IN THIS ISSUE:
>> Modern Conflict      
     Database
>> Launch of the PERI/     
     UNDP Kenya Program
>> Column in New Labor      Forum
>> Ralph Nader Visits PERI
>> PERI Working Papers
>> Calendar of Events
  > International Workers' Day      Lecture Series
  > Alternatives to Inflation      Targeting Conference

>> PERI's on-line calendar of
events can be found here.

>> Directions to Gordon Hall can be found here.

Links to further information about each event, and often downloads of the papers to be discussed, can be found by clicking on the event title.

Tuesday April 24, 7:00
Out of Balance: ExxonMobil's Impact on Climate Change
A film in the UMass
Focus on Global Warming Sustainable Film Series
Gordon Hall, third floor

Wednesday April 25, 7:00
The Next Industrial Revolution
A film in the UMass
Focus on Global Warming Sustainable Film Series
Gordon Hall, third floor

Thursday April 26, 7:00
The Power of Community:
How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
A film in the UMass
Focus on Global Warming Sustainable Film Series
Gordon Hall, third floor

Friday April 27, 1:30
Environmental Justice & Food Systems
Helen Scharber
Environmental Working Group discussion series
Gordon Hall, third floor

A Four-Day Lecture Series
in Honor of International Workers' Day

Tuesday May 1, 4:00
Social Evolution & Revolution
Howard Sherman
Gordon Hall, third floor

Wednesday May 2, 4:00
Marxian Economics Today
Prabhat Patnaik
Gordon Hall, third floor

Thursday May 3, 4:00
Socialism Today in Theory & Practice
Prabhat Patnaik
Gordon Hall, third floor

Friday May 4, 4:00
Neoliberalism & Resistance in India
Prabhat Patnaik
Gordon Hall, third floor

Friday May 4, 1:30
The Myth of Meat Self-Sufficiency in Post-War Europe
Hasan Tekguc
Environmental Working Group discussion series
Gordon Hall, third floor

Monday May 7, 4:00
Institutional Structure of Social Structure of Accumulation?
David Kotz, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Thompson Hall, ninth floor

Alternatives to Inflation Targeting Conference
co-sponsored by PERI, the Intergovernmental Group of 24 (G-24), and the New Rules for Global Finance Coalition.

Thursday May 17 -
Friday May 18
Washington, DC
Inflation Targeting, Employment Creation, and Economic Development:
A Panel Discussion and Workshop
Researchers from around the globe present their findings from the Alternatives to Inflation Targeting Project, which assesses the impacts of inflation targeting as a development practice, and, more importantly, develops concrete alternative policies, in country-specific contexts, that could achieve superior macroeconomic outcomes.

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Comments or concerns?
Send an e-mail to
Debbie Zeidenberg
PERI's Communications Director.

Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, millions of people have lost their lives in violent conflicts around the world.
PERI's new Modern Conflicts Database is a tool for researchers and students who want learn more about these conflicts. The Modern Conflicts Database has profiles of all post-Cold War conflicts with estimated death tolls of 25,000 or more, with references to further information sources. These can be accessed via a table, which ranks conflicts by total estimated deaths, or a map, which
shows the locations of war-torn countries.

ONLINE RESOURCES
>> Go to the Modern Conflicts home page

In February, PERI hosted three researchers from Kenya’s National Bureau of Statistics. Dankit Nassiuma, Robert Nderitu, and Vivian Nyarunda came to Amherst to work with Robert Pollin, James Heintz, and Jeannette Wicks-Lim on the analysis of data from their recently-completed employment and household survey. The remarkably rich data set (each completed interview entailed seventeen days of interviewing in each household) posed analytical challenges. The data from the survey, and the in-country expertise of the visitors, will inform the forthcoming PERI study, An Employment-Targeted Economic Program for Kenya.

ONLINE RESOURCES
>> Download “Expanding Decent Employment in Kenya: The Role of Monetary Policy, Inflation Control and the Exchange Rate”
>> Read an interview with Dankit Nassiuma, Robert Nderitu, and Vivian Nyarunda

Forensic Accounting: Hidden Balance of Payments of the Philippines
Edsel L. Beja
An examination of the available data between 1990 and 2005 reveals that the balance of payments of the Philippines does not record large amounts of international transactions. Unrecorded international transactions for this period amount to US $192 billion (in 1995 U.S. dollars). The results suggest a serious problem in the government’s macroeconomic management of the Philippines, and expose a weak or weakening capacity in the governance of international transactions.

Is Inequality Bad for the Environment?
James Boyce
By respecting nature’s limits and investing in nature’s wealth, we can protect and enhance the environment’s ability to sustain human well-being. But how humans interact with nature is tied to how we interact with each other. Those who are relatively powerful and wealthy typically gain disproportionate benefits from the economic activities that degrade the environment, while those who are relatively powerless and poor typically bear disproportionate costs. Wider political and economic inequalities tend to result in higher levels of environmental harm. For this reason, efforts to safeguard the natural environment must go hand-in-hand with efforts to achieve equitable distributions of power and wealth in human societies. Globalization today poses new challenges and new opportunities for both of these goals.

If Financial Market Competition is So Intense, Why are Financial Firm Profits So High? Reflections on the Current ‘Golden Age’ of Finance
James Crotty
In 1997 former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volker posed a question about the commercial banking system he said he could not answer. The industry was under more intense competitive pressure than at any time in living memory, Volcker noted, “yet at the same time the industry never has been so profitable.” In this paper, Crotty refers to the seemingly strange coexistence of intense competition and historically high profit rates in commercial banking as 'Volcker’s Paradox.' He extends the paradox to all important financial institutions and discusses developments that help resolve it. Then Crotty asks: Has the belief that financial investments that were formerly considered too risky have been made safe (and profitable) by modern risk-management techniques increased the likelihood of a future systemic financial crisis?

Do Surges in Less-Skilled Immigration Have Important Wage Effects? A Review of the U.S. Evidence
David R. Howell
This paper reviews recent studies that estimate wage effects of less-skilled immigrants during the great U.S. immigration surges (1870-1914 and 1980 to the present).
The literature is fairly consistent in finding that large long-term immigrant surges have at least small negative wage effects for less-advantaged workers, and that these are likely to be largest for foreign-born workers and less-educated African-Americans in major immigrant-receiving regions.
The paper concludes that, while consumers and employers have benefited substantially from the surge in low-skilled workers since the early 1980s, there are also losers, and there is consequently a need for policy interventions designed to ensure that reasonable wage levels, employment opportunities, and working conditions are maintained for our least advantaged workers.

Uprooting Diversity? Peasant Farmers’ Market Engagements and the on-Farm Conservation of Crop Genetic Resources in the Guatemalan Highlands
S. Ryan Isakson
The long-term security of the global food supply is contingent upon on-farm conservation of crop genetic diversity. Without it, food crops lack the ability to evolve in the face of new pests, plant diseases, and environmental conditions. The genetic diversity of many food crops is cultivated in the field, primarily by peasant farmers of the global south.
The author investigates how the participation of Guatemalan peasants in the market economy is related to on-farm diversity conservation in three crops: maize, legumes, and squash. Participation in markets is not inherently detrimental to the protection of genetic resources but, without protections, market participation may unleash processes that contribute to genetic erosion. The author suggests policies that encourage conservation of crop diversity in ways that are consistent with farmers’ development objectives.

The Correlates of Rentier Returns in OECD Countries
Arjun Jayadev & Gerald Epstein
This paper examines the correlates of rentier returns – returns to the ownership of financial assets – in a sample of OECD countries between 1960 and 2000. The authors develop a bargaining model among three classes – industrial capitalists, rentiers and workers – and show that rentier income returns increase when real interest rates rise, costs of capital mobility fall, and the power of labor declines. The paper investigates the impacts of proxies for these variables on rentier incomes. The authors find that interest rate liberalization, reduced unionization rates, and increased returns from foreign investments increase rentier returns. These results provide support for the simple model and for Post-Keynesian and Marxian stories of the impact of financialization and neo-liberal policies on income shares.

Wage Share, Globalization, and Crisis: The Case of the Manufacturing Industry in Korea, Mexico, and Turkey
Özlem Onaran
In this paper, the author assesses the effects of globalization on the wage share in the manufacturing industry in Mexico, Turkey, and Korea, as measured by the effects of international trade and foreign direct investment intensity on the economy, and the impact that exchange rate depreciation and economic recession have had on wage share. Özlem finds that recessions and nominal depreciations have lasting negative effects on the manufacturing wage share in all countries, whereas the effect of openness, in particular international trade, depends on industrial policy structure. Increased export intensity leads to a decline the manufacturing wage share in Turkey and Mexico, but has no significant effect in Korea. The positive expectations from FDI do not materialized in any of the three countries.

Gender, Distribution, and Balance of Payments
Stephanie Seguino
An unresolved debate in the development literature concerns the impact of gender inequality on economic growth. Studies have found that the effect depends on the time frame and the measure of inequality. This paper expands that discussion by considering both the short and long run, and evaluating the effects of gender equality in two types of economies — semi-industrialized economies (SIEs) and low-income agricultural economies (LIAEs). The paper identifies the pathways by which gender equality can affect short- and long-run macroeconomic output and growth. Further, it incorporates the effect of gender equity on the balance of payments constraint to growth. These preliminary results suggest that gender equality is more likely to stimulate growth in LIAEs than SIEs in both the short and long run.

The Human Development Index: A History
Elizabeth Stanton
This article recounts the intellectual history of the UNDP’s Human Development Index. It begins with the early history of welfare economics and follows this field through three successive revolutions in thought, culminating in the theory of human development. The first section traces this history from the origins of economic “utility” theory to Amartya Sen’s human capabilities approach. The second section chronicles past and present measures of social welfare used in the fields of economics and development, including national income and a variety of composite measures, up to and including HDI.

Engendering Human Development: A Critique of the UNDP’s Gender-Related Development Index
Elizabeth Stanton
This article reviews the literature critiquing the United Nations Development Programme’s Gender-related Development Index (GDI), which is a measure of human development penalized for the extent of gender inequality in each country; presents several original critiques of GDI; and presents proposed corrections to the GDI in response to both received and original critiques.

Changes in Homeowners’ Financial Security during the Recent Housing and Mortgage Boom
Christian E. Weller & Kate Sabatini
From the late 1990s through 2005, the U.S. experienced an unprecedented housing boom, which boosted the assets of many families. Families with homes had more collateral to borrow against, but new home buyers also needed to take out larger mortgages. After 2001, the U.S. saw a sharp acceleration in the growth of household debt. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, supplemented with data from the Flow of Funds Accounts, the authors consider the effect of the housing and mortgage boom on the financial security of homeowners. The data indicate that all measures of vulnerability are increasing and suggest declining security for homeowners after 2000. The increases in vulnerability were especially pronounced for minorities, younger families, and lower-income families.

Patterns of Adjustment under the Age of Finance: The Case of Turkey as a Peripheral Agent of Neoliberal Globalization
Erinc Yeldan
The IMF has been involved with the Turkish economy since before the country’s crises of 2000 and 2001, and provided financial assistance of $20.4 billion between 1999 and 2003. Following the crises, Turkey implemented a strategy of raising interest rates and maintaining an overvalued exchange rate. The government was forced to follow a contractionary fiscal policy, reduce agriculture subsidies, and reduce public sector economic activity. The end result was shrinkage of the public sector; deteriorating education and health infrastructure; and failure of social services to the middle class and the poor. As domestic industry intensified its import dependence, it was forced to adopt capital-intensive technologies with adverse consequences on employment. In the meantime transnational companies and international institutions have become the governors of the country, with implicit veto power over economic or political decisions that oppose the interests of global capital. 

ONLINE RESOURCES:
>> PERI publications database