant from Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany and the Federal State of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania; the Juho Vainio Foundation; the Juselius Foundation (Helsinki, Finland); the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International (JDRF); the KfH Stiftung Praventivmedizin e. V.; the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation; the Kuopio University Hospital; the Leenaards Foundation; the Leiden University Medical Center; the Liv och Halsa; the Local Government Pensions Institution (KEVA); the Lokaal Gezondheids Overleg (LOGO) Leuven and Hageland; the LudwigMaximilians- Universitat, as part of LMUinnovativ; the Lundberg Foundation; the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation; the Medical Research Council (G0601966; G0700931; G0000934; G0500539; G0600705; G1002319; G0701863; PrevMetSyn/SALVE; MC_ U106179471; MC_ UU_ 12019/1); the MRC centre for Causal Analyses in Translational Epidemiology (MRC CAiTE); the MRC Centre for Obesity and Related Metabolic Diseases; the MRC Human Genetics Unit; the Medical Research Council of Canada; the Mid-Atlantic Nutrition and Obesity Research Center (P30 DK072488); the Ministry of the Flemish Community, Brussels, Belgium (G. 0881.13 and G. 0880. 13); the MIUR-CNR Italian Flagship Project; the Montreal Heart Institute Foundation; the Munich Center of Health Sciences (MC Health); the Municipal Health Care Center and Hospital in Jakobstad; the Narpes Health Care Foundation; the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD); the National Cancer Institute (CA047988); the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1TR000124); the National Center for Research Resources (U54RR020278); the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI, 1RL1MH083268-01, 5R01HL087679-02, HHSN268200800007C, HHSN268201200036C, HL043851, HL080467, HL087647, HL36310, HL45670, N01HC25195, N01HC55015, N01HC55016, N01HC55018, N01HC55019, N01HC55020, N01HC55021, N01HC55022, N01HC55222, N01HC85079, N01HC85080, N01HC85081, N01HC85082, N01HC85083, N01HC85086, N02HL64278, R01HL086694, R01HL087641, R01HL087652, R01HL087676, R01HL59367, R01HL103612, R01HL105756, R01HL120393, U01HL080295); the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI, U01HG004402); the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL); the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR, RP-PG-0407-10371); the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD); the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease (NIDDKDRC, 1R01DK8925601, DK063491, R01DK089256, P30 DK072488); the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (2007-35205-17883); the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS); the National Institute on Aging (NIA; 263-MA-410953, 263-MD-821336, 263-MD-9164, AG023629, AG13196, NO1AG12109, P30AG10161, R01AG15819, R01AG17917, R01AG023629, R01AG30146); the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (5-P60-AR30701, 5-P60-AR49465-03); the National Institutes of Health (NIH; 1R01DK8925601, 1RC2MH089951, 1RC2MH089995, 1Z01HG000024, 2T32 HL 00705536, 5R01DK075681, 5R01MH63706: 02, AA014041, AA07535, AA10248, AA13320, AA13321, AA13326, AG028555, AG08724, AG04563, AG10175, AG08861, DA12854, DK046200, DK091718, F32AR059469, HG002651, HHSN268200625226C, HHSN268200782096C, HL084729, MH081802, N01AG12100, N01HG65403, R01AG011101, R01AG030146, R01D0042157-01A, R01DK062370, R01DK072193, R01DK093757, R01DK075787, R01DK075787, R01HL71981, R01MH59565, R01MH59566, R01MH59571, R01MH59586, R01MH59587, R01MH59588, R01MH60870, R01MH60879, R01MH61675, R01MH67257, R01MH81800, R01NS45012, U01066134, U01CA098233, U01DK062418, U01GM074518, U01HG004423, U01HG004436, U01HG004438, U01HL072515-06, U01HL105198, U01HL84756, U01MH79469, U01MH79470, U01NS069208-01, UL1RR025005); the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre based at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust; the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical research Centre; the Netherlands Heart Foundation (2001 D 032); the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO; Geestkracht program grant 10-000-1002; 050-060-810; 100-001-004; 175.010.2003.005; 175.010.2005.011; 175.010.2007. 006; 261-98-710; 40-0056-98-9032; 400-05-717; 452-04-314; 452-06-004; 480-01-006; 480-04-004; 480-05-003; 480-07-001; 481-08-013; 60-60600-97-118; 904-61-090; 904-61-193; 911-03012; 985-10-002; Addiction-31160008; GB-MW 94038- 011; SPI 56-464-14192); the Netherlands Organization for the Health Research and Development (ZonMw; 91111025); the Nordic Center of Excellence in Disease Genetics; the Nordic Centre of Excellence on Systems biology in controlled dietary interventions and cohort studies, SYSDIET (070014); the Northern Netherlands Collaboration of Provinces (SNN); the Novo Nordisk Foundation; the Office of Research and Development, Medical Research Service, and the Baltimore Geriatrics Research, Education, and Clinical Center of the Department of Veterans Affairs; the Ollqvist Foundation; the Paavo Nurmi Foundation; the Pahlssons Foundation; the Paivikki and Sakari Sohlberg Foundation; the Perklen Foundation; the Republic of Croatia Ministry of Science, Education and Sports research (108-1080315-0302); the Research Centre for Prevention and Health, the Capital Region of Denmark; the Research Foundation of Copenhagen County; the Research Institute for Diseases in the Elderly (014-93-015; RIDE2); the Reynold's Foundation; the Rotterdam Oncologic Thoracic Study Group, Erasmus Trust Fund, Foundation against Cancer; the Royal Swedish Academy of Science; the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (NWO-RFBR 047.017.043); the Rutgers University Cell and DNA Repository cooperative agreement (NIMH U24 MH068457-06); the Samfundet Folkhalsan; the Sigrid Juselius Foundation; the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, Kuopio, Tampere and Turku University Hospital Medical Funds (9M048, 9N035); the Social Ministry of the Federal State of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania; the Societe Francophone du 358 Diabste (SFD); the South Tyrolean Sparkasse Foundation; the Stichting Nationale Computerfaciliteiten (National Computing Facilities Foundation, NCF); the Strategic Cardiovascular Programme of Karolinska Institutet and the Stockholm County Council (560183); the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation; the Swedish Cancer Society; the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland; the Swedish Diabetes Association; the Swedish Diabetes Foundation (grant no. 2013-024); the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF; ICA08-0047); the Swedish HeartLung Foundation (20120197); the Swedish Medical Research Council (K2007-66X-20270-01-3, 20121397); the Swedish Ministry for Higher Education; the Swedish Research Council (8691, M-2005-1112, 2009-2298); the Swedish Society for Medical Research; the Swiss National Science Foundation (31003A-143914, 3200B0105993, 3200B0-118308, 33CSCO-122661, 33CS30-139468, 33CS30148401); SystemsX. ch (51RTP0_151019); the Tampere Tuberculosis Foundation; the TEKES (70103/06, 40058/07); the The Paul Michael Donovan Charitable Foundation; the Torsten and Ragnar Sderberg Foundation; the Umea Medical Research Foundation; the United Kingdom NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre; the Universities and Research of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, South Tyrol; the University Hospital of Regensburg (ReForM A, ReForM C); the University Hospital Oulu, Biocenter, University of Oulu, Finland (75617); the University Medical Center Groningen; the University of Groningen; the University of Maryland General Clinical Research Center (M01RR16500, AG000219); the University of Tartu (SP1GVARENG); the University of Tromso, Norwegian Research Council (185764); the Vasterbottens Intervention Programme; the Velux Foundation; the VU University Institute for Health and Care Research (EMGO+) and Neuroscience Campus Amsterdam (NCA); the Wellcome Trust (064890, 068545/Z/02, 076113/B/04/Z, 077016/Z/05/Z, 079895, 084723/Z/08/Z, 086596/Z/ 08/Z, 088869/B/09/Z, 089062, 090532, 098017, 098051, 098381); the Western Australian DNA Bank (NHMRC Enabling Facility); the Yrjo Jahnsson Foundation (56358); and the Zorg Onderzoek Nederland-Medische Wetenschappen, KWF Kankerbestrijding, Stichting Centraal Fonds Reserves van voormalig Vrijwillige Ziekenfondsverzekeringen. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. More details of acknowledgements can be found in S2 Text.
The longstanding "cash versus food" debate has received renewed attention in both research and practice. This paper reviews key issues shaping the debate and presents new evidence from randomized and quasi-experimental evaluations that deliberately compare cash and in-kind food transfers in ten developing counties. Findings show that relative effectiveness cannot be generalized: although some differences emerge in terms of food consumption and dietary diversity, average impacts tend to depend on context, specific objectives, and their measurement. Costs for cash transfers and vouchers tend to be significantly lower relative to in-kind food. Yet the consistency and robustness of methods for efficiency analyses varies greatly.
