bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Sex differences in obesity and the regulation of energy homeostasis
Authors: Lovejoy J. C. , Sainsbury A. ,   the Stock Conference 2008 Working Group
Published: February 2009

SummaryObesity prevalence is generally higher in women than in men, and there is also a sex difference in body fat distribution. Sex differences in obesity can be explained in part by the influence of gonadal steroids on body composition and appetite; however, behavioural, socio‐cultural and chromosomal factors may also play a role. This review, which evolved from the 2008 Stock Conference on sex differences in obesity, summarizes current research and recommendations related to hormonal and neuroendocrine influences on energy balance and fat distribution. A number of important gaps in the research are identified, including a need for more studies on chromosomal sex effects on energy balance, the role of socio‐cultural (i.e. gender) factors in obesity and the potential deleterious effects of high‐fat diets during pregnancy on the foetus. Furthermore, there is a paucity of clinical trials examining sex‐specific approaches and outcomes of obesity treatment (lifestyle‐based or pharmacological), and research is urgently needed to determine whether current weight loss programmes, largely developed and tested on women, are appropriate for men. Last, it is important that both animal and clinical research on obesity be designed and analysed in such a way that data can be separately examined in both men and women.
A Comparison of Tabular PDF Inversion Methods
Authors: Cline D. , Razdan A. , Wonka P. 
Published: February 2009

Abstract The most common form of tabular inversion used in computer graphics is to compute the cumulative distribution table of a probability distribution (PDF) and then search within it to transform points, using an O(log n) binary search. Besides the standard inversion method, however, several other discrete inversion algorithms exist that can perform the same transformation inO(1) time per point. In this paper, we examine the performance of three of these alternate methods, two of which are new.
BTF‐CIELab: A Perceptual Difference Measure for Quality Assessment and Compression of BTFs
Authors: Guthe Michael , Müller Gero , Schneider Martin , Klein Reinhard 
Published: February 2009

AbstractDriven by the advances in lossy compression of bidirectional texture functions (BTFs), there is a growing need for reliable methods to numerically measure the visual quality of the various compressed representations. Based on the CIE ΔE00 colour difference equation and concepts of its spatio‐temporal extension ST‐CIELab for video quality assessment, this paper presents a numerical quality measure for compressed BTF representations. By analysing the BTF in its full six‐dimensional (6D) space, light and view transition effects are integrated into the measure. In addition to the compressed representation, the method only requires the source BTF images as input and thus aids the objective evaluation of different compression techniques by means of a simple numerical comparison. By separating the spatial and angular components of the difference measure and linearizing each of them, the measure can be incorporated into any linear or multi‐linear compression technique. Using a per‐colour‐channel principal component analysis (PCA), compression rates of about 500:1 can be achieved at excellent visual quality.
Visual‐Quality Optimizing Super Resolution
Authors: Liu F. , Wang J. , Zhu S. , Gleicher M. , Gong Y. 
Published: February 2009

AbstractIn this paper, we propose a robust image super‐resolution (SR) algorithm that aims to maximize the overall visual quality of SR results. We consider a good SR algorithm to be fidelity preserving, image detail enhancing and smooth. Accordingly, we define perception‐based measures for these visual qualities. Based on these quality measures, we formulate image SR as an optimization problem aiming to maximize the overall quality. Since the quality measures are quadratic, the optimization can be solved efficiently. Experiments on a large image set and subjective user study demonstrate the effectiveness of the perception‐based quality measures and the robustness and efficiency of the presented method.
Tangential Distance Fields for Mesh Silhouette Problems
Authors: Olson M. , Zhang H. 
Published: February 2009

AabstractWe consider a tangent‐space representation of surfaces that maps each point on a surface to the tangent plane of the surface at that point. Such representations are known to facilitate the solution of several visibility problems, in particular, those involving silhouette analysis. In this paper, we introduce a novel class of distance fields for a given surface defined by its tangent planes. At each point in space, we assign a scalar value which is a weighted sum of distances to these tangent planes. We call the resulting scalar field a ‘tangential distance field’ (TDF). When applied to triangle mesh models, the tangent planes become supporting planes of the mesh triangles. The weighting scheme used to construct a TDF for a given mesh and the way the TDF is utilized can be closely tailored to a specific application. At the same time, the TDFs are continuous, lending themselves to standard optimization techniques such as greedy local search, thus leading to efficient algorithms. In this paper, we use four applications to illustrate the benefit of using TDFs: multi‐origin silhouette extraction in Hough space, silhouette‐based view point selection, camera path planning and light source placement.
Buyer Concentration in Markets for Developing Country Exports
Authors: Deardorff Alan V. , Rajaraman Indira 
Published: February 2009

AbstractThe authors explore the implications of buyer concentration in markets for primary commodity exports of developing countries. Simple partial equilibrium models of monopsony and oligopsony show that the best available policy for the exporting country may be to tax exports so as to extract some of the profits of the monopsonist, even though doing so will actually worsen the distortion caused by the buyer's market power. They also explore the general equilibrium implications of these results for factor markets and for patterns of trade.
Why Isn't the Doha Development Agenda more Poverty Friendly?
Authors: Hertel Thomas W. , Keeney Roman , Ivanic Maros , Winters L. Alan 
Published: February 2009

AbstractCritics of the Doha Development Agenda rightly point to the lack of aggressive reform in wealthy countries for its role in dampening developing country gains. The authors find that the absence of tariff cuts on staple food products in developing countries also critically limits poverty reduction in those countries. Based on their analysis of the impacts of multilateral trade policy reforms in a sample of 15 developing countries, they find there is some evidence of poverty increases amongst the poor who work in agriculture when they lose protection for their earnings. However, these effects are minimized when agricultural tariffs are cut in all developing countries, and when the impact of lower food prices on low income consumers is taken into account in their 15 country sample.
Option Values, Switches, and Wages: An Analysis of the Employment Guarantee Scheme in India
Authors: Scandizzo Pasquale , Gaiha Raghav , Imai Katsushi 
Published: February 2009

AbstractConsistent with real option theory, the authors argue that the value of the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) in rural India and its impact on workers' behavior does not depend so much on its income supplementation as on enlargement of opportunities in the uncertain local labor market. The choice between the EGS and other activities is modeled in a dynamic optimization framework, taking into account a fixed wage rate and certainty of employment under the EGS and a stochastic wage rate under other activities. Specifically, volatility of wages in the rural labor markets has important implications for switches into the EGS and for concomitant welfare effects. Under such conditions, the higher the EGS wage, the greater is its attractiveness to relatively skilled and affluent workers, and for those already in it to continue. These and related predictions of the model are validated by panel data estimation.
Foreign Aid and Recurrent Cost: Donor Competition, Aid Proliferation, and Budget Support
Authors: Arimoto Yutaka , Kono Hisaki 
Published: February 2009

AbstractRecent empirical studies reveal that effectiveness of aid on growth is ambiguous. The authors consider aid proliferation—excess aid investment relative to recurrent cost—as a potential cause that undermines aid effectiveness, because aid projects can only produce sustainable benefits when sufficient recurrent costs are disbursed. They consider the donor's budget support as a device to supplement the shortage of the recipient's recurrent cost and to alleviate the misallocation of inputs. However, when donors have self‐interested preferences for the success of their own projects over those conducted by others, they provide insufficient budget support relative to aid, which results in aid proliferation. Moreover, aid proliferation is shown to be worsened by the presence of more donors.
Dutch Disease in the Labor Market: Women, Services, and Industrialization
Authors: Van Pham Hoang 
Published: February 2009

AbstractThe light manufacturing export industries have been a springboard for sustained growth in many newly industrializing countries. Women have played an important role in those industries. The author presents a theory linking women's work and industrialization. The theory fits the observation that, in low‐growth developing countries, women work mostly in household services, while, in higher‐growth developing countries, women work in manufacturing. In the model, the existence of a services equilibrium or an industrialization equilibrium, or multiple equilibria, depends on an economy's endowment of land relative to labor.
International Trade and Inter‐Industry Wage Structure in Swedish Manufacturing: Evidence from Matched Employer–Employee Data*
Authors: Lundin Nannan , Yun Lihong 
Published: February 2009

AbstractThis study examines the inter‐industry wage structure in Swedish manufacturing, using matched employer–employee data for the period 1996 to 2000. First, we used detailed individual and job characteristics to estimate industry‐specific and time‐varying wage premiums. Secondly, we investigated the impact of international trade on wage premiums, controlling for effects of domestic competition and technical progress. Our results suggest that industries that face intensive import competition from low‐income countries have lower wage premiums. Surprisingly, the wage premiums are not related to export intensities. Furthermore, technical progress, measured by investment in R&D activity, appears to enhance inter‐industry wage premiums.
International Specialization and Labor Unions: Evidence from OECD Countries
Authors: Belloc Marianna 
Published: February 2009

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to explore the role of the institutional determinants of international comparative advantage. Starting from a theoretically well‐founded general‐equilibrium framework, where specialization depends on relative factor endowments and technological differences, we study the possible additional effect of labor unions. Using country–year panel data, we obtain that they are an important determinant of relative economic performance for a sample of manufacturing sectors. In particular low wages–labor‐intensive industries turn out to be relatively disadvantaged, while high wages–capital‐intensive sectors are relatively advantaged by stronger labor unions. We also allow for different institutional scenarios, letting unionization patterns interact with different regimes of bargaining coordination and social security systems. Our main conclusions are not substantially altered.
Financial Market Imperfections and the Impact of Exchange Rate Movements on Exports*
Authors: Berman Nicolas , Berthou Antoine 
Published: February 2009

AbstractThis paper analyzes empirically the role of financial market imperfections in the way countries’ exports react to a currency depreciation. Using quarterly data for 27 developed and developing countries over the period 1990–2005, we find that the impact of a depreciation on exports will be less positive—or even negative—for a country if: (i) firms borrow in foreign currency; (ii) they are credit constrained; (iii) they are specialized in industries that require more external capital; (iv) the magnitude of depreciation or devaluation is large. This last result emphasizes the existence of a nonlinear relationship between an exchange rate depreciation and the reaction of a country's exports when financial imperfections are observed. This offers a new explanation for the consequences of recent currency crises in middle‐income countries.
Currency Misalignments and Exchange Rate Regimes in Emerging and Developing Countries*
Authors: Coudert Virginie , Couharde Cécile 
Published: February 2009

AbstractPegged exchange rates are often pointed out as more prone to risk of overvaluation, because their real exchange rates have a tendency to appreciate. We check this assumption empirically over a large sample of emerging and developing countries, by using two databases for de facto classifications by Levy‐Yeyati and Sturzenegger (2003) and by Reinhart and Rogoff (2004). We assess currency misalignments by estimating real equilibrium exchange rates taking into account a Balassa effect and the impact of net foreign assets. Pegged currencies are shown to be more overvalued than floating ones.
Fiscal Trends and Self‐Fulfilling Crises
Authors: Doblas‐Madrid Antonio 
Published: February 2009

AbstractThis paper develops a second‐generation currency crisis model with endogenously changing fundamentals. Previous second‐generation models are static, e.g. Obstfeld (1994), or dynamic with exogenous paths of fundamentals, e.g. Obstfeld (1986). In our model, the government weighs the disutility of making fundamentals consistent with a peg against a penalty for floating. If the former dominates, the government runs expansionary policies, precipitating a crisis. For some parameters, self‐fulfilling speculation affects when the crisis happens, but not whether it happens. For other values, there are “purely self‐fulfilling” crises, where a peg that could have survived forever collapses if attacked in the first few periods.
Long‐Run PPP under the Presence of Near‐to‐Unit Roots: The Case of the British Pound–US Dollar Rate*
Authors: Pittis Nikitas , Christou Christina , Kalyvitis Sarantis , Hassapis Christis 
Published: February 2009

AbstractEmpirical tests typically provide evidence that the British pound–US dollar exchange rate and the relative wholesale price index contain exact unit roots and exhibit cointegration. However, the cointegrating vector is significantly different from [1, −1], thus raising doubts on the validity of the purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis. Following Elliott (1998), we show that if the exchange rate and relative price series contain near‐to‐unit roots in the context of a bivariate system, then any inference on the “cointegrating” vector and consequently on PPP, which is based on standard cointegration estimation methods, will be misleading. We then argue that the existing evidence against the PPP hypothesis in the British pound–US dollar market can be attributed to the finite sample bias of the standard cointegration estimators, arising from an endogenous and “nearly” nonstationary regressor. We also show that when robust procedures are employed the evidence favors the PPP hypothesis.
FROM A MAGAZINE FOR ‘PRACTICAL GENTLEMEN’ TO AN ACADEMIC JOURNAL: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF TESG
Authors: DE PATER BEN 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTDr. H. Blink (1852–1931) founded the Nederlandsche Vereeniging voor Economische Geographie in December 1909. The primary objective of this Dutch Association for Economic Geography was to publish a monthly magazine. Bearing the name Tijdschrift voor Economische Geographie, this periodical was the first in the world to be devoted exclusively to the field. It was launched in January 1910 with an issue filled almost entirely by Blink himself. The magazine was to become his life's work. Its name was expanded in 1948 to the current title, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie. Then, a more profound change occurred in 1966 when Blink's Association merged with the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG, its long‐standing rival. In the resulting shake‐up of geographic periodicals published by the newly styled association KNAG, the Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, better known ever since by the acronym TESG, emerged as its flagship academic journal. This change was readily visible in its masthead, where the addition of the name Journal of Economic and Social Geography marked the evolution from a Dutch‐language professional magazine into an international academic journal.
GROUNDING GEOGRAPHIES OF ECONOMIC GLOBALISATION: GLOBALISED SPACES IN CHILE'S NON‐TRADITIONAL EXPORT SECTOR, 1980–2005
Authors: BARTON JONATHAN R. , MURRAY WARWICK E. 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTThe debate around neoliberal globalisation and its impacts on economically peripheral countries has been waged by partisan forces to the right and left since the early 1990s. Much of this debate focuses at the scale of the nation‐state, or of the whole globe, and, while often sophisticated in an ideological sense, is scant in terms of consideration of the ‘grounded’ outcomes of the processes and discourses of globalisation. This paper argues that an appreciation of the contingent economic geography and political economy of any given local and regional transformation is essential for understanding the outcomes of economic globalisation. In order to illustrate this, the paper analyses two regional non‐traditional agricultural export (NTAX) complexes in the highly globalised Chilean economy. By focusing on ‘hotspots’ or ‘globalised spaces’ at the regional and local scales we are able to cut through the rhetoric associated with generalised arguments for and against economic globalisation and illustrate that both the roots and impacts of the insertion into global commodity complexes are highly geographically contingent. Our analysis concludes that NTAX development in Chile over the past 25 years has radically restructured local and regional economies, has concentrated wealth ‘extra‐regionally’, has exacerbated social differentiation, and threatens environmental sustainability. We argue that policy that seeks to address these trends requires more grounded consideration of the complex and uneven geography of economic globalisation that does not privilege analysis at any one scale and that seeks to elucidate the links between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’.
RETURN MIGRATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN GHANA AND CÔTE D’IVOIRE: THE ROLE OF CAPITAL TRANSFERS
Authors: BLACK RICHARD , CASTALDO ADRIANA 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the relationship between international migration and entrepreneurship, drawing on data on around 300 return migrants to two West African states, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. The paper reviews existing evidence on the role of entrepreneurship and small firm formation in promoting development in Sub‐Saharan Africa, before setting out a model of factors that influence whether migrants contribute to entrepreneurial activity by registering a business after their return. Factors tested for their association with entrepreneurship include a range of individual characteristics, duration of stay and reasons for return, and the acquisition of financial, human and social capital while abroad. The analysis suggests that work experience abroad is the most significant predictor of entrepreneurial activity among the return migrants interviewed, although savings accumulated while abroad, reasons for return and the frequency of visits home while abroad are also significant factors.
UKRAINIAN MIDDLEMAN SYSTEM OF LABOUR ORGANISATION IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC
Authors: ČERMÁKOVÁ DITA , NEKORJAK MICHAL 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTSince the early 1990s, due to increasing immigration to the Czech Republic, a middleman system has been established in order to organise (irregular) labour of migrants mostly from Ukraine. Due to its extent, the breadth of activities involved and interconnection with Mafia structures, this system is relatively specific and plays a significant role within the labour migration environment. With respect to the fact that the middlemen and the migrant workers are mostly from Ukraine, we regard the entire system as a type of ethnic economy. This system has two hierarchic levels, the first of which deals with the procurement of irregular migrant labour. The second level is based on the relations between middlemen and organised crime. The paper tries to explain the causes for the establishment of the middleman system of labour organisation, to describe its operation, and the roles and mutual links among individual actors.
BEYOND CONVERGENCE: SPACE, SCALE, AND REGIONAL INEQUALITY IN CHINA
Authors: WEI Y.H. DENNIS , YE XINYUE 
Published: February 2009

AbstractSince the late 1980s there has been a renewed interest in regional inequality, fuelled by the concern over the effects of globalisation and liberalisation, and facilitated by theoretical and methodological developments in geography and economics. In essence, the new convergence theory, like the old convergence theory, is another theory devoid of space and time. Research on China has unfolded a complex landscape of regional development, the existence of distinct models of regional development, and the significant role of institutions. This paper examines regional inequality in China, especially Zhejiang Province, and attempts to uncover the trend and driving forces of regional inequality. It adopts a top‐down and bottom‐up strategy and employs recent developments in exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and geographically weighted regression (GWR). We have found that regional inequality is sensitive to geographic scales and spatial organisation, and that conventional approaches mask spatial agglomeration and the significance of regions in shaping trends of regional inequality. Overall, regional inequality in Zhejiang rose during the reform period and a division between coastal and interior Zhejiang formed, additionally sustained by weak linkages between the two regions and the significance of location and nonstate enterprises in development. This paper further reveals the emergence of Wenzhou, and discusses its effect on regional inequality.
THE CHANGING POSITION OF SOCIETY JOURNALS IN GEOGRAPHY
Authors: BOSMAN JEROEN 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTThe position of geography journals published by learned societies has undergone major changes over the last decades. Growth of scientific output, specialisation, the growing importance of English as the common language for scientific publication and changes in the science publishing industry due to the rise of the Internet have challenged and continue to challenge the classic geography journals from the various national geography societies. This paper shows how these journals perform in terms of numbers of citations, internationalisation of authorship and exposure in libraries, databases and on the web, compared to some key journals from commercial publishers. It discusses choices made by these journals and the threats and opportunities they are confronted with. The paper concludes that although the conditions for non‐UK and non‐US society journals in geography have become less favourable, there are viable routes forward. On the occasion of its publication centennial, the position of the Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (TESG) is highlighted.