Search

We analyse people’s attitudes to autonomous vehicles (AVs), i.e. driverless cars and trucks, using Eurobarometer data relating to November/December 2014 on approximately 1000 people in each EU country. People tend to be lukewarm to AVs, particularly driverless cars. However, a simple average hides the fact that many people, young and old, are totally hostile to the concept and a smaller number totally in favour. AVs are part of a technological development linked in general to robots, and regression analysis finds attitudes tend to be linked to both general attitudes to robots and individual self-interest relating specifically to AVs. Consistent with the literature, we find the young to be more in favour than the elderly. There are other differences, with males, those in cities and the more educated being more in favour, as well as differences between countries. There is also some evidence that support for AVs is greater in countries with high accident rates.

Libraries exist the world over across diverse cultures and have been in existence since the dawn of civilisation. Libraries can be seen as a collection of marks, often representing sounds, made upon some kind of support, such as stone, papyrus, paper or magnetic discs, which require deciphering and interpretation to have significance. Whether tiny island libraries or huge national libraries, each offers resources that help define identity at a global, national, community and personal level. The library has many roles to play, one that cannot be measured by statistics alone; it embodies freedom of speech and the principles of democracy but can and has been a means of social control; it is often a spontaneous expression of community and conviviality, sharing viewpoints and knowledge or it can be an engineered, assertive national statement; it is often a mixture of all these. The library is more than the sum of its parts and is an expression of the relationship between the human and the mysterious universe we live in.

Jensen and Tyler (2015) have powerfully argued that 'anti-welfare commonsense', fuelled by negative political and media discourse stressing welfare dependency and deception, has buttressed support for social security reform in recent years. Along with many other academics they point to the hardening of public attitudes towards welfare state provision and how notions of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving poor' have been reintroduced into popular debates. We identify four distinct threads within this scholarship. First, there is an argument that public attitudes have shifted from an earlier post-war welfare imaginary and settlement to an anti-welfare consensus. Second, this hardening includes a growing prevalence of 'othering'. The third thread is the broadening of this moral and disciplinary gaze to include groups, such as disabled people, who until recently were not subject to the same amount of stigma as other types of benefit recipients. Fourth, is the impact of pejorative welfare discourses on the self-identity and attitudes of disadvantaged groups. While a growing body of evidence makes it increasingly difficult to argue against suggestions that there is a hostile body of anti-welfare sentiment in the UK, what is often implicit in the analysis of pejorative contemporary attitudes to welfare is the view that there was once a 'golden age' of the welfare state when public support was more fully behind a strong set of social security benefits provided as a social right of citizenship. Whether this was the case is a moot point however. Few studies have tried to piece together the attitudes to welfare of the general public during the consensus era. We attempt to undertake such a task here, drawing on ad hoc attitudes surveys and polling data in particular. Specifically, we focus on how notions of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving poor' play out in this data, pointing to some key continuities found in contemporary and historical public attitudes to welfare.

It is commonly argued that public support for the welfare state is in long-term decline in the UK. Evidence from the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) is typically cited to support this claim, but it only stretches back to 1983. Few would disagree that the Thatcher years offered an unusual socio-political-economic context, which raises a question over whether the BSA's early 1980s baseline provides a misleading view on support for the welfare state over the longue duree. In this article, we explore this issue, piecing together data from the Beveridge era through to the present day, drawing on data from contemporary studies and surveys; opinion polls; and historical government surveys and reports. Our method is undoubtedly a ‘second best approach’, making use of often limited historical data, which means we remain cautious in offering bold findings. However, we argue there is some evidence to suggest the 1980s were an unusual moment, suggesting the decline in support for welfare is less dramatic than analysis of the BSA might make it seem, but also that support for the welfare state during the postwar consensus years was likely more equivocal than we often believe it to be from today's perspective, perhaps reflecting a tendency to reify this period as a ‘golden age’ of welfare and so underplaying the complexity of the politics of social policy in the pre-BSA period.

The paper examines several aspects of developed countries with a particular focus on Europe. It argues that despite problems and qualifications, Europe is still in many respects a desirable part of the world in which to live, where people can fulfill their aspirations with a degree of safety. Having said that, Europe faces many problems. Any solution to Europe’s problems must encompass innovation. In this respect Europe’s record is better than many argue, but still there is a need to do better and to place innovation at the very core of policy making. High quality research institutions are valuable here, but too often their work is taken up by non-European multinationals. This is a time of enormous change and issues such as quantitative easing and robotics are also briefly touched upon, in particular their economic and societal impact.

Our study examines the effect of water utilization together with the effect of water quality on economic growth across countries. We constructed a panel of 177 countries covering the period of 1960–2009. We analyse two dependent variables, gross domestic product per capita and the average of five years of growth. The analysis is conducted using a fixed effects model and fixed effects with instrumental variables. We find that although water utilization affects growth, water quality also proves to be highly significant and affects growth in both the short and long run to a greater degree than water quantity.

Psychosocial hazards in mental healthcare contribute to the development of compassion fatigue in mental health professionals. Compassion fatigue has a negative impact on the mental health and wellbeing of professionals that can impair the quality of services provided to clients. The majority of research on compassion fatigue has focused on individual-level variables such as gender, history of trauma and age, among others. It is also imperative to understand the role played by alterable work-related characteristics in contributing to the development of compassion fatigue in order to attenuate its impact on mental health professionals and their clients. The present review examined articles exploring work-related factors associated with compassion fatigue. Fifteen quantitative studies were included and their quality was assessed using a checklist. An inductive content-analysis approach was adopted to synthesise the themes emerging from the data. The results suggested a theoretical model consistent with the Job Demands-Resources model, wherein job demands (such as workplace trauma, workload and therapeutic settings) are associated with compassion fatigue, and job resources (such as supervisors’, coworkers’ and organisational support) mitigate the impact of job demands. In addition to person-oriented factors, work-related factors are critical for the prevention of compassion fatigue.

Purpose: The paper examines the potential effects of academic publications on patenting and the share of high technology exports. We test the short-run and the long-run causalities among high technology exports, the number of academic publications and the number of patents in three separate models.Methodology/Approach: Our sample consists of panel data for 61 countries and 20 years. The panel Granger causality and vector error correction model have been used in order to capture the short-run causalities. Furthermore, panel cointegration regressions have been applied to test for long-run causalities.Findings: Our results strongly suggest that there is a positive long-run effect of academic publications on both patenting and the share of high technology exports. This suggests that the outcomes of basic science in the form publications strongly support technological development, and thus emphasises the importance of basic research. In addition the effect of patents on high technology exports is mostly insignificant when controlling for academic publications and GDP.Research Limitation/implication: First, the variables used in the analysis are only proxies. The scope of the data has been significantly limited by the data availability. This leads also to limited the number of control variables.Originality/Value of paper: There are still only a very limited number of studies testing the effect of academic outcomes on the technological development of the economy. Our research brings new empirical insights into this problem.

This chapter assesses how governance is being rescaled by globalisation, arguing that some nation-states have tried to circumvent globalisation pressures by injecting small slices of their territory more deeply into the global economy. This has been through establishing policy frameworks for specific localities that deliberately vary from those of the nation-state as a whole. The chapter then focuses on two examples — global cities and Special Economic Zones — the former being more common in high-income countries, the latter more common in lower-income countries. In both instances, the intensification of globalisation processes in these zones has significant implications for welfare, although the effects are by no means straightforward to analyse. Moreover, the two are often connected by global economic processes, SEZs and global cities often being key sites but serving different functions in the global production chains employed by multinational corporations.

Quantitative easing (QE) is a new instrument of macroeconomic policy which if not born in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, was at least nurtured by this crisis. The paper looks at both the history and the theory of QE. We then examine its impact, both positive and negative on the economy. The use of QE helped governments deal with the immediate aftermath of the crisis and possibly prevented much sharper recessions than we witnessed. But in many ways its impact on the real economy has been limited and there are dangers in both the potential for substantial inflation to occur at some point in the future and the weakening of the financial sector. We argue that much of the literature misses the point that QE is funding government debt and spending, at a time when fiscal policy is in a period of, perhaps temporary, decline. Finally, we discuss whether QE will be a permanent feature of macroeconomic policy in the future, or whether it will be resorted to only occasionally?

This chapter examines in more depth one of the attempts to develop a ‘progressive’ modernisation of welfare: the social investment model. The notion of a ‘social investment welfare state’ has gained increasing ground over recent years, playing an important role in the discourse of international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and EU. It forms a part of a number of concepts — others include ‘active social welfare’, the ‘new welfare state’ and ‘new risk welfare’ — that might be grouped under the label ‘new welfare’. All are based around a shared view that developed welfare states have begun to place less emphasis on income protection and more emphasis on investing in human capital. Put differently, they stress the growing importance of the ‘productive’ elements of social policy, chiefly on the basis that this may square the circle of maintaining social expenditures while responding to increased economic competition. The chapter then reviews how far reform agendas match the reality of the social investment model theory and, moreover, evaluates the effectiveness of the approach in reconciling social and economic pressures.

Discussion of welfare regimes and welfare state ideal types continues to dominate comparative social policy analysis, but the focus of the debate has expanded considerably since the publication of Esping-Andersen's (1990) groundbreaking The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Shifts in this debate have been prompted by a mixture of theoretical and empirical concerns raised by comparative social policy scholars, but they have also resulted from a more general internationalisation of social policy research agendas within the academy too. In particular, there has been a strong desire to expand the scope of the debate to encompass nations and regions not included in Esping-Andersen's initial study of just eighteen high income OECD states.

This article rounds off the themed section by reviewing broader debates within welfare state modelling relevant to Greater China. More specifically, it examines the now well-established literature around the East Asian ‘model’ of welfare, and related debates on the notion of a ‘productive welfare’ model. In so doing, it challenges simplistic classifications that present the region as representing a single model of welfare and, instead, highlights the diversity of welfare provision found within both Greater China and East Asia more generally. Building on the authors’ earlier published work comparing East Asian welfare systems with those found across the OECD, it also challenges claims that the region is home to a distinct ‘productive’ model of welfare. The article ends by highlighting some key drivers that will shape future debates.

We use an updated form of an old database to examine aid predictability, i.e. the relationship between commitments and disbursements. In contrast to the existing literature, the regression results suggest that on average almost all commitments tend to be met within two years, with the overwhelming majority met immediately. But the situation is different with respect to individual sectors. Some such as infrastructure have very long lags. For some sectors too it seems likely that commitments will never be fully met. Debt aid, however, tends to be disbursed in full almost immediately. There are also substantial differences between countries.

We discuss the costs and benefits to farmers, the environment, and consumers of GM crops. The focus is on crops because there have been far fewer examples of commercialized GM animals as food, although this may be beginning to change. We also look at regulatory issues and systems in different countries, particularly the European Union and the USA. We suggest that the differences can in part be put down to a difference on where the burden of proof should lie: with those attempting to prove that GM foods offer a net gain to the world or those who argue that they lead to net losses. We argue that we are in a sense in a game with nature: we make a move and nature then makes a counteracting move. Because of this it is difficult to evaluate the costs and benefits of GM foods by simply looking at the present and the past, we must also anticipate nature’s future moves. In many respects this is a catch 22 situation. One cannot statistically prove or disprove harm until the product is marketed. Under the position in the USA, if the technology does harm then it may be too late to stop it. Under the precautionary principle, characterizing the European Union’s approach, technological development is stalled perhaps indefinitely and certainly a competitive advantage is handed to others. The literature shows many potential and substantial benefits. Nonetheless, we argue that in proceeding with GM foods we need to be careful and arguably go slowly. There also needs to be an awareness, often absent in the literature, that safety is not the only factor on people’s minds. They are also, for example, concerned that the process is unnatural. Finally people are more accepting of cisgenesis than transgenesis, and perhaps they should not be subject to the same regulations.

Beyond dealing with wrongdoing and litigation, law has many other functions. It can be designed to make life more predictable, it can facilitate and promote certain actions, it can seek to prevent disputes by laying down rules, and provide routes to solutions other than litigation should disputes arise. All of these can have connections to matters of emotion. Using both lawbooks and records of cases from the Angevin period, the present article begins by looking at issues of land law rather than crime, and at law outside rather than inside court. It then returns to crime and litigation before exploring the significance of the nature of legal records for the relationship between emotion and law. In doing so, it pays attention to emotion in action, to uses of emotionally charged language, to appearances of the vocabulary of emotions, and to the routinized use of words that might at other times or in other contexts have an emotional element. Underlying the analysis is an exploration of the ways in which some aspects of law became more discrete from ordinary social practice and discourse, in this instance through elements of distancing from emotion. Postprint

Comparative analyses of welfare systems have largely proceeded on the basis that coherent nation-states exist. This assumption was always problematic – as many theorists have acknowledged – but globalisation processes have added a further dimension to this debate, not least because of the increasing power of global cities that act as coordinating hubs for the global economy. Although residing in nation-states, these cities have a special status flowing from their central role in the global economy with often rather different economic, demographic and social contexts. While there is growing literature on global cities, what the rise of these cities means for social policy and for welfare states remains an underexplored issue. Here we outline some key issues the rise of global cities presents for welfare states before proceeding to illustrate both theoretical and practical issues we highlight through a case study of Mexico City.

This report card presents an overview of inequalities in child well-being in 41 countries of the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It focuses on ‘bottom-end inequality’ – the gap between children at the bottom and those in the middle – and addresses the question ‘how far behind are children being allowed to fall?’ in income, education, health and life satisfaction.

The ‘welfare modelling business’ has been at the heart of comparative social policy analysis but debate has largely proceeded on the basis that coherent national welfare states exist. This assumption was always problematic but globalisation processes have added a further dimension to this debate. In particular, geographers and sociologists have pointed to the increasing power of global cities that act as co-ordinating hubs for the global economy. Though residing in nation states, these cities have a special status flowing from their central role in the global economy. Little attempt has been made to explore the implications of these cities for welfare regimes and welfare regime analysis. This paper addresses this under explored issue and suggests there are strong overlaps between global city types and welfare types.

Evaluating the Impact of the Informal Economy on Businesses in South East Europe: Some Lessons from the 2009 World Bank Enterprise SurveyThe aim of this paper is to evaluate the variable impacts of the informal economy on businesses and employment relations in South East Europe. Evidence is reported from the 2009 World Bank Enterprise Survey which interviewed 4,720 businesses located in South East Europe. The finding is not only that a large informal sector reduces wage levels but also that there are significant spatial variations in the adverse impacts of the informal economy across this European region. Small, rural and domestic businesses producing for the home market and the transport, construction, garment and wholesale sectors are most likely to be adversely affected by the informal economy. The paper concludes by calling for similar research in other global regions and for a more targeted approach towards tackling the informal economy.

Several theorists have argued that social policy in East Asia can be seen as representing a distinctive welfare ideal type based around ‘productive welfare’. However, we have contested such claims in earlier work (Hudson and Kuhner, 2009) and, in common with theorists such as Castells, have suggested that some of the OECD welfare states have a distinct bias towards the ‘productive’ rather than ‘protective’ dimensions of welfare. In this paper, we build on our earlier work, utilising fuzzy set ideal type analysis to explore the balance between ‘productive’ and protective’ dimensions of welfare state activity. Here we extended our analysis beyond the OECD, incorporating a range of nations on the ‘fringe’ of the OECD from Latin America, East Asia and the non-OECD parts of Europe. In so doing, we contest simple notions of welfare regimes aligning with regional blocks and highlight the advantages of the ‘diversity orientated’ approach to data analysis that fuzzy set methods facilitate in comparison with standard quantitative techniques such as cluster analysis.

All the large railway companies in existence prior to their amalgamation in 1923 into four groups had well-established chemistry laboratories with a staff of qualified chemists. The principal task of these laboratories was to perform quality control analyses on purchased materials. However, commencing in the 1890s, some of these laboratories were engaged in research projects. The principal areas of investigation were those of metals, lubrication and water treatment, but the railway chemists also conducted research on a considerable number of other topics. This paper considers the context in which chemical research was conducted in the railway laboratories, describes some of the work that was performed, and discusses its significance for the railway industry.

This article uses a recent wave of the World Bank Enterprise Survey to analyse four aspects of innovation: (i) the introduction of a new product or service, (ii) product/service upgrading, (iii) R&D and (iv) the licensing of technology. Good governance affects innovation on several dimensions. Bureaucracy, in the form of permits posing a problem for firms, can deter firms from innovating themselves, moving them towards the licensing of foreign technology, and corruption deters R&D. However, there is evidence of a negative impact of good and effective courts on innovation and R&D. Although perhaps slightly surprising, this is not inconsistent with much of the literature. In addition regional infrastructure, which is to varying degrees also determined by government policy, is significant in determining innovation. This includes transport, IT and financial infrastructure.

This paper considers the role of redistribution in the light of recent research findings on self reported happiness. The analysis and empirical work reported here tries to relate this to a representative actor ‘homo realitus’ and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ rather than the traditional ‘homo economicus’. Econometrically estimating the determinants of happiness in the European Union (EU) using Eurobarometer data and the construction of an ‘Index of Happiness’ facilitates policy simulations. Such simulations find that in terms of average happiness there is little advantage to redistributing income within a country, but more from redistributing income between countries. The importance for happiness of relative income, average standard of living, marital status and age are confirmed. The theoretical rationale for redistribution is also examined.

The question of how best to account for the multidimensional character of welfare states has become an integral part of discussions on the so-called dependent variable problem within comparative welfare state research. In this paper, we discuss challenges from an attempt to capture productive and protective welfare state dimensions by means of several methodological techniques, namely Z-score standardisation, cluster analysis, factor analysis and fuzzy-set ideal type analysis. While we illustrate that a decision to use any one of these techniques has a substantial bearing on the produced findings, we specifically argue that fuzzy-set ideal type analysis offers considerable advantages over more traditional, statistically rooted approaches. This is particularly true if the observed dimensions are conceptually distinct and ‘antithetical’.

Numerous analysts have suggested that globalization and the emergence of more knowledge-based economies have encouraged high-income nations to shift towards a model of productive welfare focused on social investment, yet typologies of welfare are still largely drawn on the basis of measures of social protection rather than social investment. Here we develop a classification of welfare state types that incorporates both productive and protective elements of social policy. Using fuzzy set ideal type analysis we explore data for a sample of 23 OECD countries in three time points: 1994, 1998 and 2003. Our findings provide no more than very modest support for claims that welfare states are shifting from protective to productive modes of provision and, in many cases, we identify a shift in the alternative direction. In addition, we identify some nations that are clearly productive in their focus and others that manage to combine productive and protective features.

We analyse the determinants of the number of military personnel, military expenditure and arms imports using a panel data of all available countries with data from 1984–2006. The number of military personnel increases with the extent of external threat and with conscription. There is evidence for both economies of scale and the existence of ‘ghost soldiers’. Expenditure, given the number of military personnel, increases with the extent of internal threat and the area of the country. Arms imports increase with the extent of external threat, GDP per capita and corruption. Finally, both arms imports and military expenditure impact upon corruption.

Regulating product quality benefits consumers in reducing uncertainty and allowing them to economize on search costs. Theoretical analysis suggests that not all consumers benefit to the same extent, with non-poor, less well educated and older people tending to gain most. These conclusions are supported by regression analysis of Eurobarometer data on attitudes to an EU priority to guarantee quality. The results also indicate the essential nature of the EU trade-off with countries having to compromise on their desired outcome when agreeing on a common EU standard. Institutional trust is also a critical factor in determining support for such a standard.

We examine the determinants of five year citations to papers published in the American Economic Review and the Economic Journal. Citations are positively related to page length and position in the journal. Both of these variables are consistent with the hypothesis that citations reflect paper quality, as is the number of subsequent self-citations. However, the publication of a major paper, as judged by subsequent citations, significantly increases the citations of other papers in an issue and this indicates the importance of chance in determining citations.

The contention posed by Rod Rhodes that policy is made and delivered by autonomous and self-organising policy networks is at the heart of many contemporary debates about the nature of policy and politics. However, while the concept has commanded considerable attention from policy theorists, case studies of how policy networks operate on the ground remain relatively rare. Further still, much of the empirical work has centred on testing relatively abstract claims about the nature of networks rather than thinking through their practical implications for governance. Here, we contrast the approaches taken by two English local authorities in seeking more participatory approaches to environmental policy-making. Building on the work of Kickert et al., we argue that – far from being self-organising – the form of policy networks can be strongly directed by the state through network activation strategies and, indeed, that strong state management of networks is required if policy-making is to proceed in a more inclus...

Random instruction sequence (RIS) tools continue to be the main strategy for verifying and validating chip designs. In every RIS tool, test suites are created targeted to a particular functionality and run on the design. Coverage metrics provide us one mechanism to ensure and measure the completeness and thoroughness of these test suites and create new test suites directed towards unexplored areas of the design. The results from the coverage metrics can also be used to improve the cluster efficiency. In this work we discuss the results from a coverage tool that extracted and analyzed stimuli quality from large regressions, using statistical visualization. Using this coverage tool, we captured events relating to the memory sub-system and improved the stress/efficiency of the tool by making the required modifications to the tool. We ran several experiments based on the event collection and increased the ability in the tool to create scenarios exercising patterns that can potentially highlight complex bugs.

The term anti-Americanism has become common in public and academic debate in the last decade. Yet we have only limited knowledge of those who hold such views. From 2003, 2005, and 2006 Eurobarometer data, almost 20% of European Union (EU) respondents disapproved of U.S. policy in all five dimensions the surveys examined. Following the literature, this consistent opposition is defined as anti-American. Anti-Americans exhibit systematic differences in age, education, geographical location, policy preferences, and nationality. In addition, although anti-Americanism is associated with a preference for greater European independence, perhaps surprisingly, it is also linked to a desire for a less federal and hence less powerful Europe. In both sets of attitudes, to the United States and to the EU, there are substantial variations within countries between different types of locality, which reinforces the view that it is too simplistic to describe a country as being anti-American or being pro-European integration.

The size of the shadow economy has been investigated by a number of different methodologies. A common approach is the use of macroeconomic data to investigate, for example, the relationship between the money supply and GDP and associate the error term with the shadow economy. We extend this approach to the use of cross-section survey data based on individual responses to estimate the relative size of shadow economy household income as a proportion of declared income in 2002. The analysis suggests that the relative figures for Slovakia and the Czech Republic are 23.2% and 21.8% respectively. The analysis is based on the assumption, which we provide empirical confirmation for, that law-abiding citizens are less likely to participate in the shadow economy. There are various policies open to governments and tax authorities as they attempt to deal with the shadow economy. Increased frequency of tax audits and greater fines are two obvious measures which in many, perhaps most, countries would be justified. Targeting audits at the likely participant in the shadow economy is another. One obvious example would be to target dishonest citizens, i.e. those who have been found to have broken the law within some other context. Publishing the identity of those found to have participated in the shadow economy, hence adding social penalties to legal ones may also be an effective strategy. Finally, publicity campaigns aimed at raising awareness of the damage to a country inflicted by the shadow economy may also be effective in increasing social disapproval, thus increasing the ‘social penalty’.

Central to the Blair government's economic and social policies has been the promotion of a more ‘knowledge-based economy’. However, some commentators have suggested that the knowledge economy stretches income distributions and polarises skilled and unskilled workers. Drawing on empirical data about the UK case to explore such claims, this paper concludes that there is a significant positive correlation between the extent to which a region's economy has become ‘knowledge based’ and its level of income inequality. It argues this finding has important policy relevant implications.

This paper examines the determinants of intended electoral participation. We analyze attitudes to both referenda and voting in national elections. Sample survey data are obtained from the Eurobarometer survey of transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The empirical results suggest that intended electoral participation increases with age, income and education. But attitudinal variables are also important and in particular confidence in the free market economy and satisfaction with the general development of the country impact positively on intended electoral participation.

This paper considers a measure of the “publicness” of goods and services implicit in responses that individuals make when asked about public sector spending. At the limit, all consumers consume equal amounts of a public good. Thus any differences between an individual's self-interest preferences and public-interest preferences cannot be based on differential provision, but only on differences in the individual's public- and self-interest utility functions. If we rule out the latter, self-interest and public-interest preferences for a pure public good are identical. Using sample survey data it is possible to calibrate the public good content of different public goods.

A theoretical analysis argues that a company will provide benefits if they are worth more to the employee than income equal to the net amount it is costing the firm to provide the benefit. Because the individual is being denied choice, other things being equal he/she would prefer the income. But the firm may be able to provide a benefit-wage package which compensates the individual because of (i) tax advantages, (ii) economies of scale in purchasing or (iii) production function advantages. The empirical work focuses on benefit provision in the UK.

KANSAS CITY AND HOW IT GREW, 1822-2011. By JAMES R. SHORTRIDGE. xi and 288 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780700618828. Geographers, historians, and students of the Midwest in general will be pleased with James R. (Pete) Shortridge's latest work, an in-depth study of the life and times of Kansas City. A Kansas City native who has spent his entire professional career not far away at the University of Kansas, he comes well prepared for the task. Shortridge does not entitle the book a "geography" of Kansas City, although geographers of his generation will recognize it as a work of scholarship that only a dyed-in-the-wool geographer would produce. Statistics and observations from fieldwork, map work, and painstaking calculation are evident throughout the text and are sometimes cited casually as "compiled from multiple sources," which anyone who has ever tried a project like this surely knows is the case. The many excellent maps and photographs, which are the work of Barbara Shortridge, add yet another level of detail and support to the text. Kansas City was something of a geographical inevitability. Located at the elbow of the "great bend" of the Missouri, where the river's southward flow turns abruptly eastward, Kansas City was as far west as practical river commerce would extend. The "old" river here was the Kansas (Kaw), whose eastward flow captured the diverted drainage from the north when the Missouri found a course along the margins of the wasting Pleistocene glacier. The natives and fur traders who once portaged their canoes across the swampy drainage divide that became Chicago were to have their counterparts more than a century later at Kansas City, where cargoes off the Missouri River side-wheelers were skidded up the river's bank and reloaded onto wagon trains bound for the Santa Fe Trail. Chicago would become the nation's largest freight railroad center; Kansas City, the second largest. The same order held true for stockyards and for meatpacking in the early twentieth century. Flour milling added to Kansas City's industrial mix once the winter wheat crop of Kansas became the nation's largest around World War I. The state line of Kansas, which begins where the Kaw enters the Missouri, had the effect of bisecting the natural urban growth that would have been anticipated from the start. Surely unanticipated was the era of aggressive hostilities across this line in the "Bleeding Kansas" years leading up to the Civil War. Shortridge suggests that the real rivalries across the state line were economic and that they developed between Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, in later years. But he does allow that a prominent real estate developer's attempts to sell residential lots west of the Kansas line to Missouri buyers even after 1900 "violated cultural codes dating to the Civil War and before." The upscale real estate developments that began in Kansas City in the late nineteenth century were to have a lasting impact. J. C. Nichols, a local property developer, witnessed the expansion of residential neighborhoods on Kansas City's southwest side and began to lay his own plans for even grander projects. …

The paper examines the effect of aid on poverty, rather than on economic growth. We devise a ‘pro-poor (public) expenditure index’, and present evidence that, together with inequality and corruption, this is a key determinant of the aid's poverty leverage. After presenting empirical evidence which suggests a positive leverage of aid donors on pro-poor expenditure, we argue for the development of conditionality in a new form, which gives greater flexibility to donors in punishing slippage on previous commitments, and keys aid disbursements to performance in respect of policy variables which governments can influence in a pro-poor direction.

The debate on the impact of aid on the economies of developing countries is a rapidly evolving one. Early studies by, e.g., Papanek (1972) reported a positive impact of aid on growth within a multiple regression context. This conclusion allowed policy makers to entertain the possibility that poverty across the world could be largely eradicated, that countries could be moved out of poverty through the allocation of aid and that the following of successful policies would allow them to generate increased prosperity from their own resources. Unfortunately after some thirty years the poor are still with us, poverty shows relatively little signs of disappearing and until recently enthusiasm for aid amongst donors had declined. The papers in this symposium examine the effectiveness of aid in the past and its potential in the future. A number of economic studies help explain this apparent failure. Mosley et al. (1987) found it impossible to establish any significant relationship between aid and the growth rate of developing countries. They suggested that this might be because of the possibility of leakages into non-productive expenditure in the public sector and the transmission of negative price effects to the private sector. They also argued for the targeting of aid, i.e. its allocation to countries where it would be used most effectively. Boone (1996) concluded that aid does not significantly increase growth nor benefit the poor. It did however increase the size of the government. But again the message was not entirely negative in terms of what aid could achieve and argued for the targeting of aid, this time at liberal democratic regimes, as they appeared more effective in, for example, reducing infant mortality. Hence, until recently, the dominant view within economics had become pessimistic with respect to the past effectiveness of aid but, somewhat optimistically perhaps, held out the hope for improvement on the basis of aid targeting. More recently, however, work by Burnside and Dollar (2000) was to put forward a more optimistic view of the former. They concluded that aid had a positive impact on growth for developing countries with good fiscal, monetary and trade policies in place but had little impact for those countries who were following poor policies. This therefore, partially at least, provided an explanation of why aid had been found to have little positive impact on growth in previous empirical work. It also provided specific criteria for targeting aid. This was then built upon by Collier and Dollar (2001, 2002) who calculated a 'poverty efficient allocation of aid' which focused on those countries with a combination of most poverty and best policies. They suggested that targeting of aid in this manner would almost double its effectiveness in reducing poverty. This work has had an extraordinary impact upon policy and Easterly (2003), as well as Dalgaard, Hansen and Tarp (DHT) in this symposium, document how it

This paper examines attitudes to tax evasion. Sample survey data from a randomly chosen group of people are used to analyze this problem using hypothetical questions. The results suggest that evasion is condoned by a large proportion of the population, who are particularly ready to take advantage of someone else's evasion. The problem seems greatest among the young and men. People however appear to be deterred from tax evasion by the consequences of being caught. Empirical analysis supports the importance of both civic duty and ‘law abidance’ in deterring tax evasion.

Consumers evaluate product quality with information signals such as brand name giving an advantage to established firms over other firms even when introducing a new product. Another signal is ‘country of origin’ and, as high-income countries focus more heavily on higher quality goods, there is a tendency for consumers to associate quality with a country's income per capita. Thus new firms from developing countries face particular problems in export markets. International standardization offers a potential solution to their problem. However, analysis of the use of ISO 9000 suggests that it is difficult to eliminate the informational asymmetry. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.