The evolving concept of "retirement": Looking forward to the year 2050

Economic growth, more than demography, will determine the nature of future retirement. With growth has come a steady increase in retirement years. Now, however, there is increasing interest in "rolling back" these gains. Alternatively, some scholars propose a different framework for evaluating "work" late in life — one that includes altruism, citizenship, stewardship, creativity, and the search for faith. Attitudes toward retirement in the future are likely to move sharply away from the simplistic view of all work before retirement and no work after. Some of the resulting changes we can expect to see are more part-time work, expanded "citizen participation," and an older workforce with more training and retraining.     

Landowners’ perspectives on the rural future and the role of forests across Europe

Contemporary changes in rural Europe have been characterised by the contrasting terms of rural modernisation and productivism versus restructuring and post-productivism. This study investigates how different categories of owners of farm and/or forestland in 16 case study areas in eight European countries perceive future development. Landowners’ prospects for change are investigated on both the locality and enterprise level. Special attention is given to the role of forestry as a potential future development perspective. The results reveal that both restructuring and modernisation perspectives are important to many landowners. Moreover, a polarisation seems to be developing between a minority of full-time farmers with progressive farming prospects and the vast majority of landowners with declining prospects or little dependency on primary production. More importantly, the research reveals a third employment perspective, which did not have any specific content apart from the social security of having employment opportunities in the locality. Also at the enterprise level, farmers anticipate both restructuring and modernisation practices, even on the very same property. The study proves that it is not only part-time, hobby and retired farmers that are engaged in “restructuring” activities, but also full-time farmers. As regards the role of forests, the majority of landowners do not interpret forests in an economic development context, but as green infrastructure important to the local quality of life. It can be concluded that forests are closely related to restructuring thinking among landowners. Future perspectives differ from one European rural area to another, dependent on local conditions and problems. More importantly, however, this research reveals that modernisation–restructuring thoughts and practices of landowners are manifold and heterogeneous in all types of rural areas across Europe.     

FINANCIAL INNOVATION, PRICE SMOOTHING, AND MONETARY POLICY

This paper examines an unregulated transaction services market that is subject to financial innovation in an economy that experiences aggregate supply and demand shocks. The availability of this unregulated market to transactors smooths the price response to these shocks. However, financial innovations act as money supply shocks that increase price disturbances. If there is persistence in the real aggregate supply shocks and in the rate of adoption of financial innovations, then the central bank can forecast some portion of the changes in transaction requirements that accompany these shocks and damp the residual variation in prices by accommodating these anticipated needs.     

A bayesian test for a two-way contingency table using independence priors

One method of testing for independence in a two-way table is based on the Bayes factor, the ratio of the likelihoods under the independence hypothesis H and the alternative hypothesis H. The main difficulty in this approach is the specification of prior distributions on the composite hypotheses H and H. A new Bayesian test statistic is constructed by using a prior distribution on H that is concentrated about the “independence surface” H. Approximations are proposed which simplify the computation of the test statistic. The values of the Bayes factor are compared with values of statistics proposed by Gunel and Dickey (1974), Good and Crook (1987), and Spiegelhalter and Smith (1982) for a number of two-way tables. This investigation suggests a strong relationship between the new statistic and the p-value.     

Mortality of American Troops in the Iraq War

We estimate the death rate of United States troops deployed to Iraq from the beginning of the US invasion through 30 September 2006. Eighty percent of the deaths in Iraq were combat‐related. The death rate in Iraq is lower than that of the civilian population of the United States but substantially higher than that of young adults. It is much lower than the death rate of US troops in Vietnam, in part because a much smaller fraction die among those wounded in Iraq. We also estimate relative mortality levels for US troops according to numerous demographic variables through 30 November 2006. The risk of death in Iraq per deployment is shown to be highest for Marines; Naval and Air Force personnel in Iraq have lower death rates than the civilian population of comparable age. Other categories with above‐average mortality in Iraq are enlisted troops, males, younger persons, and Hispanics.     

Kurtosis and spread

An increase in kurtosis is achieved through the location- and scale-free movement of probability mass from the “shoulders” of a distribution into its centre and tails. We introduce a coherent structure of ordering and measures, requiring no symmetry assumption, that represent different formalizations of this movement. For this purpose spread functions and spread-spread plots are defined. The orderings impose growth patterns on the spread-spread plot of the distributions involved, and the weakest involve both a specific scale-matching technique and placement of “shoulders”. The role of existing kurtosis orderings and measures in this general context is identified and examples discussed throughout.     

Privatization—A cure for all ills?

Before a troubled State-owned company can be privatized, the management dimension must be examined. The privatization strategy must be closely linked with the overall business strategy to ensure that the opportunities afforded by the operation provide for long-term profit enhancement. The logic behind the state-owned enterprise is described and the objectives of privatization, the pros and cons, are analysed.