This thesis analyses fiscal effects of aid, first of health aid on health spending for a sample of developing countries and then broadly for Ethiopia and Tanzania. Particular attention is paid to data quality and the severe difficulties in achieving a reliable disaggregation of aid into its on-budget and off-budget components. The first essay assesses the sensitivity of estimated health aid fungibility to how the missing data (often considerable) are treated and explores a novel (at least in economics) method of multiple imputation. The second essay provides a conceptual framework for the disaggregation of (sector) aid into its on-budget and off-budget components. Given that complete binary distinction is not feasible, the aid-spending relationship is explored from a broader fiscal effects angle. This yields new insights on assessing the effect of health aid on health spending. Contributing to the growing body of evidence based on time-series methods, two essays adopt a case study approach to analyse distinct fiscal dynamics in Tanzania and Ethiopia, invoking detailed understanding of qualitative economic and political context to complement the quantitative data. Both essays employ current Cointegrated Vector Auto-Regressive (CVAR) techniques to distinguish long run equilibrium relationships from short term adjustment mechanisms, test for variable exogeneity and identify which variables adjust to disequilibrium. The fifth and final essay addresses the differences between donor and recipient data records for the two countries, demonstrating that the direction of the discrepancies is not necessarily predicted from the outset and affects the estimated fiscal effects of (and on) aid. These essays contribute to the growing literature using country case studies to assess the fiscal effects of aid.

Following the Russo-Japanese War Japan acquired its second formal colony, Karafuto (southern Sakhalin), which became thoroughly integrated with mainland Japan, developing into an important supplier of marine products, lumber, paper and pulp, and coal. This sparsely populated colony offered the prospect of large scale settlement and over the course of the Japanese colonial period the population of the Karafuto increased to over 400,000 before the Pacific War. This thesis traces the course of migration to Karafuto and assesses the role of settlement policy, and migratory labour in colonial settlement. Utilizing colonial media, government reports and local documents, as well as the recollections of former settlers, this study argues that the phenomenon of migratory labour acted as an indirect means for establishing a permanent settler community in Karafuto. This study stresses that the colonial government of Karafuto’s efforts towards the establishment of permanent settlements based on agriculture largely failed. Instead, it was industries that involved the utilization of migratory labour which acted as base-industries for economic life in the colony, and helped support Karafuto’s more enduring communities. Indeed, even in the few cases of successfully established government sponsored agricultural communities in Karafuto, seasonal migratory labour and nonagricultural activity were a persistently crucial component of the community’s economic life. A further implication of this study relates to the comprehensive integration of Karafuto with migratory labour markets in northern mainland Japan and Hokkaido. Evidence presented in this study allows us to question the prevalent notions that northern Japan was an isolated, or poorly connected, region. Instead, it is found that the prefectures of Japan’s northeast were actively engaged in northward bound settlement and migratory labour circuits.

This study focuses on regional aspects of the Brazilian economy. Three avenues are explored: two related to individuals' and firms' location decision and the last regarding public policy. In general, firms and individuals seem to be moving away from the main economic centre in Brazil, Sao Paulo. It seems nevertheless that public policy is not very related to these movements. In other words, government interventions to accelerate growth in less developed regions have not achieved their goal. Chapter 2 addresses the issue of internal migration in Brazil. This chapter investigates the influence of amenities and/or disamenities on migration flows, which is an issue not yet fully covered by the literature. It investigates whether changing dwellings across cities is associated specifically with violence using urban-urban migration data at municipality level. Results show that migration is affected by violence not only locally, but also when neighbouring effects are taken into account. These findings back up previous research which evidenced an inverse relationship between city size and violence. Turning to firms, Chapter 3 explores the role of geography in the location of manufacturing and of regional disparities in wages. According to theoretical models, employment concentrates closer to the market when increasing returns to scale are taken into account. As a consequence, regional wages are a decreasing function of transport costs to markets, since firms tend to compensate for these costs by paying less to their employees. Trade shocks may impact these regional wage disparities by making foreign markets relatively more attractive for firms than internal markets, or vice-versa. This chapter tested these hypotheses using Brazilian regional data. Having two isolated trade shocks, Brazil provides an excellent case for testing which shock was more effective in reducing regional disparities. Results show that regions with higher transport costs tend to have lower wages and a reduction in this cost through trade shocks has affected these regional disparities. However, it is not possible to distinguish which trade shock was more efficient to impact these regional unbalances. Chapter 4 evaluates the effects of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) loans on firms' productivity. The importance of BNDES in the Brazilian economy is quite sizeable, reaching over 10% of aggregate investment. Using micro level data, it was possible to investigate the impact on productivity, but also distinguish its effects between large and small projects as well as between rich and poor regions, since regional development is one of its statutory goals. Results suggest BNDES loans have no effect on firms' productivity, even though some association was found without controlling for all firms' characteristics. Overall, some lessons may be learned after this work. Not only are economic reasons key determinants for individuals' and firms' location decision as shown in Chapters 2 and 3 but also some other factors seem to be important as well. Social amenities, locally and in surrounding areas, are highly correlated to individuals' migration decisions in the Brazilian case, especially violence. For firms, economic reasons prevail since trade shocks appear to change regions' attractiveness between internal and external market. Last, but not least, government intervention does not seem to be associated to firms' productivity after BNDES loans.

This thesis examines the development of English funerals through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By using a large new sample of Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) probate accounts, the study demonstrates how the funerals of the aristocracy, gentry, and the middling sort interacted and changed over this period, through a detailed investigation into the commodities and services provided at their funerals and the pattern of expenditure. It also explores the activity of the College of Arms and the work of undertakers in the same period. While most historians have argued that middle class funerals saw increased consumption, the records of funeral expenditure show that it was the aristocracy and gentry whose spending behaviour changed the most. The main reasons for this were an institutional change, the decline of the College of Arms in the late seventeenth century, and the expansion of the undertaking trade over the next hundred years. The College’s loss of control over the funerals of the aristocracy and gentry allowed these groups to opt for a heraldic funeral prepared by an undertaker, at a much lower price. For the middling sort, the undertakers created new value chains allowing them to achieve a different kind of funeral. By offering expensive funeral items for hire rather than selling them, undertakers enabled people to have a lavish funeral without massive expense. While heraldic items were still limited to aristocratic and gentry funerals, a close connection emerged between the concept of ‘decency’ and the use of more beautiful and more sophisticated items at the funeral and the grave. The findings in this thesis help us to widen our understanding of funeral changes as a whole, as well as changes in consumption patterns occurring in a period of important transformation in England.

Chapter two investigates whether insular cultures are less likely to adopt new technologies. Combining GIS crop production data with unique language data, I show that societies that are isolated on the language tree produce less of the crops that required adoption, but not of the crops not requiring adoption. Endogeneity of cultural isolation is addressed by exploiting ancestral migration route direction. Cultural isolation persists due to the endogeneity of land settlement. Land selection caused increased polarization and decreased fractionalization, a pattern that is argued to limit the incentives for cross-societal communication. Chapter three uses contract level data on a portfolio of 197 coffee washing stations in 18 countries to identify the sources and consequences of credit imperfections. Due to moral hazard, default increases following increases in world coffee prices just before the maturity date of the contract. Strategic default is deterred by relationships with the lender and foreign buyers: the value of informal enforcement amounts to 50% of the value of the sale contract for repaying borrowers. A RDD shows that firms are credit constrained. Prices paid to farmers increase implying the existence of contractual externalities along the supply chain. Chapter four analyzes the effect of interethnic trust on economic relationships in Rwanda/Burundi. The endogeneity of defaults impact on trust is dealt with by exploiting the eligibility of respondents’ grandparents to coffee corvée in the colonial era. Corvée contributed to Hutu-Tutsi tensions. Corvée eligibility is used as an exogenous instrument for interethnic trust, measured using a unique dataset collected in the field. Grandparent eligibility for corvée reduces interethnic trust, and that low trust increases the likelihood of being defaulted on. The evidence suggests that default becomes more likely among less trusting individuals due to adverse selection, not moral hazard.

This study analyses the production of environmental news and focuses upon the neglected area of source-media relations. Through a combination of in-depth, semi-structured interviews and content analysis, the study explores relations between media practitioners and key news sources, such as environmental pressure groups, related interest groups, scientists and the Department of the Environment. It suggests that a major lacuna exists within the analysis of source-media relations. Researchers have, until recently, adopted a media-centric position and have rarely considered the perceptions of the sources themselves. This thesis, then, fills an important gap in the literature. It argues that through largely focusing upon the ways in which media make use of sources, the sociology of mass communications has ignored a fundamental aspect of news production. The hypothesis that environmental pressure groups are becoming increasingly adept in their approaches towards the media was supported by the research findings. Many of the campaigning pressure groups that were formed in the 1970s have become established news sources and key definers of the political agenda. During the late 1980s many environmental pressure groups experienced greater access to television and the press. This thesis highlights a number of weaknesses with the structuralist model of source-dependency which maintains that official sources such as government or the courts, co=and privileged access to the media by virtue of their representative status, institutional standing, or their claims to expert knowledge. It suggests that a new model of source-media relations needs to be developed. While official sources tend to gam greater access to the media than non-official sources such as pressure groups, the evidence suggests that this observation needs to be qualified in a number of respects. First, this study indicates that it fails to take into account inequalities of access among 'accredited sources'. Second, it neglects the role of the media as definers in the agenda-setting process. Third, the structuralist model fails to analyse the varying degrees with which media practitioners judge the claims of 'primary definers'. The study indicates that journalists and broadcasters tend to view Friends of the Earth as more credible than Greenpeace. Finally, this thesis indicates that evidence about patterns of source-dependence deduced from content analysis or journalistic evidence needs to be supplemented by interviews with the sources themselves.

The consequences for workers of the expansion of interactive service work in Nairobi, Kenya, are explored in this thesis. I investigate workplace power relations as forms of control that are implicated in managerial strategies by examining workers' experiences in the call centre sector. The Foucauldian-inspired conceptual framework for this study privileges workplace selves, enabling a focus on how call centre agent conduct is problematized by management. The empirical part of the study uses a multimethod approach that includes interviews, workplace observations and a questionnaire. The empirical analysis demonstrates that while management tends to approach in-house or captive agents as low-status subordinate selves, business process outsourcing (BPO) agents are best regarded as flexible selves, owing to their selectively autonomous working roles and the relative insecurity of their work. As a ‘development’ project, the BPO sector is shown to have a mixed record with respect to agent livelihoods. It has given rise to new opportunities for workers but without providing stable employment. Examining the rationalities underpinning workplace control, my analysis indicates that captive agents can be understood as being subject to a rationality of directed conduct, while their BPO counterparts are more likely to be managed according to a rationality of strategic egalitarianism. Consequently, BPO agents are shown to be implicated in a relatively more complex configuration of workplace power relations than captive agents, with the result that they tend to speak more favourably about work that they also depict as onerous. The empirical analysis provides a basis for advancing theoretical understanding achieved by introducing novel concepts, the most important of which concern modes of workplace 'subjectification': comprehensive observation, selfproblematization and recognizing individualism. These help to position the analysis of managerial strategies in a way that neither regards agents as fully empowered nor assumes worker exploitation as the main outcome. The study demonstrates how management endeavours to oversee the intensive monitoring of conduct while also securing agents' commitment to their roles by providing fulfilling workplace experiences.

Several studies suggest that population health improves during recessions and deteriorates during economic expansions. However, the majority of these studies only focus on the short-term or contemporaneous effects of economic fluctuations on health. As a result, very little evidence exists on potential long-term health effects of exposure to booms or recessions. This can be regarded as a major gap in knowledge, given the fact that most diseases are the results of exposure or behaviours during a longer period of time. Furthermore, a large body of research also suggests that many risks associated with recessions may accumulate over the course of life and lead to a gradual deterioration in health. By focusing only on the short-term effects, most studies thus ignore potential longrun health effects of economic fluctuations. This thesis aims to bridge the gap between studies on the population level assessing the short-term effects of economic fluctuations on health, and studies on the individual level, which have analysed the health-effects of risks associated with a declining economy including unemployment, job loss and job insecurity. In order to assess potential longterm effects of business cycles on health, I linked historical information on macroeconomic fluctuations during the 20th century to individual-level data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) as well as the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS). This approach makes it possible to identify the state of the economy during different life-course periods for every respondent and relate it to health outcomes measured in later life. Regarding the macroeconomic conditions at any given age as largely exogenous, the four empirical papers included in this thesis thereby assess the relationship between business cycles and health during three different life-course periods: the time around graduation from full-time education, middle and late adulthood as well as the years nearing retirement. Overall, the results suggest that individuals who experienced less favourable economic conditions during these life-course periods have a higher risk of having additional limitations in physical functioning, lower levels of cognitive functioning, as well as higher risks of cardiovascular disease in later life. In contrast to studies showing that population health improves during recessions, these findings suggest that potential short-term improvements in health may be outweighed by deteriorations in health in the long run. They also raise important questions about the role of potential mechanisms linking differential exposure to the business cycle to health in later life.

This thesis addresses issues of debt and the twin deficits - two serious ‘economic ills’. The central issue in this thesis (Part II) is on macromodelling of the twin deficits in an attempt to identify their determinants. This involves an investigation of the underlying theory and empirical evidence to show the workings of the links between debt and the twin deficits and between the twin deficits themselves. The usual practice in both theory and in empirical work, is to take the accounting identity and one or two other variables that are hypothesised to have effects on the twin deficits and posit causal linkages. We try to avoid this by building on the stylized facts on each of the macroeconomic aggregates and linking them to debt issues in building a full structural model of debt and the twin deficits. We arrive at a system of simultaneous equations, which none of the previous theory or empirical work has derived. We rename the deficit system of simultaneous equations which incorporates a debt identity and an output equation the `new twin deficits' model – signifying a departure from the conventional wisdom discussed in the literature survey. With the macromodel, we address three issues simultaneously, which are: (1) the linkages between twin deficits and increased indebtedness. (2) the details of internal policies that have effects on the twin-deficits and increased indebtedness. (3) the linkages between debt, twin-deficits and output. The first issue involves the broader mechanism that explains the link between the government, the private and the external sector balances, and their links to changes in debt. Previous studies on the twin deficits covers the first part of this issue and gives evidence for the U. S. that the government sector caused the unprecedented level of external deficits in the mid 1980s and early 1990s. In our case, we argue that the change in debt equals the external deficits because according to our findings in Part I debt and deficits seem to co-move. Our macromodel also focus on the second issue, that is, the details of the internal policies that affect each of the three sector deficits and eventually increased indebtedness. The variables involved are numerous such as tax policies (rates, revenue elasticities, etc. ), financial policies (interest rates, investment versus savings behaviour, etc. ), trade policies (import liberalisation/control, exports strategies, exchange rates, prices, etc. ), debt policies, etc. as shown in the system of simultaneous equations in Chapter 5. Although the variables are numerous, there are some common ones appearing together in either two or all three of the system of equations which are expected to cause co-movements in the system. Obviously, consideration has to be made on their significance, magnitude and signs. The third issue involves recognising the supply side in response to debt and deficits which are demand-side management. The model thus ensures not only equilibrium in the internal and external sectors but also equilibrium in aggregate supply and the aggregate demand. The former equilibrium always holds because the identity serves as a constraint. For the latter equilibrium to hold, either one or a combination of the price variables found in the system adjust to maintain equilibrium in the short-run, while output adjusts to maintain equilibrium in the long-run. Having outlined the core of the thesis, it is appropriate to comment on the other parts. Part I presents the roots of debt and deficits; how developing countries accumulated debt and how it became a crisis in the 1980s. The debt and deficits situation in ASEAN in the 1980s is a particular focus. The essence of debt problem seems to be the adverse economic situation of the 1980s, against the background of mounting accumulation of debt. Exogenous shocks such as the second oil shock, terms of trade shocks, interest rates hikes, dollar exchange rate appreciation, are among the factors that are associated with debt problems. Debt and deficits co-move in the representative Latin American and ASEAN countries. Differences among regional experiences are highlighted. For example the African countries went into debt problem not because of debt accumulation. The main crux of their problem is non-performance export sector. Excessive lending by creditors are associated with the Latin American countries, apart from loans contracted on floating rates which are associated with valuation changes and capital flight. The ASEAN region moved towards yen credit in the mid 1980s, presumably insulating their economy with further spill-overs from other NICs' recycling of surpluses. The differences in experiences necessitates different treatment, or case by case approach to debt problems. In Part III, we present some empirical work on aspects of debt management. Debt servicing capacity or creditworthiness is examined using the logit approach. We builtin the marginal and elasticity analysis into the logit model so as to identify which variables are the most significant determinants. The exercise combines variables taken from the balance of payments and financial variables from the balance sheet to detect which variables cause debt servicing breakdown. The breakdown of debt servicing capacity is proxied by reschedulings, taken in terms of probabilities because it is not known a priori that a debtor will become illiquid and unable to repay interest payments falling due. We postulate that it is the foreign exchange scarcity, measured by their net borrowing requirements which comprise of the current account deficits including interest repayments and the principal due, that drive a country to demand for rescheduling. We investigate the determinants of rescheduling for each region separately to capture the differences in their experiences with indebtedness. The most important determinants of rescheduling are; the ratio of the current account deficits to export, the reserves to import ratio and the total debt to exports. In the African sample, the current account deficits to exports, the total debt to exports and the use of IMF credits are the most important determinants for rescheduling. As in the case of the Latin American countries, The current account deficits to exports, the debt service ratio and the use of IMF credit are most important. In ASEAN, the debt service ratio appears to be the single most significant ratio. Thus, the differences in experiences among regions, a cross section for all developing countries will ignore the uniqueness of each region in running into debt servicing difficulties. In the last part of the thesis, the exchange rate management is discussed in Chapter 7, relating exchange rate to import and export demand function to eventually determine the contribution of foreign exchange, through the elasticity approach, towards foreign exchange earnings and reducing debt service. Debt service seems to have links with exchange rates movements. We suggest that devaluation does have positive effects in the ASEAN countries to increase its foreign exchange earnings. Finally, we conclude and suggest some policy implications, especially pertaining to our twin deficit model. It is hoped that ASEAN would turn the already huge debt accumulation to more profitable investments so that not only timely repayment of loans is possible, the growth of output is ensured and the sustained industrialisation is possible!

This thesis examines the political economy of exchange rate policy-making from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. It argues that conventional means of understanding this subject are problematic, and it develops an alternative framework for analysis based on a Marxist methodology. From this perspective exchange rate policymaking is understood to be a component part of a wider governing strategy that is made by the core executive with a view to regulating class struggle, to providing favourable conditions for capital expansion, and for ensuring a sufficient degree of freedom for the pursuit of high political goals. This theoretical framework is applied empirically through an examination of Britain’s return to the gold standard in 1925. In contrast to conventional explanations for this policy decision it is argued that the return to gold was the central component of a governing strategy designed to address long-term economic and political difficulties in the British state through the imposition of financial discipline and the ‘depoliticisation’ of economic policy-making. Furthermore, in contrast to conventional assessments of the policy as having been a disaster, it is also argued that the return to gold was a relative success. Though failing to resolve Britain’s economic difficulties, the policy was generally successful in containing class unrest and in enabling the core executive to displace pressures over economic conditions and policy-making away from the state. The substantiation given to the alternative theoretical view of exchange rate policymaking by these empirical claims is also supported by an examination of the policy regime developed after the collapse of the gold standard, and by a brief examination of Britain’s membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism from 1990-1992, which is shown to have direct parallels with the return to gold. On this basis, the thesis offers a firm foundation for drawing wider generalisations about the political economy of exchange rate policy-making in terms of an alternative Marxist perspective.