The Subjective Approach to the Measurement of Income Inequality (published in Handbook of Income Inequality Measurement, J Silber (ed), Kluwer Academic Publishers (1999), pp.227-241)

Inequality measurement involves explicit or implicit value judgements. The subjective approach to inequality measurement is a relatively new and fast-developing area which focueses direct attention on these judgements. It is 'subjective' in the sense that it takes accounts of peoples' views on distributional comparisons. This paper conveys some of the principal contributions of recent years.inequality, social welfare and poverty

ORGANIZING A FRAGMENTED AND DISORGANIZED PRIVATE SECTOR – THE CREATION OF NON- TRADITIONAL AGRIBUSINESS CLUSTERS AND NICHE MARKETS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF CARIBBEAN AGRICULTURE

Some concerns relating to the demographics of the region as they impact on agricultural production were discussed. Traditional agriculture was in many instances on the decline. Competitive elements have been seizing the opportunity to supply the region through import substitution. Small and medium sized enterprises needed to be empowered by exposing them to state of the art technology and linking them into viable clusters, based on distinctive products, that could enhance their capacity to survive in increasingly globalized economies. This will necessitate both vertical and horizontal integration in the interest of arriving at viable economic entities to facilitate sustainable agri-business. The restructuring will require adjustments and infrastructure support from the Agencies operating in the Region. Development assistance must be goal aligned in the interest of optimizing the use of scarce resources. Governments of each state and stakeholders within will need to rationalize what they do and how they do it. Each entity will not be able to duplicate everything in each location. R&D, further processing and marketing, for example, may need to be subjected to a considerable amount of centralization. To this end the Agricultural Planning Agencies within each Government will need to interact on a regional level to a greater extentNiche markets, Caribbean Agriculture, WTO, Caribbean Agri-Business Association (CABA), Commodity, Regional Trade, CAES, Agribusiness, Agricultural Finance, Financial Economics, Production Economics,

Inequality, welfare and monotonicity

We stablish a general relationship between the standard form of the individualistic social-welfare function and the "reduced-form" version that is expressed in terms of inequality and mean income. This shows the relationship between the property of monotonicity and the slope of the equity-efficient trade-off. Particularly simple results are available for a large class of inequality measures that includes the Gini. These results do not require differentiability of the social-welfare function

Preparation of organic hydrazides

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityDue to the actual high price of hydrazine, this chemical cannot be used in an economical preparation of organic hydrazides. A synthesis of such hydrazides can be envisaged by the reduction of N-nitroamides. The problem is then to find a set of conditions under which no hydrogenolysis of the nitrogen-nitrogen bond occurs. This had been done with N-nitrocarbamates and it was hoped that the results could be extended to N-nitroamides: N-Nitro-N-methylamides were actually used in order to have a more stable N-nitro group. Dimethylation of the hydrazine could be performed either by acid hydrolysis of the addition product obtained with diethyl azodicarboxylate or by heating with pyridinium chloride. After failure to reduce p-N-dinitro-N-methylbenzamide to hydrazine, a new technique was experienced by which the amide was nitrated and reduced directly without isolation of the N-nitroamide. Preliminary results suggested that the electron shifting ability of the R group in molecules of the type R CO-N(NO2)CH3 is very important in their reduction to hydrazine. Several molecules were then reduced with different R. It was found that the yield of hydrazine increases with the electron repelling ability if R. A mechanism involving formation of an unstable platinum hydride is proposed for the reaction. A survery of the addition reactions of azodicarboxylic esters is given with the description of an attempt of "Azo reaction" between diethyl azodicarboxylate and p-N-dinitro-N-methylbenzamide

The ISO Galactic Metallicity Gradient Revisited

Two independent groups (Giveon et al. 2002; Martin-Hernandez et al. 2002) have recently investigated the Galactic metallicity gradient as probed by ISO observations of mid-infrared emission lines from HII regions. We show that the different gradients inferred by the two groups are due to differing source selection and differing extinction corrections. We show that both data sets in fact provide consistent results if identical assumptions are made in the analysis. We present a consistent set of gradients in which we account for extinction and variation in electron temperature across the disk.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic