Browse by: "PRE-2005"
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The institutional framework of a country plays a determining role in the well-being of the women who live in it. This paper examines the cases of four case countries: India, Kenya, Sudan and Tunisia. In each of these case studies, the status of women has been analysed along with the reforms that have been implemented to improve it. Comparisons between the four countries have brought to light several obstacles to change in the institutional framework such as age-old traditions, religion, economic interests and parliamentary opposition. Where there are important initial obstacles, the government’s room for manoeuvre is limited, particularly in the short-term since magistrates, administrations, media and families often endeavour to postpone the application of new, more inclusive, laws. There are, however, examples of successful reform efforts. These successes are generally attributable to the presence of numerous women in parliament and government and in the legal service, the ...
- Dementia and its most common manifestation, Alzheimer’s disease, is a complex disorder that afflicts primarily the elderly, affecting an estimated 10 million people in OECD member countries. The complexity of the disease makes treating dementia extremely difficult, involving a wide variety of social and health care interventions. Typically, these two aspects of dementia care are examined separately. This paper adopts a conceptual model that examines both types of interventions and how they interact along the dementia care continuum.
- There are no effective health care treatments for stopping dementia, which is why the social care aspect plays an important role in treating the disease, with family members an integral part of this process. This paper shows that programs designed to help alleviate the burden of family members caring for a relative with dementia can have positive health benefits to both patient and family. In particular, the use of group-living, where dementia ...
The intricate issue of detecting and forecasting macroeconomic cycles turning points has been once more perfectly illustrated with the global downturn experienced by most countries around the world in 2000-2001. Governments and Central Banks are very sensitive to economic indicators showing signs of deterioration in order to adjust their policies sufficiently in advance to avoid further deterioration or even a recession. These indicators require at least two qualities: they must be reliable and they must provide a readable signal as soon as possible. In this paper, we discuss ...
In an important paper, Diebold and Rudebusch (1991) find that, despite good performance for post revision historical versions, the U.S. Index of Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) fails to improve forecasts in real time out-of-sample tests. This paper revisits the issue of real-time performance of the LEI using growth rate forecast specifications. We contrast real-time out-of-sample tests of LEI forecasts using „composition-changing” or „as-published” versions of the LEI with those based on „composition-constant” indexes. The goal is ...
The objective of this article is to reassess the validity of the consumer confidence (or sentiment) indices in anticipating the evolution of economic activity by considering a fairly high number of countries across the world (i.e. France, Germany, Italy, UK, USA, Japan, Canada and Australia) over a period of about thirty years, from the beginning of the seventies till the end of 2002 (quarterly data). To our knowledge this is the first attempt to analyse the consumer confidence index for several countries over such a long period of time. We model the CSIoutput relationship in a cointegrated vector autoregression (VAR) framework, by considering a common set of variables for all countries. Our findings suggest that: (a) what appears to be the main driving forces of consumer confidence cannot be simply summarised on the basis of ...
This paper fits Markov switching models to quarterly New Zealand aggregate GDP growth rates for the period 1978:1 to 2003:2 in order to analyse changes in mean and volatility over time. The models considered are drawn from a simple class of parsimonious, four state, Markov switching models which encompass a wide range of stationary time series behaviour from linear AR(1) models to non-linear models with persistent cycles and outliers. An overall objective is to use the models to help understand and identify changes in the historical growth performance of New Zealand's small open economy, particularly pre and post wide ranging economic reforms. Conclusions to emerge are that, in contrast to the 1980s, New Zealand GDP growth experienced an unusually long period of time in high growth and low volatility regimes since the early 1990s. In addition, New Zealand does not appear to have ...
This paper analyses the impact of exchange rate regimes on real exchange rates, as defined by the relative price of nontradables to tradables in Argentina, Brazil, Chile (ABC) and Mexico from 1990 to 2002. The real exchange rate is determined in the long-run by the Balassa-Samuelson effect, but in the medium run also by government expenditure and terms of trade. Another determinant is fixed exchange rate regimes, which force exporters to adjust their local price of tradables. Moreover, fixed regimes attract portfolio inflows that increase demand and prices for nontradables. The econometric results of the paper confirm the impact of exchange rate regimes on relative prices in all countries except Chile, which maintained exchange rate flexibly and adopted capital controls ...
Reviewing media mergers may be more complicated than reviewing other mergers because of the huge variety of possible media content and the two-sided market aspect of many media, i.e. those earning advertising revenue. A wide variety of content means that market definition is rendered more complex. The twosided market characteristic has important and sometimes far from obvious impacts on how mergers affect economic efficiency, media plurality and content diversity...
The question of who owns our newspapers, television and radio is vital to democracy. The information and opinion we draw on must reflect a range of different voices and views if we are to be able to understand and debate the issues of the day. The Government’s task is to create a framework for media ownership which protects that plurality of voices and encourages a diversity of content whilst, at the same time, promoting the most competitive market for media businesses and attracting new investment ...
The Chairman made three general opening points: market definition is an important issue in most jurisdictions, and seems to be fairly similar across countries; behavioural remedies are heavily used and are highly case specific; and competition authorities are wrestling with the relationship between competition and pluralism issues but generally try to avoid it. Some competition authorities believe that promoting competition in itself promotes pluralism so nothing else is needed from competition authorities. Some contributions note, however, that competition authorities are criticised for ...
Le Président ouvre la table ronde en soulignant trois points : premièrement, la définition du marché, élément crucial pour la plupart des juridictions, est entendue de manière à peu près équivalente d’un pays à l’autre ; deuxièmement, les mesures comportementales, le plus souvent définies au cas par cas, sont très usitées ; troisièmement les autorités de concurrence sont confrontées à nécessité de concilier concurrence et pluralisme, mais ont tendance à éviter cette situation. Pour certaines autorités de concurrence, promouvoir la concurrence est, en soi, bénéfique au pluralisme, et par conséquent leur rôle peut s’arrêter là. D’autres contributions notent toutefois que les autorités de concurrence se voient reprocher de ne pas protéger suffisamment le pluralisme ...