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Publications (24)
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– Africa’s Presidential Investors’ Advisory Councils
Recent writing on industrial policy stresses the need for coordination between the public and private sectors. This paper examines the performance of one such coordination mechanism, Presidential Investors’ Advisory Councils, in Ethiopia, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda. It finds that the councils...
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Determining whether well-being has improved is an important multidisciplinary task. It is important therefore to develop a multidimensional measure of well-being that reflects a wide spectrum of human needs. A new approach is presented in this paper based on multidimensional hierarchical human needs...
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– Past, Present, and Future
This paper surveys the various composite well-being indices that have been inter-country assessments over the last 40 or so years, including the well known Human Development Index (HDI). A number of issues are considered, including the choice of components, component weights, scale equivalence, non...
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This paper considers the use of participatory methods in international development research, and asks what contribution these can make to the definition and measurement of well-being. It draws on general lessons arising from the project level, two larger-scale policy research processes sponsored by...
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A plethora of what are loosely described as social and political indicators of well-being exist. Both the range and country coverage of these indicators has increased appreciably in recent years. In this paper we ask what contribution these indicators can make towards our understanding of human well...
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This essay aims at a broad, main-stream account of the literature on inequality and poverty measurement in the space of income and, additionally, deals with measures of disparity and deprivation in the more expanded domain of capabilities and functionings. In addition to an introductory and a...
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This paper deals with three questions: (1) What are ‘subjective’ measures? (2) What is ‘well-being’? and (3) Are subjective measures of well-being of use for policymaking, in particular in developing nations? The first question is answered by making a distinction between two kinds of ‘subjectivity’...
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– Concepts and Conceptualizations
Economic measures of income have ignored large areas of human well-being and are poor measures of well-being in the areas to which they attend. Despite increased recognition of those distortions, ‘GNP per capita continues to be regarded as the quintessential indicator of a country’s living standard’...
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International comparisons of average national incomes omit important information about leisure, home production, health, etc. They are also bedevilled by index number problems. This paper suggests ways of combining working hours and life-expectancy with income comparisons, and shows that the fixed...
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This paper provides a review and critical discussion of indicators, which attempt to combine the measurement of sustainability with that of well-being. It starts with some commonly agreed definitions of sustainability, showing how most well-being indicators tell us little if anything at all about...
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This paper discusses the rationale as well as the challenges involved when constructing gender-related indicators of well-being. It argues that such indicators are critically important but that their construction involves a number of conceptual and measurement problems. Among the conceptual issues...
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– The Economics of La Lega and Mondragón
This paper develops a theory of endogenous league formation and considers its implications for policy in developing countries. We generalize from features of the two most prominent European co-op leagues, Mondragón and La Lega, to develop the first formal model of the endogenous formation of co...
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– Evidence from East Asia
This paper investigates the benefits and associated agency costs of using internal capital markets through affiliating with groups using data of two thousand firms from nine East Asian economies between 1994-6. We find that mature and slow-growing firms with ownership structures more likely to...
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– Evidence for Italian Public Enterprises' Investment
This study examines the effect of the hardening of the budget constraint on the investment behaviour of Italian state owned enterprises (SOEs). It carries out a natural experiment that exploits the 1987 shift of budget regimes due to the pressure of European Union economic policies on the Italian...
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– The Case of Italian State-Owned Firms and the European Union
This paper contributes to the literature on the role of decentralization in hardening the budget constraint of public enterprises. Following Qian and Roland the study adopts a ‘federalist’ approach. However, it interprets federalism as the upward devolution of domestic economic policies to a...
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– A Rent Seeking Model of China’s Township-Village Enterprises
I present a study of ownership of firms under government rent seeking. Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such a government rent seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership is shown to...
Displaying 16 of 24 results