Property Rights, Standards of Living, and Economic Growth: Western Canadian Cree

The Great Divergence in standards of living for populations around the world occurred in the late 18th century. Prior to that date, evidence suggests that real wages of most Europeans, many living in China and India were similar. Some were a little higher and some a little lower, but with a low dispersion. By the middle of the 19th century, a divergence had occurred with western Europe pulling away from other groups. Little is known about the standards of living of the aboriginal peoples of North America many of whom were primarily hunter/gatherers at the end of the 18th century. Based on comparisons of expenditure, we show that the standard of living of aboriginal people in 1740 was similar to that of wage workers in London. However, within the next century, there would be a great divergence. This paper explores the ways in which hunter-gatherer lifeways and the concomitant property rights structures reduced the likelihood that native economy could experience modern rates of economic growth. Native society and property rights structures which provided a relatively high standard of living in the mid eighteenth century and for part of the nineteenth were unable to provide avenues for further development.native americans, living standards, property rights

Capital Constraints and European Migration to Canada: Evidence from the 1920s Passenger Lists

The difficulty or inability to borrow made capital market constraints an important part of the decision of potential emigrants to move from Europe to North America. We formalize the constraint with a life-cycle model, where agents jointly choose the optimal period of saving to finance migration and whether to migrate. Simulations of the model point to the potential role of preferences, the period of adjustment after arrival, and the direct migration costs in determining who will migrate and at what age; and they help account for the large wage gaps between the Old and New World. Our analysis of data from the passenger manifests of Dutch arrivals at Canadian ports from 1925 to 1927, that importantly include the saving of these immigrants, points to the promise of this approach to international migration.immigration, canada

Unexpected Formation of 10-Iodo- and 10-Chlorocamphor under Halosulfonylation Conditions, and Convenient Routes to 10-Chloro- and 10-Bromocamphor

The generation of camphor-10-sulfonyl iodide in situ under halosulfonylation conditions or exposure of camphor-10-sulfonyl chloride to copper(II) chloride under Asscher–Vofsi conditions leads unexpectedly to the formation of 10-iodocamphor or 10-chlorocamphor, respectively. Additionally, convenient syntheses of 10-bromocamphor and 10-chlorocamphor have been achieved by extension of a previously reported methodology

Distributed Robust Consensus Control of Multi-agent Systems with Heterogeneous Matching Uncertainties

This paper considers the distributed consensus problem of linear multi-agent systems subject to different matching uncertainties for both the cases without and with a leader of bounded unknown control input. Due to the existence of nonidentical uncertainties, the multi-agent systems discussed in this paper are essentially heterogeneous. For the case where the communication graph is undirected and connected, a distributed continuous static consensus protocol based on the relative state information is first designed, under which the consensus error is uniformly ultimately bounded and exponentially converges to a small adjustable residual set. A fully distributed adaptive consensus protocol is then designed, which, contrary to the static protocol, relies on neither the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix nor the upper bounds of the uncertainties. For the case where there exists a leader whose control input is unknown and bounded, distributed static and adaptive consensus protocols are proposed to ensure the boundedness of the consensus error. It is also shown that the proposed protocols can be redesigned so as to ensure the boundedness of the consensus error in the presence of bounded external disturbances which do not satisfy the matching condition. A sufficient condition for the existence of the proposed protocols is that each agent is stabilizable.Comment: 16 page, 10 figures. This manuscript is an extended version of our paper accepted for publication by Automatic

Development of highly selective ligands for separations of actinides from lanthanides in the nuclear fuel cycle

This account summarizes recent work by us and others on the development of ligands for the separation of actinides from lanthanides contained in nuclear waste streams in the context of a future European strategy for nuclear waste management. The current status of actinide/lanthanide separations worldwide is briefly discussed, and the synthesis, development, and testing of different classes of heterocyclic soft N- and S-donor ligands in Europe over the last 20 years is presented. This work has led to the current benchmark ligand that displays many of the desirable qualities for industrial use. The improvement of radiolytic stability through ligand design is also discussed

Hemicellulase activity of fungi in wood decay

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