Building a new international is necessary and urgent

ABSTRACT

Samir Amin was one of the most creative Marxists, but also an orthodox, as his appeal for a new international proves, consistent with his defense of the socialist revolution against a decaying capitalist system, which threatens with the extinction of human civilization. However, in a contradictory way, if in the past the material conditions did not exist, they exist today, materializing in a distorted manner by capitalism, the organization of a revolutionary international leadership has never been so non-existent. This article begins by demonstrating the systemic conditions that require the proletariat to build a new International, the reasons for the current difficulty in achieving it; and, from the analysis of the most successful experience to date, the Third International, lessons are drawn for a future Fifth International.     

Equity, efficiency and inequality traps: A research agenda

This paper discusses a research agenda that arises from unanswered questions and unresolved issues considered in the World Bank’s World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development. After formalizing the key concepts of equity; equality of opportunity; and efficiency, and proposing a definition for an equitable development policy, the paper discusses the concept of inequality traps, around which the research agenda is structured. Four broad groups of research questions are highlighted: those revolving around the measurement of inequality of opportunity and the diagnostics for the existence of an inequality trap; those dealing with the causes of inequality traps; the quantification of their efficiency costs; and those related to how institutions (including governments) evolve to overcome inequality traps. Bourguignon and Ferreira are in the Development Economics Vice-Presidency, The World Bank. Michael Walton is at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Together, they led the team that produced the World Bank’s World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development.     

Entrepreneurship research: mapping intellectual structures and research trends

Review of Managerial Science - Using bibliometric techniques to identify connections between existing entrepreneurship studies, this article seeks to understand the scientific structure of...     

The Waterbirth Project: São Bernardo Hospital experience

Introduction

The following quantitative observational study aimed to analyse the maternal and neonatal outcomes of 90 low-risk pregnant women who gave birth in water at São Bernardo Hospital.

THE LONG‐TERM EFFECTS OF CONDITIONAL CASH TRANSFERS ON CHILD LABOR AND SCHOOL ENROLLMENT

This paper investigates the long‐term effects of conditional cash transfers on school attainment and child labor. To this end, we construct a dynamic heterogeneous agent model, calibrate it with Brazilian data, and introduce a policy similar to the Brazilian Bolsa Família. Our results suggest that this type of policy has a very strong impact on educational outcomes, sharply increasing primary school completion. The conditional transfer is also able to reduce the share of working children from 22% to 17%. We then compute the transition to the new steady state and show that the program actually increases child labor over the short run, because the transfer is not enough to completely cover the schooling costs, so children have to work to be able to comply with the program's schooling eligibility requirement. We also evaluate the impacts on poverty, inequality, and welfare. (JEL O11, I25, J24)     

Health care privatization processes in Europe: Theoretical justifications and empirical classification

This article analyses the health care system reform process in Europe based on the concept of privatization. This notion is understood from two perspectives. First, privatization may concern the health care financing or the provision of health services. Second, privatization can be “imposed” on individuals or be “internalized” and then introduced by individuals (patients and doctors). So we emphasize the diversity that privatization can assume. We classify privatization mechanisms used by different countries and identify which of the perspectives presented are more common in 14 European Union countries since the 1980s. The article shows that even if privatization processes are widespread, they assume different patterns in each country.     

Seeing is Believing? Evidence from Property Prices in Inundated Areas

We use hedonic property models to estimate the changes in implicit flood risk premium following a large flood event. Previous studies have used flood hazard maps to proxy flood risk. In addition to knowing whether a property lies in the floodplain, we use a unique data set with the flood inundation map. We find that the price discount for properties in the inundated area is substantially larger than in comparable properties in the floodplain that did not get inundated. This suggests that, in addition to capturing an information effect, the larger discount in inundated properties reflects potential uninsurable flood damages, and supports a hypothesis that homeowners respond better to what they have visualized (“seeing is believing”).     

Modified inference function for margins for the bivariate clayton copula-based SUN Tobit Model

This paper extends the analysis of the bivariate Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUN) Tobit model by modeling its nonlinear dependence structure through the Clayton copula. The ability to capture/model the lower tail dependence of the SUN Tobit model where some data are censored (generally, left-censored at zero) is an useful feature of the Clayton copula. We propose a modified version of the (classical) Inference Function for Margins (IFS) method by Joe and XP [H. Joe and J.J. XP, The estimation method of inference functions for margins for multivariate models, Tech. Rep. 166, Department of Statistics, University of British Columbia, 1996], which we refer to as Modified Inference Function for Margins (MIFF) method, to obtain the (point) estimates of the marginal and Clayton copula parameters. More specifically, we employ the (frequenting) data augmentation technique at the second stage of the IFS method (the first stage of the MIFF method is equivalent to the first stage of the IFS method) to generate the censored observations and then estimate the Clayton copula parameter. This process (data augmentation and copula parameter estimation) is repeated until convergence. Such modification at the second stage of the usual estimation method is justified in order to obtain continuous marginal distributions, which ensures the uniqueness of the resulting Clayton copula, as stated by Solar's [A. Solar, Fonctions de répartition à n dimensions et leurs marges, Publ. de l'Institut de Statistique de l'Université de Paris 8 (1959), pp. 229–231] theorem; and also to provide an unbiased estimate of the association parameter (the IFS method provides a biased estimate of the Clayton copula parameter in the presence of censored observations in both margins). Since the usual asymptotic approach, that is the computation of the asymptotic covariance matrix of the parameter estimates, is troublesome in this case, we also propose the use of resampling procedures (bootstrap methods, such as standard normal and percentile, by Efron and Tibshirani [B. Efron and R.J. Tibshirani, An Introduction to the Bootstrap, Chapman & Hall, New York, 1993] to obtain confidence intervals for the model parameters.     

Skew-normal distribution for growth curve models in presence of a heteroscedasticity structure

In general, growth models are adjusted under the assumptions that the error terms are homoscedastic and normally distributed. However, these assumptions are often not verified in practice. In this work we propose four growth models (Morgan–Mercer–Flodin, von Bertalanffy, Gompertz, and Richards) considering different distributions (normal, skew-normal) for the error terms and three different covariance structures. Maximum likelihood estimation procedure is addressed. A simulation study is performed in order to verify the appropriateness of the proposed growth curve models. The methodology is also illustrated on a real dataset.