'For England and For Christ': The Gospel of Liberation and Subordination in Early Nineteenth Century Southern Africa

Abstract This paper argues that British evangelical missions in the early nineteenth century provided a cultural site for the building of national imaginings. Just as success in proselytizing confirmed the self-knowledge of salvation for individuals, so missionary enterprise demonstrated divine favour toward the nation. It is suggested that the mythological language of national self identity, elaborated by missionaries to South Africa, enabled, and even required, the projection of images of African inferiority. The implication is that the language of racial stereotyping and domination in nineteenth century South Africa was not simply an expression of competing claims to land and labour.     

THE WELFARE COSTS OF DEFICIT FINANCE

We analyze the welfare consequences of deficit finance in a general equilibrium model fit to the US. economy. Current spending may be financed with current and/or future distortionary taxes. The economy is open to international capital flows. The welfare costs of financing marginal current spending are substantial and are sensitive to the timing of the required taxes; postponing a tax on labor income is advantageous but postponing a tax on asset income is not. Ricardian equivalence poorly approximates the economy we consider.     

BANK RESERVE REQUIREMENTS AS AN IMPEDIMENT TO SIGNALING

Effective legal reserve requirements may hamper the private capital market's ability to price bank deposits. In the model developed here, the market has less information about bank assets than the banks have, and a bank can therefore signal its superior information through its choice of excess reserves. Mandatory reserves can inhibit such signaling and therefore result in inefficient deposit pricing.     

TAXATION, GOVERNMENT SPENDING, AND LABOR SUPPLY A DIAGRAMMATIC EXPOSITION

The effects of a change in the level of taxation on labor supply are examined under the assumption that the government budget balances. The government spends tax revenues either on redistributions (which are assumed to have an income effect on labor supply) or on other government goods (which are assumed not to influence labor supply). In order for a rise in the tax rate to increase the quantity of labor supplied, it must be that (i) the labor-supply function bends backward, and (ii) sufficiently little of the increased tax revenues are redistributed. The quantity of labor supplied must fall if all marginal tax revenues are redistributed.     

Inference for circular distributions and processes

One approach to defining models for circular data and processes has been to take a standard Euclidean model and to wrap it around the circle. This generates rich families of circular models but creates difficulties for inference. Using data augmentation ideas which have previously been applied to this problem in the framework of an EM algorithm, we demonstrate the power and flexibility of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to fit such classes of models to circular data. The precision of the technique is confirmed through simulated examples, and then applications are given to multivariate and time series data of wind directions.