Has the rise in globalization reduced U.S. inflation in the 1990s?

This article investigates whether increased globalization of the U.S. economy has helped hold down inflation in the 1990s. Based on several measures, we find that globalization has increased. Further, we find that import prices exert a greater impact on prices of products in industries faced with greater import penetration. High foreign excess capacity accounts for much of the recent decline in U.S. inflation. Our results suggest that the decline in inflation is explained by the interaction of increased globalization and high excess foreign capacity. Globalization by itself does not lead to less inflation, just greater sensitivity to foreign economic conditions.     

Learning Global Social Conditions: A Broader View for Social Work Students

Today, students are increasingly interested in global issues. To meet this need, social work education must find models to incorporate international content into social work curriculum. This article presents a pedagogical experience to familiarize social work students with comparative social welfare from a global perspective. In a graduate seminar, students utilized data from the United Nations and the World Bank to examine social conditions in different parts of the world in order to gain a broader view of global social conditions. The result was a compilation of profiles highlighting the social conditions of developing countries across different regions of the globe. Furthermore, based on students’ feedback, the benefits of doing such comparative study and the implications for internationalizing social work curriculum are discussed.     

Reports of Conferences, Institutes, and Seminars

The Scholarly Communication Interest Group of the New England Chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries sponsored a workshop titled “Partnering with Faculty: Scholarly Communication Conversations,” held on July 29, 2010, at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts. Partnering with EBSCO and the North American Serials Interest Group, Mississippi State University (MSU) Libraries hosted the ninth MidSouth eResource Symposium at MSU's Mitchell Memorial Library in Starkville, Mississippi, on Thursday, September 16, 2010. ITHAKA Sustainable Scholarship was a two-day meeting at the Westin Times Square, New York City, September 27-28, 2010. Finally, published herein is a summary of the NISO Webinar “It's Only as Good as the Metadata: Improving OpenURL and Knowledge Base Quality,” held October 13, 2010.     

Competition and privatization amidst weak institutions: evidence from Mongolia

Mongolia's mass privatization program was implanted in a country that lacked the very basic institutions of capitalism. This paper examines the effects of competition and ownership on the efficiency of the newly privatized enterprises, using a representative sample of enterprises and controlling for possible selection biases. Competition has quantitatively large effects; perfectly competitive firms having nearly double the efficiency of monopolies. Enterprises with residual state ownership appear to be more efficient than other enterprises, reflecting an environment where the government was pressured to focus on efficiency and institutions gave little voice to outsider owners.