Informal Workers and Collective Action: A Global Perspective

[Excerpt] Around the world, in countries as far flung as Cambodia and Brazil and in industries as diverse as transportation and hospitality, workers in informal employment, who labor every day with no legal or social protection, are organizing and negotiating for better conditions. Some of them are self-employed; others work for wages in either formal or informal enterprises. Some used to have jobs in the formal sector with a union contract; others have always worked informally. To achieve their goals they are mounting collective action campaigns that draw on the repertoire of past generations of workers, but they often recombine them or innovate to fit their unique contexts. Informal workers, their organizations and their campaigns, represent the leading edge of the most significant change in the global labor movement in more than a century. This book tells the story of nine such campaigns

Review of the list of LDCs

The Committee for Development Policy is required by Economic and Social Council resolution 1991/46 to conduct triennially a review to determine the countries to be added or graduated from the list of least developed countries (LDCs). Since the previous review was conducted in 2000, the Committee conducted another review in 2003. The Committee bases its identification of the LDCs on the consideration of three dimensions of a country's state of development - its income level, its stock of human assets and its economic vulnerability. The Committee thus uses (a) Gross National Income (GNI) per capita as an indicator of income; (b) the Human Assets Index (HAI) as an indicator of the stock of human assets; and (c) the Economic Vulnerability Index (EVI) as an indicator of economic vulnerability. In addition, because the underlying concept of the LDC category excludes large economies, in 1991 the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) endorsed the principle that no country with a population exceeding 75 million should be considered for addition to the list. --

FEED/CATTLE PRICE RELATIONSHIPS AND THE OPTIMUM SYSTEM AND LOCATION OF CATTLE FEEDING IN TEXAS

Livestock Production/Industries,

Why haven't long-term interest rates fallen?

In 2001, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate target more than it had in over 25 years, but long-term interest rates didn't budge. Has monetary policy become ineffective? Just the opposite, the authors argue. The stability of long-term rates shows that people don't expect inflation to rise. That confidence, especially in light of the dramatic shocks the economy experienced, attests to the success of the central bank's policies.Interest rates ; Federal funds rate

Gaussian density fluctuations, mode coupling theory, and all that

We consider a toy model for glassy dynamics of colloidal suspensions: a single Brownian particle diffusing among immobile obstacles. If Gaussian factorization of static density fluctuations is assumed, this model can be solved without factorization approximation for any dynamic correlation function. The solution differs from that obtained from the ideal mode coupling theory (MCT). The latter is equivalent to including only some, positive definite terms in an expression for the memory function. An approximate re-summation of the complete expression suggests that, under the assumption of Gaussian factorization of static fluctuations, mobile particle's motion is always diffusive. In contrast, MCT predicts that the mobile particle becomes localized at a high enough obstacle density. We discuss the implications of these results for models for glassy dynamics.Comment: to be published in Europhys. Let

Initial Validation of a Brief Pictorial Measure of Caregiver Aggression: The Family Aggression Screening Tool

In the present study, we report on the development and initial psychometric properties of the Family Aggression Screening Tool (FAST). The FAST is a brief, self-report tool that makes use of pictorial representations to assess experiences of caregiver aggression, including direct victimization and exposure to intimate partner violence. It is freely available on request and takes under 5 minutes to complete. Psychometric properties of the FAST were investigated in a sample of 168 high-risk youth aged 16 to 24 years. For validation purposes, maltreatment history was assessed using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire; levels of current psychiatric symptoms were also assessed. Internal consistency of the FAST was good. Convergent validity was supported by strong and discriminative associations with corresponding Childhood Trauma Questionnaire subscales. The FAST also correlated significantly with multi-informant reports of psychiatric symptomatology. Initial findings provide support for the reliability and validity of the FAST as a brief, pictorial screening tool of caregiver aggression

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis

We use fourteen waves of the German panel data to ask whether individuals, after life and labour market events, return to some baseline wellbeing level. Although the strongest life satisfaction effect is often at the time of the event, significant lag and lead effects are present. Men are more affected by labour market events (unemployment and layoffs) and women by life events (marriage and divorce). Anticipation is an important component of individual wellbeing. Last, we show that happiness does not provide insurance against hard knocks: those with high baseline satisfaction are most adversely affected by negative events.Life Satisfaction; Anticipation; Habituation; Baseline Satisfaction; Labour Market and Family Events