Who Gains from Trade Reform? Some Remaining Puzzles

This paper focuses on three unresolved issues with regard to the impact of trade reform. First, many studies linking trade reform to long run growth are surprisingly fragile. To illustrate the problems with this literature, we examine a popular measure of openness recently introduced by Sachs and Warner (1995). We show that their measure fails to establish a robust link between more open trade policies and long run growth. The second puzzle we identify is the small impact of trade reform on employment in developing countries. Finally, we analyze evidence on the relationship between trade reform and rising wage inequality, focusing on the 1985 Mexican trade reform. Wage inequality in Mexico rose after the reform, which is puzzling in a Heckscher-Ohlin context if Mexico has a comparative advantage in producing low skill-intensive goods.

Spillovers, Foreign Investment, and Export Behavior

Case studies of export behavior suggest that firms who penetrate foreign markets reduce entry costs for other potential exporters, either through learning by doing or through establishing buyer- supplier linkages. We pursue the idea that spillovers associated with one firm's export activity reduce the cost of foreign market access for other firms. We identify two potential sources of spillovers: export activity in general and the specific activities of multinational enterprises. We use a simple model of export behavior to derive a logit specification for the probability a firm exports. Using panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants, we find evidence consistent with spillovers from the export activity of multinational enterprises but not with general export activity.

Communication Strategies as a Basis for Crisis Management Including Use of the Internet as a Delivery Platform

ABSTRACT Eighty per cent of small companies without a comprehensive crisis plan vanish within two years of suffering a major disaster—a remarkable and ominous statistic. Crises are occurring more often in all organizations, and when they occur, they are leaving a wake of financial, operational, and reputational damage. Why this trend, now? There are five important reasons: 1) a more volatile workplace involving financial, legal, or management issues within the organization; 2) an extreme production mentality often obscuring the conditions under which crises might otherwise be recognized, addressed, or mitigated; 3) enhanced technological platforms for information delivery, such as the Internet, generating a revolving information door thus promoting organizational stress and crisis; 4) fast-paced and invasive journalism practices that eliminate invisibility for decisionmaking or reaction; and, 5) lack of strategic planning for crisis. There is an increasing body of evidence suggesting that crises in an organizational environment, whether created by act-of-God or manmade circumstances, have defined and predictable characteristics often relating to communication problems in the discourse community. It is also evident that solutions exist to reduce the incidence and the intensity of crisis within this discourse community. Approaches include organizational vulnerability assessments, messaging strategies, forensic media tactics, and dedicated efforts to build relationships with important stakeholders. Each of these has as its foundation a vigorous strategic communication plan. Crisis plans are necessary in today’s business environment, and effective communication is an essential element of any crisis plan. This dissertation will focus on communication methodology as a means of crisis avoidance and crisis mitigation

Native Voting in Village Alaska

This paper summarizes in non-tabular form the results of a study of Native voting behaviour in rural Alaska between 1958 and 1968. Election results from every precinct corresponding to a community identified by the Federal Field Committee for Development Planning in Alaska as "predominantly Native" were recorded on IBM cards. ... It should be noted that the resultant data pertain only to rural Native electoral behaviour. .... The Federal Field Committee for Development Planning in Alaska estimates that something over 70 per cent of Alaska's Natives live in 178 villages or towns that are predominantly Native - places where half or more of the residents are Native. Another 25 per cent of Alaska's Natives live in urban centres of Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Ketchikan, Kodiak and Sitka. The remainder live in non-Native towns and in one- or two-family locations. It should also be noted that most Native villages have some resident non-Natives whose votes are included in the published precinct total. In the cases of Dillingham and Bethel, this non-Native population component is sizeable. ... Data show that 12,097 rural Natives voted in the 1968 general election. This is 4,931 more than voted in the general election a decade earlier, and represents a 69 per cent increase between 1958 and 1968. The number of Eskimo voters almost doubled during this period - from 4,485 to 8,640 - whereas the number of Southeast Indian (Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimpsian) voters stayed relatively constant - from 1,101 in 1958 to 1,218 in 1968, or an 11 per cent increase. Interior Indian (Athabascan) voters increased from 1,186 in 1958 to 1,674 in 1968, and Aleut voters increased from 394 in 1958 to 565 in 1968, 43 per cent and 41 per cent increases respectively. The largest number of Eskimos and Interior Indians voted in 1968. However, the largest number of Aleuts and Southeast Indians voted in 1964. ... Of the two major U.S. political parties, the Democratic party is clearly the stronger among rural Native voters in Alaska. (During the period 1960 to 1968, no candidate identified with a party other than the Democratic and Republican parties drew an appreciable vote.) In each election contest for U.S. president, state governor, U.S. representative and U.S. senator between 1960 and 1968 (5 general elections and 14 separate contests), the percentage of votes cast for Democratic candidates in the Native villages exceeded the percentage of votes cast for the same Democratic candidates in the state as a whole by an average of 12 percentage points. In none of the 14 single contests did the state-wide electoral support for a Democratic candidate exceed the Native village electoral support. Although the data show a clear over-all preference for the Democratic party in rural Native precincts, they also show that the patterns of party preference are not static. In 1968, for example, 60 villages (38 per cent of the total) registered a Republican or no clear party preference. This compares with 30 such Republican or competitive villages (19 per cent of the total number) in 1966, and only 11 (7 per cent of the total number) in 1964. Of the 54 villages which registered a Republican party preference in the five general elections between 1960 and 1968, 26 did so in only one of these elections. Of the 17 Eskimo villages that indicated a Republican party preference in 1960, only 9 did so again in 1968. The villages in individual election districts show different degrees of attachment to the dominant party. In the 1968 general election in the seven election districts controlled by Native voters, for example, villagers voted solidly Democratic in four districts ... and highly fragmented their vote along party lines in three districts .... The figures themselves offer no clues to the reasons for shifting party preference. ...

Shape memory alloy actuators for active disassembly using ‘smart’ materials of consumer electronic products

This paper reports the preliminary to current development of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) actuators within their application in ‘Active Disassembly using Smart Materials’ (ADSM). This non-destructive self-dismantling process is to aid recycling of consumer electronic products. Actuators were placed in single and multi-stage hierarchical temperature regimes after being embedded into macro and sub-assemblies of electronic product assemblies. Findings include active disassembly and a hierarchical dismantling regime for product dismantling using developed SMA actuators embedded into candidate products

Maximum Entropy Estimation of the Galactic Bulge Morphology via the VVV Red Clump

The abundance and narrow magnitude dispersion of Red Clump (RC) stars make them a popular candidate for mapping the morphology of the bulge region of the Milky Way. Using an estimate of the RC's intrinsic luminosity function, we extracted the three-dimensional density distribution of the RC from deep photometric catalogues of the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) survey. We used maximum entropy based deconvolution to extract the spatial distribution of the bulge from Ks-band star counts. We obtained our extrapolated non-parametric model of the bulge over the inner 40 by 40 degrees squared region of the Galactic centre. Our reconstruction also naturally matches onto a parametric fit to the bulge outside the VVV region and inpaints overcrowded and high extinction regions. We found a range of bulge properties consistent with other recent investigations based on the VVV data. In particular, we estimated the bulge mass to be in the range 13 to 17 billion solar masses, the X-component to be between 18% and 25% of the bulge mass, and the bulge angle with respect to the Sun-Galactic centre line to be between 18 and 32 degrees. Studies of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) gamma-ray Galactic centre excess suggests that the excess may be traced by Galactic bulge distributed sources. We applied our deconvolved density in a template fitting analysis of this Fermi-LAT GeV excess and found an improvement in the fit compared to previous parametric based templates.Comment: 25 pages, 27 figures, minor typo correcte