Australia and the Global South: Knowledge and the Ambiguities of Place and Identity

Australia was settled as a colony of Britain from the 17th century, and its early history of violent occupation has gradually given way to a relatively peaceful, wealthy, multicultural society. As a post-colonial country, its people share characteristics with those of Britain, but, as a multicultural society, national identity is increasingly influenced by the cultures of many countries, from both the global North and South. In this paper, the question of Australia's placement as a country of the global North or South is explored. Considerations of geography, the economy, political regimes and national identity are the backdrop to an investigation of Australian scholarship and the attitudes of scholars to the inclusion of Australia as a country of the global South.     

The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty

Many authors have insisted on the necessity of defining poverty as a multidimensional concept rather than relying on income or consumption expenditures per capita. Yet, not much has actually been done to include the various dimensions of deprivation into the practical definition and measurement of poverty. Existing attempts along that direction consist of aggregating various attributes into a single index through some arbitrary function and defining a poverty line and associated poverty measures on the basis of that index. This is merely redefining more generally the concept of poverty, which then essentially remains a one dimensional concept. The present paper suggests that an alternative way to take into account the multi-dimensionality of poverty is to specify a poverty line for each dimension of poverty and to consider that a person is poor if he/she falls below at least one of these various lines. The paper then explores how to combine these various poverty lines and associated one-dimensional gaps into multidimensional poverty measures. An application of these measures to the rural population in Brazil is also given with poverty defined on income and education.     

What to Do at Low Doses: A Bounding Approach for Economic Analysis

To quantify the health benefits of environmental policies, economists generally require estimates of the reduced probability of illness or death. For policies that reduce exposure to carcinogenic substances, these estimates traditionally have been obtained through the linear extrapolation of experimental dose-response data to low-exposure scenarios as described in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment (1986). In response to evolving scientific knowledge, EPA proposed revisions to the guidelines in 1996. Under the proposed revisions, dose-response relationships would not be estimated for carcinogens thought to exhibit nonlinear modes of action. Such a change in cancer-risk assessment methods and outputs will likely have serious consequences for how benefit-cost analyses of policies aimed at reducing cancer risks are conducted. Any tendency for reduced quantification of effects in environmental risk assessments, such as those contemplated in the revisions to EPA's cancer-risk assessment guidelines, impedes the ability of economic analysts to respond to increasing calls for benefit-cost analysis. This article examines the implications for benefit-cost analysis of carcinogenic exposures of the proposed changes to the 1986 Guidelines and proposes an approach for bounding dose-response relationships when no biologically based models are available. In spite of the more limited quantitative information provided in a carcinogen risk assessment under the proposed revisions to the guidelines, we argue that reasonable bounds on dose-response relationships can be estimated for low-level exposures to nonlinear carcinogens. This approach yields estimates of reduced illness for use in a benefit-cost analysis while incorporating evidence of nonlinearities in the dose-response relationship. As an illustration, the bounding approach is applied to the case of chloroform exposure.     

Assessing reoffense risk with juvenile sexual offenders

This article summarizes a two-year study of juvenile sexual offenders in Washington. Both community-based and institution-based treatment programs were evaluated. A typical profile of the juvenile sexual offender is offered, as well as recidivism data from a mean 20-month follow-up period.     

Valuation of childhood risk reduction: the importance of age, risk preferences, and perspective.

This article explores two problems analysts face in determining how to estimate values for children's health and safety risk reductions. The first addresses the question: Do willingness‐to‐pay estimates for health risk changes differ across children and adults and, if so, how? To answer this question, the article first examines the potential effects of age and risk preferences on willingness to pay. A summary of the literature reporting empirical evidence of differences between willingness to pay for adult health and safety risk reductions and willingness to pay for health and safety risk reductions in children is also provided. The second dimension of the problem is a more fundamental issue: Whose perspective is relevant when valuing children's health effects—society's, children's, adults‐as‐children, or parents'? Each perspective is considered, followed ultimately by the conclusion that adopting a parental perspective through an intrahousehold allocation model seems closest to meeting the needs of the estimation problem at hand. A policy example in which the choice of perspective affects the outcome of a regulatory benefit‐cost analysis rounds out the article and emphasizes the importance of perspective.     

The transition to parenthood in Puerto Rico: Occupational status and the timing of first births

This study examines the relationship between occupational status and fertility timing during a period of rapid development in Puerto Rico. Our fundamental hypothesis is that women with higher status occupations face greater opportunity costs than those with less valued jobs and therefore will be more likely to postpone parenthood until later ages than women without such high costs. We test this hypothesis using event history techniques with data from the 1982 Puerto Rico Fertility and Family Planning Assessment, an island-wide survey of women between the ages of 15 and 49. The analysis examines the effects of occupational status on the timing of first births, and finds strong support for the basic hypothesis, especially regarding the post-ponement of teen births. After the teen years, the effects are less pronounced. Overall, it appears that employment opportunities have played an important role in childbearing decisions in Puerto Rico.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, Denver, Colorado, 30 April–2 May 1992.     

English Language Proficiency of Immigrants and Refugees in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area

Studies of the determinants of English language ability have generally focused on the largest immigrant groups in the United States. Much less is known about smaller, but significant regional concentrations of immigrants and refugees. This article presents data on four very distinct and understudied groups: Russians, Somalis, Hmong, and Mexicans in the Midwest. We found large differences in English language proficiency across the different national origin groups, even after controlling for background variables. These differences were not attributable to refugee status or to linguistic distance from English. Being Somali, migrating to the United States at a young age and having a college diploma were the best predictors of both spoken and written proficiency. The returns to higher education were particularly noteworthy — respondents with college diplomas were more than 29 times more likely than non‐high school graduates to speak English well, and more than 20 times as likely to read well. Women appear to have benefited more than men from completing college in terms of spoken English proficiency since the male‐female gap narrows among the highly educated. Length of time in the United States was a good predictor of whether an individual speaks English at home, regardless of age of entry to the country.     

The Development of Affect Specificity in Infants' Use of Emotion Cues

This study examined the emergence of affect specificity in infancy. In this study, infants received verbal and facial signals of 2 different, negatively valenced emotions (fear and sadness) as well as neutral affect via a television monitor to determine if they could make qualitative distinctions among emotions of the same valence. Twenty 12‐ to 14‐month‐olds and 20 16‐ to 18‐month‐olds were examined. Results suggested that younger infants showed no evidence of referential specificity, as they responded similarly to both the target and distracter toys, and showed no evidence of affect specificity, showing no difference in play between affect conditions. Older infants, in contrast, showed evidence both of referential and affect specificity. With respect to affect specificity, 16‐ to 18‐month‐olds touched the target toy less in the fear condition than in the sad condition and showed a larger proportion of negative facial expressions in the sad condition versus the fear condition. These findings suggest a developmental emergence after 15 months of age for affect specificity in relating emotional messages to objects.     

A bayesian estimator for the dependence function of a bivariate extreme‐value distribution

Any continuous bivariate distribution can be expressed in terms of its margins and a unique copula. In the case of extreme‐value distributions, the copula is characterized by a dependence function while each margin depends on three parameters. The authors propose a Bayesian approach for the simultaneous estimation of the dependence function and the parameters defining the margins. They describe a nonparametric model for the dependence function and a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for the computation of the Bayesian estimator. They show through simulations that their estimator has a smaller mean integrated squared error than classical nonparametric estimators, especially in small samples. They illustrate their approach on a hydrological data set.