underinvestment in girls September 1, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : gender , 1 comment so farJad Chaaban & Wendy Cunningham, Measuring the Economic Gain of Investing in Girls : the Girl Effect Dividend, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (August 2011):
Although girls are approximately half the youth population in developing countries, they contribute less than their potential to the economy. The objective of this paper is to quantify the opportunity cost of girls’ exclusion from productive employment with the hope that stark figures will lead policymakers to reconsider the current underinvestment in girls. The paper explores the linkages between investing in girls and potential increases in national income by examining three widely prevalent aspects of adolescent girls’ lives: early school dropout, teenage pregnancy and joblessness. The countries included in the analysis are: Bangladesh, Brazil, Burundi, China, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Paraguay, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The authors use secondary data to allow for some comparability across countries. They find that investing in girls so that they would complete the next level of education would lead to lifetime earnings of today’s cohort of girls that is equivalent to up to 68 percent of annual gross domestic product. When adjusting for ability bias and labor demand elasticities, this figure falls to 54 percent, or 1.5 percent per year. Closing the inactivity rate between girls and boys would increase gross domestic product by up to 5.4 percent, but when accounting for students, male-female wage gaps and labor demand elasticities, the joblessness gap between girls and their male counterparts yields an increase in gross domestic product of up to 1.2 percent in a single year. The cost of adolescent pregnancy as a share of gross domestic could be as high as 30 percent or as low as 1 percent over a girl’s lifetime, depending on the assumptions used to calculate the losses.
blog effects August 31, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : technologies , add a commentDavid McKenzie & Berk Özler, The Impact of Economics Blogs, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (August 2011):
There is a proliferation of economics blogs, with increasing numbers of economists attracting large numbers of readers, yet little is known about the impact of this new medium. Using a variety of experimental and non-experimental techniques, this study quantifies some of their effects. First, links from blogs cause a striking increase in the number of abstract views and downloads of economics papers. Second, blogging raises the profile of the blogger (and his or her institution) and boosts their reputation above economists with similar publication records. Finally, a blog can transform attitudes about some of the topics it covers.
co-operative financial regulation ? August 30, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : financial regulation , add a commentThe Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier in Luxembourg has announced that it has declined to recognise ARM Asset Backed Securities S.A. as a regulated securitisation undertaking under the Luxembourg law on securitisation (the assets backing the securities are life insurance policies taken out by US seniors.) The UK’s FSA and the Central Bank of Ireland say they are working with the CSSF. The CSSF states:
The CSSF considers that this Decision, as from the notification thereof to ARM (which has occurred today), entails a suspension of any payment by ARM and prohibition for ARM, under penalty of voidance, to take any measures other than protective measures, unless otherwise authorized by the CSSF acting as supervisory commissioner (“commissaire de surveillance”).
If unchallenged, the Decision will become final one month after its notification. Once the Decision is final, the district court dealing with commercial matters shall, as a consequence thereof, be requested to pronounce the dissolution and order the liquidation of ARM.
more broken britain August 16, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : britishness , add a commentThis makes me feel quite ill.
broken britain? August 15, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : britishness , add a commentHere’s some good evidence for the idea that Britain is in fact broken. Iain Duncan Smith (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) suggests that people convicted of rioting but not imprisoned should be deprived of benefits:
“We already accept that if people who are receiving benefits do not, are not prepared to seek work, take the work that’s available to them, we take the benefit off them. And if you go to prison we take your benefit off you.
“So what we’re looking at is, for criminal charges, should we take the benefit? And the answer is yes.”
eu tobacco consultation July 27, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : consultation , add a commentThe Commission announced that it received more than 85,000 responses to its consultation on revising the tobacco products directive carried out late in 2010. In some ways it seems to have been an extremely successful consultation. The response was significant, and 96% of the responses were from citizens. But almost two thirds of the responses came from two Member States, Italy and Poland, and the Commission suggests the Italian response was a reaction to a citizen mobilization campaign which generated a significant number of standard comments. The Commission is not making the full set of responses available online:
Given the high number of contributions, it is not considered to be useful to release an online database of individual submissions.
This exercise raises other questions about whether consultations like this one really serve a useful purpose. The Commission writes:
It is difficult to draw firm conclusions from the outcome of the public consultation procedure. In general, opinions varied significantly between and also within categories of respondents. Arguments provided by respondents in the ‘free text’ sections of the consultation present a variety of different justifications for policy action.
knowledge July 20, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : truth , add a commentVia the Guardian, Cameron spinning on Wallis:
On claims that Wallis provided Coulson with some informal advice on a voluntary basis before the election, Cameron said: “To the best of my knowledge I didn’t know anything about this until Sunday night.” He later added that he did not know Wallis had been contracted to work for Scotland Yard.
Surely this should be “as far as I remember” (I don’t recall) rather than “[t]o the best of my knowledge”? Either way it looks a bit slippery.
Is Vince Cable feeling vindicated now? The Evening Standard suggests he is.
corporations compliance and crimes July 19, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : compliance , add a commentThe UK Parliament’s Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee is taking evidence from Rupert and James Murdoch. The two don’t seem to be selling quite the same story all the time. But James Murdoch, while emphasizing News Corporation’s code of conduct which prohibits criminal activity by employees, suggested that the senior executives of the corporation couldn’t be expected to know about employees’ criminal activities. He admitted that denials in 2009 had been more emphatic than was justified by the facts. But he seemed to think it was reasonable for an organization to discover facts about its own conduct in the course of litigation. All this raises some big questions about whether some large corporate organizations are really too big to comply with the law.
the meaning of integrity July 17, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : ethics , 1 comment so farThe Independent has the full text of Sir Paul Stephenson’s statement on his resignation as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service. It contains the following sentences:
As Commissioner I carry ultimate responsibility for the position we find ourselves in. With hindsight, I wish we had judged some matters involved in this affair differently. I didn’t and that’s it. However, the issue of my integrity is different. Let me state clearly: I and the people who know me know that my integrity is completely intact.
But the Commissioner did accept a stay at Champneys in Tring which news reports value at around £12,000. It seems to me that people in charge of police forces should not be accepting this sort of hospitality from anyone, and that the fact of accepting such hospitality raises real questions about the recipient’s integrity whether or not he realizes there is a problem.
consultation and standard setting July 13, 2011
Posted by Bradley in : consultation , add a commentMy paper, Consultation and Legitimacy in Transnational Standard-Setting is published in 20 Minn. J. Int’l L. 480 (2011).