bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Crisis, Informalization and the Urban Informal Sector in Sub‐Saharan Africa
Authors: Meagher Kate 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTNeo‐liberal theories of informality have emphasized the potential of the informal sector for independent employment creation and growth. An alternative perspective is provided by the structuralist ‘informalization’ approach which regards the expansion of informal activity as part of the restructuring strategy of the formal sector in the face of economic recession. The informalization perspective challenges the traditional notions of the informal sector by focusing on such issues as differentiation, social networks, subcontracting and supply linkages with the formal sector, and the role of the state in informal sector expansion. Despite its First World and Latin American focus, the informalization approach offers important insights for the study of urban informal sectors in Africa.
Structural Adjustment and Poverty Alleviation: An Interpretative Survey
Authors: Killick Tony 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTThere are few simple generalizations about the effects of adjustment programmes on poverty. There remain many data and methodological problems, and outcomes are complex and varied. Poverty groups often are harmed by adjustment programmes, especially the urban working poor, but there has been a tendency to over‐emphasize negative outcomes. There are many other influences on poverty. In the long term, adjustment is essential to the eradication of poverty. The principal responsibility for achieving anti‐poverty objectives must lie with national governments but they do not always display much concern with the poor. However, the international financial institutions must share the responsibility and could do more to design structural adjustment programmes within a cost‐minimizing framework. The principal policy tasks are to formulate a long‐term anti‐poverty strategy and ensure that adjustment policies are consistent with that, without detracting from the imperative of adapting the economy to changing circumstances.
Working Groups or Wage Labour? Cash‐crops, Reciprocity and Money among the Maka of Southeastern Cameroon
Authors: Geschiere Peter 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTThe spread of cocoa cultivation among the Maka in the 1950s created new labour demands. These were not met by wage labour, as in most cocoa producing areas, but rather by a novel system of working groups. Specific economic factors can help to explain why wage labour did not develop within the villages, but it is also clear that the preference of the Maka for more cooperative labour arrangements was related to broader socio‐cultural characteristics of this society—notably the somewhat paradoxical tension between strong levelling mechanisms and an equally strong emphasis on personal ambition. The new working groups were based on reciprocal exchange of labour, but money came to play an increasing role in their functioning. They allowed for a certain degree of commodification of labour to the advantage of richer farmers, but ultimately they restricted the rise of more structural inequalities. The recent crisis in cash‐cropping makes it clear that a system of working groups can offer farmers more flexibility than wage labour in the face of the vagaries of world‐market prices.
Gender Awareness in Migration Theory: Synthesizing Actor and Structure in Southern Africa
Authors: Wright Caroline 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTRecent developments in migration theory mirror two concerns writ large across the development literature, namely the attempt to reconcile structure and agency and the importance of gender. Using the specific context of southern Africa, this article analyses the development of migration theory over the last forty years and the dialectic between gender and the structure‐agency dyad. It is argued that gender is an essential tool for unpicking the migration process and that a gender perspective has enriched and been enriched by a model of migration allowing analytical space for both the agency of migrants and the structures which surround them. Juxtaposing the various theories which have been brought to bear on migration in southern Africa also reveals the extent to which new models and classificatory systems have developed on the basis of agendas set by preceding conceptual frameworks, distinctions between competing models rarely being as clear‐cut as the mode of scholarship would have them appear.
The Evolutionary Theory of Land Rights as Applied to Sub‐Saharan Africa: A Critical Assessment
Authors: Platteau Jean‐Philippe 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTThe evolutionary theory of land rights can be considered the dominant framework of analysis used by mainstream economists to assess the land tenure situation in developing countries, and to make predictions about its evolution. A central tenet of this theoryis that under the joint impact of increasing population pressure and market integration, land rights spontaneously evolve towards rising individualization and that this evolutioneventually leads rightsholders to press for the creation of duly formalized private property rights — a demand to which the state will have an incentive to respond. This article looks critically at the relevance of the evolutionary theory of land rights as currently applied to Sub‐Saharan Africa. In particular, the question of whether the establishmentof private property rights is an advisable structural reform in the present circumstancesis examined, in the light of evidence accumulated so far. It will be argued that most of the beneficial effects usually ascribed to such a reform are grossly over‐estimated and that, given its high cost, it is generally advisable to look for more appropriate solutions that rely on existing informal mechanisms at community level.
Economic Opportunity, Civil Society and Political Liberty
Authors: Dahrendorf Ralf 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the dilemmas associated with ‘squaring the circle’ of wealth creation, social cohesion and political freedom in the OECD countries. As the metaphor of square and circle implies, these three essential goals of development are not necessarily compatible and may even conflict with each other, particularly at a time when advancing globalization creates perverse choices. To become and remain competitive in international markets requires a flexible use of resources which threatens social cohesion and political freedom in a number of ways. After analysing these tensions, the essay concludes with six proposals for improving the likelihood that a workable balance between prosperity, democracy and social cohesion can be maintained in advanced industrial societies.
Positive Aspects of Community and the Dangers of Fragmentation
Authors: Etzioni Amitai 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTThis essay seeks to explain the premisses of the communitarian movement in the USA, and to respond to some of its principal critics. At the heart of the debate is the fundamental question of the proper balance between individual liberty and commitment to the common good. The solution to this could be a form of ‘responsive’ communitarianism which in some situations (such as the present‐day USA) may argue for more community, and in others (such as contemporary China) may press for a better anchoring of individual rights. In his examination of the centrifugal forces which can be unleashed by the search for ever‐more‐exclusive forms of community, Etzioni argues that excessive insistence on self‐determination can weaken countries seeking to establish democratic government and threaten democracy in countries which have already attained it.
The Perils of Utopia: The Russian Intelligentsia under Communism and Perestroika
Authors: Tolstaya Tatyana 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTAfter evoking the spirit of the Russian intelligentsia, this essay interprets its changing place in society. A force for humanism, universal brotherhood and freedom of expression within a succession of repressive political regimes, the intelligentsia should — one might think — be greatly favoured by perestroika. Yet its very idealism and uncritical faith in such abstractions as ‘the people’ and ‘beloved foreigners’ have ill prepared it to deal with harsh and complex realities. As earlier stereotypes crumble and the Communist regime disintegrates, the intelligentsia itself is confused and divided. Faced with moral and political dilemmas, Tolstaya suggests that there may be some virtue in a productive form of escapism in art.
Affluence, Poverty and the Idea of a Post‐Scarcity Society
Authors: Giddens Anthony 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTThe ‘end of nature’ and the attenuation of tradition, associated with accelerated modernization on a global scale, increase the need for conscious reflection on many aspects of life formerly considered to be givens. Thus in developed and developing countries alike, new questions of personal choice and ethics form the basis for a kind of life politics which is different from — and supplements, but does not replace — the longer‐established practice of emancipatory politics, concerned above all with issues of social justice. This essay invites us to consider how life politics can generate new strategies to reduce inequality and alleviate poverty.
The Political Economy of Environmental Policy Reform in Latin America
Authors: Kaimowitz David 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTMany parts of the world are threatened with environmental damage and degradation, affecting both the natural resources and the economy of the area. This article analyses the factors affecting the likelihood of different environmental policy reforms in Latin America, with particular emphasis on: the strengths and weaknesses of different groups which promote such reforms; the degree to which the reforms are compatible with the region's current economic policies; and how the type of political regime affects these issues. It reaches the conclusion that, although there has been progress in recent years, the possibility of carrying out far‐reaching reforms which could substantially reduce pollution and resource depletion has been limited by: 1) the difficulties involved in linking environmental issues with concerns for social justice; 2) economic policies which promote the exploitation of natural resources and labour and weaken the public sector; and 3) the great influence over regional governments of groups with vested interests in continuing environmentally destructive activities.
Images of Community: Discourse and Strategy in Property Relations
Authors: Li Tania Murray 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTThis article argues that divergent images of community result not from inadequate knowledge or confusion of purpose, but from the location of discourse and action in the context of specific struggles and dilemmas. It supports the view that ‘struggles over resources’ are also ‘struggles over meaning’. It demonstrates the ways in which contests over the distribution of property are articulated in terms of competing representations of community at a range of levels and sites. It suggests that, through the exercise of ‘practical political economy’, particular representations of community can be used strategically to strengthen the property claims of potentially disadvantaged groups. In the policy arena, advocates for ‘community based resource management’ have represented communities as sites of consensus and sustain‐ability. Though idealized, such representations have provided a vocabulary with which to defend the rights of communities vis‐à‐vis states. Poor farmers, development planners, consultants and academics can also use representations of community strategically to achieve positive effects, or at least to mitigate negative ones. Most, but not all, of the illustrations in this article are drawn from Indonesia, with special reference to Central Sulawesi.
The Politics of Economic Diversification: Reconceptualizing the Rural Informal Sector in South‐east Tanzania
Authors: Seppälä Pekka 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examines how economic diversification is changing a Tanzanian village under economic liberalization. More specifically, it asks how different wealth groups are able to incorporate income‐generating activities into their livelihood strategies. The conclusion is that while diversification (as a division of labour) is advanced at the village level, it appears that different activities enhance the division of the village into segregated cultural spheres and increase economic differentiation. At village level the diversity of income‐generating activities reduces any single line of economic dependency either on the state or on market actors.
Income Inequality, Welfare and Poverty in Ukraine
Authors: Kakwani N. 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTUkraine is now faced with economic crisis on an unprecedented scale. The country is on the brink of hyperinflation. The government has to follow rigorous demand management policies which entail lowering the standard of living of the population. To design policies which protect the poorest and most vulnerable groups in the society, it is important to understand the nature of poverty and income inequality. This study attempts to do exactly this for Ukraine for the first time. The paper demonstrates that the standard of living in Ukraine has been falling at an alarming rate. The government welfare programmes are ineffective in protecting the poorest and most vulnerable groups in the society. This article provides an empirical basis to design appropriate policies, but a lot more work needs to be done.
Foreign Aid, Structural Adjustment, and Public Management: The Mozambican Experience
Authors: Wuyts Marc 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTIn looking at the case of Mozambique under structural adjustment, this article argues that the particular combination of fiscal restraints imposed by financial programming, and the proliferation of decentralized project‐based management, together proved to be a potent mixture which failed to reconstruct a coherent pattern of state action. The problem lies in the increasing dominance of foreign aid and in the uneasy interplay between programme aid on the one hand and project aid on the other, as competition from projects wins resources away from regular state programmes, with very little prospect of such projects becoming self‐sustainable in the absence of the continued infusion of foreign aid.
Structural Adjustment and Structural Change in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Some Provisional Conclusions
Authors: Gibbon Peter 
Published: October 2008

ABSTRACTThis article reviews discussions concerning some of the main methodological difficulties surrounding the evaluation of structural adjustment policies, before suggesting a procedure to ‘save’ empirical discussion about new patterns of economic and social relations. In this light it proceeds to examine evidence gathered by the structural adjustment research programme of Nordiska Afrikainstitutet (Scandinavian Institute of African Studies) on the changing character of the ‘private sector’ and of the voluntary development sphere in contemporary Africa. The main conclusions are that, in what can be called ‘adjustment situations’, the main tendencies in these spheres are for a rise of trading capitals enjoying illicit relations to the state and for a privatization of local development. The article concludes with an argument that, had adjustment been implemented in a fuller and more consistent way, these tendencies would probably have been still more pronounced.
Simple Explicit Equations for Transient Heat Conduction in Finite Solids
Authors: Ostrogorsky A. G. 
Published: October 2008

AbstractBased on the one-term Fourier series solution, a simple equation is derived for low Biot number transient conduction in plates, cylinders, and spheres. In the 0&lt;Bi&lt;0.3 range, the solution gives approximately three times less error than the lumped capacity solution. For asymptotically low values of Bi, it approaches the lumped capacity solution. A set of equations valid for 0&lt;Bi&lt;1 is developed next. These equations are more involved but give approximately ten times lower error than the lumped capacity solution. Finally, a set of broad-range correlations is presented, covering the 0&lt;Bi&lt;∞ range with less than 1% error.
Whiteoak
Authors: Gil Joseph , Maman Itay 
Published: October 2008

This paper presents WHITEOAK: a JAVA extension that introduces structural type equivalence and subtyping into the language. We argue that structural subtyping addresses common software design problems, and promotes the development of loosely coupled modules without compromising type safety.
We discuss language design issues, including subtyping in face of self-referencing structural types, compile-time operators for computing the new types from existing ones, and the semantics of constructors and non-abstract methods in structural types. We describe implementation techniques, including the compile-time and run-time challenges that we faced (in particular, preserving the identity of objects). Measurement indicate that the performance of our implementation of structural dispatching is comparable to that of the JVM's standard invocation mechanisms.
Sound and extensible renaming for java
Authors: Schäfer Max , Ekman Torbjörn , de Moor Oege 
Published: October 2008

Descriptive names are crucial to understand code. However, good names are notoriously hard to choose and manually changing a globally visible name can be a maintenance nightmare. Hence, tool support for automated renaming is an essential aid for developers and widely supported by popular development environments.
This work improves on two limitations in current refactoring tools: too weak preconditions that lead to unsoundness where names do not bind to the correct declarations after renaming, and too strong preconditions that prevent renaming of certain programs. We identify two main reasons for unsoundness: complex name lookup rules make it hard to define sufficient preconditions, and new language features require additional preconditions. We alleviate both problems by presenting a novel extensible technique for creating symbolic names that are guaranteed to bind to a desired entity in a particular context by inverting lookup functions. The inverted lookup functions can then be tailored to create qualified names where otherwise a conflict would occur, allowing the refactoring to proceed and improve on the problem with too strong preconditions.
We have implemented renaming for Java as an extension to the JastAdd Extensible Java Compiler and integrated it in Eclipse. We show examples for which other refactoring engines have too weak preconditions, as well as examples where our approach succeeds in renaming entities by inserting qualifications. To validate the extensibility of the approach we have implemented renaming support for Java 5 and AspectJ like inter-type declarations as modular extensions to the initial Java 1.4 refactoring engine. The renaming engine is only a few thousand lines of code including extensions and performance is on par with industrial strength refactoring tools.
Java performance evaluation through rigorous replay compilation
Authors: Georges Andy , Eeckhout Lieven , Buytaert Dries 
Published: October 2008

A managed runtime environment, such as the Java virtual machine, is non-trivial to benchmark. Java performance is affected in various complex ways by the application and its input, as well as by the virtual machine (JIT optimizer, garbage collector, thread scheduler, etc.). In addition, non-determinism due to timer-based sampling for JIT optimization, thread scheduling, and various system effects further complicate the Java performance benchmarking process.
Replay compilation is a recently introduced Java performance analysis methodology that aims at controlling non-determinism to improve experimental repeatability. The key idea of replay compilation is to control the compilation load during experimentation by inducing a pre-recorded compilation plan at replay time. Replay compilation also enables teasing apart performance effects of the application versus the virtual machine.
This paper argues that in contrast to current practice which uses a single compilation plan at replay time, multiple compilation plans add statistical rigor to the replay compilation methodology. By doing so, replay compilation better accounts for the variability observed in compilation load across compilation plans. In addition, we propose matched-pair comparison for statistical data analysis. Matched-pair comparison considers the performance measurements per compilation plan before and after an innovation of interest as a pair, which enables limiting the number of compilation plans needed for accurate performance analysis compared to statistical analysis assuming unpaired measurements.
Java type inference is broken
Authors: Smith Daniel , Cartwright Robert 
Published: October 2008

Java 5, the most recent major update to the Java Programming Language, introduced a number of sophisticated features, including a major extension to the type system. While the technical details of these new features are complex, much of this complexity is hidden from the typical Java developer by an ambitious type inference mechanism. Unfortunately, the extensions to the Java 5 type system were so novel that their technical details had not yet been thoroughly investigated in the research literature. As a result, the Java 5 compiler includes a pragmatic but flawed type inference algorithm that is, by design, neither sound nor locally complete. The language specification points out that neither of these failures is catastrophic: the correctness of potentially-unsound results must be verified during type checking; and incompleteness can usually be worked around by manually providing the method type parameter bindings for a given call site.
This paper dissects the type inference algorithm of Java 5 and proposes a signficant revision that is sound and able to calculate correct results where the Java 5 algorithm fails. The new algorithm is locally complete with the exception of a difficult corner case. Moreover, the new algorithm demonstrates that several arbitrary restrictions in the Java type system---most notably the ban on lower-bounded type parameter declarations and the limited expressibility of intersection types---are unnecessary. We hope that this work will spur the evolution of a more coherent, more comprehensive generic type system for Java.
Pictures from the Skype
Authors: Rossi Dario , Valenti Silvio , Veglia Paolo , Bonfiglio Dario , Mellia Marco , Meo Michela 
Published: October 2008

This paper focuses on the characterization and classification of Skype traffic, a nowadays very popular and fashionable VoIP application. Building over previous work, we develop a software tool which can be used to examine the evolution of Skype call classification in an interactive fashion. The demonstrator software focuses on the main aspects of Skype traffic characterization and presents the traffic patterns Skype generates during a call or while idle. In addition, the demonstrator shows the evolution of the internal indexes the Skype classifiers use.
After describing the classification process and the demonstrator software, we use the tool to demonstrate the feasibility of online Skype traffic identification, considering both accuracy and computational costs. Experimental results show that few seconds of observation are enough to allow the classifier engines to correctly identify the presence of Skype flows. Moreover, results indicate that the classification engine can cope with multi-Gbps links in real-time using common off-the-shelf hardware.