Community-based household waste management: Lessons learnt from EXNORA's ‘zero waste management’ scheme in two South Indian cities

This paper presents two case studies on the efforts by a community-based organisation to promote a sustainable integrated waste management system in Indian mega cities. This effort was initiated in 1989 by a local non-governmental organisation (NGO) called EXNORA and is based on a ‘zero waste management scheme’ set up, run and financed by the residents themselves. As this model has been widely quoted as successful, the study aims at learning from two communities implementing this model.Results are reported from a survey of the two schemes that used various tools to assess both their performance and sustainability in selected residential areas of two Indian cities, Chennai and Hyderabad. The results indicate limited success of the schemes both in saving a significant fraction of the generated waste from dumping, and in rehabilitating the local poor. However, they show that motivated individuals can successfully set up and manage waste collection systems that lead to overall environmental improvements. The differences in the two schemes reflect how the local assets and contexts impact on the success of the scheme. The scheme in a rich neighbourhood of Hyderabad was less ambitious in its overall objectives and focussed on the provision of a waste management service, using the opportunity to provide local employment to a socially deprived fraction of the population. The scheme in a middle-class area of Chennai, although pioneering in its approach, suffered from diseconomies of scale and lack of social integration, making it less viable in the medium to long term. Both schemes suffered from a lack of community involvement, motivation and political support, which threatens the long-term sustainability of the enterprise. The research concludes that the role that communities can realistically play in management of their own waste depends on the local context. The system advocated by EXNORA seems to require significant local resources, and political and technical support which are hard to find and sustain without strong local leaders. Another model set up in the city of Visakhapatnam is finally introduced as an alternative. This is based on triangular contracts between the municipality, the residents and micro-enterprises and may provide a good solution in dealing with the technical and commercial aspects which communities find difficult.     

In-Sample Inference and Forecasting in Misspecified Factor Models

This article considers in-sample prediction and out-of-sample forecasting in regressions with many exogenous predictors. We consider four dimension-reduction devices: principal components, ridge, Landweber Fridman, and partial least squares. We derive rates of convergence for two representative models: an ill-posed model and an approximate factor model. The theory is developed for a large cross-section and a large time-series. As all these methods depend on a tuning parameter to be selected, we also propose data-driven selection methods based on cross-validation and establish their optimality. Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical application to forecasting inflation and output growth in the U.S. show that data-reduction methods outperform conventional methods in several relevant settings, and might effectively guard against instabilities in predictors’ forecasting ability.     

Life satisfaction in subjects with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

OBJECTIVES: To examine the levels of life satisfaction for patients with chronic obstructive disease (COPD) and to explore the relationships between life satisfaction, lung function, walking distance test/exercise capacity and quality of life. STUDY DESIGN: The population comprised 91 patients with COPD, 28 patients with COPD using long term oxygen therapy (LTOT) and a reference group (R) of 150 healthy individuals. Before the study, a number of the COPD patients had been tested with regard to spirometry, walking distance and quality of life using the Chronic Respiratory Disease Questionnaire (CRQ). All subjects filled in an eight-item checklist on levels of life satisfaction. RESULTS: Significantly lower levels of satisfaction were reported by both patient groups than the R group for satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction derived from vocational/occupational situation, sexual life and ADL, and by the LTOT group, furthermore, also with family life. Only 10% of the patients were satisfied with their health. The LTOT group reported significantly lower levels of satisfaction than the COPD group for life as a whole, satisfaction with their vocational/occupational situation, leisure, ADL situation and their satisfaction with family life and partnership relation. Factor analyses demonstrated different patterns between the R group and the patient group. No correlation was found between satisfaction with life as a whole and lung function parameters whereas three of the CRQ dimensions; emotional function, fatigue and mastery correlateded significicantly with satisfaction with life as a whole and several of the domains. No relationships was found between satisfaction with life as a whole or any of the domains and the CRQ dimension dyspnea. CONCLUSIONS: The low levels of satisfaction with life as a whole, in addition to low levels of satisfaction with several domains, indicate that the majority of the patients had not managed to cope successfully with the consequences of their impairment. More attention must, thus, be given to these patients in the rehabilitation work.     

Efficient Estimation with Many Weak Instruments Using Regularization Techniques

The problem of weak instruments is due to a very small concentration parameter. To boost the concentration parameter, we propose to increase the number of instruments to a large number or even up to a continuum. However, in finite samples, the inclusion of an excessive number of moments may be harmful. To address this issue, we use regularization techniques as in Carrasco (2012) and Carrasco and Tchuente (2014). We show that normalized regularized two-stage least squares (2SLS) and limited maximum likelihood (LIML) are consistent and asymptotically normally distributed. Moreover, our estimators are asymptotically more efficient than most competing estimators. Our simulations show that the leading regularized estimators (LF and T of LIML) work very well (are nearly median unbiased) even in the case of relatively weak instruments. An application to the effect of institutions on output growth completes the article.     

DEVELOPMENTAL ASPECTS OF THE COTHERAPY RELATIONSHIP*

Cotherapy has become an accepted albeit sometimes controversial approach to group and family therapy. Though many differing views of cotherapy have been expressed, most authors have emphasized the need for a cooperative, open and flexible relationship between cotherapists as being essential to facilitating growth for clients. In this paper, a model for the understanding of the development of the cotherapy relationship is proposed. Both developmental fixations and modes for enhancement of this relationship are discussed with particular reference to family therapy.