From Boom to Bust: Helping Families Prepare for the Rise in Subprime Mortgage Foreclosures

Alarm bells are ringing loudly on Wall Street amid rising late payments and delinquencies on subprime home mortgages across the country, which are adding further worries to an already slowing economy and labor market. The spike in foreclosures is delivering substantial losses to some home mortgage lenders, shaking investor confidence in the subprime loan market and possibly even prime home loan industry. A slumping housing market and the threat of higher mortgage payments are also raising fears that more homeowners will find themselves unable to service their mortgages or sell their homes, threatening mortgage lenders with further foreclosures and saddling homeowners with ruined credit ratings that cripple their ability to access loans in the future

Impact of Digital Technology on Library Resource Sharing: Revisiting LABELNET in the Digital Age

The digital environment has facilitated resource sharing by breaking the time and distance barriers to efficient document delivery. However, for the librarians, this phenomenon has brought more challenging technical and technological issues demanding addition of more knowledge and skills to learn and new standards to develop. The overwhelming speed and growing volume of digital information is now becoming unable to acquire and manage by single libraries. Resource sharing, which used to be a side business in the librarianship trade, is now becoming the flagship operation in the library projects

Measurement of a Multidimentional Index of Globalization and its Impact on Income Inequality

globalization, income inequality, indices, principal component

The Relationship between Income Inequality, Poverty, and Globalization

globalization, income inequality, poverty, indices, principal component

A Generalized Knowledge Production Function

This paper presents a generalized production model based on the knowledge production function. The model allows the relationships between corporate competitiveness strategy, innovation, efficiency, productivity growth and outsourcing to be investigated at the firm level in a number of steps. First, in reviewing recent developments of researches on the above relationships, provide discussion on data and the methods of measuring these variables. Second, depending on availability of information, different measures are transferred into single multidimensional index of corporate strategy using principal component analysis. Third, stochastic frontier production function and factor productivity analysis are used to estimate the efficiency and factor productivity growth at the firm level. Fourth, the causal relationships between the five variables of interest are established and modelled. Finally, given the direction of causality, the implications of the findings for estimation of the relationship are discussed. For the empirical analysis we use Swedish firm-level innovation survey data covering both manufacturing and service sectors.Competition; innovation; outsourcing; productivity; efficiency; causality; firm

On the Causality between GDP and Health Care Expenditure in Augmented Solow Growth Model

This paper examines conditional convergence of OECD countries in gross domestic product (GDP) and health care expenditure (HCE) per capita. It presents estimation of the augmented Solow growth model suggested by Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) to explain variation in output and expenditure per capita across countries. The variation is due to different steady state growth paths resulting from differences in the countries savings rate, education, and population growth. This paper is an extension of the MRW model by incorporating health capital proxied by HCE to the augmented Solow model. The analysis is further related to the studies of health care expenditure where GDP per capita appear to be the main factor determining the level of expenditure on health care. The issue of causality relationship between GDP and HCE is investigated. The empirical analysis is based OECD countries’ data for the period of 1970-1992. The results indicate that OECD countries converge at 3.7% per year to their steady state level of income per capita. The results show that HCE has positive effect on the economic growth and the speed of convergence. The speed of convergence is found to be sensitive to whether one imposes a constant or estimate the depreciation and technological growth components. With no restrictions imposed the convergence rate is 5.2%. Considering the rate of convergence in the HCE model the results show that OECD countries converge at 2.7% to their steady state of HCE per capita. In the HCE model a regression of the speed of convergence on variables determining the rate of convergence show close link to the variables characterizing the health care system of sample countries.Solow growth model; health care expenditure; GDP; convergence; OECD;

The Causal Relationship between Capital Structure and Cost of Capital: Evidence from ICT Companies Listed at NASDAQ

In this study, we intend to examine the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) firms, from a financial perspective. The causal relationship between capital structure and cost of capital is investigated in a simultaneous equation framework. On the one hand, we relate international diversification to the firm’s capital structure, and on the other, we test their individual and collective inferences on the combined debt and equity cost of capital. Even though ICT companies are subject to the same market forces as other firms, the rapid development of the industry, complexity of their technologies and presence of the network effect may have valuable implications in determining their financing patterns. Using information pertaining to ICT and non-ICT firms listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange, we expect a negative correlation between international diversification and higher total and long-term debt ratios, and a reduction in the overall cost of capital. Results suggest significant heterogeneity among ICT and non-ICT firms and within each group by a number of firm characteristics.International diversification; Capital structure; Cost of capital; Debt; ICT; NASDAQ

Asabiyya: Re-Interpreting Value Change in Globalized Societies

This article reflects the renewed interest of economics and the social science discipline in value systems and religion. The World Values Survey provided a data framework of global value change, whose quantitative results led Barro (2004) to analyze the connections between some dimensions of recent sociological religious value research with economic growth. The present essay starts from this methodological position, and links value systems with economic performance in a much wider and macrosociological framework. We further develop the well-known Inglehart and Welzel (2003) map of global values, and develop the idea of "Asabiyya" ("social cohesion"), as a counter-model to both Barro and Inglehart and Welzel approaches. A frequently asked question is whether “modernization” without "spiritual values" in a globalized world economy and world society possible in the long run? Starting from principal component analysis, it is shown that rather two factors are decisive in understanding global value change: a continuum of "traditional versus secular", and a continuum "cheating versus active society". Asabiyya in the 21st Century, as a way out from the modernization trap of societies, characterized by large-scale social anomaly, is a high secularism combined with a high active society score, thus avoiding the "modernization trap". We show that economic growth in the current world crisis is far more connected with these dimensions. We conclude that not a society based on fear is needed in the first place, but an active society of volunteer social work.index numbers and aggregation, international political economy, religion, bureaucracy, corruption

Learning from Latin America's Experience: Europe's Failure in the "Lisbon Process"

The current paper investigates the cross-national relevance of Latin American "dependencia theory" for five dimensions of development (democracy and human rights, environment, human development and basic human needs satisfaction, gender justice, redistribution, growth and employment) on a global scale. It tries to confront the very basic pro-globalist assumptions of the "Lisbon process", the policy target of the European leaders since the EU's Lisbon Council meeting in March 2000 to make Europe the leading knowledge-based economy in the world with a "Latin American perspective". A realistic and politically useful analysis of the "Lisbon process" has to be a "Schumpeterian" approach. First, we analyze the "Lisbon performance" of the world economy by multivariate, quantitative means, looking into the possible contradictions that might exists between the dependent insertion into the global economy and other goals of the "Lisbon process". Dependency from the large, transnational corporations, as correctly predicted by Latin American social science of the 1960s and 1970s, emerges as one of the most serious development blockades, confronting Europe. Secondly, we analyze European regional performance since the 1990s in order to know whether growth and development in Europe spread evenly among the different regions of the continent. It emerges that dependency from the large transnational corporations is incompatible with a balanced, regional development. Finally, we discuss cross-national and historical lessons learned from the views of dependency and Schumpeterian perspectives for current policy-making in Europe, and opt for an industrial policy approach in the tradition of former EU-Commission President (1985-1995) Jacques Delors.Lisbon process, European Union, Latin America, Dependency theory

Re-Orient? MNC Penetration and Contemporary Shifts in the Global Political Economy

This article analyses IMF estimates of economic growth in 180 countries (IMF, 2009), and inks the results to the "Re-orient" approach, put forward by Frank, 1998. With global economic gravitation shifting to the Indian Ocean/Pacific region, the article also analyses the role of MNC (foreign capital) penetration as the key variable of past quantitative dependency studies for contemporary economic growth and social performance. In a Schumpeterian fashion, MNC penetration reflects the power, which transnational oligopolies wield over local economies. Today, social polarization and stagnation increase as a consequence of the development model, based on high MNC penetration.international relations and international political economy, economic development, technological change, growth