Re-Examining Vicious Circles of Development: A Panel Var Approach

Using panel data from 102 countries in 1975–2010, this paper explores the dynamic interaction among health, education and growth by applying panel VAR techniques. Empirical findings reveal that the predictive pattern among health, education and economic growth is not stable in the cross section of countries. While health has positive contribution to growth for all countries, education has benefited only higher middle income and high-income OECD countries. Economic growth has predictive power for the components of human development in the high-income OECD countries. Further, econometric evidence reveals that bi-directional relationship between health and education should be supported to reap the benefits of human development on economic growth.     

A GIS-Based Framework for Hazardous Materials Transport Risk Assessment

This article presents a methodology for assessment of the hazardous materials transport risk in a multicommodity, multiple origin-destination setting. The proposed risk assessment methodology was integrated with a Geographical Information System (GIS), which made large-scale implementation possible. A GIS-based model of the truck shipments of dangerous goods via the highway network of Quebec and Ontario was developed. Based on the origin and destination of each shipment, the risk associated with the routes that minimize (1) the transport distance, (2) the population exposure, (3) the expected number of people to be evacuated in case of an incident, and (4) the probability of an incident during transportation was evaluated. Using these assessments, a government agency can estimate the impact of alternative policies that could alter the carriers' route choices. A related issue is the spatial distribution of transport risk, because an unfair distribution is likely to cause public concern. Thus, an analysis of transport risk equity in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario is also provided.     

Telling about something that you do not really know: blind people are talking about vision!

In Turkey, the laws which define disability have become increasingly harsh, and require disabled people to be assessed in order to determine ‘how disabled’ they are. For blind people, as for other disabled people, these assessments have real consequences. This article aims to discuss an appealing piece that arose during a project, which has bearing on how disabled people tend to answer these questions. The participants are legally blind adults. We, as sighted researchers, asked totally blind individuals to describe their vision. Interestingly, they all answered this question without hesitation. The paradoxical nature of this question was only realized during the analysis. We requested the participants to talk about something they do not really know. This might be a reflection of our over-visualized world and might be due to our subtle prejudices. This type of questioning not only has implications for research, but also for assessments of disability in Turkey.     

Multimodal hub location and hub network design

Through observations from real life hub networks, we introduce the multimodal hub location and hub network design problem. We approach the hub location problem from a network design perspective. In addition to the location and allocation decisions, we also study the decision on how the hub networks with different possible transportation modes must be designed. In this multimodal hub location and hub network design problem, we jointly consider transportation costs and travel times, which are studied separately in most hub location problems presented in the literature. We allow different transportation modes between hubs and different types of service time promises between origin–destination pairs while designing the hub network in the multimodal problem. We first propose a linear mixed integer programming model for this problem and then derive variants of the problem that might arise in certain applications. The models are enhanced via a set of effective valid inequalities and an efficient heuristic is developed. Computational analyses are presented on the various instances from the Turkish network and CAB data set.     

Simulation-based model comparison methodology with application to road accident models

This article assumes the goal of proposing a simulation-based theoretical model comparison methodology with application to two time series road accident models. The model comparison exercise helps to quantify the main differences and similarities between the two models and comprises of three main stages: (1) simulation of time series through a true model with predefined properties; (2) estimation of the alternative model using the simulated data; (3) sensitivity analysis to quantify the effect of changes in the true model parameters on alternative model parameter estimates through analysis of variance, ANOVA. The proposed methodology is applied to two time series road accident models: UCM (unobserved components model) and DRAG (Demand for Road Use, Accidents and their Severity). Assuming that the real data-generating process is the UCM, new datasets approximating the road accident data are generated, and DRAG models are estimated using the simulated data. Since these two methodologies are usually assumed to be equivalent, in a sense that both models accurately capture the true effects of the regressors, we are specifically addressing the modeling of the stochastic trend, through the alternative model. Stochastic trend is the time-varying component and is one of the crucial factors in time series road accident data. Theoretically, it can be easily modeled through UCM, given its modeling properties. However, properly capturing the effect of a non-stationary component such as stochastic trend in a stationary explanatory model such as DRAG is challenging. After obtaining the parameter estimates of the alternative model (DRAG), the estimates of both true and alternative models are compared and the differences are quantified through experimental design and ANOVA techniques. It is observed that the effects of the explanatory variables used in the UCM simulation are only partially captured by the respective DRAG coefficients. This a priori, could be due to multicollinearity but the results of both simulation of UCM data and estimating of DRAG models reveal that there is no significant static correlation among regressors. Moreover, in fact, using ANOVA, it is determined that this regression coefficient estimation bias is caused by the presence of the stochastic trend present in the simulated data. Thus, the results of the methodological development suggest that the stochastic component present in the data should be treated accordingly through a preliminary, exploratory data analysis.     

The Stages of Human Capital and Economic Growth: Does the Direction of Causality Matter for the Rich and the Poor?

This paper demonstrates that key models of human mobility across several disciplines can be considered as specific cases of a broader conceptualisation of mobility in terms of its contribution to wellbeing. It is argued that this wellbeing perspective offers important advantages for the formulation of policy in areas that must respond to mobility in cross-cultural contexts, and particularly in regard to policy relating to highly mobile, indigenous peoples. An applied example is provided through a discussion of how this conceptualisation of mobility offers a different understanding of the mobility of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, one that may have led to superior policy outcomes.     

Attachment Styles and Self‐Image in Turkish Adolescents

The purpose of this article is to examine the attachment styles and the relation of these styles to the self‐image in Turkish adolescents. The study included 378 adolescents (196 females and 182 males) from high schools with different socioeconomic status (SES) who were administered Relationship Scale Questionnaires and Offer Self‐Image Questionnaires. The findings indicate that adolescents from a low SES had significantly low scores on self‐image scales compared with those from high and middle SES. It was found that secure attachment patterns affect social relationships and superior adjustment aspects of self‐image positively. The results of this study show that attachment patterns play an important role in the development of the self‐image, which is a crucial psychological structure gained in adolescence.     

Coming Out as Queen: Jewish Identity,Queer Theory,and the Book of Esther

Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960) is a significant work on many levels—to Hitchcock’s career, to film history, to the horror genre. I propose that a crucial aspect of Psycho’s design, one that relates to Hitchcock films as a whole, is its thematization of a concept that I call the “death-mother.” A distinction between Mrs. Bates/“Mother,” on the one hand, and the death-mother, on the other hand, impels this discussion. The death-mother—which relates to the varieties of femininity on display but exceeds their specific aspects and implications—is an effect produced by the film text and can only be understood through an analysis of the work as a whole. Exceeding the specifications of the Mrs. Bates character, the death-mother maps onto tropes and preoccupations in Hitchcock’s oeuvre but, more importantly, indicates the aesthetic implications, for the male artist most commonly, of the dread of femininity. I develop the concept of the death-mother from the writings of Freud, Nietzsche, and André Green and from feminist psychoanalytic theory: Barbara Creed, in her reworking of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Diane Jonte-Pace, in her analysis of Freud’s work. My analysis focuses on the relevance of the death-mother to issues of femininity and queer sexuality crucial to and enduringly controversial within Psycho.     

A Romerian contribution to the empirics of economic growth

Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) made the Solovian set up widely used to test the determinants of economic growth and the speed of convergence. In accordance with the nature of the Solow framework, almost all empirical growth studies considered technological progress constant and identical across countries and over time, and hence underemphasized its role. In this study, in order to overcome this weakness, we propose that the Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) set-up should be replaced by the Solovianized Romer (1990) framework, thus allowing the role of technology to be considered in the empirical analysis. In particular, within this framework, the growth rate of technology varies across economies and over time. We estimate the convergence equation derived from Solovianized Romer model for 31 OECD countries for the period 1980–2008 by applying the system GMM approach. The empirical findings of the model support the conditional convergence hypothesis, but reveal a lower convergence rate than that predicted by the existing literature. As a policy implication, we argue that, investment in R&D and human capital are important determinants of convergence, and in cases where economies are unable to allocate sufficient resources to R&D, policy makers should ease the diffusion of technology (e.g., via FDI or trade) in order to retain a high convergence rate.