Remittances from labor migration: evaluations,performance and implications

2 evaluative views of worker remittances draw opposite conclusions. The negative one posits that remittances increase dependency, contribute to economic and political stability and development distortion, and lead to economic decline that overshadows a temporary advantage for a fortunate few. The positive view sees remittances as an effective response to market forces, providing a transition to an otherwise unsustainable development. They improve income distribution and quality of life beyond what other available development resources could deliver. The implications are tested for labor supply countries to Europe and the Middle East. The implications of the negative are not supported. Although the dire predictions of the pessimistic view have not materialized, the converse - contributions of remittances to economic performance - should not be overstated due to a lack of data.     

Urban Aboriginal use of fringe financial institutions: Survey evidence from Prince George, British Columbia

This paper analyses the use of fringe financial institutions (FFIs), such as payday loan and check cashing providers, by urban Aboriginal people based on a survey undertaken in Prince George, British Columbia. We found that 60% of FFIs’ clients surveyed self-identified as Aboriginal. Their characteristics, compared to the non-Aboriginal FFI clients, included having lower average incomes, lower levels of education, more likely to be female, a higher incidence of being unemployed, higher levels of financial exclusion, and less satisfaction with the service provided by FFIs. We find that government policy towards regulating the FFI industry is inadequate for meeting the basic financial needs of urban Aboriginal people.     

Return of talent programs: rationale and evaluation criteria for programs to ameliorate a 'brain drain'

The term, brain drain, describes the loss of skilled professionals and the nonreturn of students from advanced study abroad. It is now used almost exclusively in reference to mobility from less developed countries to more developed countries. Controversy centers on whether needed skills are being drawn off unfairly at subsidized rates from developing to developed countries or whether excess capability is being utilized in developed countries rather than underemployed or wasted at home. Some causes of high level personnel migration include: 1) wage differentials between sending and receiving countries; 2) absence of opportunities for career development or mobility for reasons other than merit or accomplishment; 3) lack of high quality facilities, equipment, time, and other costly supports in developing countries; 4) employer's lack of knowledge of employee work and the resulting wages; and 5) political disagreement or persecution. Prospects for closing wage gaps and upgrading working conditions on a large scale in developing countries are dim. Growth of the labor force coupled with national needs that are not congruent with professions requiring costly facilities, supplies, and equipment make this a slim possibility. Increasing career mobility possibilities seems to be a more promising route to reducing brain drain. One form of preventive measure is offering study abroad which requires service at the end of the study period; a variation is to guarantee employment for university graduates or for certain sectors, such as scientists. Restructuring decisions on hiring and promotion would have a positive effect, as would developing a better evaluation of expected productivity by type of training. Successful return of talent programs will be relatively modest in terms of the number of people returning and should be thought of as a part of human capital investment. Programs that are concerned with filling positions rather than with luring talent home are more likely to be efficient. The employing agency should be involved and should have some flexibility in negotiation with employment candidates to curb the unnecessary use of resources. In summary, return of talent programs should be used as a tool for development that reduces the incentives for nonreturn from training of for emigration by experienced professionals, not as a brain drain cure.     

When Birds of a Feather Don't Flock Together: A Macrostructural Approach to Interracial Crime

The greater prevalence of intraracial crime to interracial crime is a common finding in criminology. This issue is best understood when specific crimes are studied from a proper theoretical basis. We argue that variation in rates of cross‐racial crime is explained by homophily bias, reflected in residential segregation, in conjunction with the motivational mindset of an offender, specifically whether a crime is instrumental or expressive in nature. We hypothesize that homophily bias is stronger in expressive crimes than it is in instrumental crimes. Using the National Incident‐Based Reporting System (NIBRS) for 2009 and 2010, we analyze robbery and aggravated assault as instrumental and expressive crimes, respectively. The analyses show that racial residential segregation increases, as expected, the relative frequency of black intraracial assault to black interracial assault, whereas it does not affect the relative frequency in robbery. Contrary to our hypothesis, however, the same variable shows little effect on the relative frequency of white intraracial to interracial assault. We give possible explanations as to why white crimes are insensitive to residential segregation.     

Sizing Inventory When Lead Time and Demand are Correlated

Determining appropriate inventory levels has been a subject of interest for both researchers and practitioners. Standard practice is to treat lead time demand as a random sum of random numbers and rely on established probability theory to calculate both reorder point and safety stock levels. A key assumption in these calculations, however, is that lead time and demand are not correlated. In this paper, we first explore situations where this assumption is untrue and then develop equations to determine the reorder point and the safety stock when lead time and demand are correlated. More specifically, we (1) derive formulas for the average and variance of the demand in a lead time, which can then be used to calculate the reorder point and the safety stock, (2) apply these formulas to two distributions for which there is a closed‐form solution: normal and Poisson, and (3) examine the effect of correlation on safety stock requirements under the normal distribution.