Carbon taxes, consumer demand and carbon dioxide emissions: a simulation analysis for the UK

In this paper we examine the effects of a carbon tax, one of the possible instruments for reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Such taxes are currently being proposed as a means of reducing CO2 emissions, motivated by concerns about the global greenhouse effect and its potential impact on global climate and sea levels (Cline, 1991) and on global economies (Nordhaus, 1991). We therefore take as our problem the reduction of CO2 emissions by the UK economy by use of a carbon tax, and the corresponding effect of this tax on the purchasing power and economic behaviour of households. If they were introduced, carbon taxes would affect the price of fossil fuels in the UK, and thus UK consumer prices, both directly for fuels and indirectly for manufactured goods. These price changes would in turn affect the level and structure of UK final demand, and it is this post-tax UK final demand which will determine UK fossil fuel use, and thus CO2 emissions. In particular, we investigate the social effects of a carbon tax, by considering the distribution of the increased tax burden across consumers.

Gender and Remittances: Creating Gender-Responsive Local Development: The Case of Lesotho

The number of international migrants passed 200 million in 2008, more than double the figure in 1965. As the number of migrants continues to grow, the character of international migration has been transformed. South-South migration, as it is now commonly referred to, is acquiring ever-greater significance in contemporary migration configurations. South-South movements of international migrants are highly gendered. In particular, the feminization of international migration has meant that the absolute numbers and proportion of women migrants is increasingly rapidly. More and more women are also migrating for work in other countries in their own right. The gender dynamics behind this new trend in South-South migration have not been sufficiently examined. In spite of the rapid increase in the volume and diversity of knowledge on the migration-development nexus, issues on gender and especially the changing role of women, continue to be lacking. This study aims to contribute to the narrowing of this knowledge gap through an interlinked analysis of migration and development from a gendered perspective. It pays particular attention to the impact of remittances – financial, in-kind and social – on gendered development processes in countries of origin and amongst transnational households spanning the origin and destination countries. The study focuses on these dynamics in the context of Lesotho and the destination country of South Africa. Objectives The overall objective of the Project is to enhance gender-responsive local development by identifying and promoting options in the utilization of remittances for sustainable livelihoods and the building of social capital in poor rural and semi-urban communities. The strategic aims include: increasing awareness and improving access by women-headed, remittance-recipient households to productive resources while augmenting their assets and strengthening their capacities; providing relevant information and support to local and national governments to identify and formulate policies that will optimize the utilization of remittances for sustainable livelihoods and building social capital; and enhancing the capacities of key stakeholders to integrate gender into policies, programmes, projects and other initiatives linking remittances with sustainable livelihoods and building social capital. The Project has been implemented in six countries, which provide a global representation of UNDP’s regional bureaus: Albania, Dominican Republic, Lesotho, Morocco, Phillipines and Senegal. The Project’s main hypothesis is that the optimized use of remittances enhances gender-responsive local development. By analyzing the actual use of remittances, opportunities and weaknesses will be diagnosed, thus identifying possibilities for intervention as well as identifying capacity building needs for enhancing gender-responsive local development. The developmental impacts of remittances can be analyzed at the macro, meso and micro levels

The Culham Educational Foundation and its Institute in collaboration with the St Gabriel's Trust: a history 1980 - 2011

Two casualties of the so-called massacre of the colleges of education in the late 1970s were Culham which was linked to the University of Oxford and Saint Gabriel’s in south London. Both were Church of England foundations and so out of their closures were borne the new St Gabriel’s trust in 1977 and the Culham Educational Foundation in 1980. Initially working independently, collaboration increased until in 2012 they merged to form a single trust, the Culham St Gabriel’s Trust. This history covers the three decades from their origins to their merger in 2012 Culham decided to undertake its own research and development work in the areas of church schools, church colleges/universities and in school based religious education and collective worship. Initially St Gabriel’s focussed on grant giving but increasingly it worked with Culham through the St Gabriel’s Programme. Collaboration also involved working with other trusts especially other church college trusts and the Jerusalem Trust. All the major work undertaken was designed to have nation implications and applications. This included the Church Colleges Research Project, research projects on church schools, the 1990s national conferences on RE, RE teacher residential weekends, the development of RE resources in collaboration with the BBC and Channel4 Education, an early use of the internet through REonline and the collective worship website, and an RE teacher recruitment programme. Collaboration with the RE Council of England and Wales, and liaison with the diocesan directors of education, the church colleges of HE/universities, national education officers and government were all undertaken on a regular basis. This report provides a strong foundation for future longitudinal studies

Land Grant Application- Gay, John (Roxbury)

Land grant application submitted to the Maine Land Office for John Gay for service in the Revolutionary War.https://digitalmaine.com/revolutionary_war_mass/1147/thumbnail.jp

No. 52: Migration, Remittances and ‘Development’ in Lesotho

Lesotho is one of the most migration dependent countries in the world. Migrant remittances are the country’s major source of foreign exchange, accounting for 25% of GDP in 2006. Lesotho is also one of the poorest countries in the world due to high domestic unemployment, declining agricultural production, falling life expectancy, rising child mortality and half the population living below the poverty line. The majority of households and rural communities are dependent on remittances for their livelihood. Households without access to migrant remittances are significantly worse off than those that do have such access. Since 1990, patterns of migration from Lesotho to South Africa have changed dramatically. These changes include significant increases in legal and irregular cross-border movement between Lesotho and South Africa; declining employment opportunities for Basotho men in the South African gold mines; increased female migration from Lesotho; growing internal female migration of young women within Lesotho; a ‘brain drain’ from Lesotho to South Africa and the growth of AIDS-related migration in Lesotho. The central question addressed in this report is how these changes have impacted remittance flows and usage. For most of the twentieth century, the vast majority of migrants from Lesotho were single young men who went to work on the South African gold mines and remitted funds to their parents’ households. Migration has become much more mixed in recent years and the profile of migrants leaving Lesotho has changed significantly: The number of Basotho male migrants working on the mines declined from 100,000 in 1990 to 46,000 in 2006. However, the majority of male migrants from Lesotho are still mineworkers. The demographic profile of male migrants has shifted markedly. Migrants used to be single young men. Now 84% are married and 77% are heads of households. Nearly 50% of migrants are over the age of 40 and only 5% are under 25. Half of the growing number of female migrants from Lesotho are domestic workers in South Africa. The rest are spread between the informal sector (9%), commercial farmwork (5%), self-employed businesses (6%), the professions (5%) and skilled manual work (5%). In other words, although one sector dominates, female migrants work in a wider variety of jobs than males. On the whole, female migrants are younger than males but significant numbers of older women are also migrants. In contrast to male migrants, only 27% of female migrants are married. On the other hand, 42% are divorced, separated, abandoned or widowed. Most older women migrants fall into this category. A sizable group of women thus has the responsibility of being the head of their own household but have to migrate to South Africa in order to ensure the survival of the household. Over 40,000 young, mostly single, women are internal migrants working in Lesotho’s textile factories. The textile workers have been called the ‘new miners’ though wages in the factories are paltry compared with the mines. If the textile industry did not exist, or closed down, then most of these women would probably migrate to South Africa. Most migrants who work outside mining are irregular migrants as the South African government is reluctant to give them work permits. This increases their vulnerability to exploitation. Many women are in South Africa on 30-day visitor’s passes and are supposed to return to Lesotho every 30 days to renew them. If they do not, they have to pay a “fine” when they eventually return home. Changes in the profile of migration from Lesotho have impacted on remittance flows in a number of ways: The decline in mine employment has not led to a decrease in remittance flows to Lesotho. On the contrary, total remittance flows increased as a result of increases in mine wages. But rising remittance flows are directed to a shrinking number of households thus increasing inequality between households and accelerating levels of poverty and food insecurity for households that do not have a mineworker. Female domestic workers in South Africa remit less to Lesotho than male miners. This is primarily because they earn about a third as much as their male counterparts. Domestic workers are notoriously exploited in South Africa. Some migrants have second families or partners in South Africa. In the case of male migrants, this tends to reduce the amount remitted to Lesotho. In the case of female migrants, it often increases the flow of remittances as they are able to remit some of their partner’s earnings back home as well. The vast majority of cash remittances flow through informal channels (usually carried by hand). Only 5% of migrants use the Post Office and 2% the banks to remit. Remittance-receiving households in Lesotho tend to use most of the remittances for basic needs: Migrant remittances form an important, and in many cases, the only, source of income for migrant-sending households in Lesotho. Over 95% of the households with male migrant members and 90% with female migrant members list remittances as a source of household income. Fewer than 10% list income from the second-ranking income source, non-migrant wage labour. Most households (89%) say that the contribution of remittances to household income is important or very important. Remittances are also key to having enough food in the household (with nearly 90% saying that it is important or very important). The most common use of remittances is for food (90% of households spend remittances on food), clothing (76%), school fees (56%) and fares for transportation (34%). Almost three quarters of households do not invest remittances in agriculture. Of those that do, a quarter spend remittances on seed, 18% on fertilizer, 12% on tractors and 4% on livestock. Nearly 19% of households put some remittance income into savings. Other expenditures such as funerals (incurred by 16% of households) and funeral and burial insurance policies (29%) reflect the impact of HIV and AIDS. Households with female migrants are more likely to supplement remittance earnings with other sources of income. Remittances are not used on luxury consumer items but are used, directly or indirectly, to meet the household’s subsistence needs. The proportion of households investing remittances in formal or informal business is extremely low. In the rural villages, remittances are often “pooled” by women through burial societies, grocery associations and egg circles. As well as loaning money to be paid back with interest, the associations buy food and groceries in bulk to divide up among members. Remittances are essential to household survival in Lesotho but the opportunities for investing remittances in productive, developmental activities are very limited. This suggests that it is important to stop seeing Lesotho as the only site for entrepreneurship by migrants from there. Companies from all over the world are permitted to come and do business in South Africa. The same opportunity should be afforded to Basotho households. Basotho should also be freely allowed to do business in South Africa. Instead, migrants are more often viewed as a threat and undesirable. Migration needs to be re-thought as something that is mutually beneficial for both countries. The only realistic option is to open the borders for unrestricted travel in both directions and to allow Basotho to pursue economic opportunities in South Africa free of harassment and deportation

Mining methods at the Arevalo Mine, El Chico, Hidalgo, Mexico

The Arevalo Mine of the Cia.de Real del Monte y Pachuca is located nine kilometers north of the City of Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico. It is reached by an excellent automobile road from Pachuca. Several different branches of the Mexican Railway System place Pachuca within easy access of the different entries of Mexico --The Arevalo Mine, Location, page 1

Gender Fairness within the Force Concept Inventory

Research on the test structure of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has largely ignored gender, and research on FCI gender effects (often reported as "gender gaps") has seldom interrogated the structure of the test. These rarely-crossed streams of research leave open the possibility that the FCI may not be structurally valid across genders, particularly since many reported results come from calculus-based courses where 75% or more of the students are men. We examine the FCI considering both psychometrics and gender disaggregation (while acknowledging this as a binary simplification), and find several problematic questions whose removal decreases the apparent gender gap. We analyze three samples (total $N_{pre}=5,391$, $N_{post}=5,769$) looking for gender asymmetries using Classical Test Theory, Item Response Theory, and Differential Item Functioning. The combination of these methods highlights six items that appear substantially unfair to women and two items biased in favor of women. No single physical concept or prior experience unifies these questions, but they are broadly consistent with problematic items identified in previous research. Removing all significantly gender-unfair items halves the gender gap in the main sample in this study. We recommend that instructors using the FCI report the reduced-instrument score as well as the 30-item score, and that credit or other benefits to students not be assigned using the biased items.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables; submitted to Phys. Rev. PE

Quality of Working Life In Sociological Perspective,

Although the economic and political climate has changed dramatically since the early 1970s, when the 'Quality of Working Life' (QWL) movement was officially 'born', such that QWL has now been effectively marginalised as an issue of public concern, the basic problems at the heart of this movement, and that of both its predecessors and ostensible descendents, are still very much alive. Indeed, it is argued throughout the present thesis that QWL theorists and practitioners have rarely recognised the nature of the problems at the heart of their own project, nor have they traced thoroughly the genealogies of their own theory and practice. Amongst many other things, the QWL project lacks sociological perspective. It is this particular criticism that formed the focus of the present thesis. In approaching the subject matter of the thesis, a deliberate decision was made to locate discussion of QWL within a broader sociological context than its advocates were willing, or able, to do. Thus, it was hoped to show that mainstream approaches to QWL had either Ignored completely, or inadequately conceptualised and treated, issues of key importance to a fuller understanding of the problems at the heart of QWL concerns. The main areas chosen to highlight the weaknesses of QWL theory and practice, and to provide necessary sociological perspective, were those of structural contradiction in the relations between capital and labour; management; work; and worker participation, In addition, an attempt was made to map out and criticise both the homogeneity and diversity of QWL theory and practice. It was subsequently argued that whether considered as one homogeneous perspective, or as a number of divergent, though still related, perspectives, QWL theory and practice lacked soclologiacl perspective, and, that such a lack of perspective had detrimental consequences for the intellectual validity (and, indeed, for the practical utility) of QWL initiatives. Overall, it was concluded that the Inherent limitations of the discourse of QWL precluded deployment of the 'sociological imagination'. However, without the deployment of such a perspective, attempts to comprehend the nature of the problems which lie at the heart of the QWL project are doomed to failure