Philippine NGOs and Multistakeholder Partnerships: Three Case Studies

This paper discusses an emerging role for Philippine NGOs—building and maintaining intersectoral cooperation among various sectors of society to tackle key issues like agricultural development, HIV/AIDS, and agrarian reform. The three case studies elaborated in the paper show that Philippine NGOs play important intermediary and bridging functions crucial for the success of multistakeholder partnerships. NGOs are well equipped for this because of their middle-class and professional nature and because of various characteristics like autonomy, flexibility, and the ability to mobilize resources.     

Optimal sampling for repeated binary measurements

The authors consider the optimal design of sampling schedules for binary sequence data. They propose an approach which allows a variety of goals to be reflected in the utility function by including deterministic sampling cost, a term related to prediction, and if relevant, a term related to learning about a treatment effect To this end, they use a nonparametric probability model relying on a minimal number of assumptions. They show how their assumption of partial exchangeability for the binary sequence of data allows the sampling distribution to be written as a mixture of homogeneous Markov chains of order k. The implementation follows the approach of Quintana & Müller (2004), which uses a Dirichlet process prior for the mixture.     

ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF THE TIMING OF PREFERENTIAL TRADE AGREEMENT FORMATIONS AND ENLARGEMENTS

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have proliferated over the past 60 years. While a small number of recent studies have examined empirically the economic determinants of the likelihood of a pair of countries having a PTA, this study explains empirically the timing of all PTA formations and enlargements from 1950 through 2006 using duration analysis. Our main and novel goal is to predict (in‐ and out‐of‐sample) a substantive share of these 1,560 PTA events using a parsimonious model with mainly economic variables, taking selection dynamics into account. Our analysis reveals that we can predict correctly in‐sample the actual year of entry into force for 26% of the 1,560 bilateral PTA formations/enlargements in the period 1950–2006 among 10,518 pairings of 146 countries using only a few economic and political variables. Moreover, we can predict correctly in‐sample 57% of these PTA events within a 10‐year window leading up to the event using this model. The model also performs well out‐of‐sample for the near term (82%), but not if the out‐of‐sample period is very long. We conclude with an evaluation of the model's ability to predict the timing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union's formation and enlargements, and the model's ten most likely post‐2006 PTA events. (JEL F14, F15)     

Learning Life Skills Through Challenging and Negative Experiences

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal - Youth who are socially vulnerable are disproportionately confronted with culminating risk factors that impact their everyday lives. Within positive youth...     

Farmers' Contribution to Agricultural Social Capital: Evidence from Southern Spain

Social capital is the whole set of shared norms, values, attitudes, and beliefs that promote cooperation among individuals within the community and that has proved to be a key factor in explaining development processes. This article aims to provide an analytically reliable notion of social capital within the farming sector and a methodological tool for empirically measuring how social capital is accumulated at the farmer level. The theoretical framework proposed is based on the multidimensionality of the complex concept of social capital. Thus, to develop a comprehensive index for social capital, we identify three dimensions of the concept, structural, relational, and cognitive social capital, each one also comprising several subdimensions. This integrative approach permits creation of a composite indicator of the agricultural social capital accumulated at the farmer level, further identifying socioeconomic factors that influence its accumulation at that level. We empirically apply this methodological approach to farmers in Andalusia in southern Spain as a case study. This research provides an interesting starting point for informing policymakers about social capital and helping them implement the necessary programs to facilitate sustainable development in the agricultural sector.     

The Multidimensionality of Child Poverty: Evidence from Afghanistan

This paper examines multidimensional poverty among children in Afghanistan using the Alkire-Foster method. Several previous studies have underlined the need to separate children from their adult nexus when studying poverty and treat them according to their own specificities. From the capability approach, child poverty is understood to be the lack of freedom to do and to be what children themselves value and have reason to value. The case of Afghanistan is particularly relevant as years of conflict aggravated by several severe droughts, political insecurity, bad governance and ongoing violence have significantly increased poverty in the country. The paper discusses the relevant dimensions when analysing child poverty and uses data from a survey carried out by Handicap International which contains information on dimensions of children’s wellbeing that is typically missing in standard surveys. Ten dimension are considered in this paper: health, care and love, material deprivation, food security, social inclusion, education, freedom from economic and non-economic exploitation, shelter and environment, autonomy, and mobility. Our results show that younger children, those living in rural areas, girls and disabled children are the most deprived.     

A Diagnostic Test for Normality Within the Power Exponential Family

This article develops the locally uniformly most powerful unbiased Lagrange multiplier test of normality of regression disturbances within the family of power exponential distributions. The small sample power properties of the test are compared in a Monte Carlo study with 6 well-known tests across 12 alternative nonnormal distributions. In addition, the finite sample power properties for nonnormal alternatives within the power exponential family are summarized by estimating response surfaces. The results suggest that the proposed text is computationally convenient and possesses relatively attractive power properties even against alternatives outside the power exponential family.     

What Survey Data Reveal about Price and Wage Rigidity in Portugal

This paper exploits the information collected from a survey conducted on a sample of Portuguese firms to study the patterns of firms’ price and wage adjustments and the extent of nominal price and wage rigidities. The evidence shows that the frequency of price changes varies substantially across sectors and depends on the intensity of competition, the share of labor costs and firms’ price reviewing behavior. The results also suggest that the constraint imposed by the presence of downward nominal wage rigidity is less important in firms where the fraction of permanent and high‐skilled workers is lower and the share of flexible pay components is higher.     

Short-Term GDP Forecasting With a Mixed-Frequency Dynamic Factor Model With Stochastic Volatility

In this article, we develop a mixed frequency dynamic factor model in which the disturbances of both the latent common factor and of the idiosyncratic components have time-varying stochastic volatilities. We use the model to investigate business cycle dynamics in the euro area and present three sets of empirical results. First, we evaluate the impact of macroeconomic releases on point and density forecast accuracy and on the width of forecast intervals. Second, we show how our setup allows to make a probabilistic assessment of the contribution of releases to forecast revisions. Third, we examine point and density out of sample forecast accuracy. We find that introducing stochastic volatility in the model contributes to an improvement in both point and density forecast accuracy. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.