Stephanie Urdang was born in Cape Town, South Africa, into a white, Jewish family staunchly opposed to the apartheid regime. In 1967, at the age of twenty-three, no longer able to tolerate the ...grotesque iniquities and oppression of apartheid, she chose exile and emigrated to the United States. There she embraced feminism, met anti-apartheid and solidarity movement activists, and encountered a particularly American brand of racial injustice. Urdang also met African revolutionaries such as Amilcar Cabral, who would influence her return to Africa and her subsequent journalism. In 1974, she trekked through the liberation zones of Guinea-Bissau during its war of independence; in the 1980's, she returned repeatedly to Mozambique and saw how South Africa was fomenting a civil war aimed to destroy the newly independent country. From the vantage point of her activism in the United States, and from her travels in Africa, Urdang tracked and wrote about the slow, inexorable demise of apartheid that led to South Africa's first democratic elections, when she could finally return home. Urdang's memoir maps out her quest for the meaning of home and for the lived reality of revolution with empathy, courage, and a keen eye for historical and geographic detail. This is a personal narrative, beautifully told, of a journey traveled by an indefatigable exile who, while yearning for home, continued to question where, as a citizen of both South Africa and the United States, she belongs. "My South Africa!" she writes, on her return in 1991, after the release of Nelson Mandela, "How could I have imagined for one instant that I could return to its beauty, and not its pain?"
In this paper I try to determine whether international trade has been increasing the own-price elasticity of demand for U.S. labor in recent decades. The empirical work yields three main results. ...First, from 1961 through 1991 demand for U.S. production labor became more elastic in manufacturing overall and in five of eight industries within manufacturing. Second, during this time U.S. nonproduction-labor demand did not become more elastic in manufacturing overall or in any of the eight industries within manufacturing. If anything, demand seems to be growing less elastic over time. Third, the hypothesis that trade contributed to increased elasticities has mixed support, at best. For production labor many trade-related variables have the predicted effect for specifications with only industry controls, but these predicted effects disappear when time controls are included as well. For nonproduction labor things are somewhat better, but time continues to be a very strong predictor of elasticity patterns. Thus the time series of labor–demand elasticities are explained largely by a residual, time itself. This result parallels the common finding in studies of rising wage inequality. Just as there seems to be a large unexplained residual for changing factor prices over time, there also seems to be a large unexplained residual for changing factor demand elasticities over time.
We introduce a dual definition of the Factor Content of Trade (FCT) using the concept of the Equivalent Autarky Equilibrium. Estimating a symmetric normalized quadratic revenue function for the U.S. ...manufacturing sector between 1965 and 1991, we find that the FCT for capital is positive, while the FCT for skilled and unskilled labor is negative, suggesting that the Leontief Paradox is not present. Then the growth rate of the factor rewards is decomposed to the FCT, endowments, and technological change effects. We find that technological change is the most important determinant in explaining wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labor. (JEL F11, F16, J31)
This paper investigates the relationship between the agricultural technological level and R&D expenditures, human capital, and openness to international trade using cross‐country information for a ...sample of 104 countries and various subsamples over the period 1961–91. The unobservable technological level is modeled as a dynamic process in the context of a general translog production function. The results suggest that the technological gap between developed and less developed countries in agriculture increased considerably over this period of time. Overall, the technological levels are directly related to R&D expenditures, human capital, and openness, although this relationship is not robust across different groups of countries.
This paper is based on recent developments in the theory of innovation-driven growth that emphasize both the importance of R&D efforts - domestic as well as foreign - for explaining national ...productivity, and the complementarity between R&D and human capital investments. Estimates of specifications, in growth terms and in level terms, on a cross-section of OECD countries from the early 1960s to the early 1990s lend strong support to this thesis. The data show a significant influence of both domestic and foreign R&D. Moreover, there is clearly a net positive impact of human capital. The level and growth rate of human capital are shown to affect productivity growth and there is evidence of interaction with the catch-up process.
This paper formally examines the implications of international consumption risk sharing for a panel of industrialized countries. We theoretically derive the international consumption insurance ...proposition in a simple setup and show how to modify it in more complicated models. We analyze the implications of the theory for pairs of countries and find that aggregate domestic consumption is almost completely insured against idiosyncratic real, demographic, fiscal and monetary shocks over short cycles, but that it covaries with these variables over medium and long cycles. The cross equation restrictions imposed by the theory are rejected. The policy implications are discussed.
Over the past 3 decades Africa's public agricultural research systems have changed in substantive ways. The total number of researchers increased 4-fold, the dependency on expatriate researchers ...significantly declined, while the education levels of national researchers improved. Initially the growth in research staff was matched by growth in expenditures. But since the late 1970s, real research spending has stagnated. In addition, loans and grants from donor agencies now account for a sizable share of total funding for many African agricultural research systems. Many of the developments of the past decade in personnel, expenditures, and sources of support for public sector research and development in Africa are not sustainable.
The purpose of this study is to provide a new look at the evolution of regional disparities in Canada in the light of the recent convergence studies produced by European and American economists. The ...degree of convergence of a variety of per capita income and output measures from 1961 to today is analysed. The empirical analysis suggests that there is evidence of convergence in Canada for different measurements of per capita income and output since the early 1960s. During this period convergence has been helped by a favourable change in terms of trade and by government transfers and taxes. Our estimates of the convergence speed for Canadian provinces are of the same magnitude as those found for regions within the same country, and across countries, in European and American studies. /// La convergence régionale au Canada, 1961 à 1991. L'étude jette un nouvel éclairage sur l'évolution des disparités régionales au Canada à la lumière des études de convergence produites récemment par des économistes européens et américains. L'originalité de l'étude réside dans les comparaisons qui y sont faites entre le degré de convergence d'une variété de mesures du revenu et de la production de 1961 à nos jours. Les résultats empiriques montrent les disparités régionales ont eu tendance à décroître depuis le début des années 60. Durant cette période, la convergence a été favorisée par l'évolution des prix relatifs régionaux (termes de l'échange), des paiements de transfert et du régime fiscal. Les vitesses de convergence que nous avons estimées pour les économies régionales au Canada sont du même ordre de grandeur que celles estimées pour des régions de pays et entre les pays dans des études européennes et américaines.
PDF
