Subjective well-being, disability and adaptation: a case study from rural Ethiopia

In many developing countries poor infrastructure – including sanitation and health facilities – exposes the population to high risks of disability. Low standards of health and safety at work and at home, coupled with political, ethnic, and domestic violence, also contribute to raising the risk of becoming physically disabled. The effect of physical disability on people’s lives is likely to be worse than in developed economies because of the reliance on physical labour for income generation – for example, in farming. Higher levels of national income and technological capability may also enable societies to make the investments required to enable disabled individuals to be productively employed. Finally, since formal social insurance is usually lacking in developing countries, the effect of disability on welfare is expected to be higher as disabled people must rely on social networks that have limited capacity to pool risks

Social networks and research output

We study how knowledge about the social network of an individual researcher - as embodied in his coauthor relations - helps us in developing a more accurate prediction of his future productivity. We find that incorporating information about coauthor networks leads to a modest improvement in the accuracy of forecasts on individual output, over and above what we can predict based on the knowledge of past individual output. Second, we find that the informativeness of networks dissipates over the lifetime of a researcher's career. This suggests that the signalling content of the network is quantitatively more important than the flow of ideas

Bridging the gender divide: an experimental analysis of group formation in African villages

Assortative matching occurs in many social contexts. We experimentally investigate gender assorting in sub-Saharan villages. In the experiment, co-villagers could form groups to share winnings in a gamble choice game. The extent to which grouping arrangements were or could be enforced and, hence, the distribution of interaction costs were exogenously varied. Thus, we can distinguish between the effects of homophily and interaction costs on the extent of observed gender assorting. We find that interaction costs matter - there is less gender assorting when grouping depends on trust. In part, this is due to trust based on co-memberships in gender-mixed religionsASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Creating inclusive communities: the results of resettlement in Zimbabwe

ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Empirical studies of social capital : a critical survey

public finance;public policy;research

Evaluating Biological Productivity in Intercropping Systems with Production Possibility Curves

Drawing on the notion of production possibility curves from economics literature, an analytical procedure for evaluating trade-offs in biological productivity in intercropping experiments is presented. Yield trade-offs between species are evaluated by plotting the normalized yields of the two competing crops on a graph using data from intercropping trials on groundnuts/Pennisetum americanum/sorghum/pigeonpeas and Leucaena/sorghum/pigeonpeas. The resulting shape of the curve passing through the scatter of mean treatment-yield observations indicates the nature of the relationship between the crops: complementary, if the curve is convex; competitive, if concave; and independent, where the competitive ability of both species is the same, if the estimated relationship is a straight line between the sole crop yields (treatments for which the LER, the Land Equivalent Ratio, is one). A 'global' index of biological productivity is defined as the ratio of the area under the curve to the area under the straight line joining the sole crop yields. The procedure for the index's computation is described, the index estimated over a range of intercropping situations, and its implications for experimental research and extension are discussed. The proposed index is similar to the LER in its interpretation but overcomes some of the weaknesses of the LE

Piroxicam fails to reduce myocellular enzyme leakage and delayed onset muscle soreness induced by isokinetic eccentric exercise

To test the hypothesis that delayed onset muscular soreness (DOMS) following intense eccentric muscle contraction could be due to increased production of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), ten healthy male subjects were studied. Using a double-blind randomized crossover design, each subject performed two isokinetic tests separated by a period of at least 6 weeks: once with placebo, and once with piroxicam (Feldene®). They were given one capsule containing either placebo or piroxicam (20 mg) per day for 6 days with initial doses given starting 3 days prior to isokinetic testing. Exercise consisted of eight stages of five maximal contractions of the knee extensor and flexor muscle groups of both legs separated by 1 min rest phases, on a Kin Trex device at 60°/s angular velocity. The subjective presence and intensity of DOMS were evaluated using a visual analogue scale immediately after, and 24 and 48 h after each test. The mean plasma concentration of PGE2 measured at rest and after exercise was significantly lower in the group treated with piroxicam (p < 0.05). However, statistical analysis (two-way ANOVA test) revealed that exercise did not cause any significant change of mean plasma PGE2 over time in either of the two groups. Eccentric work was followed by severe muscle pain in extensor and flexor muscle groups. Maximal soreness was noted 48 h postexercise. Serum creatine kinase activity and the serum concentration of myoglobin increased significantly, and reached peak values 48 h after exercise in both experimental conditions (p < 0.001). By paired t-test, it appeared that there were no significant differences in the serum levels of these two markers of muscle damage between the two groups at any time point. We conclude that: (1) oral administration of piroxicam fails to reduce muscle damage and DOMS caused by strenuous eccentric exercise; and (2) the hypothetical role of increased PGE2 production in eccentric exercise-induced muscle damage, DOMS, and reduced isokinetic performance is not substantiated by the present results