Buoyancy on the Bayou: Shrimpers Face the Rising Tide of Globalization

[Excerpt] This book is about shrimp fishers from one coastal community in southeastern Louisiana. But more generally, it is about how individuals respond to large-scale economic change and industrial restructuring, largely a consequence of the forces of globalization. Throughout the book, I draw from the rich ethnographic data I collected to show how local actors respond to economic challenges. And while focusing on the responses of the shrimpers to the collapse of their industry is culturally worthy in itself, there is value that goes well beyond it. While most studies of industrial decline focus on communities where few jobs are available after an industry leaves, my case study shows that even though alternative employment opportunities exist, some forgo those opportunities to try to fulfill what they perceive as their cultural calling. Others reluctantly leave this identity behind. From the shrimp fishers\u27 experiences with industrial decline, we stand to gain a greater understanding of the importance of the work that we do in shaping our social lives and our understanding of the world around us

A study of the current philosophy and practices in developing interracial understanding in twelve group work agencies in Boston

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Multinationals in economic development: the benefits of FDI

During her five years at the World Bank, Harrison initiated four studies involving multinational enterprises in four developing countries: Ivory Coast, Mexico, Morocco and Venezuela. These studies measure the role of multinational enterprises in promoting technology transfer; test whether multinationals push up wages for local workers; and analyze the validity of the "pollution haven hypothesis," which states that foreign investors flock to developing countries to take advantage of lax environmental standards. Harrison finds no evidence of pollution havens and shows that multinationals raise wages for local workers. However, she finds that technology transfer has generally been limited to the joint ventures who receive foreign equity participation.multinational corporations; wages; pollution havens; technology transfer

Openness and growth : a time series, cross-country analysis for developing countries

This paper compares the association between many popular proxies for openness and the rate of GDP growth, as well as the results from cross-section and panel estimation, controlling for country effects. The results suggest that using period averages versus annual data critically affects the strength of the association between openness and growth. The paper reviews the empirical literature on openness and technological change. It discusses the dataset for this paper and the empirical specification, while also presenting the main results. The sensitivity of the results to the inclusion of both macroeconomic variables and country size are also tested. It concludes with an agenda for future research.Economic Theory&Research,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Achieving Shared Growth,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Growth

The new trade protection : price effects of antidumping and countervailing measures in the United States

The frequent application of antidumping and countervailing measures in the United States in the 1980s has been described as a new form of protection. The author measures the effect not only of investigations (to evaluation claims of dumping or subsidies) but of the resulting duties, by measuring their impact on import prices. The dataset combines cross-section and time series data for 1981 - 86, making it possible to control for differences across industries and separately measure the effects of duties and investigations. The result suggests that for some sectors the price effect of investigations is as great as imposing a duty. Investigations that endin duties have different effects than those resulting in no action.Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT

Ownership versus Environment: Why are Public Sector Firms Inefficient?

In this paper we disentangle the sources of public sector inefficiency using 1982-1995 panel data on manufacturing firms in Indonesia. We consider two leading hypotheses: (1) public sector enterprises are inefficient due to monitoring problems and (2) public sector enterprises are inefficient because of the environment in which they operate, as measured by the soft budget constraint. The two models are nested in a production function framework and the empirical results provide support for the second hypothesis. Public sector enterprises are inefficient because of their access to soft loans; public sector ownership has no independent impact on productivity growth. The finding that ownership per se does not matter, but environment does, holds when we control for fixed effects and when we allow for the endogeneity of government loans. Interestingly, private sector firms with access to government loans did not perform more poorly than other private sector enterprises. Another dimension of the environment, i.e. import penetration, also matters; public sector enterprises that have been shielded from import competition are inferior performers.

An expert system shell for inferring vegetation characteristics: Interface for the addition of techniques (Task H)

All the NASA VEGetation Workbench (VEG) goals except the Learning System provide the scientist with several different techniques. When VEG is run, rules assist the scientist in selecting the best of the available techniques to apply to the sample of cover type data being studied. The techniques are stored in the VEG knowledge base. The design and implementation of an interface that allows the scientist to add new techniques to VEG without assistance from the developer were completed. A new interface that enables the scientist to add techniques to VEG without assistance from the developer was designed and implemented. This interface does not require the scientist to have a thorough knowledge of Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) by Intellicorp or a detailed knowledge of the structure of VEG. The interface prompts the scientist to enter the required information about the new technique. It prompts the scientist to enter the required Common Lisp functions for executing the technique and the left hand side of the rule that causes the technique to be selected. A template for each function and rule and detailed instructions about the arguments of the functions, the values they should return, and the format of the rule are displayed. Checks are made to ensure that the required data were entered, the functions compiled correctly, and the rule parsed correctly before the new technique is stored. The additional techniques are stored separately from the VEG knowledge base. When the VEG knowledge base is loaded, the additional techniques are not normally loaded. The interface allows the scientist the option of adding all the previously defined new techniques before running VEG. When the techniques are added, the required units to store the additional techniques are created automatically in the correct places in the VEG knowledge base. The methods file containing the functions required by the additional techniques is loaded. New rule units are created to store the new rules. The interface that allow the scientist to select which techniques to use is updated automatically to include the new techniques. Task H was completed. The interface that allows the scientist to add techniques to VEG was implemented and comprehensively tested. The Common Lisp code for the Add Techniques system is listed in Appendix A

An expert system shell for inferring vegetation characteristics: The learning system (tasks C and D)

This report describes the implementation of a learning system that uses a data base of historical cover type reflectance data taken at different solar zenith angles and wavelengths to learn class descriptions of classes of cover types. It has been integrated with the VEG system and requires that the VEG system be loaded to operate. VEG is the NASA VEGetation workbench - an expert system for inferring vegetation characteristics from reflectance data. The learning system provides three basic options. Using option one, the system learns class descriptions of one or more classes. Using option two, the system learns class descriptions of one or more classes and then uses the learned classes to classify an unknown sample. Using option three, the user can test the system's classification performance. The learning system can also be run in an automatic mode. In this mode, options two and three are executed on each sample from an input file. The system was developed using KEE. It is menu driven and contains a sophisticated window and mouse driven interface which guides the user through various computations. Input and output file management and data formatting facilities are also provided

Ownership versus environment : disentangling the sources of public sector inefficiency

The authors compare the performance of public and private sector manufacturing firms in Indonesia for 1981-95. They analyze whether public sector inefficiency is due primarily to agency-type problems ("ownership") or to the business environment in which public enterprises operate, as measured by soft budget constraints or barriers to competition. They nest the two alternatives in a production function framework. The results, obtained from fixed-effects specifications, provide support for both models. The business environment matters. Only public enterprises that received loans from state banks or those shielded from import competition performed worse than private enterprises. Ownership matters. For a given level of import competition or soft loans, public enterprises perform worse than their counterparts in the private sector. Eliminating soft loans to Indonesia's public enterprises would raise total factor productivity by 6 percentage points; the same result could be achieved by increasing import penetration by 15 percentage points. The authors show that these findings are not due to selection effects for either privatization or the receipt of soft loans.Labor Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Public Sector Economics&Finance