The Fundamentals of the Portuguese Crisis

This paper analyses the fundamentals of the Portuguese crisis. The financial crisis of 2007 worsened and triggered the current Portuguese crisis. We argue that the main problem that the economy is facing is its output stagnation due to a kind of Dutch disease that has created high and increasing levels of indebtedness, low and decreasing levels of saving and has reduced Portuguese competitiveness. Moreover, the existence of a dualist labour market and a new vague of emigration reproduces inefficiency increasing unemployment of younger workers and the supply of human capital abroad funded by the Portuguese taxpayers. Governance problems such as bad public budget governance, lack of transparency and accountability are also at stake and have to be solved to allow the economy to return to its long-run growth path.Growth, Debt, Saving, Dutch disease, Unemployment, Budget policy

Take the money and run: making profits by paying borrowers to stay home

Can a bank increase its profit by subsidizing inactivity? This paper suggests this may occur, due to the presence of hidden information, in a monopolistic credit market. Rather than offering credit in a pooling contract, a monopolist bank can sort borrowers through an appropriate subsidy to inactivity. Under some conditions, sorting may avoid the collapse of the market and increases the welfare of everybody. The bank increases its profits, good borrowers benefit from lower interest rates and bad potential borrowers from the subsidy. The subsidy policy however implies a cross subsidy between contracts and this is possible only under monopoly

Les sondages moins rigoureux sont-ils moins fiables?

Bill C-83 proposes to regulate the publication of polls and their methodology during electoral campaigns. It would be necessary to determine the type of pertinent methodological information in order to judge the quality of the poll. This article presents results of a study on the relation between methodology used in polls published in Quebec during the May/June 1997 federal electoral campaign and the quality of the estimates of voter intentions. Analysis verifies that, when the methodology used was less rigorous, the spread between the polls and the true voter intentions was larger and less stable even when taking account of errors due to sample size. These results underline the necessity to enforce requirements about the publication of the methodology of the surveys reported during electoral campaigns and of revising Bill C-83 accordingly

Environmental Impact Analysis and Comparative Assessment of the Interurban Passenger Transport Modes

A methodology and results from a com­parative analysis of quantity assessment and evaluation of the interurban passenger transport modes environmental impact are presented in the article. The research is focused on the inter­urban road passenger trips (by busses and by personal vehicles) and the railway trips. Some main relations, origin and destination points of the Bulgarian transport network are examined. The research covers 30 year period – from 2011 to 2041. The assessments include some of the main indicators for the negative environmental impact of the transport. The comparative analysis results are derived using a specially developed assessment model. It estimates the pollutants quantities and social costs from the evaluated transport modes for two scenarios. The first scenario represents the real situation for the transport modes with no future improvements. The second one includes some target values from the European strate­gies and particularly the growth of the railway passenger trips sharecomparative analysis, assessment model, environmental impact, land passenger transport, external effect

Techno-Economic Analysis of Integrating First and Second-Generation Ethanol Production Using Filamentous Fungi: An Industrial Case Study

The 2nd generation plants producing ethanol from lignocelluloses demand risky and high investment costs. This paper presents the energy- and economical evaluations for integrating lignocellulose in current 1st generation dry mill ethanol processes, using filamentous fungi. Dry mills use grains and have mills, liquefactions, saccharifications, fermentation, and distillation to produce ethanol, while their stillage passes centrifugation, and evaporation to recycle the water and dry the cake and evaporated syrup into animal feed. In this work, a bioreactor was considered to cultivate fungi on the stillage either before or after the centrifugation step together with pretreated lignocellulosic wheat bran. The results showed that the integrated 1st and 2nd generation ethanol process requires a capital investment of 77 million USD, which could yield NPV of 162 million USD after 20 years. Compared to the fungal cultivation on thin stillage modified 1st generation process, the integrated process resulted in 53 million USD higher NPV. The energy analysis showed that the thin stillage modified 1st generation process could reduce the overall energy consumption by 2.5% and increase the ethanol production by 4%. Such modifications in the 1st generation processes and integration concepts could be interesting for the ethanol industries, as integrating lignocelluloses to their existing setup requires less capital investment.process design; techno-economic analysis; process integration; lignocelluloses; ethano

Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

This paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method ρκ that extends traditional approaches, and a class of poverty measures Ma that satisfies several desirable properties including decomposability. Our identification step employs two forms of cutoff: one within each dimension and a second across dimensions that identifies the poor by counting their deprivations. We aggregate using Foster-Greer-Thorbecke measures adjusted for multidimensionality. Our adjusted headcount ratio is well suited for use with ordinal data. Examples from Indonesia and the US illustrate our methodology

Human Development: Definitions, Critiques, and Related Concepts

The purpose of this background paper is 1) to synthesize the discussions regarding the concept of human development, so as to inform the 2010 Report’s definition, and 2) drawing on the extensive policy and academic literatures, to propose relationships between the concept of human development and four related concepts: the Millennium Development Goals, Human Rights, Human Security, and Happiness. Inequality, the duration of outcomes across time, and environmental sustainability are also prominent due to their fundamental importance

Beyond Headcount: Measures that Reflect the Breadth and Components of Child Poverty

This paper presents a new approach to child poverty measurement that reflects the breadth and components of child poverty. The Alkire and Foster method presented in this paper seeks to answer the question “who is poor” by considering the intensity of each child’s poverty. Once children are identified as poor, the measures aggregate information on poor children’s deprivations in a way that can be broken down to see where and how children are poor. The resulting measures go beyond the headcount by taking into account the breadth, depth or severity of dimensions of child poverty. The paper illustrates one way to apply this method to child poverty measurement, using Bangladeshi data from four rounds of the Demographic Health Survey covering the period 1997-2007. Results for Bangladesh show that the AF adjusted headcount ratio adds value because it produces a different ranking than the simple headcount, because it also reflects the simultaneous deprivations children experience (intensity). Given this, we argue that child poverty should not be assessed only according to the incidence of poverty but also by the intensity of deprivations that batter poor children’s lives at the same time. The Bangladesh example is used to illustrate how to compute and interpret the child poverty figures, how the final measure can be broken down by groups and by dimensions in order to analyse child poverty, how to interpret changes over time, and how to undertake robustness checks concerning the poverty cut-off

Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis: Chapter 4 - Counting Approaches: Definitions, Origins, and Implementations

The measurement of poverty involves identification: the fundamental step of deciding who is to be considered poor. A “counting approach” is one way to identify the poor in multidimensional poverty measurement, which entails the intuitive procedure of counting the number of dimensions in which people suffer deprivation. Atkinson (2003) advised an engagement between multidimensional measures from social welfare and the counting approaches due to the widespread policy use of the latter. This chapter reviews applications of the counting methods in the history of poverty measurement. We focus on empirical studies since the late ‘70s which developed relatively independently of each other in two regions. In Latin America, applications of the Unsatisfied Basic Needs Approach were widespread, often using census and survey data. European work drew on concepts of social exclusion and inclusion, and now include national and European initiatives