Racial Discrimination and Human Rights in the Global Context: The International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination

This essay will discuss racism and racial discrimination by locating them within a context of international human rights. It is argued that conceptually racism and racial discrimination within an international human rights paradigm sharpens our understanding of these concepts from both a global and regional vantage point. The main idea is to provide a thematic and procedural overview of key international human rights instruments that address racial discrimination. It will situate racial discrimination in the context of international human rights and provide a critical discussion focused on the International Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and other human rights instruments that address racial discrimination.     

Education and Roma Children in the Basque Region of Spain

The European Union and those countries that make up the region of South-eastern Europe are built on the pillars of a multicultural society, with different languages, cultures, religions and ethnic groups. This diversity gives rise to various kinds of conflicts. The way in which we resolve these will determine the kind of future we can create for next generations. In this paper, we look at the situation of Roma and Educational provisions for Roma in the Basque region of Spain. It is clear that improvements are being made, but that much work is still necessary. Too few Roma children succeed at the moment in the Spanish and Basque educational systems. We use the case study of one school, the La Esperanza School, to highlight opportunities and barriers to effectively addressing the issue of Roma education.     

Statistical control charts for shifted generalized poisson distribution

Summary The use of shifted (or zero-truncated) generalized Poisson distribution to describe the occurrence of events in production processes is considered. The methods of moments and maximum likelihood are proposed for estimating the parameters of shifted generalized Poisson distribution. Control charts for the total number of events and for the average number of events are developed. Finally, a numerical example is used to illustrate the construction of control charts.     

Are Subsidies to be Blamed? A Reexamination of U.S. Countervailing Duty on Hog Imports From Canada

A dramatic increase in U.S. hog imports from Canada triggered a successful countervail action against Canada in 1985, and resulted in an import tariff. This paper finds Canadian subsidies were not a major factor explaining increased hog exports, rather, the depreciation of the Canadian dollar played a larger role. More importantly, we find that hog imports from Canada did not “injure” the U.S. industry. These results imply the U.S. hog countervail duty was the outcome of rent-seeking activities rather than due to economic factors.     

A computational analysis of the tournament equilibrium set

A recurring theme in the mathematical social sciences is how to select the “most desirable” elements given a binary dominance relation on a set of alternatives. Schwartz’s tournament equilibrium set (TEQ) ranks among the most intriguing, but also among the most enigmatic, tournament solutions proposed so far. Due to its unwieldy recursive definition, little is known about TEQ. In particular, its monotonicity remains an open problem to date. Yet, if TEQ were to satisfy monotonicity, it would be a very attractive solution concept refining both the Banks set and Dutta’s minimal covering set. We show that the problem of deciding whether a given alternative is contained in TEQ is NP-hard, and thus does not admit a polynomial-time algorithm unless P equals NP. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic that significantly outperforms the naive algorithm for computing TEQ.     

Marginalized zero-inflated generalized Poisson regression

The generalized Poisson (GP) regression model has been used to model count data that exhibit over-dispersion or under-dispersion. The zero-inflated GP (ZIGP) regression model can additionally handle count data characterized by many zeros. However, the parameters of ZIGP model cannot easily be used for inference on overall exposure effects. In order to address this problem, a marginalized ZIGP is proposed to directly model the population marginal mean count. The parameters of the marginalized zero-inflated GP model are estimated by the method of maximum likelihood. The regression model is illustrated by three real-life data sets.     

Approximate Generalizations and Computational Experiments

In this paper I demonstrate how one can generalize finitely many examples to statements about (infinite) classes of economic models. If there exist upper bounds on the number of connected components of one‐dimensional linear subsets of the set of parameters for which a conjecture is true, one can conclude that it is correct for all parameter values in the class considered, except for a small residual set, once one has verified the conjecture for a predetermined finite set of points. I show how to apply this insight to computational experiments and spell out assumptions on the economic fundamentals that ensure that the necessary bounds on the number of connected components exist. I argue that these methods can be fruitfully utilized in applied general equilibrium analysis. I provide general assumptions on preferences and production sets that ensure that economic conjectures define sets with a bounded number of connected components. Using the theoretical results, I give an example of how one can explore qualitative and quantitative implications of general equilibrium models using computational experiments. Finally, I show how random algorithms can be used for generalizing examples in high‐dimensional problems.     

Child Mortality and Environment in Developing Countries

This paper studies child mortality and fertility in 61 developing countries including the Central Asian Republics (CARs). To control for simultaneity, an estimated value of fertility was used in the mortality equation and a final specification included only exogenous socio-economic, health and environmental variables. We confirm the importance of female literacy in explaining both fertility and mortality, and also find a measure of consumption for the poorest share of the population to be significant, while controlling for nutrition, health expenditure, and income distribution. Incidence of tuberculosis and female agricultural population proxy for environmental impacts, but in spite of these controls, approximately 41% additional mortality was estimated due to living in the CARs. The results fill gaps in the literature: we use a wider range of socio-economic and environmental health variables than previously in an encompassing analysis of mortality and fertility, and find evidence of excessive mortality in the CARs most likely linked to environmental degradation in the region.