Price Elasticity Estimates of Cigarette Demand in Vietnam

In this paper, we analyze a complete demand system to estimate the price elasticity for cigarette demand in Vietnam. Following Deaton (1990), we build a spatial panel using cross sectional household survey data. We consider a model of simultaneous choice of quantity and quality. This allows us to exploit unit values from cigarette consumption in order to disentangle quality choice from exogenous price variations. We then rely on spatial variations in prices and quantities demanded to estimate an Almost Ideal Demand System. The estimated price elasticity for cigarette demand is centered around -0.53, which is in line with previous empirical studies for developing countries.Price elasticity; Cigarette Demand; Taxation; Consumption; Vietnam

Compensating Whom For What? Reconsidering the Composition of Public Spending

This paper reports the preliminary work under way to analyse the composition of public spending in response to increased economic openness in the advanced industrial societies over recent decades. The compensation hypothesis predicts that public spending will rise in response to greater openness, especially trade competition. The globalization hypothesis predicts that public spending will be constrained by increased capital market openness. Our research design distinguishes between four aspects of public spending. First it considers spending targeted at producer as opposed to labour market interests. It further distinguishes between short-term transfer spending and longer-term investment spending, all of which have aspects of compensation spending to them. The principal focus of the research project is to analyse to what degree left-right partisanship makes a difference to spending effort, and to what degree the patterns vary between different varieties of capitalism. Drawing mainly on OECD data for the period since 1980, the modelling and analysis, using pooled time-series cross-sectional data with an error correction model, is as yet at a relatively early stage. Preliminary results suggest that neither trade nor capital market openness is associated with increase spending efforts in the manner anticipated by the compensation hypothesis. A number of lines of further inquiry are identified.

Ireland: Savior of Civilization?

One of the most important aspects of early medieval Ireland is the advent of Christianity on the island, accompanied by education and literacy. As an island removed from the Roman Empire, Ireland developed uniquely from the rest of western continental and insular Europe. Amongst those developments was that Ireland did not have a literary tradition, or more specifically a Latin literary tradition, until Christianity was introduced to the Irish. Once introduced to the island through Christianity, however, the early Irish mastered the language with astonishing pace

What is Orientation in Reality? A Philosophical Exploration of Technology, Placement, Enchantment and Wonder

This thesis gives an account of the ontological basis of the profound sense of disorientation in contemporary society and attempts to discover through a phenomenological account of orienting experience that which holds the possibility of authentic orientation in reality. Martin Heidegger’s understanding of “being-in-the-world,” the “there” of Dasein, and the epochal revealing of reality as resources in modern technological society is the philosophical backdrop for the thesis. This philosophical foundation is elaborated upon by showing that the challenging-revealing of the real as resources within the “framework” of technology results in the ontological “dis-traction” of reality. This dis-traction pulls apart the fabric of reality resulting in a discontinuous, homogenized, horizon of fungible entities available as resources and commodities for the satisfaction of human needs and desires. The character of dis-tracted reality is disclosed in displacement and disenchantment. Reality is displaced in the sense that as resources and commodities everything is neither near nor far—rather, all things are in a strange sense distanceless—at no place. Further, reality is disenchanted in the original sense that things as resources and commodities no longer “sing from within.” They can no longer speak to us in their own right because they no longer have any independent standing apart from their dependent status as resources and commodities. Careful phenomenological attention to concrete experiences of place and enchantment in our everyday lives discloses the promise of re-engagement with and authentic orientation in reality. The thesis concludes with reflections on the essential task of philosophy: to reawaken us in wonder to an enchanted world that in its independence speaks to us and to which we appropriately respond