Russian Roulette- Expenditure Inequality and Instability in Russia, 1994-1998

This paper uses the second phase of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey to investigate the changes in expenditure inequality and instability in Russia between the autumn of 1994 and the autumn of 1998. The expenditure distribution is stable in spite of the economic and political turmoil Russia is going through. However, that does not imply much economic stability. Households' expenditure fluctuated considerably, with over 60 percent of the population's expenditure either more than doubling or falling to less than half their previous levels. Only about 10 percent of all households experienced an expenditure shock of less than 10 percent. The measured level of expenditure mobility is very high. This raises the question whether the observed mobility is in fact the expenditure instability. Distinguishing between the two is crucial for policy makers. While the mobility is often viewed as favorable, the high instability may affect the incentives of Russians to support the economic reforms, acquire human capital, and undertake entrepreneurial activities.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39742/3/wp358.pd

A single weekly Kt/Vurea target for peritoneal dialysis patients does not provide an equal dialysis dose for all

Copyright © 2016 International Society of Nephrology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Dialysis adequacy is traditionally based on urea clearance, adjusted for total body volume (Kt/Vurea), and clinical guidelines recommend a Kt/Vurea target for peritoneal dialysis. We wished to determine whether adjusting dialysis dose by resting and total energy expenditure would alter the delivered dialysis dose. The resting and total energy expenditures were determined by equations based on doubly labeled isotopic water studies and adjusted Kturea for resting energy expenditure and total energy expenditure in 148 peritoneal dialysis patients (mean age, 60.6 years; 97 male [65.5%]; 54 diabetic [36.5%]). The mean resting energy expenditure was 1534 kcal/d, and the total energy expenditure was 1974 kcal/day. Using a weekly target Kt/V of 1.7, Kt was calculated using V measured by bioimpedance and the significantly associated (r = 0.67) Watson equation for total body water. Adjusting Kt for resting energy expenditure showed a reduced delivered dialysis dose (ml/kcal per day) for women versus men (5.5 vs. 6.2), age under versus over 65 years (5.6 vs. 6.4), weight 80 kg (5.8 vs. 6.1), low versus high comorbidity (5.9 vs. 6.2), all of which were significant. Adjusting for the total energy expenditure showed significantly reduced dosing for those employed versus not employed (4.3 vs. 4.8), a low versus high frailty score (4.5 vs. 5.0) and nondiabetic versus diabetic (4.6 vs. 4.9). Thus, the current paradigm for a single target Kt/Vurea for all peritoneal dialysis patients does not take into account energy expenditure and metabolic rate and may lead to lowered dialysis delivery for the younger, more active female patient.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

On expenditure functions

In this paper we present complete characterizations of the expenditure function for both utility representations and preference structures. Building upon these results, we also establish under minimal assumptions duality theorems for exıpenditure functions and utility representations, and for expenditure functions and preference structures. These results generalize previous work in this area; moreover, in the case of preferences structures they apply to non-completeı preorders

Improving estimates of inequality and poverty from urban China’s household income and expenditure survey

In urban China the Household Income and Expenditure Survey requires respondents to keep a daily expenditure diary for a full 12-month period. This onerous reporting task makes it difficult to recruit households into the survey, compromising the representative nature of the sample. In this article we use data on the monthly expenditures of households from two urban areas of China to see if data collection short-cuts, such as extrapolating to annual totals from expenditure reports in only some months of the year, would harm the accuracy of annual expenditure, inequality and poverty estimates. Our results show that replacing 12-month diaries with simple extrapolations from either one, two, four or six months would cause a sharp increase in estimates of annual inequality and poverty. This finding also undermines international comparisons of inequality statistics because no country other than China uses such comprehensive 12-month expenditure records. But a corrected form of extrapolation, based on correlations between the same household’s expenditures in different months of the year, gives much smaller errors in estimates of inequality and poverty

Public expenditure and national income - Time series evidence from Greece

The paper investigates the existence and nature of long-run relationships between Greek national income and four categories of public expenditure. Our results suggest that there exists a positive long-run relationship between GDP on the one hand; and public expenditure and “productive” public consumption on the other, with causality running both ways. There appears to be no long-run relationship between GDP and public-sector personnel expenditure; and GDP and public-debt service expenditure. From that point of view, it would appear that in terms of output growth, the fiscal policy followed by Greece during the 1975-1990 period has rather been ineffective

Characteristics and Spending Patterns of Consumer Units in the Lowest 10 Percent of the Expenditure Distribution

How do poor consumers differ from the average consumer? Typically, consumers’ ability to purchase goods and services is measured by their income, and consumers are classified as “poor” if their income falls below some standard level, such as the poverty threshold. However, income is often mismeasured due to nonresponse or underreporting. Although the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) was designed primarily to collect expenditure data, it also collects income and assets data for participating consumer units (CUs). To utilize the strength of the CE—its expenditure data— and the positive correlation observed between income and expenditures, this study uses total expenditures instead of income as the classifying variable. This report highlights the characteristics and spending patterns of CUs in the lowest 10 percent of the expenditure distribution in 1999

Quantity aggregation and quality price adjustment : problems with measuring Indonesian food demand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Agricultural Economics at Massey University

One Asian country which is predicted to provide excellent opportunities for New Zealand exporters is Indonesia. To measure Indonesian demand responses requires the use of cross-sectional survey data. However, the use of such data produces aggregation errors, caused by quality effects, in the measurement of commodity price and quantity elasticities. Such aggregation errors produce biased elasticity estimates. The bias in the estimation of price elasticities is compounded by errors of measurement in measured quantities and expenditures. Adapting the theoretical model of Houthakker (1952) and Theil (1952), Deaton (1988) developed a methodology which accounts for both aggregation and measurement error. Using Deaton's methodology, the demand for five commodities - rice, meat, fruit, vegetables, and milk products - were computed. The expenditure elasticities are ordered much as would be expected, with rice and vegetables close to zero, and meat, fruit and milk products all having elasticities greater than one. Comparing the expenditure elasticities with respect to total expenditure with those of previous studies, the quantity elasticities are decreasing with time as expected. Thus while meat, fruit, and milk products are still considered luxury items, they will increasingly be within the average Indonesian consumer's reach in the near future. Also, the quality of foodstuffs consumed is increasing with incomes. The effects of quality, and measurement error especially, produced dubious price elasticity estimates. After adjusting for these influences, the price elasticity estimates are, with the exception of milk products, negative, although the rice price elasticity is larger than predicted. Meanwhile, the effects of quality in the estimation of quantity elasticities is relatively minor. While the model produced satisfactory results, it was considered that further exploration of the methodology was required, particularly with regard to the use of food expenditure. In the absence of data on total expenditure, Deaton (1988) assumed that food expenditure was a theoretically acceptable alternative explanatory variable. To measure if this was so, elasticities using both food and total expenditure were calculated. Although no formal non-nested tests were used, differences in the price elasticities between the two models casts doubt on the use of food expenditure in place of total expenditure. Nevertheless, estimation of a 'food share' elasticity provides a method for moving from food expenditure elasticities to total expenditure elasticities, with a proxy value for this elasticity providing encouraging results. Yet the estimation of such an elasticity requires information on total expenditure, providing limited empirical value for the researcher with just food expenditure data, and only a theoretical curiosity for the researcher with information on both. Other methodological problems included a larger than expected rice price elasticity and the estimation of biased OLS parameter estimates through the use of zero expenditures in the model. Consequently, without further exploration of these issues, the procedure should only be applied cautiously

The relationship between government revenue and expenditure in Malaysia

The study examines the relationship between government revenue and expenditure in Malaysia. The results of the Dickey and Fuller (1979) and Phillips and Perron (1988) unit root test statistics show that government revenue and expenditure are integrated of order one. The results of the Johansen(1988) and Gregory and Hansen (1996) cointegration methods show that government revenue and expenditure are cointegrated. Thus, there is a longrun relationship between the government revenue and expenditure. The intertemporal budget constraint is not violated and the budget deficit of the Malaysian government is generally said to be sustainable. The results of the Granger-causality test generally show that the government revenue leads to government expenditure in Malaysia

CaloriNet: From silhouettes to calorie estimation in private environments

We propose a novel deep fusion architecture, CaloriNet, for the online estimation of energy expenditure for free living monitoring in private environments, where RGB data is discarded and replaced by silhouettes. Our fused convolutional neural network architecture is trainable end-to-end, to estimate calorie expenditure, using temporal foreground silhouettes alongside accelerometer data. The network is trained and cross-validated on a publicly available dataset, SPHERE_RGBD + Inertial_calorie. Results show state-of-the-art minimum error on the estimation of energy expenditure (calories per minute), outperforming alternative, standard and single-modal techniques.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure