Fertility and Financial Development in South Asia

The paper empirically examines old-age security hypothesis to explain fertility rates in South Asia. Panel data is used for the period 1972–2013 for seven South Asian countries which include Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The estimated results reveal that in South Asia fertility rate decreases with the increase in financial development. Thus, the findings support old-age security hypothesis that parents use children as financial instruments to secure their old age. This paper validates the theory that the availability of alternative financial tools reduces the incentives of households to have large offspring. Infant mortality is also shown an important factor for high fertility rate in South Asia. This implies that households cover their risk from losing children by producing more children. The results also reveal that fertility rate decreases with the increase in per capita income, which implies that households treat children as inferior good in this region. In other words, households prefer quality of children over quantity of children when their income level increases. The results have also shown that fertility decreases with the increase in education, urbanization, agriculture productivity and industrialization. The study has some important policy implications.     

Understanding the Alternative Globalisation Movement

Resistance to neo‐liberalism had been gathering pace for sometime before it crystallised into the alternative globalisation movement (AGM) in 1999 at the Third Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, WA, USA. Since then, many more protests have ensued in cities around the globe against the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G8. The emergence of this phenomenon has precipitated new research and debates for social movement studies and social sciences generally. This paper critically reviews some of the new academic perspectives on the AGM including, post‐structuralist anarchist, autonomist, complexity theorisations, as well as new applications of older social movement theories such as the political process approach and new social movement theory. The paper explains the emergence and establishment of the World Social Forum (WSF) and the theoretical and practical difficulties of a charter which suggests such an inclusive an open ended rubric. Finally, the paper concludes by arguing that further research on the tensions within the WSF and the AGM is required if an answer is to be provided to the question: Is another World Possible?     

Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain

Forest struggles and movements in India were a part of the rich tradition of anti-colonial struggle. In North Bengal, the recorded history of forest movements dates back to the 1960s and the movements themselves have been continuous ever since. However, despite the sincere efforts of those movements the livelihood opportunities of the forest dwellers worsened daily. The 1972 Wildlife Act together with the 1980 Forest Conservation Act strengthened further the oppressive structure of the forest bureaucracy. After the introduction of the Joint Forest Management Programme in the 1990s backed by the 1988 Forest Policy in India, it was expected that the forest dwellers would become more empowered economically and socially in lieu of their participation in the forest protection activities. But this failed miserably in the region and in 2000, against such a backdrop, a movement was started to demand land and livelihood rights for the forest dwellers. Following the Notification of the Forest Rights Act (2006) the movement has gained a new momentum while continuing its struggle against the biased implementation of the Act. This article presents a brief account of the movement in order to assess its significance and changing focuses over the years.     

Between Revolution and Defeat: Student Protest Cycles and Networks

This article reviews the literature on student protest movements, during and after the mass mobilisations of the 1960s. It considers the usefulness of the major social movement frameworks that have been applied to student protest movements. The first part of the article explains how the new social movement paradigm developed from the wave of 1960s protests in the United States and Europe. This was because of a rare conjunction of social and political structural societal changes and dynamics within the student population. The second part considers student protest movements in authoritarian regimes. In particular, how the political process approach allows for an analysis of student protests after the 1960s within and outside of the occident. The third considers the relatively recent application of social network analysis to student protests and the politicising effect of the university campus. Finally, the article concludes by arguing that student protest movements are not a homogenous phenomenon. Their dynamics and the political structures they challenge vary between countries. Furthermore, although the conditions of student life and the rapid turnover of generations suggest sustained long-term political activity is not possible, recent research drawing upon social network analysis suggests political activity across student generations may be maintained.     

Trade-off between cost and variance for a multi-objective compromise allocation in stratified random sampling

In the present paper, a multi-objective goal optimization mechanism is developed by trading off between cost and variance. Both are adversaries to each other while allocating a sample size even in stratified sampling design. Discussion section shows how these adversaries put their influence on optimal selection. This is a dual optimization procedure in which variance or mean square error is optimized in the first step and then considering some compromise on variance, cost is optimized. The process is applied to both individual and multi-objective programming models.     

《突厥语大词典》等文献中的粟特语借词

本文以历史上的文化接触为背景,对《突厥语大词典》等文献中的粟特语借词进行考证。