The Nonobvious Basis of Ownership: Preschool Children Trace the History and Value of Owned Objects

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93685/1/cdev1806.pd

Addressing the migration of health professionals: the role of working conditions and educational placements

This article provides a brief overview of the global health-worker shortage, which could undermine the Millennium Development Goal to halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS. The current situation suggests that long-term solutions to shortages can only be found by addressing the problem from a global perspective; that is, to eliminate shortages through substantial investments in training and retaining health workers in developed and developing countries, and not through policies that do not work towards solving this underlying problem, such as ones that restrict migration

The remittances of migrant Tongan and Samoan nurses from Australia

BACKGROUND: Migration and remittances are of considerable importance in the small Pacific island states. There has been a significant migration of skilled health workers in recent decades to metropolitan fringe states, including Australia and New Zealand. This paper reports the findings of a re-analysis of survey of Samoan and Tongan migrants in Australia where the sample is split between nurse households and others. METHODS: The study analyzes the survey data with a view to comparing the remittance behaviour and determinants of remittances for nurses and other migrant households, using both descriptive, cross-tabulations and appropriate econometric methods. RESULTS: It is found that a significantly higher proportion of nurse households sent remittances home, and, on average remitted more. Remittances of nurse households did not decline significantly over time contrary to what has generally been predicted. This was in contrast to other migrant households in the sample, for whom remittances showed a sharp decline after 15 years absence. Remittances contribute much more to the income of migrant sending countries, than the cost of the additional human capital in nurse training. CONCLUSIONS: Given the shortage of nurses in Australia and New Zealand, and therefore the high demand for immigrant nurses, investment by Pacific island governments and families in nurse training constitutes a rational use of economic resources. Policies encouraging investment in home countries may be more effective than policies directly discouraging brain drain in contributing to national development

Remittances: A loan funds for rural economy? Evidence from the Kayes District (Western Mali)

peer reviewedIn addition to have a direct and positive impact on reducing of food insecurity and poverty gaps in more vulnerable countries to shocks on the rainfall, the remittances received by the migrants families also allow them to have saving. This is what reveals the self-managed village banks of Kayes’ region, the most important emigration basin of Mali and located in strong climate variations area. However, this saving contributes less at agricultural sector finance

Remittances, school quality, and household education expenditures in Nepal

A heightened interest in understanding the remitting practices of immigrants and their impact on a variety of economic indicators has emerged as remittances to developing countries have risen substantially over the past decade. If remittances primarily enhance consumption, they may have no lasting impact on economic growth. However, through asset accumulation and human capital investment, remittances may serve as a vehicle for growth. In this paper, we use the 2010 Nepal Living Standards Survey III (NLSS III) to examine how remittances affect household expenditures on human capital investment. Overall, our findings suggest that at the margin, remittances do contribute to human capital investment, but this effect varies substantially by school quality within Nepal. In addition, our results indicate that internal remittances (remittances from household members migrating internally) have a greater impact on education than do external remittances. We posit that this may be due to a higher value placed on Nepali education by internal migrants as compared to the education needed for foreign job opportunities by migrants abroad

Migrant Remittances Provide Resilience Against Disasters in Africa

How responsive are migrant remittances to various disasters, both natural and human-made? Would remittances be affected by systemic financial crises, such as the 2008–09 financial crisis, or more recent crises affecting the Eurozone? Using panel data on 23 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries from 1980 to 2007, we find that remittances are slow to respond to natural disasters, unresponsive to outbreaks of conflict, and will slowly decline following a systemic financial crisis. This suggests that, given its stability, remittances are sources of resilience in SSA.http://link.springer.com/journal/11293http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11293-014-9403-9http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11293-014-9403-

Reforms, Market Dynamics and Productivity in Developing Countries

Between the end of World War II and the mid-eighties, development strategy in a number of developing countries was based on the protectionist "Import substitution" (IS) concept. Many of these countries' governments were of the opinion that maintaining free trade would prevent their economies from industrializing and would therefore render them vulnerable to long-term adverse movements in terms of trade, and impact their growth and welfare. However, during the 1980s, both economists and policy-makers became skeptical about the beneficial impact of the IS strategy. The difference in performance between the outward-oriented Asian and the inward-oriented Latin American economies clearly called for a reconsideration of the strategy. Empirical evidence (Sachs and Warner 1995) also suggests that open economies tend to adjust more rapidly from primary-intensive to manufacture-intensive exports, and to achieve sustained growth. Since the mid-eighties, many LDCs have engaged in a process of economic reform, involving a more outward orientation of their economies, the lowering of trade barriers, privatization of many industries and reform of the foreign-exchange market. © 2010 Springer-Verlag New York.SCOPUS: ch.binfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe