Poverty and the rural non-farm economy in Armenia, Georgia and Romania: a synthesis of findings (NRI report no. 2773)

The focus of this paper is on rural non-farm livelihoods in economies in transition. It looks at key factors affecting the ability and motivation of rural dwellers to become involved in the non-farm economy. The intended outputs of this study are: (i) to improve understanding of the dynamics of the RNFE in providing employment and income diversification opportunities in Armenia, Georgia and Romania; and (ii) to promote mechanisms for integrating research results into relevant policy processes

Towards a financial cycle for the U.S., 1973-2014

With this paper, we suggest a new approach to estimating financial cycles in terms of interactions of real-sector and financial-sector sentiments. We will apply this to U.S. financial indicators from 1973 to 2014. Based on Schumpeter’s and Minsky’s financial cycle concepts, we arrive at a selection of six indicators that capture finance and real sector linkages: the slope of the yield curve, a Purchasing Managers’ Index, real-estate price returns, the S&P stock price index, and leverage ratios of households (consumer spending) and non-financial corporations. We estimate lead-lag relations and apply principal component analysis to aligned series in order to construct factors. Our conclusion is that two factors, capturing corporate and consumer sentiments, account for over 60% of the cumulative variance in our data. Corporate optimism peaks before crisis episodes, while household/consumer sentiment is more persistent and follows corporate sentiment with a lag

Social Semiotics: Theorising Meaning Making

This chapter outlines a theoretical framework to account for practices of meaning making in health care and sets out an agenda for clinical educational research. It shows how meaning making pervades all aspects of clinical work and how it can be explored and made explicit within a framework derived from social semiotics. The chapter illustrates how the framework produces accounts of the ways in which clinicians make sense of and interact with the world, in situations where they give, review, and imagine care. It explores how clinicians interpret, and communicate through, human bodies, tools, and technologies, giving meaning to, and expressing meaning through, distinct material forms. In so doing, the chapter begins to render visible the semiotic skills that clinicians develop to prepare for, provide, and evaluate clinical care