DO LARGE EMPLOYERS PAY MORE? THE CASE OF FIVE DEVELOPING AFRICAN COUNTRIES

Using comparable data sets for five African countries, we evaluate possible explanations for the employer-size wage effect across these countries. Our results indicate that, apart from observable worker characteristics, most theories cannot explain very much of the wage premium received in larger firms. Moreover, we find that the employer-size wage effect does not differ greatly across the five African countries. As is the case with other developing nations, however, the effect is larger than that found in the industrialised world, though unlike the industrialised world it is larger for white collar workers than for blue collar workers. Data for one of the African countries, in conjunction with other evidence, suggest that this may in part be the result of skill-biased technology having a greater effect on the firm¡¯s size-wage distribution across skill groups in developing countries.Employer Size Wage Effect, Firm Size Wage Premium

The FOMC's balance-of-risks statement and market expectations of policy actions

In January 2000, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) instituted the practice of issuing a “balance of risks” statement along with their policy decision immediately following each FOMC meeting. Robert H. Rasche and Daniel L. Thornton evaluate the use of the balance-of-risks statement and the market’s interpretation of it. They find that the balance-of-risks statement is one of the factors that market participants use to determine the likelihood that the FOMC will adjust its target for the federal funds rate at their next meeting. Moreover, they find that, on some occasions, the FOMC behaved in such a way as to encourage the use of the balance-of-risks statement for this purpose. The clarifying statements that sometimes accompany these balance-of-risks statements, as well as general remarks made by the Chairman and other FOMC members, often provide additional useful information.Federal Open Market Committee ; Federal funds rate ; Monetary policy

The potentials of boundaries: steps toward a theory of the social edge

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 199

Greenspan's unconventional view of the long-run inflation/output trade-off

Greenspan, Alan ; Inflation (Finance)

The colonial, the imperial, and the creation of the 'European' in southern Africa

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 23 May 1994This paper examines the Zulu attempt to understand and to exploit the imperial power of Queen Victoria relative to the colonial powers of Natal's earliest colonists, missionaries, and administrators. The study reveals the opening up, and exploitation of a distinction between the interests of the " imperial", represented for the Zulu royalty by Queen Victoria in England. and the "colonial" (or "Colonialist" -a term invented in mid nineteenth century southern Africa) represented by the Shepstone administration in Natal and the Cape Parliament in the Cape Colony. An attempt is made to sketch the 19th century Zulu imagination of power in which the colonial, the imperial, the missionary, the Zulu and the European or " Western" (Occidental) types and sources of power could be comprehended and manipulated. It amounted to the creation of the social category of "The White" by southern African people who were simultaneously cast as "The Black" or "The Natives" by people of European descent in southern Africa. It also led to the creation of the characteristically South African politics which seeks a moral arbitor and guarantee not in its own limited arena, but in the world at large

The monetary/fiscal policy debate: a controlled experiment

Fiscal policy - Japan ; Monetary policy - Japan

Unimagined Community: sex, networks and AIDS in Uganda and South Africa

E Book in PDF formatTo follo

Ethnicity and the geometry of power: One moment in the imagination of the polity

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 29 March 1993Ethnicity, for those who subscribe to the concept, is understood to be one 'part' of a polity that contains, at least, other 'ethnicities' and probably many other kinds of groupings and 'parts'. This paper argues that in order to understand ethnicity, we must seek to understand why it is that people believe that 'society' is composed of 'parts' and to understand how those parts are visualized and 'imagined'. [To say that they are imagined does not means that they are thought of as merely 'imaginary', but rather that they depend on images and beliefs]. In short, it is argued that 'ethnicities' are conceptualised quite literally as maps, puzzles, blocks or masses, as groups or sets, as levels or power 'bases'. Ethnicity can be also understood, at a higher level of generalization as one moment, or part, of a complex visualization of other sorts of social power such as 'state', 'family' 'economic', spiritual/ancestral', 'witchcraft/sorcery' and so on. Ethnicity, seen in this way then, appears not as some special 'social formation', but rather as a special case of the visualization (or objectification, reification) and metaphorization of social relations. It is these visualizations that make political rhetoric and recruitment possible. They are objectified in 'ethnic' dress, dance, the built environment, bodily dispositions, ritual forms, and other cultural displays Ethnicity, then, is an aesthetic phenomenon, and must be understood at least partly in these terms. This approach permits us to reason about why special kinds of social power are associated with certain 'ethnicities' and thus to understand the cultural basis for an imagined, socially transmitted and sanctioned geometry of social power

The American traditional concept of democracy as seen in the American local board of education with special reference to the Massachusetts school committee

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit