Progress and Pitfalls in Popularising Trade

Book reviewed in this article: A Raw Deal: Trade and the World's Poor. By Peter Madden Trade and the Poor: The Impact of International Trade on Developing Countries. By John Madeley Fixing the Rules: North—South Issues in International Trade and the GATT Uruguay Round. By Kevin Watkins Taming Commodity Markets: The Integrated Programme and the Common Fund in UNCTAD. By Gamani Corea Commodities in Crisis: The Commodity Crisis of the 1980s and the Political Economy of International Commodity Policies. By Alfred Maizels     

The Role of International Municipal Cooperation in Housing the Developing World's Urban Poor: The Toronto-São Paulo Example

Increasingly, local governments in developing countries are entering into partnership arrangements with their counterparts in the developed world as part of an attempt to come to grips with problems associated with rapid urban expansion. As part of a preliminary investigation of the development-related impact of this little studied form of international municipal cooperation (IMC), this paper assesses the effectiveness of one particularly ambitious information and technology sharing arrangement struck by the cities of São Paulo, Brazil and Toronto, Canada. Specifically, the study focuses on an initiative -- referred to as the Integrated Operations (OI-Operações Interligadas) -- developed by the two cities to assist São Paulo in its efforts to facilitate public housing. Based upon the evidence -- collected over a four-year period (1993-1997) in both settings -- the paper suggests that IMC ventures of the type described can help deal with problems such as housing, and thus may well provide a new and cost effective mechanism for improving conditions generally in the world's less affluent urban agglomerations.     

Perfectionism and binge drinking in Canadian students making the transition to university

Objective: In September 2005, the authors explored the relationship between perfectionism and binge drinking in a sample of first-year college students. Participants: The authors recruited 207 first-year college students (76 men, 131 women) to complete the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS) and Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (F-MPS). Methods: The authors divided participants into 3 groups on the basis of frequency of binge drinking and conducted multivariate analyses of variance to compare the binge drinking groups on the 3 MPS subscales and the 5 F-MPS subscales. Results: The group with 2 or more binge drinking episodes in the past 2 weeks had higher levels of parental criticism and lower levels of self-oriented perfectionism, but they did not have lower scores on a measure of personal standards. Conclusions: These findings suggest that certain perfectionists binge drink in response to harsh parental treatment and that, at least initially, the pursuit of extreme standards of personal perfection is incompatible with binge drinking. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.