Productivity Competitiveness among Non Cooperating Integrated Economies: A Negative-Sum Game

ABSTRACT: The strategies adopted by European countries during the 1970‘s and 1980‘s have been unsuccessful in their attempt to produce more employment. These strategies have been centred on attempts to improve the international position of a country at the expense of the others through increasing productivity and competitiveness. The negative effects on employment due to higher productivity should have been offset, in the longer run, by an increasing share of exports. But the eventual result has been that relative positions of countries have remained fundamentally unchanged. This is due to the fact that all countries adopted the same strategy. Aggressive strategies do not pay in terms of employment. More effective policies, in a situation characterized by accelerated technical progress, can be more easily implemented in a more co-operative international context. Even if there is no moral solidarity between the nearly related races of Europe, there is an economic solidarity which we cannot disregard. Even now the world markets are one. This is to put the issue on its lowest grounds. There are other arguments, which the most obtuse cannot ignore, against a policy of spreading and encouraging further the economic ruin of great countries (J.M. Keynes) ¹⁸     

Jerusalem's Population, 1995–2020: Demography, Multiculturalism and Urban Policies

This paper reports on a new projection of Jerusalem's population to the year 2020. Cultural, social and demographic trends within the city were analysed for eight main subpopulations featuring different ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic characteristics. Separate assumptions on mortality, fertility, and geographical mobility were developed and projected based on 1995 estimates of size and age-sex composition for each subpopulation. The selected results presented here focus on the balance of the Jewish versus the Arab and other population, and within the Jewish population, of the more religiously observant subpopulation versus the rest. The findings shed light on the critical importance of the mutual relationship between demography and socio-political developments. Implications of expected demographic trends for urban planning in a multicultural context are discussed within a broader evaluation of local and national policy options.     

Generalized least squares with misspecified serial correlation structures

Summary. The regression literature contains hundreds of studies on serially correlated disturbances. Most of these studies assume that the structure of the error covariance matrix Ω is known or can be estimated consistently from data. Surprisingly, few studies investigate the properties of estimated generalized least squares (GLS) procedures when the structure of Ω is incorrectly identified and the parameters are inefficiently estimated. We compare the finite sample efficiencies of ordinary least squares (OLS), GLS and incorrect GLS (IGLS) estimators. We also prove new theorems establishing theoretical efficiency bounds for IGLS relative to GLS and OLS. Results from an exhaustive simulation study are used to evaluate the finite sample performance and to demonstrate the robustness of IGLS estimates vis-à-vis OLS and GLS estimates constructed for models with known and estimated (but correctly identified) Ω. Some of our conclusions for finite samples differ from established asymptotic results.     

Efficient Semiparametric Estimation of Quantile Treatment Effects

This paper develops estimators for quantile treatment effects under the identifying restriction that selection to treatment is based on observable characteristics. Identification is achieved without requiring computation of the conditional quantiles of the potential outcomes. Instead, the identification results for the marginal quantiles lead to an estimation procedure for the quantile treatment effect parameters that has two steps: nonparametric estimation of the propensity score and computation of the difference between the solutions of two separate minimization problems. Root‐N consistency, asymptotic normality, and achievement of the semiparametric efficiency bound are shown for that estimator. A consistent estimation procedure for the variance is also presented. Finally, the method developed here is applied to evaluation of a job training program and to a Monte Carlo exercise. Results from the empirical application indicate that the method works relatively well even for a data set with limited overlap between treated and controls in the support of covariates. The Monte Carlo study shows that, for a relatively small sample size, the method produces estimates with good precision and low bias, especially for middle quantiles.     

Patterns of american jewish fertility

The 1971 National Jewish Population Survey provides cross-sectional data on achieved fertility, detailed birth histories, and other information on family formation for a countrywide representative sample of 5,303 ever-married women. Cohort analysis shows that—although at lower levels—Jewish fertility has followed the general trends of American population.     

The design of socially optimal decisions in a consensus scenario

Several situations of conflict between basic social principles can crop up during a consensus searching process. The majority principle and respect for minority groups is a possible example of a conflictive situation between two social principles. In this paper, we outline a specific consensus searching scenario, where individual preferences are expressed by “pairwise” comparison matrices. The set of compromise consensuses between the majority and minority principles is determined using a procedure based upon an adaptation of Yu's p-metric distances. Finally, we use three different theoretical approaches – utility theory, p-metric distance functions and bargaining theory – to obtain the social optimum from the set of compromise consensuses. The links and differences among the three approaches are analysed. Finally, the working of the proposed theoretical framework is illustrated with the help of a forestry case study.     

Measuring cross-country technological catch-up through variable-parameter FDH

In this paper, we estimate indices of technological catch-up for a sample of 52 countries through the FDH approach with variable scaling parameters proposed in Kerstens and Vanden Eeckaut (1999). We show that this technique has significant advantages for the international comparisons of productivity and, more generally, wherever the assumption of convexity for the production set is not likely to be appropriate. We want to thank Laurens Cherchye, Hal Fried, Kristian Kerstens and an anonymous referee for useful comments on preceding versions of this paper. The usual disclaimer applies. Financial support from the MURST, Italy, is gratefully acknowledged.     

Multidimensional poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean: new evidence from the Gallup World Poll

This paper studies poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean from a multidimensional perspective, exploiting the Gallup World Poll, a survey that provides a unique opportunity to perform intercountry comparisons. By applying factor analysis we find that welfare can be appropriately summarized by three dimensions: income, subjective welfare and “basic needs”. Another finding is that the US$ 1 line appears to be a reasonable cut-off value to measure food deprivation.     

CAN WE INFER HOSPITAL QUALITY FROM MEDICAL GRADUATES’ RESIDENCY CHOICES?

This paper uses a novel approach to infer hospital technical quality from revealed preferences over residency programs. Specifically, we use Spanish medical graduates’ residency choices made from 1995 to 2000. We start by estimating a model of medical graduates preferences that controls for hospital, proximity, specialty, and gender effects. We interpret the coefficients on the hospital dummy variables as measures of medical graduates’ preferences over hospitals. Our results show that graduates do indeed discriminate between hospitals and that their preferences correlate with hospital‐specific covariates arguably related to hospital training quality. We then show that preferences from medical graduates are positively and statistically significantly correlated with risk‐adjusted hospital rankings based on five alternative outcome measures. Finally, we construct reputation scores for each hospital using news story counts in three media outlets and find that medical graduates’ preferences are especially valuable for inference of hospital technical quality of care as they do not simply reflect well known reputation.