"Promoting Gender Equality through Stimulus Packages and Public Job Creation: Lessons Learned from South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme"

Beyond loss of income, joblessness is associated with greater poverty, marginalization, and social exclusion; the current global crisis is clearly not helping. In this new Public Policy Brief, Research Scholar Rania Antonopoulos explores the impact of both joblessness and employment expansion on poverty, paying particular attention to the gender aspects of poverty and poverty-reducing public employment schemes targeting poor women. The author presents the results of a Levy Institute study that examines the macroeconomic consequences of scaling up South Africa's Expanded Public Works Programme by adding to it a new sector for social service delivery in health and education. She notes that gaps in such services for households that cannot afford to pay for them are mostly filled by long hours of invisible, unpaid work performed by women and children. Her proposed employment creation program addresses several policy objectives: income and job generation, provisioning of communities' unmet needs, skill enhancement for a new cadre of workers, and promotion of gender equality by addressing the overtaxed time of women.

Quantum Mechanics without the quantum

Incompatibility between conjugate variables and complementary pictures comes in two kinds, exclusive of one another. The first kind is unconditional, and the second conditional on quantum's indivisibility. We employ this distinction to study the wave-particle dualism and the energy-time uncertainty relation. Afterwards we look upon the present state of the quantum mechanical formalism. We demonstrate that the two incompatibilities are employed in the same treatment forming a "hybrid" description of the phenomena and leading to a contradiction.Comment: Corrected typos Changed conten

Asset Depletion Among the Poor: Does Gender Matter? The Case of Urban Households in Thailand

The paper analytically and empirically examines the issue of gender inequality in household wealth in the form of tangible assets among urban poor households Thailand. It seeks to answer the following questions: (1) is there a gendered pattern of asset ownership between husbands and wives; 2) during times of crises, is there a gendered pattern of asset depletion and 3) does asset depletion impact on men and women differently in regards to their income earnings capabilities? The answers are especially important since asset ownership and access impact the form of coping mechanisms and income earnings of men and women, hence on their individual well-being as well as the longer term well-being of the household. This paper joins in the recent efforts in the literature in investigating gender differences in asset ownership and depletion. In particular, we explore analytically and empirically this type of gender inequality among 135 couples, with and without dependents using quantitative and qualitative data drawn from a random sample of 152 urban, low-income households in Bangkok (Thailand) in 2002. The multi-purpose survey included information at the level of the individual respondent on accumulated tangible or physical assets as well as the status of those owned assets six months later. Both husband and wife were interviewed separately and the data gathered from the multi-visit interviews include pertinent household and individual information, employment, credit as well as household decision making issues, division of tasks and earnings allocation for various expenses. Tobit and probit tests are used to examine the varied factors that may affect the gendered pattern of asset depletion and whether there are any significant differences in asset depletion between men and women in the same households. In addition, two probit models are estimated in order to determine the effects of various individual and household characteristics on the probability of pawning or selling real assets and more specifically, business-related assets . The empirical results demonstrate that, alongside gender equality in employment opportunities and earnings, there is need to raise the importance of and promote advocacy for gender equality in wealth and assets, both public as well as private, and for policy interventions that addresses the gender-wealth gap.

"Public Job-creation Programs: The Economic Benefits of Investing in Social Care. Case Studies in South Africa and the United States"

This paper demonstrates the strong impacts that public job creation in social care provisioning has on employment creation. Furthermore, it shows that mobilizing underutilized domestic labor resources and targeting them to bridge gaps in community-based services yield strong pro-poor income growth patterns that extend throughout the economy. Social care provision also contributes to promoting gender equality, as women—especially from low-income households-constitute a major workforce in the care sector. We present the ex-ante policy simulation results from two country case studies: South Africa and the United States. Both social accounting matrix–based multiplier analysis and propensity ranking–based microsimulation provide evidence of the pro-poor impacts of the social care expansion.Social Care; Job Creation; Gender Equality; Pro-Poor Growth

Complex statistics in Hamiltonian barred galaxy models

We use probability density functions (pdfs) of sums of orbit coordinates, over time intervals of the order of one Hubble time, to distinguish weakly from strongly chaotic orbits in a barred galaxy model. We find that, in the weakly chaotic case, quasi-stationary states arise, whose pdfs are well approximated by $q$-Gaussian functions (with $1<q<3$), while strong chaos is identified by pdfs which quickly tend to Gaussians ($q=1$). Typical examples of weakly chaotic orbits are those that "stick" to islands of ordered motion. Their presence in rotating galaxy models has been investigated thoroughly in recent years due of their ability to support galaxy structures for relatively long time scales. In this paper, we demonstrate, on specific orbits of 2 and 3 degree of freedom barred galaxy models, that the proposed statistical approach can distinguish weakly from strongly chaotic motion accurately and efficiently, especially in cases where Lyapunov exponents and other local dynamic indicators appear to be inconclusive.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, submitted for publicatio

"Time and Poverty from a Developing Country Perspective"

This study is concerned with the measurement of poverty in the context of developing countries. We argue that poverty rankings must take into account time use dimensions of paid and unpaid work jointly. Reviewing the current state of the literature on this topic, our methodology introduces a critical but missing analytical distinction between time poverty and time deprivation. On this basis, we proceed to provide empirical evidence by using South African time use survey data compiled in 2000. Our findings show that existing methods that work well for advanced countries require modification when adopted in the case of a developing country. The results identify a group of adults who previously were inadvertently missing, as they were considered "time wealthy."Time Poverty Measurement; Time Use; Poverty; Policy

Detecting chaos, determining the dimensions of tori and predicting slow diffusion in Fermi--Pasta--Ulam lattices by the Generalized Alignment Index method

The recently introduced GALI method is used for rapidly detecting chaos, determining the dimensionality of regular motion and predicting slow diffusion in multi--dimensional Hamiltonian systems. We propose an efficient computation of the GALI$_k$ indices, which represent volume elements of $k$ randomly chosen deviation vectors from a given orbit, based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) algorithm. We obtain theoretically and verify numerically asymptotic estimates of GALIs long--time behavior in the case of regular orbits lying on low--dimensional tori. The GALI$_k$ indices are applied to rapidly detect chaotic oscillations, identify low--dimensional tori of Fermi--Pasta--Ulam (FPU) lattices at low energies and predict weak diffusion away from quasiperiodic motion, long before it is actually observed in the oscillations.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, submitted for publication in European Physical Journal - Special Topics. Revised version: Small explanatory additions to the text and addition of some references. A small figure chang