Colonialism, elite Formation and corruption

This paper argues that corruption in developing countries has deep historical roots; going all the way back to the characteristics of their colonial experience. The degree of European settlement during colonial times is used to differentiate between types of colonial experience, and is found to be a powerful explanatory factor of present-day corruption levels. The relationship is non-linear, as higher levels of European set- tlement resulted in more powerful elites (and more corruption) only as long as Europeans remained a minority group in the total population.

Aid Effectiveness: The Role of the Local Elite

We study the importance of the local elite as a determinant of the effectiveness of foreign aid in developing countries. An "extractive" elite will misuse aid flows, an issue that is probably as old as foreign aid itself. We proxy for the existence of an "extractive" elite by using an historically determined variable: the percentage of European settlers in colonial times. Our econometric results clearly show the importance of this factor and its robustness to a wide set of alternative aid-growth relationships advanced in the literature.Foreign aid; Elite; Economic growth

The Galactic Branches as a Possible Evidence for Transient Spiral Arms

With the use of a background Milky-Way-like potential model, we performed stellar orbital and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations. As a first experiment, we studied the gaseous response to a bisymmetric spiral arm potential: the widely employed cosine potential model and a self-gravitating tridimensional density distribution based model called PERLAS. Important differences are noticeable in these simulations, while the simplified cosine potential produces two spiral arms for all cases, the more realistic density based model produces a response of four spiral arms on the gaseous disk, except for weak arms -i.e. close to the linear regime- where a two-armed structure is formed. In order to compare the stellar and gas response to the spiral arms, we have also included a detailed periodic orbit study and explored different structural parameters within observational uncertainties. The four armed response has been explained as the result of ultra harmonic resonances, or as shocks with the massive bisymmetric spiral structure, among other. From the results of this work, and comparing the stellar and gaseous responses, we tracked down an alternative explanation to the formation of branches, based only on the orbital response to a self-gravitating spiral arms model. The presence of features such as branches, might be an indication of transiency of the arms.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Trade Preferences: Economic Issues and Policy Options

[Excerpt] Since 1974, Congress has created multiple trade preference programs designed to foster economic growth, reform, and development in less developed countries. These programs give temporary, non-reciprocal, duty-free U.S. market access to select exports of eligible countries. Congress conducts regular oversight of these programs, repeatedly revising and extending them. Two major issues face the 111th Congress: (1) the expiration of two preference programs by December 31, 2010; and (2) possible legislative action on broader reform of the preference programs based on comprehensive reviews in hearings held in both the House and the Senate earlier in this Congress. This report discusses the major U.S. trade preference programs, their possible economic effects, stakeholder interests, and legislative options

The ternary distinction of sound cinema

This thesis addresses the problematic categorization of film music in terms of a reductive diegetic/nondiegetic distinction (‘the binary’) and presents an alternative analytical framework. Following the law of parsimony, we reconstruct this original binary distinction in order to establish a new tripartite schema that accounts for the many otherwise ambiguous categories of sound that had occupied an unknown or indeterminate region of the binary zones. Drawing on the works of Bordwell, Kassabian, and Neumeyer in particular, the thesis seeks to put an end to the theoretical indeterminacy that haunts the binary distinction by introducing a new and inclusive ternary schema of sound cinema