Demographic and technological variables in Kenya's employment scene

One reason why employment growth rate in Kenya has been rather disappointing despite impressive growth of output and capital stock is because in the recent past Kenya has experienced technological progress which is biased against labour usage. Capital per worker is far in excess of capital per head of population. The mode of job creation has been very capital-expensive. An attack on the problem from the point of view of reducing population growth could only be effective in the long run because most of the working population for fifteen or so years to come has already been born. In order to increase the supply of positions for these workers, ways and means have to be devised for reducing the capital cost per job. One major recommendation is that institutional and educational measures be undertaken to hasten the development and adoption of efficient labour intensive technologies

Elasticity of substitution, returns to scale and firm size: an analysis of Kenyan data

In this paper the author attempts a comparative analysis of different firm sizes in Kenya's industrial sector, within the prouuction function framework. It is discovered that substitution elasticities are roughly the same and uniformly greater than zero. Homogeneity parameters are about the same at the individual firm level and about unity, but at the aggregate level we witness constant returns to scale for the large firms and increasing returns to scale for the small firms. With present data, we cannot identify duality in factor prices faced by different firm sizes. Capital cost per job is lower for small firms than for large ones. On the basis of the foregoing, we can tentatively conclude that, if there is a choice between firm sizes, for most policy objectives it would be advisable to opt for the small scale firm. The most important conclusion is that firm size can be a policy instrument

Factor intensity in Kenya's industrial sector: an input ration analysis

Three approaches - value added approach, capital consumption approach, capital cost approach - are utilised to assess the relative factor intensities in small and large firms in Kenya. We conclude that small scale firms are less skill intensive and less capital intensive than their larger counterparts

Effectively increasing employment : an agenda for business

Unemployment is one of the most pressing problems in Kenya. Some remedial measures have been undertaken. The Tripartite Agreements of 1964 and 1970 purported to use the collective bargaining process to augment employment. Both achieved this objective in the short run. Neither had long-lasting effects on the situation basically because they, perhaps inadvertently, tried to induce extra-market behaviour. No positive economic incentives were incorporated in the Agreements. The initial capital investment allowance, refund of customs duty on imported capital goods, and accelerated depreciation allowances amount to a substantial subsidy on capital so that capital-labour ratio is higher than would be the case otherwise. An attempt to counteract this by an Employment Allowance or similar subsidy on labour is opposed for fiscal reasons. It is recommended that the subsidies on capital be overhauled. It is in the business interest to expand employment for such reasons as maintenance of a buoyant market and preservation of social and political stability which are ingredients in "investment climate". From a broader viewpoint, comparative cost doctrine dictates that a capital short economy should use the abundant factor -labour - more widely than it does capital. Of the three possible means of effecting a less unequal income distribution, namely institution of unemployment benefits, steeply progressive income tax, and provision of employment for those able and willing to work, only the last policy instrument has reasonable prospects of achieving the desired end. Businesses can implement several measures in an endeavour to augment their work forces. They can, wherever possible, readjust their production techniques toward more labour intensity; utilise excess capacity by introduction of shift work; alter skill composition when that results in lowering or maintaining the same output-cost ratio but increasing the number of persons engaged; develop their markets with the aim of tapping the "mass" market; and apply objective criteria in job placement so as to maximise allocative efficiency and demand for supportive or auxiliary personnel. In a nutshell, business can play a vital role in combating this problem of unemployment by, for example, sacrificing their privileged fiscal position and by implementing positive programmes for this purpose

Development in practice: some reflections on Kenya's experience

This paper does not aim at being a comprehensive analysis of Kenya's economic performance. Rather it singles out some aspects of Kenya's development and examines to what extent those aspects are reflected in the plan, how they have been implemented, and what has possibly been neglected which, if done, would improve the outcome of stated policies. After a brief introduction, there are skeleton statements on the main thrusts of Government policy as stated in the Sessional Paper on African Socialism and the various Development Plans. Then follow discussions on five topics. 1) On self-help, one notices tremendous will to develop on the part of the populace but that at the time self-help projects are carried out, they rarely are included in the national Development Plan before hand. The result is uncoordinated projects and inconsistent "planning". 2) Regional Balance is just at its infancy in Kenya. The action programmes up to now have been moderate, e.g. the Special Rural Development pilot projects which cover just a few areas and are inadequately financed. The implementation machinery could be improperly placed, e.g. the urban—oriented Kenya Industrial Estates Ltd. is charged with the Rural Industrialisation Program! 3) The stated employment generation intent is negated by implicit subsidies on capital as the section on "Employment and Technology" brings out. 4) In Kenya, published statistics generally cover firms with five or more employees, but small business sector (which has some "unregistered" and hence "illegal" businesses) accounts for over half of persons gainfully engaged. After a discussion of the "Formal and the Informal sectors", a case is made for the formalisation of the informal sector. 5) Section five is a critique of the planning machinery as presently constituted. The main conclusion is that development in practice may not always be the development as planned and in fact some aspects of development are not planned at all

Closed-cycle, low-vibration 4 K cryostat for ion traps and other applications

In-vacuo cryogenic environments are ideal for applications requiring both low temperatures and extremely low particle densities. This enables reaching long storage and coherence times for example in ion traps, essential requirements for experiments with highly charged ions, quantum computation, and optical clocks. We have developed a novel cryostat continuously refrigerated with a pulse-tube cryocooler and providing the lowest vibration level reported for such a closed-cycle system with 1 W cooling power for a <5 K experiment. A decoupling system suppresses vibrations from the cryocooler by three orders of magnitude down to a level of 10 nm peak amplitudes in the horizontal plane. Heat loads of about 40 W (at 45 K) and 1 W (at 4 K) are transferred from an experimental chamber, mounted on an optical table, to the cryocooler through a vacuum-insulated massive 120 kg inertial copper pendulum. The 1.4 m long pendulum allows installation of the cryocooler in a separate, acoustically isolated machine room. In the laser laboratory, we measured the residual vibrations using an interferometric setup. The positioning of the 4 K elements is reproduced to better than a few micrometer after a full thermal cycle to room temperature. Extreme high vacuum on the $10^{-15}$ mbar level is achieved. In collaboration with the Max-Planck-Intitut f\"ur Kernphysik (MPIK), such a setup is now in operation at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) for a next-generation optical clock experiment using highly charged ions

Transitory Income Shocks and Essential Household Consumption Expenditures in Rural Kenya

Majority of rural households in developing economies derive their livelihoods from agriculture, a sector that is highly prone to transitory shocks. In the absence of effective coping mechanisms, these households are unable to smoothen consumption and are thus likely to experience fluctuations in consumption expenditures. This study examines the effect of transitory income shocks on different categories of household expenditures, focusing on spending on essential goods and services such as food, health and education in rural Kenya. The study explores the heterogeneity in households and consumption to test the permanent income hypothesis using a sample of 5,828 rural households disaggregated along two distinct agro-ecological zones. Decomposing household income into permanent and transitory components failed to yield distinct estimates of permanent and transitory incomes when applied to this study’s data. We therefore modified the estimation approach to capture the effect of transitory income shocks by introducing a dummy of crop loss in the household expenditure equation. Our results show that in the countrywide sample, households that experienced crop loss had a statistically significant reduction in the aggregate, food and non-food expenditures compared to the ones that did not. For the high and medium potential agro-ecological zones sample, we found that consumption expenditures were not associated with crop loss. In the arid and semi-arid zones sample, aggregate and food expenditures reduced for households affected by crop loss. The findings provide a basis of policy recommendations on the need for the existing government poverty alleviation programmes to focus on drivers of impoverishment such as transitory income shocks. Keywords: transitory income shocks, consumption expenditure, agro-ecological zones, Kenya DOI: 10.7176/JESD/10-12-04 Publication date:June 30th 201

Perceptual memory drives learning of retinotopic biases for bistable stimuli.

The visual system exploits past experience at multiple timescales to resolve perceptual ambiguity in the retinal image. For example, perception of a bistable stimulus can be biased toward one interpretation over another when preceded by a brief presentation of a disambiguated version of the stimulus (positive priming) or through intermittent presentations of the ambiguous stimulus (stabilization). Similarly, prior presentations of unambiguous stimuli can be used to explicitly "train" a long-lasting association between a percept and a retinal location (perceptual association). These phenonema have typically been regarded as independent processes, with short-term biases attributed to perceptual memory and longer-term biases described as associative learning. Here we tested for interactions between these two forms of experience-dependent perceptual bias and demonstrate that short-term processes strongly influence long-term outcomes. We first demonstrate that the establishment of long-term perceptual contingencies does not require explicit training by unambiguous stimuli, but can arise spontaneously during the periodic presentation of brief, ambiguous stimuli. Using rotating Necker cube stimuli, we observed enduring, retinotopically specific perceptual biases that were expressed from the outset and remained stable for up to 40 min, consistent with the known phenomenon of perceptual stabilization. Further, bias was undiminished after a break period of 5 min, but was readily reset by interposed periods of continuous, as opposed to periodic, ambiguous presentation. Taken together, the results demonstrate that perceptual biases can arise naturally and may principally reflect the brain's tendency to favor recent perceptual interpretation at a given retinal location. Further, they suggest that an association between retinal location and perceptual state, rather than a physical stimulus, is sufficient to generate long-term biases in perceptual organization

Funnels in Energy Landscapes

Local minima and the saddle points separating them in the energy landscape are known to dominate the dynamics of biopolymer folding. Here we introduce a notion of a "folding funnel" that is concisely defined in terms of energy minima and saddle points, while at the same time conforming to a notion of a "folding funnel" as it is discussed in the protein folding literature.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to European Conference on Complex Systems 200