Age structure and capital dilution effects in neo-classical growth models

This paper reexamines the problem of the relationship between demographic growth and per capita income in neo-classical growth models with age-structured populations. It is suggested that, when they assume a constant rate of capital depreciation, such models overestimate the negative impact of population growth through capital dilution effects. With more realistic depreciation schedules, the ageing of the capital stock which results from lower growth implies a higher overall depreciation rate, which reduces benefits from lower capital dilution. The implications of this observation are examined for the existence of an optimum population growth rate, for models with heterogeneous capital, and for models where capital obsolescence is not fixed but is allowed to vary.This article is a modified version of a paper presented at the First Annual Meeting of the European Society for Population Economics, Rotterdam, September 1987. I am indebted to the anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions and to Linda Sergent for revising the English text.     

New Public Management et professions dans l’État : au-delà des oppositions, quelles recompositions ?

More and more reforms in public administrations are being conducted that are based on the principles and instruments of “new public management”. They have set off protest and collective actions by several professional groups in various sectors (health, education, justice, social work, research…), whence questions about the future of professional groups in public services, in particular about their autonomy, which these reforms threaten. The opposition between this new public management and certain professional groups, is not the final explanation to draw from an analysis of this situation. Should these changes be seen as the decline of professional groups and of their autonomy, as a mutation of professional models, an overhaul of professionalism, etc.? These questions, which current events in France and Europe have raised, are a matter for ongoing sociological thought. They are approached empirically, from the field, using varied scales of analysis and research. Forms of tension between this new public management and professional groups are explored.     

Quality certification, regulation and power in fair trade

This article examines governance changes and shifting power relations within the fair-labelling network. These shifts are framed analytically by reference to broader changes in the agrofoods sector tied to the increasingly key role played by quality relations and standards in the production and marketing of food. The author argues that evident trends such as a growing complexity of fair-labelling markets, the centralization of its regulating bodies, and the normalization of certification processes have altered power relations to the detriment of small producers. In addition, and at the same time, this ‘fair’ market niche has become more desirable to dominant market actors leading to a combination of factors that has triggered a broad debate within fair trade with respect to the definition and mission of the fair-trade network.     

The Quest for Aid Complementarity: Reforming Co‐operation between Nordic+ Donors and NGOs

Aid fragmentation is a maddening problem in the aid business. NGOs are part and parcel of this fragmentation problem; hence calls for more complementarity between Northern NGOs and (their) governments have led to a series of co‐funding reforms. This article analyses the co‐funding reforms of the Nordic+ donors and situates them within the broader evolutions that have taken place in donor‐NGO relations in these countries. It finds that these donors have interpreted complementarity in very different and even contradictory ways. Where some require NGOs to develop activities within the confines of the official bilateral strategy (intensive complementarity), others allow NGOs to do very different things (extensive complementarity).     

The Role of European Welfare States in Explaining Resources Deprivation

In a previous paper in this journal (Headey etal., 2000) a comparison was made between threeso-called `best cases' of welfare regime types,the `Liberal' US, `the `Corporatist' Germanyand the `Social-Democratic' Netherlands. Themain conclusion was that the Social-Democraticwelfare state performed best on nearly allsocial and economic indicators that wereapplied. That paper was based on the ten-yeardatasets drawn from the national socio-economicpanel studies. For this paper we use the uniquecomparative panel dataset of the EuropeanCommunity Household Panel. At the time ofresearch, only three waves of data covering the1994–96 period were available. Instead of threecountries representing three different welfarestate types as in the earlier paper we covertwelve countries allowing us to distinguish afourth Southern or Mediterranean welfare regimetype and to compare the performance of the fourregimes. Compared to the Headey's et al. paperwe focus on the comparative analysis of thelevel of deprivation and pay less attention toincome poverty and inequality. Because weconsider deprivation to be part of the conceptof social exclusion (see also Atkinson et al.,2002) our results also provide evidence on howwelfare regimes across the EU cope with socialexclusion. We conclude that theSocial-Democratic welfare state does a good jobof preventing income poverty but performs lesswell in equalising levels of deprivation. Ourresults also show that the immature Southernwelfare states perform worse with respect topreventing deprivation. Trying to explainlevels of deprivation by estimating Tobit panelregressions it turned out that the impact ofregime type remains significant though limited.Common, `structural' disparities between thecountries and regimes in terms of economicwelfare, the demographic structure, and theemployment situation explain most of thevariance across countries.     

A new method for the estimation of variance matrix with prescribed zeros in nonlinear mixed effects models

We propose a new method for the Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) of nonlinear mixed effects models when the variance matrix of Gaussian random effects has a prescribed pattern of zeros (PPZ). The method consists of coupling the recently developed Iterative Conditional Fitting (ICF) algorithm with the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. It provides positive definite estimates for any sample size, and does not rely on any structural assumption concerning the PPZ. It can be easily adapted to many versions of EM.     

A simple model for interpreting cross-tabulations of family size and women's labour force participation

Simple 2×2 contingency tables cross-tabulating family size and activity status of mothers are analyzed with a logistic or log-linear model whose parameters can be interpreted as, respectively, the intrinsic value given to work by mothers, the value given to large families, and the degree of incompatibility between work and child care. An analysis of French data for 1968 and 1982 suggests that it is the increased value given to work which accounts best for activity and fertility changes over this time period, variation of the two other parameters playing only a minor role. The same result is observed, cross-sectionally, when analyzing fertility and activity of women across a sample of French couples in 1982 stratified by education levels of both parents. But this simple explanation of activity and fertility differentials does not apply when analyzing fertility and activity differentials across EEC countries, using data from the EUROSTAT Labour Force Survey of 1990.L'article utilise un modèle logistique ou log-linéaire pour analyser des tableaux de contingence élémentaires à quatre cases croisant activité féminine et taille de la famille. Les paramètres de ce modèle s'interprètent respectivement comme le degré de valorisation du travail, la préférence pour la famille nombreuse, et le degré d'incompatibilité entre travail et charge de famille. L'analyse des données françaises de 1968 et 1982 suggère que c'est la valorisation croissante du travail qui explique le mieux les mouvements joints de l'activité et de la fécondité au cours de cette période, les variations des deux autres paramètres ne jouant qu'un rôle mineur. Le même résultat se retrouve, en coupe transversale, si on analyse l'activité et la fécondité dans un échantillon de ménages français de 1982 stratifié par niveaux d'éducation des deux parents. Mais cette explication simple des variations de l'activité et de la fécondité ne s'applique plus si on s'intéresse aux différences d'activité et de fécondité entre pays de la CEE, mesurées à travers l'Enquête sur la Force de Travail coordonnée par EUROSTAT en 1990.     

His and Her Education and Marital Dissolution: Adding a Contextual Dimension

Educationally hypogamous marriages, where the wife is more educated than the husband, have been expected to be less stable than other educational pairings, in part because they do not conform to social norms. With the reversal of the gender gap in education, such marriages have become more common than in the past. Recent research suggests that this new context might be beneficial for the stability of hypogamous unions compared to other educational pairings. Here, we investigate how educational matches in married couples are associated with divorce risks taking into account the local prevalence of hypogamy. Using Belgian census and register data for 458,499 marriages contracted between 1986 and 2001, we show that hypogamy was not associated with higher divorce rates than homogamy in communities where hypogamy was common. Against expectations, marriages in which the husband was more educated than the wife tend to exhibit the highest divorce rates. More detailed analysis of the different types of educational matches revealed that marriages with at least one highly educated partner, male or female, were less divorce prone compared to otherwise similar couple types.     

Vanishing financial contagion?

While a number of crises in emerging markets generated widespread contagion in financial markets during the 1990s, more recent crises (notably, in Argentina) have been mostly contained within national borders. This has led some observers to wonder whether contagion might have become a feature of the past, with financial markets now better discriminating between emerging countries with good and bad fundamentals. Available data suggest that the main channels that contribute to transmitting financial crises across countries are – if anything – even stronger today than in the 1990s. Moreover, anticipation by international investors may help to explain the near-absence of contagion in the context of the Argentine crisis. This paper argues that a prudent working assumption is that financial contagion has not vanished.