Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 154-156).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2005. / Vita. Thesis advisor: Herakles Polemarchakis. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 153-158). Also available online.

Thesis (D.Phil. (Economics)) -- University of Pretoria, 2007. / Abstract in English. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: It is estimated there are tens of millions of street children throughout the world. Existing literature has identified the conditions street children live in; and additional research has shown how these conditions typically affect the self-esteem of children. There is also ample research to support self-esteem as a critical component to a healthy childhood development. Existing research suggests that street children should have a low self-esteem, however data has not yet been collected to examine if this is true. Existing literature has also not yet explored how the self-esteem of street children is a necessary component to economic development. Based on Amartaya Sen's development theory of capabilities, damaged self-esteem in street children could be considered a hindrance to development. This paper will examine how the self-esteem of street children is important to overall economic development. To understand if the self-esteem of street children are affected how existing literature suggests, this research examines the self-esteem of street children (n=22) in the Philippines using the Culture Free Self-Esteem Inventories 3 tool, which quantifies self-esteem levels with the Global Self-Esteem Quotient (GSEQ). In comparison to the GSEQ standardized scale, almost all street children surveyed scored below average or lower. The mean GSEQ score for the street children in Manila was below average. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Global Technology and Development 2015

abstract: "Navigation, Trade, and Consumption in Seventeenth Century Oxfordshire" investigates how the inhabitants of Oxfordshire transitioned from an agricultural to a consumer community during the Jacobean and post-Restoration eras. In agrarian England, this reconfigured landscape was most clearly embodied in the struggle over the access to available land. Focusing on the gentleman farmer's understanding of the fiscal benefits of enclosure and land acquisition, I argue that the growth in agricultural markets within Oxfordshire led to a growing prosperity, which was most clearly articulated in the community's rise as viable luxury goods consumers. By juxtaposing probate documents, inventories, pamphlets, and diaries from the market towns of Burford, Chipping Norton, and Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, this study examines the process by which these late sixteenth and early seventeenth century agricultural communities began to embrace the consumption of luxury goods, and, most importantly, purely market-based understanding of agrarian life. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Interdisciplinary Studies 2013

abstract: Buyers have private information on auctioning divisible goods. Linearity could be a useful property on measuring their marginal utility on those goods or on their bidding strategies under such a share auction environment. This paper establishes an auction model with independent private-values paradigm (IPVP) where bidders have linear demand. A mechanism design approach is applied to explore the optimal share auction in this model. I discuss the most popular auction formats in practice, including Vickrey auction (VA), uniform-price auction (UPA) and discriminatory price auction (DPA). The ex-post equilibriums on explicit solutions are achieved. I found VA does not generally constitute an optimal mechanism as expected even in a symmetric scenario. Furthermore, I rank the different auction formats in terms of revenue and social efficiency. The more private information bidders keep, the lower revenue VA generates to seller, and it could be even inferior to UPA or DPA. My study aggregates dispersed private information with linearity and is robust to distributional assumption. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Economics 2014

This study contains an attempt to define and analyse the elusive concept of "stabilization"' in its application to the export production of countries in Africa south of the Sahara. The writer has found it hard to place his analysis in a specifically African context. This difficulty arose partly from the lack of data and the paucity of general reference works based upon African economic conditions. But it was also due to his desire to treat the subject of stabilization against a broad background of the social and economic factors which typically bear upon policy-making in Africa. The Introduction contains a methodological discussion of the means by which an economic analysis might take explicit notice of African social, political and administrative conditions. The conclusion is reached that it is impossible to blend all these factors into one analysis. The primarily non-economic background material is therefore consigned to Chapters I and II, with the discussion of the main theme following in Chapters III and IV. Chapter I contains five numbered sections. (l) The reader is introduced to the newly-independent 'Country X', an expositional device for lending coherence to material drawn from several different African countries. (2) Under the heading 'Political Factors’ there is a discussion of Pan-Africanism and of the "Mobilization' form of political organization. (3) Under 'Social Factors', there are brief outlines of several representative social problems, followed by an interpretation of the economic rationales underlying the 'hoarding' of cattle and the 'extended family system'. (4) Under 'Public Administration’ are discussed standards of morality in public affairs and the need for eliminating bureaucratic rigidities. (5) The summary points to the "confused and confusing" general situation in "X", and enjoins caution and a "piecemeal" approach to the application of economic theory. Emphasis is placed upon the social disruption which inevitably attends economic development of primitive societies. In Chapter II, to illustrate the importance of social and political factors in economic policymaking, there are brief reviews of three questions. (l) The use of psychological indoctrination to speed economic development. (2) The prospects for comprehensive planning in the light of the physical and conceptual difficulties experienced in compiling statistics. (3) The "export-bias" doctrine, Hlla Myint's refutation, and his alternative formulation. The conclusions are broadly similar to those of Chapter I. Chapter III analyses the case for a general international commodity price stabilization scheme. Following a review of the supply and demand factors responsible for the present pattern of international trade, it is concluded (a) that such a stabilization scheme would be administratively, politically and economically unworkable. (b) that the proposal is essentially one for achieving disguised income transfers from rich to poor countries, and (c) that stabilization of producer prices can equally well be achieved by domestic action. The discussion of domestic stabilization policy in Chapter IV centers upon the marketing of Ghana cocoa. The ambiguities of stabilization, which may refer to different periods of time, and to either prices, money incomes or real incomes are fully discussed. The effect of low prices upon production incentives is treated at length, as is the use of the stabilization authority to extract "forced savings" from peasant producers. The conclusion is generally in favour of national stabilization schemes, provided their objectives are strictly defined. Chapter V summarizes the conclusions already set out for the preceding chapters. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

Each of us is solitary. Each of us dies alone. That is a fate against which we cannot struggle, but there is plenty in our condition which is not fate, and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle. The people in the industrialized countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialized countries are at best standing still: the gap is widening every day. Industrialization is the only hope of the poor. Health, food, education; nothing but industrialization could have made them available to the very poor. Economists are inclined to be impatient in attempting to ameliorate this social condition; and are inclined to think that it should be done. The lessons which the present underdeveloped countries can learn may lie as much in the past as in the contemporary history of their developed forerunners. Such common problems as capital accumulation, economic diversification, balance of payments, technological development, population, labour, employment, land distribution, colonialism, dualism or pluralism, political affairs and social ideology are of importance. However, what are absolutely necessary are systematic comparisons of the processes of economic growth and of the economic structures of different countries by linking non-economic factors to the structure of modern economics. Thereby it will be possible to clarify the character of the process of economic growth and to disclose the relative importance of the various factors. Without over-simplification, dynamic theory can be divided into two categories; economic dynamic approach and sociological institutional approach. No "dynamics of world economic development" is as simple as to be fully explained by one of these approaches. As a result of the inevitable process being a synthetic theory from different opinions founded on different bases, the theory of Professor Walt Whitman Rostow must be considered. It seems that his theory is cogent, and successful in establishing a sequence of cause and effect in the field of economic growth. A matter of factual history observed in the light of economics is fully discussed by using illustrations of sixteen countries in the world. The process of economic development is ascertained. The dynamics of Professor Rostow indicates the ways of mollifying the dangerous characteristics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, of coping with the vast number of underdeveloped countries, and of clarifying the meaninglessness of Marxism. Here, our social hope can find the basis on which policies should be dependent. The trick of getting rich is no secret and the world cannot survive half rich and half poor. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

In the developing countries where development plans are effected through the budget, it is imperative that effective and efficient execution of plans require not only integration between planning and budgeting, an efficient budgeting system, but also that, since national goals are realized through fulfilment of planned targets in programs and projects, the budgeting system should have a built-in format which reflects such activities, and that they ought to be the basis for financial allocations. The essence of such effective integration, an efficient budgeting system and presentation of activities in the budget, lies in the fact that since planning is a continuous process which involves the constant re-examination of trends, tendencies, policies, in order to adapt and adjust government policies and to make plans flexible, it requires as its basis for rational decision-making and ultimate selection of courses of action, assemblage of facts, data thoroughly analysed to ensure that what has been planned is in fact achieved. The planning process, and even more so the plan execution process, thus needs a lot of active, positive support to be successfully maintained; an efficient management tool providing the necessary vehicles for evaluation of achievements of planned targets. Therefore it is hypothesized that the evaluation of a development plan's performance is of only partial validity if it is not based on a budgetary classification system, which along with reflecting the physical and financial targets in the plan is effectively integrated with it. Integration between a comprehensive plan and the budget involves first, annual programming of the goals and targets in the plan; second, assignment of responsibility of carrying out its component programs and projects; third, effective coordination and the closest of co-operation between the central planning agency, the ministry of finance and the operating agencies; making such an annual program the basis of budget presentation and allocation of financial resources to accomplish the targets; and fifthly integrating the physical and financial plans of the programs in the budget classification system to provide tools for progress reporting and evaluation. Using the Soviet planning experience to illustrate the processes involved, it is noted that although the processes are complex, yet the planning and budgeting systems are fully synchronized. Such effective co-ordination and integration are found to be wanting in many developing countries. The formulation of plans is divorced from plan implementation and there is no link anywhere in the budgeting system between planned targets and financial allocations. Planning is thus not only incomplete but also ineffective as the mechanism to give effect to planning decisions is not attuned to the requirements of development planning. It is demonstrated that owing to inadequate planning, or lack of flexibility in planning, absence or inadequacy of proper and efficient communication between planning and budgeting agencies, deficient budgetary techniques employed in the process of plan implementation and failure of the budgetary system to link financial resource allocations to the needs of physical targets, the system operating, leads one to conclude that an efficient budgeting management system to implement plans may be more important than the plans themselves. Therefore since evaluation and analysis of progress on projects and programs is critical to "planning for development" to enable selection from among alternative objectives, policies and programs and optimal allocation of limited resources, the attributes of program and performance budgeting that help in this process are analysed. It is demonstrated that it is an efficient management tool whose salient features can contribute to both effective plan implementation and execution and the whole planning process. It is pointed out that the technique links planning with budgeting and provides in its format planning goals in the form of programs and project targets linked to the requisite financial resources and also provides the necessary classification systems and tools to evaluate a plan's performance. The principles of program and performance budgeting provide the basis for the case study of Ghana's planning and budgeting systems. It is demonstrated that although some features of the technique are being utilized, there is not effective coordination and co-operation in the formulation and presentation of annual programs and the budget. Owing to this lack of coordination it is demonstrated that plan implementation and execution has been ineffective and that there is room for improvement. In conclusion, it is emphasized that in countries "planning for development" an efficient budget mechanism to effectuate the social, economic and physical development policies of governments is more important than the development plans. Thus it is noted that program budgeting is an efficient mechanism and the information it provides is very essential and useful to formulating, implementing and evaluating soundly conceived plans. As such it is a useful tool which a developing country, like Ghana, should adopt to buttress its development planning efforts. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

Until recently, proofs establishing the existence of gains from trade have used the assumption that the government can alter the distribution of income by a set of lump sum transfers , i.e ., the government has at its disposal a set of household specific transfer instruments. However, recent work has been devoted to situations where these transfer instruments are inadmissible. Dixit and Norman (1980: 79-80) demonstrate that a government that can alter all domestic commodity taxes can ensure that no individual is made worse of by moving from autarky to free trade. It turns out, however, that this Dixit and Norman proof of the gains from trade shows only that the autarky equilibrium can be replicated under free trade and not that positive gains will occur. One of the purposes of this thesis is to investigate the problem of the gains from trade when a variety of tax and transfer instruments are available. It is fruitful to regard the problem of the gains from trade as a policy reform question: can the government in the home country find a small (differential) perturbation in the country's initial international trade prohibitive tariffs which, accompanied with a suitable (differential) perturbation in the country's commodity tax structure, results in a strict Pareto improvement? In order to answer the question, a model for the production side of an economy is presented in Chapter 2. It is established that, under some very weak conditions, there are (differential) tariff perturbations that improve the country's initial net balance of trade. In Chapter 4, it is shown that these productivity gains can be distributed to the consumers in the economy in a strict Pareto improving way by suitably adjusting the country's initial commodity tax rates. The principal tool for establishing these results is a duality theorem: Motzkin's Theorem. Chapter 3 develops two approximative formulae for measuring the productivity gain accruing from a change of tariffs. Some examples of strict Pareto improving perturbations in commodity taxes and tariffs are given in Chapter 7. These include proportional and uniform reductions of tariffs as well as a change toward uniformity in the country's initial tariff structure. Next, the government is assumed to be able to adjust only the home country's initial vectors of tariffs and lump sum transfers but not the vector of commodity taxes. Conditions for strict Pareto improving tariff and transfer perturbations to exist are developed. In Chapter 9 it is shown that neither the existence of strict gains from trade under commodity taxation or under lump sum compensation necessarily implies the other. Examples of strict Pareto improving changes in tariffs, taxes and transfers are given in Chapter 10. These include proportional reductions of tariffs and/or taxes and movements toward uniformity in the tax rates for domestic and tradable commodities. The role of normality of commodities in consumption in policy recommendation results is also discussed. Chapter 11 develops sufficient conditions for a perturbation in the home country's tax structure, which causes international trade, to be strict Pareto improving. In Chapter 12 the goal of the government is to choose a policy that reduces the level of economic inequality associated with the initial observed equilibrium in the economy. It is shown that inequality reducing perturbations in commodity taxes and tariffs exist, if the preferences and initial commodity endowments of the consumers satisfy certain conditions. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate