What explains the low survival rate of developing country export flows ?

Successful export growth and diversification require not only entry into new export products and markets, but also the survival and growth of export flows. This paper uses a detailed, cross-country dataset of product level bilateral export flows to illustrate that exporting is an extremely perilous activity and especially so in low-income countries. The authors find that unobserved individual heterogeneity in product-level export flow data prevails despite controlling for a wide range of observed country and product characteristics. This questions previous studies that have used the Cox proportional hazards model to model export survival. The authors estimate a Prentice-Gloeckler model, amended with a gamma mixture distribution summarizing unobserved individual heterogeneity. The empirical results confirm the significance of a range of products as well as country-specific factors in determining the survival of export flows. From a policy perspective, an interesting finding is the importance of learning-by-doing for export survival: experience with exporting the same product to other markets or different products to the same market are found to strongly increase the chance of export survival. A better understanding of such learning effects could substantially improve the effectiveness of export promotion strategies.Economic Theory&Research,Free Trade,Trade Policy,Emerging Markets,Markets and Market Access

Criteria for and Appropriateness of Renal Transplantation in Elderly Patients With End-Stage Renal Disease : A Literature Review and Position Statement on Behalf of the European Renal Association-European Dialysis and Transplant Association Descartes Working Group and European Renal Best Practice

During the last 20 years, waiting lists for renal transplantation (RT) have grown significantly older. However, elderly patients (ie ≥65 years of age) are still more rarely referred or accepted to waiting lists and, if enlisted, have less chances of actually receiving a kidney allograft, than younger counterparts. In this review, we looked at evidence for the benefits and risks of RT in the elderly trying to answer the following questions: Should RT be advocated for elderly patients? What should be the criteria to accept elderly patients on the waiting list for RT? What strategies might be used to increase the rate of RT in waitlisted elderly candidates? For selected elderly patients, RT was shown to be superior to dialysis in terms of patient survival. Virtually all guidelines recommend that patients should not be deemed ineligible for RT based on age alone, although a short life expectancy generally might preclude RT. Concerning the assessment of comorbidities in the elderly, special attention should be paid to cardiac evaluation and screening for malignancy. Comorbidity scores and frailty assessment scales might help the decision making on eligibility. Psychosocial issues should also be evaluated. To overcome the scarcity of organ donors, elderly RT candidates should be encouraged to consider expanded criteria donors and living donors, as alternatives to deceased standard criteria donors. It has been demonstrated that expanded criteria donor RT in patients 60 years or older is associated with higher survival rates than remaining on dialysis, whereas living donor RT is superior to all other options.Peer reviewe

Association of circulating levels of MMP-8 with mortality from respiratory disease in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are implicated in the destruction of the joint and have been shown to be strongly associated with inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Circulating MMPs have also been associated with cardiovascular disease in the general population, and are predictive of cardiovascular mortality. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether circulating levels of MMPs are predictive of mortality in RA

Business Dynamics Statistics: An Overview

Describes new measures of business dynamics at the economy-wide, broad industry, state, firm size, and firm age levels of aggregation. Outlines findings on the effects of business formation on employment growth and churn rates among young businesses

New Methods for Analyzing Structural Models of Labor Force Dynamics

This paper takes a first step toward developing econometric models for the structural analysis of labor force dynamics. Our analysis is presented in continuous time, although most of the points raised here can be applied to discrete time models. We show that in previous attempts to estimate "structural" models of job search, a key source of information necessary to identify certain structural parameters has been neglected. We discuss the conditions under which structural search models can be estimated. In particular, the wage offer distribution must be recoverable -- i.e., it must be the case that the parameters of the untruncated wage offer distribution be estimable from the truncated accepted wage distribution. The wage offer distribution must be assumed to belong to a parametric family. Estimates of structural parameters are shown to be sensitive to the distributional assumption made. A partial equilibrium two state model of employment dynamics is estimated, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men. We find employment and nonemployment rates implied by the structural parameter estimates to be generally consistent with those observed for the population of young males.

Process of transition from school-to-work: generator for the initial stage of path dependence in career development

Main achievements: The major objective of the project was accomplished through building life-table of survival analysis (event history analysis or duration analysis or transition analysis) for describing transitions from school-to-work using longitudinal micro-data. It is important to mention that we built a longitudinal data base, using the ECHP data base for all the 8 waves, with the SPSS program. The discrete model’s approach for this transition is described as the process of entering on the labour market, between two moments/points in time. The observed subjects are viewed as a cohort, a homogenous one. The selective final sample included the people over 16 years old who responded to the interviews in all the 8 waves, within the same household and who achieved the highest level of education one year before 1994. So, the entrance point is 1994 and the exit point is represented by the year of obtaining the main activity status – self defined as "working with an employer in paid employment (15+ hours/week)". There are some intermediary results obtained for 10 countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Germany (ECHP – from national sources), United Kingdom (ECHP – from national sources). Transition process from school-to-work is described as the distribution of time-to-event variables, where the 'event' is considered ‘to be employed’ (in the conditions already specified) in opposition to the state of not experiencing this event. Additionally, we compared the distribution by levels of a factor variable represented by 'gender'/sex and 'the highest level of general or higher education completed' (stated in ISCED levels). The main results of the study are expressed through: Median Survival Time, Cumulative Proportion Surviving at End of Interval, Probability Density, Hazard Rate - for the aggregate sample and also for the selected countries: Italy, Portugal and Spain. Final remarks: The major objective of the project was accomplished through building life-table of survival analysis (event history analysis or duration analysis or transition analysis) for describing transitions from school-to-work using longitudinal micro-data. But, under this destination we encounter a lot of “traps” and “opportunities” in view to answer to a lot of questions. First set of questions is concentrated to a better understanding of the Life Table Main Results, their interpretation and analysis from the labour market perspective. 1.The cumulative proportion surviving at the end of an interval could be a speed of (still) searching or a speed of (no)allocation? 2. Probability density / probability of experiencing the event of entering on work, during the given year interval, could be an indicator of the absorbent power of the labour market for the new entrants? 3. Could we consider the hazard rate as a way to measure the “permeability characteristic” of the “local” labour market? Second set of questions is strongly connected with some visible consequences of the duration measuring and analysis in perspective of shaping of the working life span. The median period of this transition process or the average searching period regarded as a measure of searching duration could be a starting point to determine: 1. The “average age” of entrance on the labour market; 2. Discussion regarding the age borders for the young people’s definition. We consider that our enterprise was concentrated to find new semantics for the main results obtained through Life Table Analysis, useful for better explaining the functioning and the characteristics of the labour markets at different levels (national, local and regional). The idea of the journey from learning-to-know to learning-to-do represents a complex set of interactions between the individual/person/young and: o itself, in the sense of making a lot of choices (intending to get employment under the personal strategy); o the socio-economic environment, regarded in this article particularly as the labour market space (described under the absorptive, permeability and speed of allocation characteristics for the new entrants); o unknown, in the sense of the efficient utilisation of all the resources under the new circumstances … We tried to answer the questions and present our study results in this paper. For the moment: “that’s it”, even if the various analyses could continue and we suppose having made misinterpretations/inaccuracies/mistakes; we are expecting readers’ comments in order to correct them. The only reliable conclusion is that the Life Table Analysis could represent a useful tool/instrument to better understand and explain the differences in functioning and for better shaping the characteristics of the labour markets.Demand and Supply of Labo ; Labour Force and Employme ; Time Allocation and Labou ; Labour Demand ; Human Capital; Skills; Oc