Economic and Institutional Reforms in French-speaking West Africa Impact on Efficiency and Growth

Economic reforms, West Africa, Institutions, Privatization

Can HIPC Reduce Poverty in Tanzania?

Tanzania, HIPC, Debt, Growth

Can HIPC Reduce Poverty in Tanzania?

While growth has increased in Tanzania during the past five or six years, it is still too low to have a visible impact on poverty. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that the amount of both income and non-income poverty are roughly the same as they were a decade ago. Since debt relief provided under HIPC will free government resources, the initiative will potentially help reduce poverty through larger government expenditures on social sectors. However, it is unlikely that Tanzania will be able to reach the situation projected in the Decision Point document; projections are extremely optimistic, and deviations from these are likely to lead to a rapid accumulation of debt, so debt sustainability – as reflected in the debt-to-export ratio – will not be met.Tanzania; HIPC; debt; growth

When Do the Poor Benefit From Growth, and Why?

This paper summarizes and synthesizes some literature that picks up and extends the discussion of Dollar and Kraay (2000). While most of the theory has been known for a long time, the empirical material that has gradually become available in the past decade or so in the form of household budget surveys has made it possible to paint a more detailed and nuanced picture than the one usually available. Here, three major arguments are developed. First, the poverty reduction (PR) impact of a certain rate of growth depends crucially on the pattern of that growth, with rural growth usually being more efficient than urban growth, and agricultural growth more efficient than manufacturing growth. Second, poverty reduction in agriculture is much stronger in the medium run than in the short run. This is because the indirect PR effect – a multiplier effect – is typically much stronger than the direct one. Third, there is much that both governments and donors can do to improve the rate of PR, including appropriate targeting of public expenditure, increased provision of primary education to address growth-hampering income inequality, and better focus onb gender issues.poverty reduction; growth; agriculture

Partiality, revisited: the partiality monad as a quotient inductive-inductive type

Capretta's delay monad can be used to model partial computations, but it has the ``wrong'' notion of built-in equality, strong bisimilarity. An alternative is to quotient the delay monad by the ``right''notion of equality, weak bisimilarity. However, recent work by Chapman et al. suggests that it is impossible to define a monad structure on the resulting construction in common forms of type theory without assuming (instances of) the axiom of countable choice. Using an idea from homotopy type theory---a higher inductive-inductive type---we construct a partiality monad without relying on countable choice. We prove that, in the presence of countable choice, our partiality monad is equivalent to the delay monad quotiented by weak bisimilarity. Furthermore we outline several applications

Kollektivtrafikorganisation i Sverige. Regionerna blir färre men större – spelplanen förändras.

Rapporten behandlar organisation av svensk kollektivtrafik, institutionella förutsättningar och historisk bakgrund till de omvandlings- och bevarandeprocesser som pågår idag. De avtalstyper som existerar mellan länstrafikansvariga beskrivs utförligt

Information Needs and Requirements for Decision Support in Primary Care: An Analysis of Chronic Pain Care

Decision support system designs often do not align with the information environments in which clinicians work. These work environments may increase Clinicians’ cognitive workload and harm their decision making. The objective of this study was to identify information needs and decision support requirements for assessing, diagnosing, and treating chronic noncancer pain in primary care. We conducted a qualitative study involving 30 interviews with 10 primary care clinicians and a subsequent multidisciplinary systems design workshop. Our analysis identified four key decision requirements, eight clinical information needs, and four decision support design seeds. Our findings indicate that clinicians caring for chronic pain need decision support that aggregates many disparate information elements and helps them navigate and contextualize that information. By attending to the needs identified in this study, decision support designers may improve Clinicians’ efficiency, reduce mental workload, and positively affect patient care quality and outcomes

Aid Allocation of the Emerging Central and Eastern European Donors

The paper examines the main characteristics of the (re)emerging foreign aid policies of the Visegrád countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia), concentrating on the allocation of their aid resources. We adopt an econometric approach, similar to the ones used in the literature for analyzing the aid allocation of the OECD DAC donors. Using this approach, we examine the various factors that influence aid allocation of the Visegrád countries, using data for the years between 2001 and 2008. Our most important conclusion is that the amount of aid a partner county gets from the four emerging donors is not influenced by the level of poverty or the previous performance (measured by the level of economic growth or the quality of institutions) of the recipients. The main determining factor seems to be geographic proximity, as countries in the Western-Balkans and the Post-Soviet region receive much more aid from the Visegrád countries than other recipients. Historical ties (pre-1989 development relations) and international obligations in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq are also found to be significant explanatory factors. This allocation is in line with the foreign political and economic interests of these new donors. While there are clear similarities between the four donors, the paper also identifies some individual country characteristics