ECONOMIC BOOM, FINANCIAL BUST, AND THE FATE OF THAI AGRICULTURE: WAS GROWTH IN THE 1990S TOO FAST?

Thailand's economic boom since 1987 resulted in absolute agricultural employment and land use declines. Both were caused by rapid wage growth due to nonagricultural investment. Irreversible land use changes and rapid agricultural mechanization have followed. Following the 1987 financial crisis, agriculture may no longer be able to absorb excess labor or dramatically increase output as in the past.Labor and Human Capital, Land Economics/Use, Productivity Analysis,

Evaluating lists of high-frequency words: Teachers’ and learners’ perspectives

With a number of word lists available for teachers to choose from, teachers and students need to know which list provides the best return for learning? Four well-established lists were compared and it was found that BNC/COCA2000 (British National Corpus / Corpus of Contemporary American English 2000) and the New General Service List (New-GSL) provided the greatest lexical coverage in spoken and written corpora. The present study further compared these two lists using teacher perceptions of word usefulness and learner vocabulary knowledge as the criteria. First, 78 experienced teachers of English as a second language / English as a foreign language (ESL/EFL) rated the usefulness of 973 non-overlapping items between the two lists for their learners. Second, 135 Vietnamese EFL learners completed 15 yes/no tests which measured their knowledge of the same 973 words. Teachers perceived that the BNC/COCA2000 had more useful words. Items in this list were also better known by the learners. This suggests that the BNC/COCA2000 is the more useful high-frequency wordlist for second language (L2) learners

Technical progress in agriculture, income distribution and economic policy : the Philippines, 1950-80

Successive Philippine governments since world war II have pursued a development strategy predicated upon industrial growth. Through such policy instruments as exchange rate overvaluation, tariffs on imports of consumer goods, and export taxes on agriculture, capital has been directed into industry - and especially the manufacturing sector - both from abroad and from out of agriculture. The growth of the protected industrial sector has been achieved at the cost of periodic trade balance crises, and a persistent maldistribution of income between rural households (which are largely dependent on agriculture) and their urban counterparts. Within the agricultural sector, public investment, subsidies, credit programs, research and extension have been focused on food crop producers in the most favourable (irrigated) agricultural areas, especially those in the Manila hinterland regions of Central Luzon and Southern Tagalog. Agricultural producers in less well developed regions have been doubly taxed: once by the economy-wide bias against agriculture, and a second time relative to other agricultural producers by the "irrigation bias" of public spending on agricultural development. A faster rate of technical progress in the areas favoured with better quality land endowments and public policy support has further disadvantaged producers in other agricultural areas by driving down real product prices and raising the real prices of mobile factors. Empirical partial equilibrium analyses of the distributional effects of new technologies have failed to capture these indirect costs of technological innovation. In this thesis a simple Johansen-style general equilibrium model is developed for the analysis of changes in prices and technology in stylised well-irrigated and poorlyirrigated agricultural environments. The model’s parameters of agricultural factor demand, supply response and technical change are estimated from Philippine data. Hypothetical and empirically measured technical change shocks are applied to the model. In this way the ceteris paribus effects of technical progress are assessed for their impact on wages, sectoral employment and factor intensity, and the functional and household distributions of income

The Academic Spoken Word List

The linguistic features of academic spoken English are different from those of academic written English. Therefore, for this study, an Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) was developed and validated to help second language (L2) learners enhance their comprehension of academic speech in English‐medium universities. The ASWL contains 1,741 word families with high frequency and wide range in an academic spoken corpus totaling 13 million words. The list, which features vocabulary from 24 subjects across four equally sized disciplinary subcorpora, is graded into four levels according to Nation's British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English lists, and each level is divided into sublists of function words and lexical words. Depending on their vocabulary levels, language learners may reach 92–96% coverage of academic speech with the aid of the ASWL

Social capital and soil conservation: Evidence from the Philippines

The formation of social capital is hypothesised to enhance collective efforts for soil conservation. The Landcare Program in the Southern Philippines promotes simple conservation practices in upland environments by supporting community landcare groups and municipal landcare associations, thus augmenting social capital. A study was conducted in 2002 to evaluate the Landcare Program, using a mix of quantitative and qualitative techniques. In this paper the relationship between social capital formation and adoption of soil conservation is investigated. It is concluded that, although membership in a local landcare group was not a major factor in adoption, the Landcare Program as a whole created a valuable stock of bridging social capital, with significant benefits for long-term natural resource management

The Effect of Content Retelling on Vocabulary Uptake from a TED Talk

This study investigates the potential benefits for incidental vocabulary acquisition of implementing a particular sequence of input-output-input activities. More specifically, EFL learners (n = 32) were asked to watch a TED Talks video, orally sum up its content in English, and then watch the video once more. A comparison group (n = 32) also watched the TED Talks video twice but were not required to sum it up in between. Immediate and delayed post-tests showed significantly better word-meaning recall in the former condition. An analysis of the oral summaries showed that it was especially words which learners attempted to use that stood a good chance of being recalled later. These findings are interpreted with reference to Swain’s (e.g., 1995) Output Hypothesis, Laufer and Hulstijn’s (2001) Involvement Load Hypothesis, and Nation and Webb’s (2011) Technique Feature Analysis. What makes the text-based output task in this experiment fundamentally different from many previous studies which have investigated the merits of text-based output activities is that it was at no point stipulated for the participants that they should use particular words from the input text. The study also illustrates the potential of TED Talks as a source of authentic audio-visual input in EFL classrooms