Suchergebnisse

This article provides a case study of four late nineteenth‐century share flotations of Indian railway companies. It highlights an important gap in the historiography of Indian railway finance, which has focused on the period up to 1875. The role of N. M. Rothschild as lead underwriter and its relationship with the India Office, managing agents, and investors is analysed. This gives an evolving picture of mutual dependence between the City and Whitehall in the financing of the British Empire's largest investment programme. Gentlemanly capitalists are shown to combine the self‐reinforcing roles of arranger, investor, and informal government advisor.

AbstractQuantile regression applied to child growth trajectories has been proposed in the methodological literature but has only seen limited applications even though it is a promising framework for the evaluation of school-based policy interventions designed to address childhood obesity. Data that could be used to support such assessments, school-based collection of height and weight, has become increasingly common. Three states currently mandate annual collection and several other jurisdictions including California and New York City (NYC) collect BMI as part of physical fitness assessments. This has resulted in the establishment of extremely large databases that share important characteristics including the ability to define longitudinal growth curves by student with high coverage rates. In NYC public schools, starting in 2006, student records have been linked to registry, academic, and attendance data and across years resulting in a longitudinal dataset containing 9 cohorts with 2 million unique children. A high level of demographic and geographic detail allow for analysis of public policy at the local scale. We demonstrate the utility of quantile regression longitudinal growth curve models applied to BMI trajectories as a means of assessing policy interventions. Models consisting solely of age terms yield empirical curves similar to CDC growth charts; covariates modify these curves. Incorporating lag terms yields a distribution of possible growth trajectories and the effect of interventions can be explicitly quantified. We evaluate area-based and individual poverty measures, known strong correlates of child obesity, as a baseline assessment of the modeling framework. We then evaluate the impact of a real intervention (water jet installations). Our results indicate that students with access to water jets have a statistically significant leftward shift in the right tail of the BMI distribution relative to students without access to water jets. The absolute magnitude of the shift is comparable to the difference in BMI associated with student residential exposure to low versus extreme poverty.

AbstractWomen's empowerment has been a subject of interest because of its relevance to development and demography, particularly in West Africa. Women's empowerment is typically conceptualized as an individual attribute of women, associated with socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. However, we hypothesize a geography of women's empowerment in the West African region, where empowerment processes are culturally situated and embedded in place. Such a geography would be observable via spatial associations over the region. This study uses Demographic and Health Survey data from 14 West African states over the past decade and an innovative multi-stage approach combining advanced statistical methods and spatial assessment to analyze indicators of women's empowerment and its spatial variability across the West African region. First we use a multivariate classification method to identify patterns in responses to empowerment questions and derive an empowerment classification scheme. Next we use these classifications to render a map of West Africa depicting the spatial variation of women's empowerment in the region. Ultimately, we fit multinomial structured geo-additive regression models to the data to analyze spatial variation in women's empowerment while controlling for certain socioeconomic-demographic characteristics. Our results demonstrate that women's responses to empowerment survey questions indeed vary geographically, even when controlling for individual socioeconomic-demographic attributes. This finding suggests that women's empowerment may relate to aspects of culture embedded in place in addition to the ways it relates to socioeconomic and demographic characteristics.

ABSTRACTThe last decade of the twentieth century was heralded as the 'end of agrarian reform' in Mexico and the initiation of a new era of market‐led agricultural policy and practice. The impact of neoliberalism and the North American Free Trade Agreement on smallholder maize production has been widely conceived as negative, associated with ecological degradation, rural emigration and cultural erosion. Yet, some twenty years later, all evidence suggests that smallholder maize production is continuing in Mexico, albeit in evolving structures and forms. This article uses a farm‐level survey implemented in three Mexican states to assess the current condition of maize farming in Mexico. The authors revisit past categorizations of Mexican farmers and apply similar approaches to explore what maize‐producing households are doing with their maize, and what current patterns of production imply for future Mexican maize policy. They find evidence of greater persistence and adaptability in Mexican maize farming than is often presented. On the basis of their analysis, they advocate for a reconsideration of the underlying assumptions of public policy, highlighting the heterogeneity of the maize landscape and the unrealized and generally unrecognized potential this heterogeneity represents.