Does a food for education program affect school outcomes? The Bangladesh case

The Food for Education (FFE) program was introduced to Bangladesh in 1993. This paper evaluates the effect of this program on school participation and duration of schooling using household survey data collected in 2000. Using propensity score matching combined with difference-in-differences methodologies, we find that the program is successful in that eligible children on average have 15% to 26% higher school participation rates, relative to their counterfactuals who would have been eligible for the program had they lived in the program-eligible areas. Conditional on school participation, participants also stay at school 0.7 to 1.05 years longer than their counterfactuals.     

Human resource development in small organizations

This article draws upon case-study research into human resource development (HRD) within three small organizations in the north west of England. It positions the case-study work within an overall framework of doctoral research and summarizes the research design; discusses the characteristics and values of small organizations and how they influence HRD policies and practices: presents findings and conclusions about HRD in the case-study organizations, focusing in particular upon one case in the voluntary sector; compares and contrasts the different models of HRD in the three cases; and concludes with some suggestions for further research.     

Manufacturing in the Nineties By H.J. STRUDEL and P.DESRUELLE(Van Nostrand Reinhold,New York, 1992). £31.50.

Abstract

Looking for a world model for the manufacturing information flow diagram has brought us to the conclusion that it is impossible to build an all-encompassing, all-inclusive system. The redundancy and overlap would make the system excessively complex and ineffective. The best way to generalize a model of this type is to simplify. The result is that we eliminate nearly the entire production control mechanism that is found in the labour intensive MRP system (Fig. 1). We come up with a system that is much closer to the material intensive JIT system (Fig. 2). The conclusion is that effective production control requires that you choose which resource you wish to optimize, and then select a system that controls the plant around the selected resource base. This is the function of books like International Management and Production. A second conclusion would be that complexity (MRP—Fig. 1) gains very little over simplicity (JIT—Fig. 2 or World Model—Fig. 4) in productivity or efficiency. As Shozo Hibino says in his book Breakthrough Thinking, we need to run our plants smarter, not harder.     

Influence analysis in multivariate linear general models

In this paper we obtain several influence measures for the multivariate linear general model through the approach proposed by Muñoz-Pichardo et al. (1995), which is based on the concept of conditional bias. An interesting charasteristic of this approach is that it does not require any distributional hypothesis. Appling the obtained results to the multivariate regression model, we obtain some measures proposed by other authors. Nevertheless, on the results obtained in this paper, we emphasize two aspects. First, they provide a theoretical foundation for measures proposed by other authors for the mul¬tivariate regression model. Second, they can be applied to any linear model that can be formulated as a particular case of the multivariate linear general model. In particular, we carry out an application to the multivariate analysis of covariance.     

A Note on the Moments and Computer Generation of the Shifted Gompertz Distribution

In this paper we give a class of row-column designs with the property that the i-th row and the j-th column have precisely r treatments in common. A conjecture that such designs are quasi-factorial is disproved by showing that the designs given in this paper are not quasi-factorial. It is also shown that the designs given here are nearly optimal.     

The social construction of a cultural disaster: New Labour’s millennium experience

This article presents the findings of an Arts and Humanities Research Board project on London’s Millennium Dome exposition in the year 2000. The Dome was generally considered to be a cultural disaster in the news media and public conversation. It became a political embarrassment for Britain’s New Labour government but did not prove damaging in the 2001 general election. The article does not dispute the media’s damnation of the Dome but questions its acuity. It also questions the managerialist perspective on the Dome’s ‘failure’ whilst taking into account claims regarding a managerial ‘turnaround’ and an ‘under-reported success’. Empirical evidence and theoretical analysis concerning the political economy of the Dome’s production, its representational meanings and visitor reception provide a more complex and multidimensional explanation. Corporate sponsorship played a key role in the cultural disaster and, in this particular case study, it exemplifies social democracy’s symbolic as well as material coalescence with neo-liberalism. A distinction is made between associative and deep sponsorship that is illustrated with examples from the Dome. A typology of generous and reflexive visiting is also formulated in order to analyse the visitor data.     

Mood in Daily Contexts: Relationship With Risk in Early Adolescence

Disturbances in affect have been linked to problem behavior in adolescence and future psychopathology, but little is known about how such disturbances manifest themselves in everyday contexts. This study investigated daily mood in Dutch 7th graders, aged 11–14. Cluster analysis of problem measures distinguished high-risk (n=25) and low-risk (n=106) subgroups. Participants completed experience-sampling reports of mood, social context, and location nine times daily for 5 days. Multilevel regression analyses of four mood measures confirmed higher anxiety and depressed mood in the high-risk group. Moods varied by location and social context, with significant differences between groups in two specific social contexts. First, when with family, low-risk adolescents felt less depressed than when alone, whereas high-risk adolescents felt more depressed. Second, high-risk adolescents showed more pronounced anxiety in social situations outside the network of family and friends. These findings point to everyday social contexts in which young adolescents with emotional and behavioral problems appear to be particularly vulnerable.     

Family Development Cycle,Social Class,and Inequality in Rwanda1

Abstract The relative importance of social class differences (social differentiation) and stages of the family development cycle (demographic differentiation) on income inequalities in rural Rwanda are discussed and compared using survey data from 1,019 households. Both forms of differentiation are conceptualized as dynamic processes that intersect through their mutual inclusion of landholding—land being fundamental to our understanding of social class in the Third World and likewise closely tied to the timing of the developmental stages of the family cycle. Findings demonstrate that both forms of differentiation are vitally important, in roughly equal proportions, to household income generation in Rwanda. Emphasis is placed on the direct effects of the social class variables and on the indirect effects of the demographic differentiation process. The importance of the impact of contextual variables, such as land scarcity and the absence of alternative nonfarm employment, on income inequality are assessed.