Excess leverage and productivity growth in emerging economies:is there a threshold effect?

This paper studies the relationship between leverage and growth, focusing on a large sample of firms in emerging economies of central and eastern Europe (CEE). Contrary to the general wisdom, we find that deviation from optimal leverage, especially, excess leverage is common among firms in many CEE countries. Using firm-level panel data from a group of transition countries, the paper provides support to the hypothesis that leverage positively affects productivity growth but only below an endogenously determined threshold level.

The potential use of bio-ultracarbofluids in a standard diesel engine

The replacement of diesel fuel by ultra-carbofluids was perceived to offer the potential to decrease the emissions of environmental pollutants such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons (HC's) and smoke. Such ultracarbofluids consist of a suspension of coal in fuel oil and water generally in the ratio of 5: 3: 2 plus a small amount of stabilising additive. The literature relating to the economies of coal and fuel oil production, and the production and properties of charcoal and vegetable oils has been critically reviewed. The potential use of charcoal and vegetable oils as replacements for coal and fuel oil are discussed. An experimental investigation was undertaken using novel bio-ultracarbofluid formulations. These differed from an ultracarbofluid by having bio-renewable charcoal and vegetable oil in place of coal and fuel oil. Tests were made with a Lister-Petter 600cc 2-cylinder, 4-stroke diesel engine fitted with a Heenan-Froude DPX 1 water brake dynamometer to measure brake power output, and Mexa-321E and Mexa-211E analysers to measure exhaust pollutants. Measurements were made of engine brake power output, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and smoke emissions over the speed range 1000 to 3000 rpm at 200 rpm intervals. The results were compared with those obtained with a standard diesel reference fuel. All the bio-ultracarbofluid formulations produced lower brake power outputs (i.e. 5.6% to 20.7% less brake power) but substantially improved exhaust emissions of CO2, CO, HC's and smoke. The major factor in the formulation was found to be the type and amount of charcoal; charcoal with a high volatile content (27.2%) and present at 30% by mass yielded the best results, i.e. only slightly lower brake power output and significantly lower exhaust pollutants.

Biosynthesis and separation of dextran fructose mixtures in a chromatographic reactor

A literature review of work carried out on batch and continuous chromatographic biochemical reactor-separators has been made. The major part of this work has involved the development of a batch chromatographic reactor-separator for the production of dextran and fructose by the enzymatic action of the enzyme dextransucrase on sucrose. In this reactor, simultaneous reaction and separation occurs thus reducing downstream processing and isolation of products as compared to the existing industrial process. The chromatographic reactor consisted of a glass column packed with a stationary phase consisting of cross linked polysytrene resin in the calcium form. The mobile phase consisted of diluted dextransucrase in deionised water. Initial experiments were carried out on a reactor separtor which had an internal diameter of 0.97cm and length of 1.5m. To study the effect of scale up the reactor diameter was doubled to 1.94cm and length increased to 1.75m. The results have shown that the chromatographic reactor uses more enzyme than a conventional batch reactor for a given conversion of sucrose and that an increase in void volume results in higher conversions of sucrose. A comparison of the molecular weight distribution of dextran produced by the chromatographic reactor was made with that from a conventional batch reactor. The results have shown that the chromatographic reactor produces 30% more dextran of molecular weight greater than 150,000 daltons at 20% w/v sucrose concentration than conventional reactors. This is because some of the fructose molecules are prevented as acting as acceptors in the chromatographic reactor due to their removal from the reaction zone. In the conventional reactor this is not possible and therefore a greater proportion of low molecular weight dextran is produced which does not have much clinical use. A theoretical model was developed to describe the behaviour of the reactor separator and this model was simulated using a computer. The simulation predictions showed good agreement with experimental results at high eluent flowrates and low conversions.

A study of new product market search and user adoption

The research was carried out in the Aviation Division of Dunlop Limited and was initiated as a search for more diverse uses for carbon/carbon composites. An assumed communication model of adoption was refined by introducing the concept of a two way search after making cross industry comparisons of supplier and consumer behaviour. This research has examined methods of searching for new uses for advanced technology materials. Two broad approaches were adopted. First, a case history approach investigated materials that had been in a similar oosition to carbon/carbon to see how other material producing firms had tackled the problem. Second, a questionnaire survey among industrialists examined: the role and identity of material decision makers in different sized firms; the effectiveness of various information sources and channels; and the material adoption habits of different industries. The effectiveness of selected information channels was further studied by monitoring the response to publicity given to carbon/carbon. A flow chart has been developed from the results of this research which should help any material producing firm that is contemplating the introduction of a new material to the world market. Further benefit to our understanding of the innovation and adoption of new materials would accrue from work in the followino areas: "micro" type case histories; understanding more fully the role of product champions or promoters; investigating the phase difference between incremental and radical type innovations for materials; examining the relationship between the adoption rate of new materials and the advance of technology; studying the development of cost per unit function methods for material selection; and reviewing the benefits that economy of scale studies can have on material developments. These are all suggested areas for further work.

Vertical and horizontal scope economies in the regulated US electricity power industry

This paper investigates vertical economies between generation and distribution of electric power, and horizontal economies between different types of power generation in the U.S. electric utility industry. Our quadratic cost function model includes three generation output measures (hydro, nuclear and fossil fuels), which allows us to analyze the effect that generation mix has on vertical economies. Our results provide (sample mean) estimates of vertical economies of 8.1% and horizontal economies of 5.4%. An extensive sensitivity analysis is used to show how the scope measures vary across alternative model specifications and firm types. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Editorial Board of The Journal of Industrial Economics.

Assessment of national health systems performance in the WHO African region

There is growing peer and donor pressure on African countries to utilize available resources more efficiently in a bid to support the ongoing efforts to expand coverage of health interventions with a view to achieving the health-related Millennium Development Goals. The purpose of this study was to estimate the technical and scale efficiency of national health systems in African continent. Methods The study applied the Data Envelopment Analysis approach to estimate the technical efficiency and scale efficiency among the 53 countries of the African Continent. Results Out of the 38 low-income African countries, 12 countries national health systems manifested a constant returns to scale technical efficiency (CRSTE) score of 100%; 15 countries had a VRSTE score of 100%; and 12 countries had a SE score of one. The average variable returns to scale technical efficiency (VRSTE) score was 95% and the mean scale efficiency (SE) score was 59%; meaning that while on average the degree of inefficiency was only 5%, the magnitude of scale inefficiency was 41%. Of the 15 middle-income countries, 5 countries, 9 countries and 5 countries had CRSTE, VRSTE and SE scores of 100%. Ten countries, six countries and 10 countries had CRSTE, VRSTE and SE scores of less than 100%; and thus, they were deemed inefficient. The average VRSTE (i.e. pure efficiency) score was 97.6%. The average SE score was 49.9%. Conclusion There are large unmet need for health and health-related services among countries of the African Continent. Thus, it would not be advisable for health policy-makers address NHS inefficiencies through reduction in excess human resources for health. Instead, it would be more prudent for them to leverage health promotion approaches and universal access prepaid (tax-based, insurance-based or mixtures) health financing systems to create demand for under utilised health services/interventions with a view to increasing ultimate health outputs to efficient target levels.

The global competitiveness of regions

The aim of this book is to consider theoretically the notion of the global competitiveness of regions, as well as giving attention as to how such competitiveness may be empirically measured. With this in mind, the book has three specific objectives: first, to place the concept of regional competitiveness within the context of regional economic development theory; second, to present a rationale and method for quantifying the global competitiveness of regions; and, third, to undertake the most geographically widespread analysis of regional competitiveness differences across the globe. With regard to the third goal, the analysis incorporates more than 500 regions across Europe, North and South America, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and the so-called BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The importance of the concept of competitiveness has increased rapidly in recent years, with the issues surrounding it becoming, at the same time, more empirically refined and theoretically complex. The focus on regions reflects the growing consensus that they are the primary spatial units that compete to attract investment, and it is at the regional level that knowledge is circulated and transferred, resulting in agglomerations, or clusters, of industrial and service sector enterprises. This growing acknowledgement of the region’s role as a key spatial unit of organisation has led to attention turning to competitiveness at a more regional level. The book explores the results of the World Competitiveness Index of Regions (WCIR), covering the rankings and results of the 2014 edition. The WCIR provides a tool for analysing the development of a range of regional economies across the globe. It enables an illustration of the changing patterns of regional competitiveness on the international stage to be generated. In fundamental terms, the WCIR aims to produce an integrated and overall benchmark of the knowledge capacity, capability, and sustainability of each region, and the extent to which this knowledge is translated into economic value and transferred into the wealth of the citizens of each region.

A szovjetológiától az új intézményi közgazdaságtanig - töprengések két évtized távlatából = From Sovietology to the new institutional economics - meditations from a distance of two decades

A következőkben arra teszünk kísérletet, hogy összegezzük a közép- és a kelet-európai rendszerváltozások és az ezt tanulmányozók fordulatos történetét az elmúlt két évtizedben. Bemutatjuk, hogy a közgazdaságtan egy kevéssé fejlett ága miképp szembesült a tudományág egésze szempontjából is talán legnehezebb értelmezési és alkalmazási kérdéseket fölvető történelmi folyamattal. Megpróbáljuk feloldani azt a rejtvényt, hogy a főáramú megközelítés megismerése és alkalmazása miért nem hozott átütő eredményt sem a térség gazdaságainak, sem magának a tudományszaknak. Megvizsgáljuk a fokozatosság és a reformok kritikus tömege viszonyát. Végül kísérletet teszünk arra, hogy e sajátos szakterület elemzéséből adódó, tartósnak bizonyuló tételeket beépítsük a fenntartható fejlődés szélesebben értelmezett, immár főáramú megközelítéseibe. ___________ The article attempts to give an account of the changes of system in Central and Eastern Europe and of those who studied them in the last two decades. It shows how a less devel-oped branch of economics faced a historical process that posed possibly the most difficult questions of interpretation and application for the whole discipline. An attempt is made to discover why recognition and application of the mainstream approach failed to bring resounding success for the economies of the region or for economics itself. The author examines the relation between continuity and the critical weight of reforms. Finally, an attempt is made to advance durable propositions based on analysis of this specific field through now mainstream approaches in terms of sustainable development.

The Impact of the Internet in Six Latin American Countries

Access to the Internet has grown exponentially in Latin America over the past decade. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) estimates that in 2009 there were 144.5 million Internet users in South America, 6.4 million in Central America, and 8.2 million in the Caribbean, or a total 159.2 million users in all of Latin America.1 At that time, ITU reported an estimated 31 million Internet users in Mexico, which would bring the overall number of users in Latin America to 190.2 million people. More recent estimates published by Internet World Stats place Internet access currently at an estimated 204.6 million out of a total population of 592.5 million in the region (this figure includes Mexico).2 According to those figures, 34.5 per cent of the Latin American population now enjoys Internet access. In recent years, universal access policies contributed to the vast increase in digital literacy and Internet use in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica. Whereas the latter was the first country in the region to adopt a policy of universal access, the most expansive and successful digital inclusion programs in the region have taken hold in Brazil and Chile. These two countries have allocated considerable resources to the promotion of digital literacy and Internet access among low income and poor populations; in both cases, civil society groups significantly assisted in the promotion of inclusion at the grassroots level. Digital literacy and Internet access have come to represent, particularly in the area of education, a welcome complementary resource for populations chronically underserved in nations with a long-standing record of inadequate public social services. Digital inclusion is vastly expanding throughout the region, thanks to stabilizing economies, increasingly affordable technology, and the rapid growth in the supply of cellular mobile telephony. A recent study by the global advertising agency Razorfish revealed significant shifts in the demographics of digital inclusion in the major economies of South America, where Web access is rapidly increasing amid the lower middle class and the working poor.3 Several researchers have suggested that Internet access will bring about greater civic participation and engagement, although skeptics remain unsure this could happen in Latin America. Yet, there have been some recent instances of political mobilization facilitated through the use of the Web and social media applications, starting in Chile when “smart mobs” nationwide demonstrated against former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet when she failed to enact education reforms in May 2006. The Internet has also been used by marginalized groups and by guerrillas groups to highlight their stories. In sum, Internet access in Latin is no longer a medium restricted to the elite. It is rather a public sphere upon which civil society has staked its claim. Some of the examples noted in this study point toward a developing trend whereby civil society, through online grassroots movements, is able to effectively pressure public officials, instill transparency and demand accountability in government. Access to the Internet has also made it possible for voices on the margins to participate in the conversation in a way that was never previously feasible. 1 International Telecommunications Union [ITU], “Information Technology Public & Report,” accessed May 15, 2011, http://www.itu.int/. 2 Internet World Stats, “Internet Usage Statistics for the Americas,” accessed March 24, 2011, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats2.htm 3 J. Crump, “The finch and the fox,” London, UK (2010), http://www.slideshare.net/razorfishmarketing/the-finch-and-the-fox.

Racialized sexualities within the romance tour industry: The influence of affect and emotion upon transnational hierarchies of desire

Online international introduction sites that offer romance tours to American men in search of a foreign bride are an important and rapidly growing component of the internet dating industry; the number of these agencies in the U.S. tripled from two hundred to six hundred in the past 10 years. Previous scholars have examined the so-called `mail order bride' industry in order to demonstrate that the women involved are agents and not victims. Many scholars have also highlighted the importance of race in shaping American men's desires in one particular region or country. My dissertation provides an important addition to the literature surrounding romance tourism by including participants from all three major regions associated with romance tourism: Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia. I collected the data for the dissertation by becoming a participant observer of a romance tour in Ukraine, Colombia, and the Philippines. I argue that romance tourism is an important example of the global intimate, and the ways in which globalized processes are created and sustained through everyday intimate emotions and interactions. By examining the ways in which the emotions of desire, disgust, and anxiety influence individual romance tour participant's constructions of racialized hierarchies, the links between individual emotions and global systems are revealed. The concept of the global intimate challenges the hierarchy of scale that places the body, the home, and the intimate on a much lower level than the scale of the global or the national, and at the same time challenges the binary that divides the individual from the global. Through highlighting the different emotional negotiations that are constantly occurring in the romance tour industry, I highlight the important ways in which individual emotions and affects influence global processes on a large scale and vice versa.^

Three essays on the economics of defense contracting, output and income inequality

This dissertation analyzes both the economics of the defense contracting process and the impact of total dollar obligations on the economies of U.S. states. Using various econometric techniques, I will estimate relationships across individual contracts, state level output, and income inequality. I will achieve this primarily through the use of a dataset on individual contract obligations. ^ The first essay will catalog the distribution of contracts and isolate aspects of the process that contribute to contract dollar obligations. Accordingly, this study describes several characteristics about individual defense contracts, from 1966-2006: (i) the distribution of contract dollar obligations is extremely rightward skewed, (ii) contracts are unevenly distributed in a geographic sense across the United States, (iii) increased duration of a contract by 10 percent is associated with an increase in costs by 4 percent, (iv) competition does not seem to affect dollar obligations in a substantial way, (v) contract pre-payment financing increases the obligation of contracts from anywhere from 62 to 380 percent over non-financed contracts. ^ The second essay will turn to an aggregate focus, and look the impact of defense spending on state economic output. The analysis in chapter two attempts to estimate the state level fiscal multiplier, deploying Difference-in-Differences estimation as an attempt to filter out potential endogeneity bias. Interstate variation in procurement spending facilitates utilization of a natural experiment scenario, focusing on the spike in relative spending in 1982. The state level relative multiplier estimate here is 1.19, and captures the short run, impact effect of the 1982 spending spike. ^ Finally I will look at the relationship between defense contracting and income inequality. Military spending has typically been observed to have a negative relationship with income inequality. The third chapter examines the existence of this relationship, combining data on defense procurement with data on income inequality at the state level, in a longitudinal analysis across the United States. While the estimates do not suggest a significant relationship exists for the income share of the top ten percent of households, there is a significant positive relationship for the income share of top one percent households for an increase in defense procurement.^

Globalizing the Sculptural Landscapes of the Sarapis and Isis Cults in Hellenistic and Roman Greece

“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs.

I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.

In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.

Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.

These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.

"On our way": identities and representations of African women seeking asylum in Ireland

This thesis provides the first explicit Postcolonial study of asylum in the Irish context that integrates Black Feminist analyses of intersectional identity with Postcolonial Feminist theories of representation. African women seeking asylum in the Republic of Ireland were key political instruments used by the state to re-draw racial lines. The study examines how, for a group of African women “On their Way” through asylum, identity and representation work hand in hand to force identities, subaltern spaces and bodies to occupy them. Rich biographical data is gathered through mixed art and drama methods over two intensive participatory research projects conducted in a small Irish city. Data analysis critically examines the poetics (practices that signify) and politics (the powers that govern these practices) and affective economies of global and local NGO visual representations, exposing how they consume, fragment, and appropriate African women’s identities and bodies. Though hypervisible, the women themselves “cannot speak”. The women in the study reported feeling “tired” and “used”. Asking “What work are they doing as they do asylum?” the study finds that black female identities and bodies are forced to perform political, cultural, emotional and material labour on their way through this context of Irish asylum. The author argues that Postcolonial Asylum is a performative encounter that re-scripts colonial race/class/gender discourse through a humanitarian alibi to naturalize European/white supremacy, reinscribe patriarchal power and justify racialised incarceration of bodies seeking asylum in the North. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach that centralizes Black and Postcolonial Feminist theory and innovates Participatory Art-Based Action methodology. Black and Postcolonial feminisms can recognize, theorize and replenish black female political and intellectual agency. Participatory Action research, if grounded in Black feminist epistemology and ethics, can allow participants to “speak back” to what is already said about them in spaces of convivial self-representation.

Three Essays on the Economics of Defense Contracting, Output and Income Inequality

This dissertation analyzes both the economics of the defense contracting process and the impact of total dollar obligations on the economies of U.S. states. Using various econometric techniques, I will estimate relationships across individual contracts, state level output, and income inequality. I will achieve this primarily through the use of a dataset on individual contract obligations. The first essay will catalog the distribution of contracts and isolate aspects of the process that contribute to contract dollar obligations. Accordingly, this study describes several characteristics about individual defense contracts, from 1966-2006: (i) the distribution of contract dollar obligations is extremely rightward skewed, (ii) contracts are unevenly distributed in a geographic sense across the United States, (iii) increased duration of a contract by 10 percent is associated with an increase in costs by 4 percent, (iv) competition does not seem to affect dollar obligations in a substantial way, (v) contract pre-payment financing increases the obligation of contracts from anywhere from 62 to 380 percent over non-financed contracts. The second essay will turn to an aggregate focus, and look the impact of defense spending on state economic output. The analysis in chapter two attempts to estimate the state level fiscal multiplier, deploying Difference-in-Differences estimation as an attempt to filter out potential endogeneity bias. Interstate variation in procurement spending facilitates utilization of a natural experiment scenario, focusing on the spike in relative spending in 1982. The state level relative multiplier estimate here is 1.19, and captures the short run, impact effect of the 1982 spending spike. Finally I will look at the relationship between defense contracting and income inequality. Military spending has typically been observed to have a negative relationship with income inequality. The third chapter examines the existence of this relationship, combining data on defense procurement with data on income inequality at the state level, in a longitudinal analysis across the United States. While the estimates do not suggest a significant relationship exists for the income share of the top ten percent of households, there is a significant positive relationship for the income share of top one percent households for an increase in defense procurement.

The contribution of community enterprise to British urban regeneration in a period of state retrenchment

This chapter discusses the growth and nature of community enterprise and in particular the sub-set of asset-based community development trusts and reviews their contribution to urban regeneration in Britain. Three models are presented and illustrated with case studies.