Free personal care for older people : a wider perspective on its costs

The paper comments on the so-called "Free Personal Care (FPC)" policy established in Scotland in 2002. FPC is the legal entitlement of people aged 65 and older, who have been assessed by the council as having personal care needs, to receive services that will assist them in their day-to-day activities. One view is that FPC may not be affordable in its current form because population ageing will increase dramatically the numbers eligible for assistance in the future. This paper discusses ways in which FPC may actually lower the total per-person cost of accommodating Scotland's ageing population

Trade liberalization and endogenous growth in a small open economy : a quantitative assessment

The authors develop a numerical endogenous growth model approximating an infinite horizon, which allows them to investigate the relationship between trade liberalization and economic growth. Economic theory generally implies that trade liberalization will improve economic growth, and the two phenomena are positively correlated in empirical tests, but the connection is not well-substantiated in numerical general equilibrium models. In the authors'model, an intermediate input affects aggregate output through a Dixit-Stiglitz function. Additional varieties provide the engine of growth in this framework and the existence of this mechanism magnifies the welfare costs. In this model with lump sum revenue replacement, reducing a tariff from 20 percent to 10 percent produces a welfare increase (in terms of Hicksian equivalent variation over the infinite horizon) of 10.7 percent of the present value of consumption in their central model, where the economy is assumed to be unable to borrow on international financial markets. If macroeconomic and financial reforms are in place that would allow international borrowing, however, the same tariff cut is estimated to result in a 37 percent increase in Hicksian equivalent variation. On the other hand, if inefficient replacement taxes must be used in an economy without the capacity to borrow internationally, the gains would be reduced to 4.7 percent. Larger tariff cuts--typical of those in many developing countries over the past 30 years--produce larger estimated welfare gains at least proportionate to the size of the cut. The authors apply the model to five developing countries and estimate the impact of the tariff changes those countries plan to undertake as part of Uruguay Round commitments. Because of the dynamic effects, estimated gains are considerably larger than those found in the literature on the impact of the Uruguay Round.International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Labor Policies,Inequality,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Trade and Regional Integration

Migrant Farmworkers\u27 Perceptions of Pesticide Risk Exposure in Adams County, Pennsylvania: A Cultural Risk Assessment

Agricultural exceptionalism, a system in which regular labor laws and standards do not apply to farm labor, makes migrant farmworkers particularly vulnerable populations—economically, socially, and in terms of environmental health. To address inequities inherent in migrant farmworker margin­aliza­tion, studies advocate for actively engaging the migrant farmworker population in the conversation surrounding these issues. We conducted 40 semi­structured interviews with migrant farmworkers in Adams County, Pennsylvania, to understand pesti­cide risk exposure perceptions and practices. We employed the Health Belief Model as our cultural risk assessment frame, using it in combination with technical risk assessment, which uses government calculations (from the Environmental Protection Agency) to quantify pesticide risk exposure. We used mixed methods analyses (quantitative and qualitative) to compare and understand farmworker demographics, perceived risk, perceived control, and risk behavior. Results show that demo­graphics —e.g., age, education, visa status—are important factors in risk perception. They also confirm observations present in many earlier studies. While trainings and educational materials are valuable to help build awareness of risk, a systemic lack of control over their circumstances make it hard for migrant farmworkers to engage in safe behavior. Results also highlight the limitations of technical risk assessment. Such calculations, however, rarely account for risk perceptions and experiences of farm­workers themselves. Acknowledging the voices of migrant farmworkers is an essential first step in rebalancing inequities of power in our food systems, and cultural risk assessment can help frame recommendations that target different stake­holders across the pesticide regulatory spectrum to ensure migrant farmworker needs and safety

Some results on the structure and spectra of matrix-products

We consider certain matrix-products where successive matrices in the product belong alternately to a particular qualitative class or its transpose. The main theorems relate structural and spectral properties of these matrix-products to the structure of underlying bipartite graphs. One consequence is a characterisation of caterpillars: a graph is a caterpillar if and only if all matrix-products associated with it have real nonnegative spectrum. Several other equivalences of this kind are proved. The work is inspired by certain questions in dynamical systems where such products arise naturally as Jacobian matrices, and the results have implications for the existence and stability of equilibria in these systems

Modeling Services Liberalization: The Case of Tanzania

This paper employs a 52-sector, small, open-economy computable general equilibrium model of the Tanzanian economy to assess the impact of the liberalization of regulatory barriers against foreign and domestic business service providers in Tanzania. The model incorporates productivity effects in both goods and services markets endogenously, through a Dixit-Stiglitz framework. It summarizes policy notes on the key business service sectors that were prepared for this work, and estimates the ad valorem equivalent of barriers to foreign direct investment based on these policy notes and detailed questionnaires completed by specialists in Tanzania. The authors estimate that Tanzania will gain about 5.3 percent of the value of Tanzanian consumption in the medium run (or about 4.8 percent of gross domestic product) from a full reform package that also includes uniform tariffs. The estimated gains increase to about 16 percent of consumption in the long-run, steady-state model, where the impact on the accumulation of capital from an improvement in the productivity of capital is taken into account. Decomposition exercises reveal that the largest gains to Tanzania will derive from liberalization of costly regulatory barriers that are non-discriminatory in their impacts between Tanzanian and multinational service providers.accounting; accurate estimate; aged; allocation; amount of money; baseline scenario; beneficiaries; beneficiary; Breast Cancer; budget constraint; calculation; central government; child care

The Front Office Manager: Key To Hotel Communications

The Front Office Manager: Key to Hotel Communications is a written study by Denney G. Rutherford, Department of Hotel and Restaurant Administration, College of Business and Economics at Washington State University. In it he initially observes, “Since the front office manager is usually viewed as the key to the efficient and orderly operation of a hotel, the author has researched the job and activities of this individual in an attempt to provide data about an area which he says was intuitively known but never empirically explored. “Current literature implies that the activities of the front office are so important to the daily operations of the hotel that it occupies a preeminent position among other departments,” Rutherford says. He also references, Gray and Liguori, who describe the front office as: “the nerve center of the hote1,” echoing an early work by Heldenbrand indicating that it “becomes a sort of listening post for management.” The quotes are cited. The primary stage of the article relies on a seven-page, two-part questionnaire, which was used to collect data regarding the FOM – front office manager - position. Even though the position is considered a crucial one, it seems there is a significant lack of pragmatic data regarding it. Rutherford graphs the studies. Good communication skills are imperative. “Other recent research has suggested that the skills of effective communication are among the most vital a manager at any level can bring to his/her endeavors in the service industries,” Rutherford notes. He provides a detailed – front office communications model – to illustrate the functions. In, Table 4, for example - Office Manager as Facilitator – Rutherford provides Likert Rating Scale values for a comprehensive list of front office tasks. Rutherford informs you that the communicative skills of a front office manager flow across the board, encompassing variables from guest relation exchanges to all the disparate components of employee relations. Not withstanding and compared to technical knowledge, such as computer and fiscal skills, Rutherford suggests: “The most powerful message derived from analysis of the data on the FOM\u27s job is that communication in its various forms is clearly central to the successful mission of the front office.

Piecemeal trade reform in partially liberalized economies : an evaluation for Turkey

Turkey undertook a major liberalization of trade policy in the 1980s. Import quotas disappeared, the Turkish lira was made convertible, and tariffs are generally lower. Those changes and the export subsidies that remain have removed the anti-export bias from Turkey's external incentive regime. Using a 40-sector computable general equilibrium model, the authors consider several more trade liberalization options available to the Turkish government. They conclude that uniformity of tariffs and export subsidies would substantially improve Turkey's welfare. Although the"Ramsey"optimal import taxation would call for non-uniform import taxes inversely proportional to the elasticity of import demand in each sector, the observed dispersion of tariff structure in Turkey is inconsistent with optimal departures from uniform protection. In fact, uniformity achieves an extremely high proportion of the benefits of full trade liberalization because, in the absence of a general anti-export bias, theprincipal distortion remaining in the trade regime derives from dispersion of the tariff and, especially the export subsidy structure. An increasing number of developing countries - including Chile, Indonesia, Mexico, and Poland - have in recent years undertaken extensive trade liberalization. It is no longer clear that these economies retain an anti-export bias in their trade regime. Perhaps the most important policy conclusion the authors reach is that one must be wary of advocating piecemeal reform of tariffs or export subsidies alone. Piecemeal across-the-board tariff reductions do not always improve welfare; they must generally be coordinated with reductions in export subsidies to ensure improved welfare. The authors counterfactually assume that Turkey's tariffs are at the 1985 level which reintroduces an anti-export bias of import tariffs. In this case, piecemeal tariff reduction to the 1989 level is beneficial. Even small export subsidies are not always beneficial, despite the rule of thumb that small export subsidies are a welfare-enhancing offset to the anti-export bias of import tariffs. Export subsidies in Turkey are highly dispersed, and piecemeal reductions in the export subsidies reduce that dispersion. When the authors counterfactually impose uniformity of tariffs and export subsidies, they note that small export subsidies are beneficial as a piecemeal policy for offsetting the anti-export bias. Policymakers in developing countries have occasionally applied export subsidies in individual sectors with high tariffs as a means of encouraging exports in a sector that may otherwise rely on the highly protected domestic market. The authors show that in Turkey high export subsidies in sectors with high tariffs are particularly counterproductive - because at the multisector level the distortion introduced by the export subsidy dominates the reduction in anti-export bias. Turkey's proposed policy of harmonizing its tariff to the European Community's (EC's) common external tariff would yield only small welfare changes. Harmonizing the EC tariffs will require lowering tariffs below already low levels, in the presence of export subsidies almost as large as the existing average effective tariff rate. However harmonizing to the EC tariff structure can be beneficial if at the same time export subsidies are removed or reduced.Environmental Economics&Policies,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Economic Theory&Research,Tax Law,Trade Policy