The fiscal consequences of deflation : evidence from the golden age of globalization

We study the fiscal consequences of deflation on a panel of 17 economies in the first wave of globalization, between 1870 and 1914. By means of impulse response analyses and panel regressions, we find that a 1 percent fall in the price level leads to an increase in the public debt ratio of about 0.23- 0.32 pp. and accounting for trade openness, monetary policy and the exchange rate raises the absolute value of the coefficient on deflation. Moreover, the public debt ratio increases when deflation is also associated with a period of economic recession. For government revenue, lagged deflation comes out with a statistically significant negative coefficient, while government primary expenditure seems relatively invariant to changes in prices.

Wage Matters & Globalization: South Florida’s Low-Wage Immigrant Plant Nursery Workers and Business Protectionism in the Age of Neoliberalism

Ornamental plant production in the State of Florida is an anomaly with respect to current theories of globalization and particularly their explanation of the employment of low-wage, immigrant labor. Those theories dictate that unskilled jobs that do not need to be performed within highly developed countries are outsourced to where labor is cheaper and more flexible. However, the State of Florida remains an important site of ornamental plant production in the US amidst a global economic environment of outsourcing and transnational corporate expansion. This dissertation relies on 50 semi-structured interviews with insiders of the Florida plant nursery industry, focus groups, and participant observation to explain how US trade, labor, and migration policy-making at local levels are not removed from larger global processes taking place in the world since the 1970s. In Florida, elite market players of the plant nursery industry have been able to resist global trends in free trade, operating instead in a protected market. They have done this by appealing to scientific justifications and through arbitrary implementations of neoliberal ideology that keeps small and middle range business alive, while maintaining a seemingly endless supply of marginalized and exploited low-wage, immigrant workers.

Empire's Children: Soviet Childhood in the Age of Revolution

Ideas of childhood and citizenship stood at the center of the Soviet Union’s empire-building project during the 1920s and 1930s. After the 1917 Revolution the Bolsheviks were faced with the challenge of establishing a new state structure and governing a vast territory inherited from its tsarist predecessor. In the early years of the Soviet project, new leaders enlisted a cadre of professionals tasked with not only creating the norms of childhood and the everyday, but also implementing policies to modernize habits and values of the empire’s younger citizens. To understand how children became a prime focus of Soviet imperial and ethno-cultural politics, my dissertation employs discourse analysis and compares the ways in which Soviet imperial policies were implemented in two ethnically different regions: the Buddhist Republic of Kalmykia as the colonial case study and Moscow as the Metropole. The current project examines newspapers, treatises, and inspectors’ reports over the span of twenty years. It finds that the Bolsheviks’ initial values and discourses in the realm of children’s education, health, leisure and nutrition, all which were scientifically designed to transform children into ideal Soviet and modern citizens, changed over time as a result of the competing ideologies among local elites and the challenges they faced while intervening in children’s everyday lives. The most significant conclusion in this dissertation reveals that, contrary to previous scholarly arguments, the modernization projects that took place in Moscow and Kalmykia were more similar in the challenges and outcomes that local officials faced when implementing state policies.

Age of pending criminal cases report for period 7/1/2016 thru 9/30/2016

This gives statistics on the age of pending criminal cases broken down by circuits and counties.

Gender, class and the household economy in Scotland in the ‘Age of affluence’

From early 1950s to the early 1970s Britain is said to have experienced an ‘age of affluence’. Whilst material conditions for many households improved in these decades, this detailed examination of budget management processes shows that for many working-class households, these gains were the product of hard work and careful money management. Using oral history methodology, this thesis explores lived experiences of the household economy to illuminate these qualifications to ‘affluence’. In so doing, this thesis advances analysis which considers the relationship between the macro-level economic conditions of affluence and the everyday economic realities of households in the post-war period. The thesis examines the operation of the household economy and shows how working-class households utilised domestic labour, budgeting, paid work, credit and thrift to make ends meet, as well as to achieve ‘affluence’. Further, by exploring these areas of the household economy, this thesis shows that gendered ideology continued to preserve power and material inequalities between men and women. Although considerable change did occur, particularly involvement in the paid labour market, domestic responsibilities continued to be an important focus of women’s identities and the effective performance of these duties by women remained central to the success of the household. This thesis represents a fresh focus on how the exploration of everyday life, including the salience of ideological continuities in shaping experience, can qualify and refine our understanding of twentieth century economic and social change, and contributes to socio-historical understandings of ‘affluence’ and its intersections with the household, gender, and class.

Inclusion in an age of mobility

Learning with mobiles in UK universities is not new and is not novel. It is, in fact, at least 10 years old, well-documented and comparable to activity in universities elsewhere in Western Europe, America and Asia Pacific. Continued and dramatic changes in the ownership, access and expectations of mobiles amongst university students and equally across UK society have suddenly propelled learning with mobiles to centre-stage as a feasible proposition but, it is now argued, only if students can bring-your-own-device. This has already catalysed discussion about authority, agency and control within university settings but the equally significant and profound implications for the inclusion agenda have not been articulated. This paper begins that process. A theoretical framework for social inclusion in this context is considered, identified and discussed. The paper reviews the progress and problems of the substantial and unique programme of mobile learning across UK higher education since 2000 in relation to its stance on inclusion, where this is apparent. These are all well-documented in academic and official sources; the paper does however also draw on the author's involvement in many of the events and initiatives. The paper raises however significant questions about this programme's meaning and direction in a world where now there is more, better, cheaper, faster, newer but different digital technology in the hands of students, potential students and everyone else than there is routinely in the educational institutions themselves. This digital technology, mobile technology, now allows learners to create, own, transform, discuss, discard, share, store and broadcast ideas, opinions, images and information, and to create and transform identities and communities. The paper argues that this epistemological revolution may mean that universities and colleges are no longer credible and authoritative gatekeepers to knowledge and its technologies and so the meaning and relevance of inclusion are much less clear. The paper proposes a new stance on inclusion.

Rising China and Internet governance: Multistakeholderism, fragmentation and the Liberal Order in the age of digital sovereignty

In its open and private-based dimension, the Internet is the epitome of the Liberal International Order in its global spatial dimension. Therefore, normative questions arise from the emergence of powerful non-liberal actors such as China in Internet governance. In particular, China has supported a UN-based multilateral Internet governance model based on state sovereignty aimed at replacing the existing ICANN-based multistakeholder model. While persistent, this debate has become less dualistic through time. However, fear of Internet fragmentation has increased as the US-China technological competition grew harsher. This thesis inquires “(To what extent) are Chinese stakeholders reshaping the rules of Global Internet Governance?”. This is further unpacked in three smaller questions: (i) (To what extent) are Chinese stakeholders contributing to increased state influence in multistakeholder fora?; (ii) (how) is China contributing to Internet fragmentation?; and (iii) what are the main drivers of Chinese stakeholders’ stances? To answer these questions, Chinese stakeholders’ actions are observed in the making and management of critical Internet resources at the IETF and ICANN respectively, and in mobile connectivity standard-making at 3GPP. Through the lens of norm entrepreneurship in regime complexes, this thesis interprets changes and persistence in the Internet governance normative order and Chinese attitudes towards it. Three research methods are employed: network analysis, semi-structured expert interviews, and thematic document analysis. While China has enhanced state intervention in several technological fields, fostering debates on digital sovereignty, this research finds that the Chinese government does not exert full control on its domestic private actors and concludes that Chinese stakeholders have increasingly adapted to multistakeholder Internet governance as they grew influential within it. To enhance control over Internet-based activities, the Chinese government resorted to regulatory and technical control domestically rather than establishing a splinternet. This is due to Chinese stakeholders’ interest in retaining the network benefits of global interconnectivity.

Sealing practices in the Near East during the Late Bronze II period: administration and trade in the age of internationalism

This PhD research investigates sealing practices in the Near East during the Late Bronze II period (ca. 1375-1175 BCE). Sealings from archaeological contexts in the Southern Levant, North Syria, Upper and Lower Mesopotamia and South-Western Iran are taken under consideration and analyzed on multiple aspects at local, regional, and international levels. The contextual, functional, and iconographic analysis of these materials, in fact, allows to reconstruct the nature of the transactions and the agents involved in the sealing operations within local administrative systems, highlighting at the same time aspects of inter-regional interactions during the age of internationalism. Following a survey of the available evidence, a corpus consisting of 1845 records from 28 different sites across the ANE, has been filed using MS Access and MS Excel, including 740 unpublished sealing from Karkemish. Among this large evidence, the corpus of recently discovered sealings from Karkemish and the other scattered sealings from the North Syrian provinces, for instance, provide insights on the core-periphery relationships under the Hittite Empire; while the deposit from Building P at Tell Sheikh Hamad, that of the Middle Assyrian houses at Tell Fekheriye, and of the dunnu of Tell Sabi Abyad, significantly contributes to defining the administration of provinces within the Middle Assyrian state and the regional circulation of good. The less extensive evidence from South Mesopotamia under the Kassite rule and from Middle Elamite contexts in South-Western Iran somewhat contribute as well to the understanding of sealing practices in the LB II period. The South Levantine kingdoms, on the other hand, seems participates to the Egyptian regional network of exchanges and sealing practices.

Artisanal food productions of animal origin: exploring food safety in the age of Whole Genome Sequencing

The artisanal food chain is enriched by a wide diversity of local food productions with delightful organoleptic characteristics and valuable nutritional properties. Despite their increasing worldwide popularity and appeal, several food safety challenges are addressed in artisanal facilities context suffering from less standardized processing conditions. In such scenario, recent advances in molecular typing and genomic surveillance (e.g., Whole Genome Sequencing [WGS]) represent an unprecedent solution capable of inferring sources of contamination as well as contributing to food safety along the artisanal food continuum. The overall objective of this PhD thesis was to explore potential microbial hazards among different artisanal food productions of animal origins (dairy and meat-derived) typical of the food culture and heritage landscape belonging to Mediterranean countries. Three different studies were then carried out, specifically focussing on: 1) compare the seasonal variability of microbiological quality and potential occurrence of microbial hazards in two batches of Italian artisanal fermented dairy and meat productions; 2) Investigate genetic relationships as well as virulome and resistome of foodborne pathogens isolated within dairy and meat-derived productions located in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Morocco; 3) investigate the population structure, virulome, resistome and mobilome of Klebsiella spp. isolates collected from study 1, including an extended range of public sequences.

Assessing the influence of dam construction on the spatial and temporal evolution of population density across the United States of America

Finding the optimum location for placing a dam on a river is usually a complicated process which generally forces thousands of people to flee their homes because they will be inundated during the filling of the dam. Dams could also attract people living in the surrounding area after their construction. The goal of this research is to check for dam attractiveness for people by comparing growth rates of population density in surrounding areas after dam construction to those associated with the period antecedent to the dam construction. To this aim, 1859 dams across the United States of America and high-resolution population distribution from 1790 to 2010 are examined. By grouping dams as a function of their main purpose, water supply dams are found to be, as expected, the most attractive dams for people, with the biggest growth in population density. Irrigation dams are next, followed by hydroelectricity, flood control, Navigation, and finally Recreation dams. Fishery dams and dams for other uses suffered a decrease in population in the years after their construction. The regions with the greatest population growth were found approximately 40-45 km from the dam and at distances greater than 90 km, whereas the regions with the greatest population decline or only a modest gain were located within 10-15 km of the dam.

Multi-trait and random regression mature weight heritability and breeding value estimates in Nelore cattle

Mature weight breeding values were estimated using a multi-trait animal model (MM) and a random regression animal model (RRM). Data consisted of 82 064 weight records from 8 145 animals, recorded from birth to eight years of age. Weights at standard ages were considered in the MM. All models included contemporary groups as fixed effects, and age of dam (linear and quadratic effects) and animal age as covariates. In the RRM, mean trends were modelled through a cubic regression on orthogonal polynomials of animal age and genetic maternal and direct and maternal permanent environmental effects were also included as random. Legendre polynomials of orders 4, 3, 6 and 3 were used for animal and maternal genetic and permanent environmental effects, respectively, considering five classes of residual variances. Mature weight (five years) direct heritability estimates were 0.35 (MM) and 0.38 (RRM). Rank correlation between sires' breeding values estimated by MM and RRM was 0.82. However, selecting the top 2% (12) or 10% (62) of the young sires based on the MM predicted breeding values, respectively 71% and 80% of the same sires would be selected if RRM estimates were used instead. The RRM modelled the changes in the (co) variances with age adequately and larger breeding value accuracies can be expected using this model.

Efeitos ambientais e genéticos sobre peso, perímetro escrotal e escores de avaliação visual à desmama em bovinos da raça Canchim

Os efeitos de ano e época de nascimento, propriedade, sexo do bezerro, regime alimentar, idade do bezerro e idade da vaca ao parto, os efeitos aditivos direto e materno da raça Charolesa e o efeito de heterose materna entre as raças Charolesa e zebu foram avaliados pelo método dos quadrados míninos sobre características de importância econômica, como peso, perímetro escrotal e escores visuais de conformação frigorífica, de umbigo e de pelame à desmama em bovinos da raça Canchim. Utilizaram-se dados de 12.334 animais Canchim nascidos de 1999 a 2005. O ano e a época de nascimento, a propriedade, o regime alimentar e a idade da vaca ao parto (linear e quadrático) tiveram efeitos significativos sobre todas as características estudadas. Houve efeitos do sexo sobre o peso do bezerro à desmama e o escore de umbigo; da idade do bezerro sobre peso, perímetro escrotal e escores de conformação frigorífica e de pelame; e das proporções de Charolês no bezerro e na mãe sobre o peso, a conformação frigorífica e a qualidade de pelagem; e da heterozigose materna sobre peso, perímetro escrotal e escores de conformação frigorífica e de umbigo. Os efeitos aditivos diretos da raça Charolesa como desvio do zebu foram negativos sobre peso, conformação frigorífica e qualidade da pelagem à demama, enquanto os efeitos aditivos maternos foram positivos. Os efeitos heteróticos maternos foram positivos sobre peso, perímetro escrotal e escores de conformação frigorífica e de umbigo. em geral, essas fontes de variação devem ser consideradas nas estimativas de parâmetros genéticos e nas avaliações genéticas dos animais Canchim para as características estudadas.

Componentes de variância para o período de gestação em bovinos de corte

Estimaram-se os componentes de variância do período de gestação (PG) considerando-se o efeito direto do bezerro e os efeitos direto da vaca e aleatório do touro (pai do bezerro). Além dos efeitos aleatórios, os modelos estatísticos incluíram os efeitos fixos de grupo de contemporâneos, composto pela data juliana de inseminação, ano de nascimento e sexo do bezerro, e a idade da vaca ao parto (covariável linear e quadrática). As médias de PG para os animais da raça Nelore foram 294,55 dias (machos) e 293,34 dias (fêmeas) e para os animais cruzados, 292,49 dias (machos) e 292,55 dias (fêmeas). Os componentes de variância observados no Nelore, utilizando-se o modelo 1, que considerou o PG como característica do bezerro, foram 14,47; 72,78 e 57,31 para os componentes aditivo direto (sigma2a), fenotípico total (sigma2p) e residual (sigma2e), respectivamente, e a herdabilidade foi 0,21. Para os animais cruzados, pelo mesmo modelo, os componentes de variância foram 90,40 (sigma2a), 127,35 (sigma2p ) e 36,95 (sigma2e), e a herdabilidade, 0,71. Os componentes de variância do PG do Nelore sob o modelo 2, que considerou o PG como característica da vaca, foram 12,78; 5,01; 74,84 e 57,05, para sigma2a; sigma2pb (variância do pai do bezerro); sigma2p e sigma2e, respectivamente. A fração fenotípica atribuída ao touro (c²) foi 0,07 e a repetibilidade, 0,17. Para os cruzados, estimaram-se 22,11; 22,97; 127,70 e 82,61 para sigma2a; sigma2pb; sigma2p e sigma2e, respectivamente, enquanto o c² foi 0,18 e o coeficiente de repetibilidade, 0,17. Sugere-se, para fins de seleção, que o coeficiente de herdabilidade utilizado seja o obtido na análise em que PG foi considerado como característica do bezerro.

Influência de Alguns Fatores de Ambiente sobre os Escores de Conformação, Precocidade e Musculatura à Desmama em um Rebanho da Raça Nelore

Dados de 23.251 animais da raça Nelore desmamados no período de 1994 a 1997, pertencentes à Agropecuária Jacarezinho Ltda., foram analisados para se avaliar os efeitos ambientais da idade da vaca, data de nascimento e idade à desmama sobre os escores visuais de conformação (C), precocidade (P) e musculatura (M). Todos os efeitos estudados influenciaram significativamente os escores visuais. As análises indicaram que as vacas que pariram aos sete, oito e nove anos, obtiveram os melhores resultados para os escores visuais de C, P e M, assim como os animais que nasceram mais cedo dentro da estação de parição. Para a idade à desmama foi constatado que, quanto mais tarde o animal for desmamado, melhores serão seus escores. Os animais que desmamaram com 220 dias tiveram os melhores escores, enquanto os piores escores foram daqueles que desmamaram com 140 dias. Portanto, para se ter maior precisão na avaliação genética dos indivíduos jovens, fatores de correção para idade da vaca, data juliana de nascimento e idade à desmama devem ser utilizados sobre os escores de conformação, precocidade e musculatura.