Commodity price uncertainty and shocks: implications for economic growth

It has long been believed that commodity price variability causes problems for primaryproducing developing countries, but there is less agreement about which particular manifestations of commodity price movements matter to developing countries. This paper tests the effects of ex post shocks and ex ante price uncertainty on economic growth using the Burnside and Dollar (1997) data set. The shock and uncertainty variables are constructed using a new data set of unique aggregate commodity price indices for 113 developing countries over the period 1957Q1-1997Q4. The analysis shows that per capita growth rates are significantly reduced by large discrete negative commodity price shocks. The magnitude of the effect of negative shocks on growth is very substantial, and appears to work independently of investment, which suggests that adjustment is achieved through severe reductions in capacity utilization. Negative shocks remain highly significant after controlling for government economic policy and institutional quality, which indicates that the result is not attributable exclusively to inappropriate policy responses on the part of governments. The paper also shows that positive shocks have no lasting impact on growth, which is consistent with the findings of both Deaton and Miller (1995) and Collier and Gunning (1999a), but overturns an earlier result which suggested that the long run effects of positive temporary shocks are negative. The third key result is that ex ante uncertainty does not affect growth, which holds for nine different definitions of uncertainty. Hence, what reduces growth is not the prospect of volatile world prices, but the actual realizations of negative shocks. The results are robust to changes in sample composition, changing the time series dimensions of the data, instrumenting for endogenous regressors, and across different estimation methods.

Private investment in developing countries: The effects of commodity shocks and uncertainty

The link between ex post discrete shocks and private investment have never been formally tested in a panel data context, while the evidence of a link between ex ante commodity price uncertainty and investment is weak. This paper constructs measures of discrete shocks and uncertainty using a new multi-country data set of aggregate commodity price indices, and tests the relationship between various manifestations of commodity price variability and private investment rates within the context of a canonical empirical investment model estimated on a sample of 44 developing countries. The analysis confirms theoretical predictions that positive ex post commodity price shocks have strong positive effects on private investment rates in low income developing countries, conditional upon the level of commodity prices. It is also shown that the prospect of uncertain future commodity prices andex post negative shocks do not affect private investment rates.

The effects on growth of commodity price uncertainty and shocks

The author estimates the effects on growth of commodity price shocks, and uncertainty within an established empirical growth model. Ex-post shocks, and ex-ante uncertainty have been treated in the empirical literature as if they were synonymous. But they are distinct concepts, and it is both theoretically, and empirically inappropriate to treat them as synonymous. He shows that the interaction between policy, and aid is robust to the inclusion of variables capturing commodity price movements. More important, his approach departs in three ways from earlier empirical studies of the subject: 1) It deals with issues of endogeneity, without incurring an excessive loss of efficiency. 2) It defines the dependent variable to allow an assessment of the longer-term implications of temporary trade shocks. 3) It imposes no priors on how commodity price movements affect growth, but compares and contrasts a range of competing shock, and uncertainty specifications. The author resolves the disagreement about the long-run effect of positive shocks on growth, finding that positive shocks have no long-run impact on growth (that windfalls from trade shocks do not translate into sustainable increases in income). He shows that negative shocks have large, highly significant, and negative effects on growth, but that commodity price uncertainty does not affect growth.Economic Theory&Research,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Markets and Market Access,Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Economic Theory&Research,Inequality,Markets and Market Access

Aid, shocks, and growth

Analysis of the relationship between aid and growth by Burnside and Dollar found that the better a country's policies, the more effective aid is in raising growth in that country. But this result has been criticized for being sensitive to choice of sample and for neglecting shocks. The authors incorporate export price shocks into the analysis of aid's effect on growth. They construct export price indices using the approach pioneered by Deaton and Miller. They locate shocks by differencing the indices, removing predictable elements from the stationary process, and normalizing the residuals. Extreme negative shocks are the bottom 2.5 percent tail of this distribution. Introducing these extremeshocks into the Burnside-Dollar regression, the authors find that they are highly significant: unsurprisingly, extreme negative shocks reduce growth. Once these shocks are included, the Burnside-Dollar results become robust to choice of sample. Moreover, the adverse effects of negative shocks on growth can be mitigated through offsetting increases in aid. Indeed, targeting aid to countries experiencing negative shocks appears to be even more important for aid effectiveness than targeting aid to countries with good policies. But the authors show that, overall, donors have not used aid for this purpose.Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,Gender and Development,Markets and Market Access,Environmental Economics&Policies,School Health,Environmental Economics&Policies,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,Inequality,School Health,Markets and Market Access

The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray's reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conservingmeasures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853-55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process

Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life [Book Review]

Lucy Hartley’s densely packed and deeply intelligent Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life is filled to the brim with moving pieces that are, for the most part, intricately and tightly interlocking. Hartley is interested in what she suggests was the rise of ‘‘a new language for speaking about beauty’’ that occurred across the nineteenth century, as linked to ‘‘emerging democratic ideals’’ (p. 2)

Die Reorganisation der Fascia dentata der Ratte nach entorhinaler Denervierung : eine regulatorische Rolle für das Chondroitinsulfat Proteoglykan NG2

Lesion of the rat entorhinal cortex denervates the outer molecular layer of the fascia dentata followed by layer-specific axonal sprouting of uninjured fibers in the denervated zone. One of the candidate molecules regulating the laminar-specific sprouting response in the outer molecular layer is the transmembrane chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan NG2. NG2 is found in glial scars and has been suggested to impede axonal regeneration following injury of the spinal cord. The present study adressed the question whether NG2 could also regulate axonal growth in denervated areas of the brain. Therefore, (1) changes in NG2 mRNA and NG2 protein levels, (2) the cellular and the extracellular localisation of the molecule, (3) the identity of NG2 expressing cells, and (4) the generation of NG2-positive cells were studied in the rat fascia dentata before and following entorhinal deafferentation. Laser microdissection was employed to selectively harvest the denervated molecular layer and combined with quantitative reverse transcription-PCR to measure changes in NG2 mRNA amount (6h, 12h, 2d, 4d, 7d post lesion). The study revealed increases of NG2 mRNA at day 2 (2.5-fold) and day 4 (2-fold) post lesion. Immunocytochemistry was used to detect changes in NG2 protein distribution (1d, 4d, 7d, 10d, 14d, 30d, 6 months post lesion). NG2 staining was increased in the denervated outer molecular layer at 1 day post lesion, reached a maximum at 10 days post lesion, and returned to control levels within 6 month. Interestingly, the accumulation of NG2 protein was strongly restricted to the denervated outer molecular layer forming a border to the unaffected inner molecular layer. Using electron microscopy, NG2-immunoprecipitate was localized not only on glial surfaces and in the extracellular matrix but also in the vicinity of neuronal profiles indicating that NG2 is secreted following denervation. Double-labelings of NG2-immunopositive cells with markers for astrocytes, microglia/macrophages, and oligodendrocytes suggested that NG2-cells are a distinct glial subpopulation before and after entorhinal deafferentation. Bromodeoxyuridine-labeling revealed that some of the NG2-positive cells are postlesional generated. Taken together, the data revealed a layer-specific upregulation of NG2 in the denervated outer molecular layer of the fascia dentata that coincides with the sprouting response of uninjured fibers. This suggests that NG2 could regulate lesion-induced axonal growth in denervated areas of the brain.Ziel dieser Arbeit war es, die Regulation axonaler Wachstumsprozesse und die Bedeutung des wachstumshemmenden Chondroitinsulfat Proteoglykans (CSPG) NG2 bei plastischen Umbauvorgängen des ZNS besser verstehen zu können. Die zu Grunde liegende Frage war, ob NG2 an der Regulation axonaler Wachstumsprozesse in denervierten Zonen des ZNS beteiligt ist. Hierfür wurden die zeitlichen und regionalen Veränderungen von NG2 in der Fascia dentata der Ratte vor und zu verschiedenen Zeitpunkten nach einer Läsion des entorhinalen Kortex untersucht. Die Expression von NG2 wurde auf mRNA-, Protein- und ultrastruktureller Ebene bestimmt und mit dem postläsionalen Sprossungsverhalten unverletzter Axone in der denervierten äußeren Molekularschicht (OML) der Fascia dentata korreliert. Abschließend wurde die Identität NG2-produzierender Zellen analysiert und untersucht, ob es zu einer Neubildung von NG2-positiven Zellen nach der Läsion kommt. Die Ergebnisse zeigten eine Hochregulierung von NG2 auf mRNA und auf Protein Ebene, die räumlich auf die deafferenzierte OML begrenzt war. Auf ultrastruktureller Ebene war in der OML NG2-positives Immunoprezipitat nicht nur auf glialen Zelloberflächen und in der extrazellulären Matrix zu sehen, sondern auch in engem Kontakt zu neuronalen Strukturen. Kolokalisationen von NG2-positiven Zellen mit anderen glialen Zellen (Astrozyten, Mikroglia/Makrophagen und Oligodendrozyten) wurden weder vor noch nach der Läsion gefunden, sehr wohl jedoch einige postläsional neu generierte NG2-positive Zellen. Zusammenfassend lässt sich sagen, dass alle postläsionalen Veränderungen von NG2 (1.) räumlich auf die denervierte OML begrenzt waren und (2.) zeitlich mit der Sprossungsantwort unverletzter Fasern übereinstimmten. Dies legt nahe, dass NG2 an der Regulation axonaler Wachstumsprozesse in denervierten Schichten des ZNS beteiligt ist. Ausserdem wird vermutet, dass NG2 postläsional gespalten wird und, dass NG2-positive Zellen ein von Astrozyten, Mikroglia/Makrophagen und Oligodendrozyten differenter glialer Zelltyp sind

Surveying Oregon’s Digital Heritage Collections

In 2018, the Oregon Heritage Commission conducted a survey of heritage organizations across the state to capture data regarding digitization efforts. The goal of the survey was to collect a baseline of information on the types of digital collections in Oregon, existing digital infrastructure, and a level of interest in collaborative options. Data gathered was shared with our partners, including the Orbis Cascade Alliance, to aid their work in considering how to create an on-ramp for smaller collections to enter into the Digital Public Library of America. This work followed the 2013 Environmental Scan of Digital Collections conducted by the State Library of Oregon and the outcomes of the 2015 Northwest Digital Summit, which identified overall gaps in support for digital collections at heritage organizations in Oregon and Washington. Unlike previous statewide assessments, the 2018 survey strove to capture data from heritage organizations of all types and sizes, both with and without digital collections, so that the Oregon Heritage Commission and our partners can determine strategies, tools, and trainings to best assist organizations at all stages of the digitization process

Statement aus der Perspektive von Studien zum schulischen Schriftspracherwerb

Der Beitrag ist ein Statement zur Beziehung von Diagnose und Förderung aus der Perspektive von Studien zum Schriftspracherwerb. Anhand von drei Thesen wird der Schwierigkeit der Passung von Unterricht bzw. Förderung und Lernprozess nachgegangen: 1) Schriftspracherwerb ist ein dynamischer Prozess, in dem es keine 1:1 Entsprechung von Lehr- und Lernprozessen gibt. 2) Das Beobachten von Lernvoraussetzungen und Lernprozessen setzt eine Haltung voraus, die Fehler als lernspezifische Notwendigkeit ansieht und auf Dialog mit den Lernenden gerichtet ist. 3) Stufenmodelle des (Schrift-)Spracherwerbs taugen als Orientierungsgrundlage zum Maßstab der Förderung, sollten aber nicht als Norm für individuelle Entwicklungsprozesse verwendet werden. (DIPF/Orig.