Interaction between HIV Awareness, Knowledge, Safe Sex Practice and HIV Incidence: Evidence from Botswana

This paper makes methodological and empirical contributions to the study of HIV awareness, knowledge, incidence and safe sex practice in the context of Botswana, one of the most HIV prone countries in the world. While the focus is on Botswana, the paper presents comparable evidence from India to put the Botswana results in perspective. The results point to the strong role played by affluence and education in increasing HIV knowledge, promoting safe sex and reducing HIV incidence. The study presents African evidence on the role played by the empowerment of women in promoting safe sex practices such as condom use. The Botswana results show however that simply increasing HIV knowledge may not be effective in lowering HIV incidence unless people are also made fully aware of the lethal nature of the disease. The lack of significant association between HIV incidence and safe sex practice points to the danger of HIV infected individuals spreading the disease through multiple sex partners and unprotected sex. This danger is underlined by the result that females with multiple sex partners are at higher risk of being infected with HIV.HIV incidence, Female Empowerment, Safe Sex Methods, Finite Mixture Models, Principal Components Analysis.

Multidimensional Deprivation in China, India and Vietnam: A Comparative Study on Micro Data

This study compares living standards in China, India and Vietnam using the recent multidimensional approach. A distinguishing feature of this study is the use of unit record data sets containing household level information on a wide range of variables including access to several dimensions of living, wealth and child health. The study uses household level information on a wide variety of indicators and the methodology of Principal Component Analysis to measure household wealth. The wealth index is then used to examine the distribution of deprivation and poverty by wealth percentiles. This paper uses the Lorenz curve for wealth and the pseudo Lorenz curves for deprivation and poverty to show that wealth, used here as a proxy for income, understates deprivation and poverty in all the three countries. The paper also provides evidence on child health, which is at odds with the overall progress that is portrayed by the multidimensional measures.Multidimensional Deprivation, Wealth Index, Principal Component Analysis, Sub group Decomposability.

Effect of spin-orbit interaction on the critical temperature of an ideal Bose gas

We consider Bose-Einstein condensation of an ideal bose gas with an equal mixture of `Rashba' and `Dresselhaus' spin-orbit interactions and study its effect on the critical temperature. In uniform bose gas a `cusp' and a sharp drop in the critical temperature occurs due to the change in the density of states at a critical Raman coupling where the degeneracy of the ground states is lifted. Relative drop in the critical temperature depends on the diluteness of the gas as well as on the spin-orbit coupling strength. In the presence of a harmonic trap, the cusp in the critical temperature smoothened out and a minimum appears. Both the drop in the critical temperature and lifting of `quasi-degeneracy' of the ground states exhibit crossover phenomena which is controlled by the trap frequency. By considering a 'Dicke' like model we extend our calculation to bosons with large spin and observe a similar minimum in the critical temperature near the critical Raman frequency, which becomes deeper for larger spin. Finally in the limit of infinite spin, the critical temperature vanishes at the critical frequency, which is a manifestation of Dicke type quantum phase transition.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Estimating Intra Country and Cross Country Purchasing Power Parities from Household Expenditure Data Using Single Equation and Complete Demand Systems Approach: India and Vietnam

This study departs from the previous literature on purchasing power parity (PPP) by proposing a demand system based methodology for calculating the PPP that takes account of consumer preferences and allows for the substitution effect of price changes. The methodology is applied to provide evidence on PPP between the Indian Rupee and the Vietnamese Dong. The study is conducted within a framework that allows for regional variation in preferences and price changes both inside the country and between countries and proposes and applies a methodology for constructing prices from unit values after adjusting them for quality and demographic effects. Using these prices the intra-country PPPs for India and Vietnam are calculated using the single equation (Engel curve based) procedure of Coondoo, Majumder and Chattopadhyay (2011). The cross country PPPs are calculated between sectors and across expenditure classes, apart from PPP at aggregate country to country level, using both the single equation and system based procedures. The paper contains evidence that the incorporation of price effects leads to a significant change in the PPP rates obtained from using cross section data (single equation procedure) ignoring price changes. The demand system based methodology yields PPP rates that are consistent with those obtained from conventional procedures such as the CPD method, yields standard errors of the PPPs and has the additional advantage of testing for invariance of inter-country PPP across expenditure classes. The disaggregated PPP rates question the conventional practice of using a single economy wide PPP in inequality and poverty comparisons.Purchasing Power Parity, QAIDS, CPD method, Spatial Prices, TCLI.

The Calculation of Rural Urban Food Price Differentials from Unit Values in Household Expenditure Surveys: A new procedure and comparison with existing methods

While national and international statistical agencies spend much resource on calculating purchasing power parity (PPP) between countries, relatively little attention is given to PPP calculations within countries. Yet, for large and heterogeneous countries, such as the US and India, intra country PPP is as important as cross-country PPP. This is particularly true of the rural urban divide in such countries where the idea that one unit of currency has the same purchasing power in both sectors is clearly false. This paper addresses this limitation by proposing a demand system based methodology for calculating rural urban PPP that incorporates rural urban differences in preferences and applies it to India. The methodology is compared with conventional procedures, such as the Laspeyre’s price index and the CPD model, and shown to have several advantages over them. The result on significant rural urban price difference in India underlines the need to extend the cross-country PPP calculations to incorporate spatial differences in large, heterogeneous countries with a diverse set of preferences and prices.Rural Urban PPP, Unit Values, Quality Adjustment, CPD Model