Land reform, poverty reduction and growth : evidence from India

In recent times there has been a renewed interest in relationships between redistribution, growth and welfare. Land reforms have been central to strategies to improve the asset base of the poor in developing countries thought their effectiveness has been hindered by political constraints on implementation. In this paper we use panel data on the sixteen main Indian states from 1958 to 1992 to consider whether the large volume of land reforms as have been legislated have had an appreciable impact on growth and poverty. The evidence presented suggests that land reforms do appear to be associated with poverty reduction

Can Labour Regulation Hinder Economic Performance? Evidence from India

This paper investigates whether the industrial relations climate in Indian States has affected the pattern of manufacturing growth in the period 1958-92. We show that pro-worker amendments to the Industrial Disputes Act are associated with lowered investment, employment, productivity and output in registered manufacturing. Regulating in a pro-worker direction is also associated with increases in urban poverty. This suggests that attempts to redress the balance of power between capital and labour can end up hurting the poor.Indian industrial relations, Industrial Disputes Act, manufacturing growth, pro-worker regulations, urban poverty, capital and labour.

Benchmarking government provision of social safety nets

The question of how much governments should spend on social programs generally, or safety nets in particular, is of great obvious interest to policymakers but is extremely difficult to address empirically. The approach in this paper differs from others by assuming that what governments can potentially do in terms of spending on social programs is given by what governments across the world are actually observed to be doing on average. After first briefly reviewing the existing methodologies, their limitations, and what can be learned, an analysis of 63 countries spending patterns from 1972-1997 is presented using a comparative benchmarking methodology. Unconditional rankings of spending on safety nets and other health and education social programs are refined by controlling for various factors which affect the ability to fund programs. Two sets of factors are examined: (i) structural features captured by regional dummy variables and characteristics of the underlying populations; and (ii) quality of government as reflected in measures of corruption, rule of law, political pressure, and others. Separate analyses are conducted across countries for selected welfare indicators such as the infant mortality rate and life expectancy at birth and for states in India, for which additional information is available on macroeconomic factors and institutional features influencing safety nets spending. The approach generates a picture as to how states are performing relative to international expenditure norms and may be useful to policymakers in determining the appropriate level of overall spending.Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Safety Nets and Transfers,Rural Poverty Reduction,Poverty Assessment

An Examination of the Short Term Reversal Premium

The intent of this study is to explore short-term reversal effects in public securities markets. The basis of this study is to take into consideration prior work done by economists, paying particularly attention to periods specifically before and after the decimalization of the stock market in 2001. This study finds that from years 1980-2000, there is a monthly return premium of -0.0552% or 5.5 basis points, which is quite significant with a t-statistic of 11.08. Following decimalization in 2001 through year 2012, this monthly return premium drops 44% to -0.031% or 3.1 basis points, again with a high t-statistic of 4.50. Despite these findings, the resulting return premium is still quite small in nature and would require large capital commitments to realize any type of meaningful return. Regardless, there inherently appears to be an arbitrage opportunity that would pique the curiosity of any rational investor and begs to be explored further

From Dopant to Source: The Use of Zinc as an Enabler in the Synthesis of Nanostructures by Metalorganic Vapour Phase Epitaxy

As conventional methods of semiconductor fabrication approach fundamental physical limits, new paradigms are required for progress. One concept with the potential to deliver such a paradigm shift is the bottom-up synthesis of semiconductor nanostructures. Beyond further scaling, bottom-up methods promise novel geometries and heterostructures unavailable by conventional top-down methods. This is particularly true in the case of nanostructure growth by the vapour-liquid-solid (VLS) method. Commonly realised using existing vapour phase epitaxy techniques, a range of high-performance VLS devices have now been demonstrated including photovoltaic cells, lasers and high-frequency-transistors. In this dissertation, selected applications of diethylzinc (DEZn) are used to step through a range of opportunities and challenges arising from the VLS synthesis of semiconductor nanostructures by metal-organic vapour phase epitaxy (MOVPE). These applications are broadly grouped into four chapters focusing on the use of zinc firstly as a dopant and then morphological agent, internal quantum efficiency (IQE) enhancer and finally, source. In the context of doping, relatively high DEZn flows are shown to alter the morphology of GaAs nanowires by introducing planar defects, kinking and seed-splitting. Growth studies are used to establish the threshold for these effects and thus the range of DEZn flows suitable for doping. Successful incorporation of up to 5 x1020 Zn/cm3 is demonstrated through atom probe tomography (APT) and electrical characterisation. Building on these results, DEZn is then used to generate periodic twinning in GaAs nanowires. The morphology and overgrowth of these twinning superlattice (TSL) nanowires is studied. Unlike for other III-V materials, twin spacing is found to be a linear function of nanowire diameter. By analysing the probability of twin formation, this result is related to the relatively high twin plane and solid-liquid interface energies of GaAs. Values for the wetting angle and supersaturation of the seed particle during growth are also extracted. In addition to acting as a dopant, zinc is also shown to produce an orders of magnitude increase in the IQE of GaAs nanowires. Performance gains are quantified by measuringthe absolute efficiency of individual nanowires. This increase in IQE with doping enables room-temperature lasing from unpassivated GaAs nanowires. The performance of doped nanolasers, including the transition to lasing, is fully characterised. In addition to increasing radiative efficiency, Zn doping also increases differential gain while reducing the transparency carrier density. The threshold pump power of a Zn doped nanowire is thus shown to be less than that of an equivalent AlGaAs passivated structure. In the final chapter, DEZn is used as a source for the growth of ZnAs, ZnP and ZnSb nanostructures by MOVPE. A range of growth conditions, substrates and seed materials are investigated. Individual nanostructures of both ZnAs and ZnP are shown to exhibit excellent optoelectronic performance with emission from individual nanostructures at 1.0 and 1.5 eV respectively. Overall, this thesis underlines the vast range of possibilities offered by VLS growth and opens to the door to both a variety of new techniques and new family of semiconductor nanomaterials

Computational and numerical aspects of full waveform seismic inversion

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a nonlinear optimisation procedure, seeking to match synthetically-generated seismograms with those observed in field data by iteratively updating a model of the subsurface seismic parameters, typically compressional wave (P-wave) velocity. Advances in high-performance computing have made FWI of 3-dimensional models feasible, but the low sensitivity of the objective function to deeper, low-wavenumber components of velocity makes these difficult to recover using FWI relative to more traditional, less automated, techniques. While the use of inadequate physics during the synthetic modelling stage is a contributing factor, I propose that this weakness is substantially one of ill-conditioning, and that efforts to remedy it should focus on the development of both more efficient seismic modelling techniques, and more sophisticated preconditioners for the optimisation iterations. I demonstrate that the problem of poor low-wavenumber velocity recovery can be reproduced in an analogous one-dimensional inversion problem, and that in this case it can be remedied by making full use of the available curvature information, in the form of the Hessian matrix. In two or three dimensions, this curvature information is prohibitively expensive to obtain and store as part of an inversion procedure. I obtain the complete Hessian matrices for a realistically-sized, two-dimensional, towed-streamer inversion problem at several stages during the inversion and link properties of these matrices to the behaviour of the inversion. Based on these observations, I propose a method for approximating the action of the Hessian and suggest it as a path forward for more sophisticated preconditioning of the inversion process.Open Acces

Providing Genetic Testing Through the Private Sector: A View From Canada

[À l'origine dans / Was originally part of : ESPUM - Dép. médecine sociale et préventive - Travaux et publications]Genetic testing technologies are rapidly moving from the research laboratory to the market place. Very little scholarship considers the implications of private genetic testing for a public health care system such as Canada’s. It is critical to consider how and if these tests should be marketed to, and purchased by, the public. It is also imperative to evaluate the extent to which genetic tests are or should be included in Canada’s public health care system, and the impact of allowing a two-tiered system for genetic testing. A series of threshold tests are presented as ways of clarifying whether a genetic test is morally appropriate, effective and safe, efficient and appropriate for public funding and whether private purchase poses special problems and requires further regulation. These thresholds also identify the research questions around which professional, public and policy debate must be sustained: What is a morally acceptable goal for genetic services? What are the appropriate benefits? What are the risks? When is it acceptable that services are not funded under health care? And how can the harms of private access be managed?Medical Research Council, the University of Alberta Health Law Institute, and the Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbi

DC-SIGN (CD209) mediates dengue virus infection of human dendritic cells

Dengue virus is a single-stranded, enveloped RNA virus that productively infects human dendritic cells (DCs) primarily at the immature stage of their differentiation. We now find that all four serotypes of dengue use DC-SIGN (CD209), a C-type lectin, to infect dendritic cells. THP-1 cells become susceptible to dengue infection after transfection of DC-specific ICAM-3 grabbing nonintegrin (DC-SIGN), or its homologue L-SIGN, whereas the infection of dendritic cells is blocked by anti-DC-SIGN antibodies and not by antibodies to other molecules on these cells. Viruses produced by dendritic cells are infectious for DC-SIGN- and L-SIGN-bearing THP-1 cells and other permissive cell lines. Therefore, DC-SIGN may be considered as a new target for designing therapies that block dengue infection

The Effective Potential, the Renormalisation Group and Vacuum Stability

We review the calculation of the the effective potential with particular emphasis on cases when the tree potential or the renormalisation-group-improved, radiatively corrected potential exhibits non-convex behaviour. We illustrate this in a simple Yukawa model which exhibits a novel kind of dimensional transmutation. We also review briefly earlier work on the Standard Model. We conclude that, despite some recent claims to the contrary, it can be possible to infer reliably that the tree vacuum does not represent the true ground state of the theory.Comment: 23 pages; 5 figures; v2 includes minor changes in text and additional reference