De-industrialisation and the post-communist transition:Rowthorn and Wells' model revisited

In this paper we present a simple three-sector model explaining the structural change in employment, which is a modified version of Rowthorn-Wells (1987). We supplement the theoretical analysis with simple econometric tests, which illustrate how the modified Rowthorn-Wells model can be used to (i) motivate empirical estimates of the link between the level of development and structures of employment, (ii) illustrate structural distortions under the command economies, and the structural adjustment that happened during the post-Communist transition. We demonstrate that in the case of these economies, the transition process leads to an adjustment to the employment structures predicted by the model.

Researching with, not on:using photography in researching street children in Accra, Ghana

What is discussed in this chapter is work-in-progress, an opportunity for reflection upon elements of an on-going research project examining the lives of street children in Accra, Ghana. Street children have received much research in recent years but our project is, we believe, distinctive in two respects. The first of these is that access to reliable data on the growing presence of children on the streets of African cities is often problematic. Available research is often diffuse and hard to access, it is more often than not driven by the short-term requirements of specific programmes and interventions and as a consequence can be lacking in depth, rigour and innovation. Without the means to provide a sufficiently self-conscious and critical engagement with accepted understandings of the lives of street children, consideration of the experience of street children in Africa continues to rely heavily on the more capacious and better disseminated research from the Americas (e.g., Mickelson, 2000). At the very least, Africa's specific experience of large population displacements, diversity of family forms, rapid urbanisation, vigorous structural adjustment and internal conflict raise important questions about the appropriateness of such ready generalisations. Judith Ennew (2003, p. 4) is clear that caution is needed in an uncritical endorsement of the “globalisation of the street child based on Latin American work”. She is equally mindful, however, that as far as Africa is concerned the absence of reliable evidence continues to hinder debate.

Purchasing power parity and structural instability in the US/UK exchange rate

The aim of this study is to determine if nonlinearities have affected purchasing power parity (PPP) since 1885. Also using recent advances in the econometrics of structural change we segment the sample space according to the identified breaks and look at whether the PPP condition holds in each sub-sample and whether this involves linear or non-linear adjustment. Our results suggest that during some sub-periods, PPP holds, although whether it holds or not and whether the adjustment is linear or non-linear, depends primarily on the type of exchange rate regime in operation at any point in time.

Risk and structural instability in US house prices

This paper employs a Component GARCH in Mean model to show that house prices across a number of major US cities between 1987 and 2009 have displayed asset market properties in terms of both risk-return relationships and asymmetric adjustment to shocks. In addition, tests for structural breaks in the mean and variance indicate structural instability across the data range. Multiple breaks are identified across all cities, particularly for the early 1990s and during the post-2007 financial crisis as housing has become an increasingly risky asset. Estimating the models over the individual sub-samples suggests that over the last 20 years the financial sector has increasingly failed to account for the levels of risk associated with real estate markets. This result has possible implications for the way in which financial institutions should be regulated in the future.