The Politics of Federalism in Argentina: Implications for Governance and Accountability

This paper contributes to an agenda that views the effects of policies and institutional reforms as dependent on the structure of political incentives for national and subnational political actors. The paper studies political incentive structures at the subnational level and the mechanisms whereby they affect national-level politics and policymaking at the national level in Argentina, a highly decentralized middle-income democracy, Argentina. The Argentine political system makes subnational political power structures very influential in national politics. Moreover, most Argentine provinces are local bastions of power dominated by entrenched elites, characterized by scarce political competition, weak division of powers, and clientelistic political linkages. Political dominance in the provinces and political importance at the national level reinforce each other, dragging the Argentine political and policymaking system towards the practices and features of its most politically backward regions

Do We Know How Much Poverty There is?

This paper tests the sensitivity of poverty indexes to the choice of adult equivalence scales, assumptions about the existence of economies of scale in consumption, methods for treating missing and zero incomes, and different adjustments to handle income misreporting. We also perform sensitivity analysis to the use of different poverty lines and poverty indexes, which are issues that have been much more explored in the literature. The sensitivity analysis is applied to household survey data from 17 Latin American countries, which include 92% of the population in the region. By varying these parameters within reasonable boundaries, we find that the proportion of poor could be said to be either 12. 7 percent or 65. 8 percent of the total population. Additionally, the ranking of countries with respect to poverty is also highly sensitive. This points to the need of justifying and being explicit about the underlying choices and definitions behind poverty statistics, and to the need of performing sensitivity analysis illustrating the menu of options that can answer the question of how much poverty there is

Non-stomatal ozone deposition to vegetation: new insights and models

Tropospheric ozone is a natural constituent of the troposphere but man-made emissions of NOx and VOCs have led to an increase in concentrations globally. Ozone plays an important role in the Earth System, e.g. damaging vegetation, modifying the oxidation potential of the atmosphere and by acting as a greenhouse gas. Dry deposition of ozone to terrestrial surfaces governs its potential to cause damage and provides an important atmospheric sink. Ozone is very reactive so readily deposits on most surfaces. It is also taken in through stomata as the plant respires and this stomatal uptake can cause damage to the plant. Stomatal uptake is estimated using existing stomatal conductance models that have been well characterized and evaluated. However non-stomatal deposition has not been well described in land-atmosphere exchange models to date. Several sets of ozone flux measurements have been collated to examine the non-stomatal deposition process. The data showed ozone deposition increased to dry canopies as temperature or solar radiation increased, consistent with the thermal decomposition of ozone on leaf cuticles or reactions with emitted biogenic VOCs. It was also found that the presence of surface water increased ozone deposition, probably due to aqueous chemical reactions with compounds in the water; therefore this may depend on the composition of cuticular waxes or the presence of other deposited compounds. A new parameterisation for non-stomatal ozone deposition to grassland and coniferous forests is derived and incorporated into a standard resistance type deposition model. This new model is evaluated using data reserved from the parameterization process and compared to other existing models