China's Impact on the Exports of Other Asian Countries: A Note

Despite widespread interest in China's growing trade surplus and its impact on other countries, empirical research in these issues is handicapped by the lack of reliable statistics on aggregate import and export prices. Although researchers estimate the trade volumes of China and other East Asian countries using a variety of surrogate price indices, an inappropriate deflator can give rise to a significant bias in econometric analysis. This paper discusses the potential seriousness of this problem by examining recent studies on the export competition between China and other Asian countries.

Re-examining "difference" and "development" : a note on broadening the field of gender and development in Japan

It is the author’s position that the framework for WID/GAD, as academic field and practice concerned primarily with developing countries should be broadened so as to incorporate Japan’s own gender and development issues in its scope. Unlike other developed countries, activists and scholars in Japan rarely connected, as was also the case with the fields of women’s/gender studies and WID/GAD. However, this was not due to any lack of interest among Japanese women regarding the lives of women in developing countries. Rather the points of fissure were the notions of ‘difference’ and ‘development’ held by Japanese women. These analytical concepts were narrowly defined, which resulted in limited interaction between discourse on women’s issues in Japan and WID/GAD related to ‘other’ women. By re-examining these notions and looking more deeply into perceived differences in the local context of ‘development’, not only can we strategize on ‘differences’ in such a way that we draw strength from the very fact of being different, but also prevent ‘differences’ from being used as grounds for discrimination. As a whole, we could gain substantially by broadening the field of Gender and Development and, as such, it is imperative that this field be broadened with urgency as development itself changes in this ever-interconnected world

A note on ethnic return migration policy in Kazakhstan : changing priorities and a growing dilemma

This paper offers a brief analysis of the legal aspects of the ethnic return migration policy of Kazakhstan, a post-Soviet Central Asian state that has been active in seeking ties with its diaspora since independence. This paper examines the definition of oralman (repatriates) and the establishment of a quota on the number of Kazakh immigrants who are eligible for government funds to show how the rationale and preferences in repatriation policy have changed over the years. By focusing on changes in migration-related legislation in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the paper notes that two key goals of Kazakhstan’s migration policy are not necessarily consistent with each other: the promotion of an ethnically based nation-building project by encouraging the "return" of co-ethnics living abroad, and building a workforce that is best suited for the development of the state’s economy.

A note on three factor model of discounting

In Montiel Olea and Strzalecki (2014), authors have axiomatically developed an algorithm to infer the parameters of beta-delta model of cognitive bias (present and future biases). While this is extremely useful, it allows the implied beta to become very large when the response is impatient in the future choices relative to present choices, i.e., when there is a strong future bias. I modify the model to further exponentiate the functional form to get more reasonable beta values.