Which Domestic Firms Benefit from FDI? Evidence from Selected African Countries

The existing literature on the effects of FDI inflows on domestic firms' performance offers ambiguous evidence. Macro‐level studies suggest that the characteristics of inward FDI and the ‘absorptive capacity’ of the host economy matter in determining the sign (or the mere existence) of these effects. Studies based on micro‐level data have so far mostly focused on finding a nexus between FDI inflows and the productivity of domestic firms, suggesting that the effects might be highly heterogeneous. This article, using a recent firm‐level survey conducted by UNIDO in 19 sub‐Saharan African countries, explores the channels through which multinational enterprises may exert an impact on local firms: products’ market, input availability and costs, access to finance and export opportunities, and analyses the strategic reactions of domestic firms induced by the presence of foreign affiliates.     

Donor Requirements and Pockets of Effectiveness in Senegal's Bureaucracy

Donors increasingly value the work of statistics, project assessment and related offices in developing countries, but can they ensure these offices are able to do their work? This article assesses donors’ efforts to do so in Senegal's ministries of finance, health and agriculture in the mid‐2000s. It contends that donors' impact is greatest if they generate political incentives for governments to create ‘pockets of effectiveness’ in these areas. The health and agriculture case studies indicate that direct donor involvement, particularly if incompatible with domestic political forces, produces disappointing results, while the finance case studies suggest donors can induce political support for the work of specific offices if donor incentives coincide with domestic political imperatives.     

西南联大群体的新诗研究及其外来影响——以闻一多、朱自清为中心的探讨

抗日战争时期,西南联大中文系教授闻一多和朱自清不断总结新文学创作的艺术经验,作出了创造"现代诗学"的努力,并取得了第一批成果:朱自清的《新诗杂话》和闻一多的系列诗论,为新诗的理论化和系统化提供了坚实的基础。同时,他们的新诗研究深受西方理论的影响,使闻一多和朱自清在"现代诗学"的创造中受益颇多。     

Institutional Diversity and Performance in African Cotton Sectors

This article analyses the performance of cotton sectors across East, Southern, and West Africa, paying particular attention to the wide diversity of institutional arrangements that they now exhibit. It finds strong support for earlier contentions regarding trade‐offs between competition and coordination, and between the roles of public and private sectors. New insights provide concrete and context‐specific guidance to policy‐makers and stakeholders regarding the key challenges they will face and the risks they will need to manage as they work to improve productivity and ensure an equitable division of benefits within cotton sectors.     

Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow

ABSTRACT

Drawing on social histories of rumour, this article challenges notions of white and Afrikaner homogeneity which persist in the scholarship on late and post-apartheid South Africa. In so doing, it demonstrates the revisionist potential of rumour as a historical source, while reinserting class in a scholarship which privileges race as salient historical feature. The article focuses on Arrie Paulus, apartheid South Africa’s most prominent white trade unionist, infamous as the personification of working-class racism. Yet this defender of race-based privilege and staunch Afrikaner nationalist was haunted by a rumour: Paulus, it was whispered, was not actually white. The rumour circulated in reform-era South Africa and persists in the post-apartheid present. By examining the rumour surrounding Paulus’s racial and ethnic origins in terms of the functions it fulfilled within the particular contexts in which it appeared, this article exposes longstanding tensions around the politics of class characterizing Afrikaner society since the 1970s.     

“跑警报”背景下的西南联大教授

1938—1941年间，在日军对昆明的频繁空袭下，“跑警报”成为联大教授日常生活的一部分。为了躲避日军的空袭，西南联大的部分教学研究机构和教授们疏散于昆明城郊各处。同时，日军的频繁空袭严重影响了昆明的物资流通，致使物价飞涨．生活费用大大提高，西南联大的教授们不得不为衣、食、住、行而奔波。在“跑警报”中，联大教授有的从容．有的狼狈；他们或以读书，或以闲聊来消磨躲警报的时间。难能可贵的是，西南联大的教授们竟然从“跑警报”这种在日军空袭下不得已的生存方式里，找到一些生活的乐趣，体会出些许积极意义。     

论高校内迁对西南地区教育近代化的影响

抗战时期高等学校向大后方迁移 ,为西南地区的教育近代化提供了历史性契机 ,它为西南带来了大批高素质的近代教育人才 ,促进了西南地区教育观念、教学方式方法和初、中、高各等教育的发展 ,高校内迁对西南地区教育的影响是深远、巨大而持久的     

Age at first marriage in Malawi: a Bayesian multilevel analysis using a discrete time-to-event model

Summary.  The paper presents a hierarchical discrete time survival model for the analysis of the 2000 Malawi Demographic and Health Survey data to assess the determinants of transition to marriage among women in Malawi. The model explicitly accounts for the unobserved heterogeneity by using family and community random effects with cross-level correlation structure. A nonparametric technique is used to model the base-line discrete hazard dynamically. Parameters of the model are computed by using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. The results show that rising age at marriage is a combination of birth cohort and education effects, depends considerably on the family and to some extent on the community in which a woman resides and the correlation between family and community random effects is negative. These results confirm a downward trend in teenage marriage and that raising women's education levels in sub-Saharan Africa has the beneficial effect of increasing age at marriage, and by implication reducing total fertility rates. The negative correlation between family and community random effects has policy implications in that targeting communities with an intervention to increase age at first marriage may not necessarily yield reduced fertility levels in individual families. A campaign that is geared towards individual families would achieve the desired goals. Overall, the findings point to the need for the Government in Malawi to enact public policies which are geared at vastly improving women's education at higher levels. The variation in marriage rates over families poses problems in delivering the policy, since particular policies must be devised for specific groups of families to accomplish the required social and health objectives.