A General Measure of the "Effective" Number of Parties in a Political System.

This paper proposes a general measure of the effective number of parties, based on the family of generalized entropy inequality indices. This measure encompasses existing measures in the sense that these can be derived, through an appropriate configuration of parameter values, from this general measure. The proposed measure has attractive properties both in terms of interpretation and in terms of aggregation. In terms of interpretation, this measure always yields a value between 1 and N (N=the number of parties contesting) and takes one, or the other, extreme value depending on whether vote (or seats) are monopolized by a party or shared equally between the contesting parties. In terms of aggregation, it is always the case that the effective numbers of parties at sub-national levels can be aggregated to yield a national figure. The aggregation is effected through weights which, themselves, have an appealing interpretation in terms of the different sub-national contributions to overall inequality in the distribution of votes (or seats). The use of this general measure is illustrated by applying it to the results of the 1997 and 2001 Parliamentary (Westminster) elections in Northern Ireland. The central message of the paper is that the construction of indices or measures which purport to give scalar representation to vectors of distributive outcomes cannot be wholly based on "objective" considerations. This observation applies in full to the measurement of the effective number of parties in a political system.

Health and Wealth in the North of Ireland: Is There a “Social Gradient” to Health Outcomes?

This paper investigates using data on 2,700 persons in the North of Ireland, whether there is a social gradient to health, both with respect to general health (self-assessed health status; long-term limiting illness; the existence of a health problem) and with respect to specific illnesses (asthma; arthritis; back pain; blood pressure problem; heart problem; mental illness). The evidence suggests that people who live in poor housing (for example, damp houses with inadequate heating) are more likely to be in bad health, in respect of both general health and specific ailments, than persons living in good housing. There is also evidence that persons without educational qualifications are more likely to be in bad health than persons who have educational qualifications. Lastly, the results point to the fact that higher levels of household income are associated with better health outcomes. If one defines the “social gradient” in terms of these three factors – housing quality, education qualifications, and income level – then the results suggest that people’s health outcomes depend upon their position on the social ladder.

The Role of Maternal Literacy in Reducing the Risk of Child Malnutrition in India.

This study uses unit-record data on over 50,000 rural children, from the sixteen major states of India, to analyse the determinants of the risks of severe stunting and of being severely underweight. The importance of this study derives from the fact that the prevalence of under-nourishment in India is, even relative to other poor countries, shockingly high. The study focuses on the role of maternal literacy in reducing the risk of child malnourishment. It concludes that when the mother is literate, real benefits flow to children in terms of reduced risk; the same benefits, however, do not flow when the father, but not the mother, is literate. Literate mothers make more effective use of health-care institutions, like anganwadis and hospitals. Consequently, the benefits to children from expanding the supply of such institutions are greater when these institutions interact with mothers who are literate.

A Duration-Sensitive Measure of the Unemployment Rate: Theory and Application.

The measurement of unemployment, like that of poverty, involves two distict steps: identification and aggregation. In this two-step process, the issue of identifying the unemployed has received considerable attention but, once the unemployed have been identiified, the aggregation issue has been addressed by simply "counting heads": the unemployment rate is conventionally defined as the proportion of the labour force that, on a given date, is unemployed. This, in particular, leads to differences between individuals, in their unemployment experiences being ignored when the unemployment rate is being computed. This paper - predicated on the proposition that what matters to a person is not just the fact of unemployment but also its duration - proposes a methodology, derived from the measurement of income inequality, for adjusting unemployment rates so as to make them "duration-sensitive". In consequence, different values of the "duration-sensitive" rate will, depending upon the degree of inequality in the distribution of unemployment duration, and upon the extent to which society is averse to such inequality, be associated with the same value of the conventionally defined unemployment rate. A numerical example, based on published data for seven major OECD countries, illustrates the methodology.

Why is the World Short of Democracy? A Cross-Country Ananlysis of Barriers to Representative Government

This study first uses a set of graphs and tables to present the pattern of democracy in the world, using the Gastil Index. Then a statistical analysis is conducted by two techniques: Regression techniques are used to analyze the effect on democracy of a handful of variables. It shows that poverty, Communism and the Muslim culture are the main barriers to democracy. It then uses Bayesian probability methods to make explicit the concept of the “risk” of countries being ndemocratic. The analysis focuses on the dynamics of the income effect and of the democratic deficit of the Muslim countries to see if it is stationary or transitory. It is unstable, so it may be transitory, but it has been rising.Democracy, Lipset’s law, Western vs Muslim Culture

Some Issues in the Calculation of Batting Averages: Ranking (and Re-Ranking) the Top 50 Batsmen in Test Cricket, 1877-2006

Batsmen in cricket are invariably ranked according to their batting average. Such a ranking suffers from two defects. First, it does not take into account the consistency of scores across innings: a batsman might have a high career average but with low scores interspersed with high scores; another might have a lower average but with much less variation in his scores. Second, it pays no attention to the “value” of the player’s runs to the team: arguably, a century, when the total score is 600, has less value compared to a half-century in an innings total of, say, 200. The purpose of this paper is to suggest new ways of computing batting averages which, by addressing these deficiencies, complement the existing method and present a more complete picture of batsmen’s performance. Based on these “new” averages, the paper offers a “new” ranking of the top 50 batsmen in the history of Test Cricket.

Bridging the gap between the measurement of poverty and of deprivation

One way of measuring the deprivation or poverty of persons is to use money based measures: a person is regarded as "poor" if his/her income (or expenditure) falls below a poverty line value. Such an approach - usually termed poverty analysis - has spawned a large literature embodying several sophisticated measures of poverty. The downside to this is that low income or expenditure may not be very good indicators of deprivation. Another way, usually termed deprivation analysis, is to define an index whose value, for each person, is the number (or proportion) of items, from a prescribed list, that he/she possesses: persons are then regarded as "deprived" if their index value is below some threshold value. This offers an alternative method of identifying deprived persons. The downside of deprivation analysis is that it measures deprivation exclusively in terms of the proportion of deprived persons in the total number of persons. The purpose of this paper is to bridge the gap between poverty and deprivation analysis by constructing a wider set of deprivation measures and showing, with data for Northern Ireland, how they might be applied

Some Issues in the Calculation of Batting Averages: Ranking (and Re-Ranking) the Top 50 Batsmen in Test Cricket, 1877-2006

Batsmen in cricket are invariably ranked according to their batting average. Such a ranking suffers from two defects. First, it does not take into account the consistency of scores across innings: a batsman might have a high career average but with low scores interspersed with high scores; another might have a lower average but with much less variation in his scores. Second, it pays no attention to the 'value' of the player’s runs to the team: arguably, a century, when the total score is 600, has less value compared to a half-century in an innings total of, say, 200. The purpose of this paper is to suggest new ways of computing batting averages which, by addressing these deficiencies, complement the existing method and present a more complete picture of batsmen's performance. Based on these 'new' averages, the paper offers a 'new' ranking of the top 50 batsmen in the history of Test Cricket