The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of CBI-reforms on inflation in different parts of the world from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Compared to previous studies, this study focuses on whether CBI-reforms have different effects on reducing inflation in different parts of the world. The study is based on a 132 country data-set from 1980 to 2005 compiled by Daunfeldt et al. (2008). The result indicates that the reduction in inflation due to the CBI-reforms varies between 2.2 and 12.32 percentage points in Asia, Europe, South America and Oceania, supporting the claim that implementing CBI-reforms can be successful in reducing inflation in most of the parts of the world.

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Measuring and explaining poverty and its geographic differences in Indonesia is mostly confined to a single measure of poverty and to macro-level explanations. This thesis moves beyond these constraints to investigate regional poverty trends using multiple measures of poverty and to explore household and individual level explanations. The analyses in the thesis are undertaken using data from the SUSENAS core, covering the period 2000-2009. Different measures of poverty produce different numbers of poor. Some 33 million additional Indonesians were identified as poor using the $1.25 a day poverty measure than the official measure used by the government. The differences between both measures of poverty are, however, driven by poverty trends in the early 2000s, following the devastating impact of the 1997-1998 financial crisis. In the latter part of the 2000s, poverty trends were converging between the two poverty measures, suggesting some degree of reliability of Indonesia's official poverty measure. At the macro level, on average, increasing GDP is significantly associated with falling levels of poverty. The association is reduced marginally when the share of the informal workforce is taken into account, but in general the negative relationship remains robust. Regional analyses, however, reveal that GDP has a very small, insignificant negative association with poverty in the poorest region. At the individual level, education strongly determines poverty, independently of employment status. A substantial share of the primary and lower secondary qualified population is employed in informal work, yet their risk of poverty is substantially lower when compared to those with no formal qualification engaging as informal workers. More importantly, the highest risk of poverty exists among the unemployed who lack a formal education. This finding is highlighted because unemployment is often seen as having little relevance to poverty, since a higher proportion of the unemployed are tertiary educated. The 'penalty' on poverty for those occupying the lower tiers of educational qualification is heavier in less developed regions. Household level analysis show that the different groups of female-headed households (de facto, widows and divorcees) are less likely to be in poverty than male-headed couple households. After controlling for socioeconomic characteristics and the number of young children within households, however, female-headed divorcee households are found to be marginally poorer than male-headed couple households. Regional level analyses reveal that poverty is significantly higher in female divorcee-led households than in male-headed couple households in all regions, except in the most and least developed ones, where poverty is comparable between both groups.

Literature provides evidence for disparities and inequities in health and birth outcomes based on geographical location, which highlight differential mother characteristics. These differences influence behaviors associated with adverse birth outcomes such as premature birth and low birth weight (LBW), the leading causes of infant morbidity and mortality. Consistent with the Healthy People 2020 and Millennium Development goal, to reduce infant morbidity and mortality rates, we sought to compare maternal characteristics and behaviors and the occurrence of adverse birth outcomes in Northeast (NETN) region, as defined by the Tennessee Department of Health, compared to the rest of Tennessee (TN). TN vital statistics birth record data for the years 2009 - 2014 were used in this analysis; n = 20,786 and 482,681 live births for NETN and TN respectively. Bivariate analyses were performed to deduce the demographic and birth characteristics and their proportions across the years. Logistic regression was used to calculate crude odds ratios for pre-pregnancy smokers, with the dependent variables of preterm birth and LBW. We followed with adjusted odds ratios, which controlled for mother’s demographic variables; age, education years and reported household income and mother’s behavioral characteristics; pre-pregnancy cigarette smoking, prenatal care by first trimester and previous preterm birth. From 2009 through 2014, the percentage of teenage mothers decreased for both TN groups, with a larger proportion in NETN (%:13.8,12.2,12.5, 11.9,9.6,9.4) compared to TN (%:12.8,11.8,10.8,10.0,9.0,8.4). A larger percentage of TN mothers did not have a high school degree or completed GED compared to NETN. A larger proportion of NETN mothers were married at the time of birth of the infant (%:60.3,60.5,59.3,58.6,57.6,57.8) compared to TN mothers (%:55.5,55.9,55.9,55.8,56.0,56.0). Over the period, 34% of NETN women smoked during the 3 months prior to pregnancy versus 21% for TN mothers. Through the third trimester 24% of NETN mothers reported cigarette smoking compared to 13% of TN mothers. Throughout, more adverse birth outcomes were observed in NETN. Compared to non-smokers, for six consecutive years and overall, the odds of a LBW among pre-pregnancy smoking mothers were higher in NETN (odds ratio (OR):2.16,1.73,2.56,2.03, 2.02,1.83,2.05) than in TN (OR:1.51,1.53,1.56,1.56,1.56,1.52,1.54), p-values

This thesis focuses on various factors affecting effectiveness of aposematic signals against avian predators. Adult, wild-caught as well as hand-reared juvenile great tits (Parus major) were used as predators in the experiments. The thesis consists of the following four studies. In the first study, we compared the reactions of great tits from two geographically distant populations toward aposematic firebugs (Pyrrhocoris apterus) and their non-aposematic artificially made colour variant. The birds from the Bohemian population mostly avoided aposematic firebugs and attacked non-aposematic variant. Finnish birds, which lacked experience with firebugs from their natural environment, were less hesitant to attack both firebug colour forms. Although the Bohemian birds avoided the aposematic prey variant, they were not more neophobic than Finnish birds. We conclude that the geographic differences in reactions of the birds to aposematic prey can be explained by a different population-specific experience of the birds with local aposematic prey communities. In the second study, we compared effectiveness of two chemical defence strategies in leaf beetle larvae (Chrysomela lapponica) against great tits. The birds avoided larvae devoid of external secretions after the first attack, which indicates the presence...