Legal heritage and urban slums

This paper studies the effect of legal origins (common law vs. civil law) on contemporary slum formation in developing countries. First, we provide a cross-country correlation analysis. Second, we provide a regression discontinuity analysis using household data from Cameroon. The results suggest that a common law heritage is associated with a lower probability of slum conditions. The legal philosophies transplanted through colonization appear to be associated with the pattern of contemporary urban housing stocks in developing countries.     

Nostalgia as Affective Landscape: Negotiating Displacement in the “World City”

Bangalore, an aspiring “world city”, is rapidly transforming as factories and mills are sold to private developers. As their neighbourhoods now accommodate multi-million-dollar gated communities and post-industrial labour markets, residents experience an in situ displacement, staying in place while landscapes around them dramatically reconfigure. This paper makes sense of how old-time residents locate themselves within such urban growth through nostalgic invocations of the past. Emplaced within histories and geographies of neighbourhood change, nostalgia creates “affective landscapes” through which residents invoke their closeness to past landscapes of abundance and involvement in community-making. Such affective landscapes bring together embodied, sensorial, and more-than-human fields of action to shape an everyday politics in which residents narrate their marginalization within the world city and articulate their own value here.     

Gender Bias in China,South Korea and India 1920–1990: Effects of War,Famine and Fertility Decline

How has the history of the twentieth century affected the extent of female disadvantage in child survival in China, South Korea and India, and how has this in turn shaped spousal availability and marriage payments? These three countries have similar kinship systems which generate discrimination against girls, and they show the highest levels of excess female child mortality in the world. This article explores how the extent of excess female child mortality was influenced by historical events in these countries in the period 1920–90, and discusses some of the substantial social ramifications of resulting changes in sex ratios. The authors hypothesize that these changes encouraged the retention of brideprice in China while dowry became the norm in India, and illustrate how these demographic changes have influenced the extent and manifestations of violence against women.     

Location Equilibrium for Cournot Oligopoly in Spatially Separated Markets

Consider a two-stage non-cooperative Cournot game with location choice involving n≥ 2 firms each with several facilities. There are m≥ 2 spatially separated markets constituting the vertices of a network. Each firm first selects the locations of their facilities and then selects the quantities to supply to the markets to maximize its profit. There exists a Nash equilibrium in the quantities offered by each firm at the markets. Furthermore, when the demand in each market is sufficiently large, each firm chooses to locate its facilities only at vertices. With linear demand in each market, there exists a Nash location equilibrium.     

Cultural Theory and the Measurement of Deep Core Beliefs Within the Advocacy Coalition Framework

Deep core beliefs represent an important yet theoretically underspecified concept within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). This underspecification can (in part) be attributed to the ad hoc way in which ACF scholars have defined and measured the concept over time. To overcome this, we advocate the development and future use of a standardized metric for measuring deep core beliefs in ACF studies. Such a measure, we contend, should be multidimensional, generalizable, measurable using multiple techniques, and broad enough in scope to operate across virtually all policy domains. Using these criteria as our benchmark, we evaluate the viability of cultural theory (CT) as one such metric. In short, we find that CT meets all of these criteria, and therefore provides ACF scholars with a way to measure deep core beliefs across enduring public policy disputes that are demarcated by conflicting belief systems. Accordingly, we advocate its use in future studies.     

Thermally assisted OSL: A potent tool for improvement in minimum detectable dose and extension of dose range of Al2O3:C

The influence of electron-phonon interaction on the shape of the optically stimulated luminescence decay curve of Al₂O₃:C has been studied using thermally assisted optically stimulated luminescence (TA-OSL). The minimum detectable dose (MDD) of a phosphor depends on the standard deviation of the background signal which affects the signal-to-noise ratio. The standard deviation of the background signal reduces at lower stimulation light intensity while the readout time increases. Further, measurement at higher temperature enhances the OSL signal with faster decay due to the temperature dependence of photo-ionization cross-section. To achieve the same decay constant and more signal, the temperature of measurement was raised. As a result of lowering the stimulation in-tensity at higher temperature (85°C) the overall MDD of α-Al₂O₃:C was found to improve by 1.8 times. For extension of dose linearity in higher range, deeper traps were studied by simultaneous application of CW-OSL and thermal stimulation up to 400°C, using a linear heating rate of 4K/s. By using this method, two well defined peaks at 121°C and 232°C were observed. These TA-OSL peaks have been correlated with two deeper defects which can be thermally bleached at 650°C and 900°C respectively. These deeper defects are stable up to 500°C, so they can store absorbed dose information even if the sample is inadvertently exposed to light or heat. The dose vs. TA-OSL response from deep traps of α-Al₂O₃:C was found to be linear up to 10 kGy, thus extending its application for high dose dosimetry.     

Improving Child Nutrition? The Integrated Child Development Services in India

Levels of child malnutrition in India have fallen only slowly during the 1990s, despite significant economic growth and considerable expenditure on the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme, of which the major component is supplementary feeding for malnourished children. To begin to unravel this puzzle, this article assesses the programme's placement and its outcomes, using NFHS data from 1992 and 1998. The authors find that programme placement is clearly regressive across states. The states with the greatest need for the programme — the poor Northern states which account for nearly half of India's population and which suffer from high levels of child malnutrition — have the lowest programme coverage and the lowest budgetary allocations from the central government. Programme placement within states is more progressive: poorer and larger villages have a higher probability of having an ICDS centre, as do those with other development programmes or community associations. In terms of outcomes, the authors find little evidence of programme impact on child nutrition status in villages with ICDS centres.