Macroeconomic reform and growth in Africa : adjustment in Africa revisited

The 1994 World Bank study,"Adjustment in Africa: reforms, results, and the road ahead,"assessed the extent of, and economic payoffs from, policy reform in 29 countries in sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-1980s and 1990s. Here, the authors update the results of that report with 1992 macroeconomic data and explore some issues in more detail. The conclusions of the earlier report still hold: improved policies are still associated with improved performance, but countries fall short of having sound policies. In fact, the 1991-92 policy stance was not as strong as the 1990-91 stance, reflecting the slow, fragile, and often reversal-prone nature of macroeconomic reform in Africa. Getting the real exchange rate right and reducing the fiscal deficit should be the top priority for restoring growth. Countries that significantly reduced their budget deficits and reduced the black market premium (by devaluing) enjoyed the greatest payoffs from reform. Devaluation of the CFA franc in January 1994 represents a real opportunity for the CFA franc zone countries to restore growth. Many countries have made considerable progress in moving toward competitive real exchange rates. There still remains the challenge of reducing budget deficits in ways consistent with poverty-reducing growth. Hence, the need to reorient public spending to the essential tasks of government, especially providing social services. Reform in two areas will be important to sustaining fiscal reform: implicit subsidies to public enterprises must be cut, and the cost of restructuring the banking sector must not be absorbed by the budget. Policy reforms undertaken so far have paid off in higher growth rates, but the level of growth is still too low to sustain rapid rates of poverty reduction. Increased growth seems to have come more from efficient use of existing capacity than from new investments. Only steady and increased policy reform will convince investors of the credibility of reform and thus of a more favorable investment climate.Economic Stabilization,Macroeconomic Management,Economic Theory&Research,Achieving Shared Growth,Environmental Economics&Policies

Women's economic advancement through agricultural change

This paper reviews donor experience with the design of development projects that are sensitive to gender-specific constraints. The review finds that the gap between intentions and implementation as regards gender-sensitivity is larger in agriculture than in health and nutrition. One of the reasons forwarded for this gap is the dearth of quantitative studies documenting the foregone benefits in terms of agricultural productivity of not promoting the economic advancement of women in agriculture.employment ,Nutrition ,Gender ,Women Economic conditions. ,Women Employment Bangladesh. ,Women in agriculture Bangladesh. ,Gender. ,Nutrition ,

Are women overrepresented among the poor?

This paper presents new evidence on the proportion of women in poverty in ten developing countries. It compares poverty measures for males and females and male- and female-headed households, and investigates the sensitivity of these measures to the use of per-capita and per-adult equivalent units and different definitions of the poverty line.Gender issues ,Developing countries ,Poverty ,

Gender and poverty

This paper presents new evidence on the association between gender and poverty based on an empirical analysis of 11 data sets from 10 developing countries. The paper computes income- and expenditure-based poverty measures and investigates their sensitivity to the use of per capita and per adult equivalent units. It also tests for differences in poverty incidence between individuals in male- and female-headed households using stochastic dominance analysis. Stochastic dominance analysis reveals that differences between male- and female-headed households among the very poor are not sufficiently large that one can conclude that one is unambiguously worse- or better-off, except for a few exceptions. When we use the method of endogenous bounds, persons in female-headed households in rural Ghana and Bangladesh are consistently worse-off, using two stochastic dominance criteria. These results suggest that, among the very poor, persons in male- and female-headed households may not differ significantly. The consistent and significant exceptions, rural Ghana and Bangladesh, suggest that cultural and institutional factors may be responsible for higher poverty among women in these countries. Our results point to the need to analyze determinants of household income and consumption using multivariate methods, and to give greater attention to the processes underlying female headship.Gender ,Household resource allocation ,Poverty ,rural population ,Developing countries ,

Are women overrepresented among the poor?

This paper presents new evidence on the proportion of women in poverty in ten developing countries. It compares poverty measures for males and females and male- and female-headed households, and investigates the sensitivity of these measures to the use of per-capita and per-adult equivalent units and different definitions of the poverty line.Gender issues ,Developing countries ,Poverty ,

Situating emotional experience

Psychological construction approaches to emotion suggest that emotional experience is situated and dynamic. Fear, for example, is typically studied in a physical danger context (e.g., threatening snake), but in the real world, it often occurs in social contexts, especially those involving social evaluation (e.g., public speaking). Understanding situated emotional experience is critical because adaptive responding is guided by situational context (e.g., inferring the intention of another in a social evaluation situation vs. monitoring the environment in a physical danger situation). In an fMRI study, we assessed situated emotional experience using a newly developed paradigm in which participants vividly imagine different scenarios from a first-person perspective, in this case scenarios involving either social evaluation or physical danger. We hypothesized that distributed neural patterns would underlie immersion in social evaluation and physical danger situations, with shared activity patterns across both situations in multiple sensory modalities and in circuitry involved in integrating salient sensory information, and with unique activity patterns for each situation type in coordinated large-scale networks that reflect situated responding. More specifically, we predicted that networks underlying the social inference and mentalizing involved in responding to a social threat (in regions that make up the “default mode” network) would be reliably more active during social evaluation situations. In contrast, networks underlying the visuospatial attention and action planning involved in responding to a physical threat would be reliably more active during physical danger situations. The results supported these hypotheses. In line with emerging psychological construction approaches, the findings suggest that coordinated brain networks offer a systematic way to interpret the distributed patterns that underlie the diverse situational contexts characterizing emotional life

Primary interoceptive cortex activity during simulated experiences of the body

Studies of the classic exteroceptive sensory systems (e.g., vision, touch) consistently demonstrate that vividly imagining a sensory experience of the world – simulating it – is associated with increased activity in the corresponding primary sensory cortex. We hypothesized, analogously, that simulating internal bodily sensations would be associated with increased neural activity in primary interoceptive cortex. An immersive, language-based mental imagery paradigm was used to test this hypothesis (e.g., imagine your heart pounding during a roller coaster ride, your face drenched in sweat during a workout). During two neuroimaging experiments, participants listened to vividly described situations and imagined “being there” in each scenario. In Study 1, we observed significantly heightened activity in primary interoceptive cortex (of dorsal posterior insula) during imagined experiences involving vivid internal sensations. This effect was specific to interoceptive simulation: it was not observed during a separate affect focus condition in Study 1, nor during an independent Study 2 that did not involve detailed simulation of internal sensations (instead involving simulation of other sensory experiences). These findings underscore the large-scale predictive architecture of the brain and reveal that words can be powerful drivers of bodily experiences

Giving in Illinois, 2015

Illinois is home to over 5,200 grantmaking foundations spanning all types—independent or family, corporate, community, and operating—sizes, and issue areas. The community includes many foundations that only give locally or within the state, as well as those that fund nationally and even internationally. The following analysis provides an overview of the scale and composition of the Illinois foundation community and an examination of how Illinois foundations have fared relative to U.S. foundations in general over the past decade

Gene associations: true romance or chance meeting in a nuclear neighborhood?

Many recent studies have raised interest in the nuclear associations of coregulated genes from different chromosomes, often evoking interpretations of gene–gene interactions, communication, and even “romance.” However, in some cases, the associations may be indirect and infrequent and may reflect the segregation of active and inactive genes into different nuclear compartments. The study by Brown et al. (see p. 1083 of this issue) reports that the apparent association of erythroid genes is not a direct interaction nor colocalization to one tiny transcription factory but arises as a result of the known clustering of many active genes with larger splicing factor–rich speckles (a.k.a., SC35-defined domains). This clustering appears largely stochastic but is impacted by the chromosomal neighborhood of the gene as well as its transcriptional status. The study adds a new twist by examining the same gene in a foreign chromosomal context, providing evidence that this impacts a gene's propensity to form gene–domain (or apparent gene–gene) associations within nuclei

Accelerating Change for Women and Girls: The Role of Women's Funds

In recent years, interest in philanthropy for and by women has intensified, accompanied by a growing acceptance of the idea that philanthropic investments in women and girls can accelerate positive change in communities. To understand this evolution in thinking and practice within philanthropy, the Foundation Center partnered with the Women's Funding Network, a global movement of women's funds, to chart the current landscape of philanthropy focused on women and girls and document the specific role played by women's funds