Documents found
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36631.More information
The tens of thousands of workers who entered the domestic service sector in twentieth century Jamaica included young persons, most of whom were female and some of whom were « children ». While some were recruited as paid servants, others were placed (sometimes through informal « adoptions ») into households where they performed domestic labour in exchange for the necessities of life and, they hoped, access to an education. As pervasive as these circumstances were, not a great deal is known about the working lives of these « child » servants. This paper seeks to contribute to discussions about child domestic workers, gendered domestic labour, informal adoptions, constructions of childhood as well as potentially exploitative, and possibly servile, « child » labour. It argues that a long-extant culture of work, widely varying conditions of labour, gendered, racialized and classed definitions of childhood and the intersections of international and local laws, created a complex sub-sector of workers whose experiences destabilized the categorisations of domestic service, servitude, family and childhood.
Keywords: Johnson, « enfants » domestiques, adoptions informelles, enfance, travail servile, Johnson, « Child » Domestic Workers, Informal Adoptions, Childhood, Servile Labour, Johnson, sirvientas « niñas », adopciones informales, infancia, trabajo servil
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36632.More information
In this paper, the author examines the return of kings to the public arena in Benin. Indeed, since the very beginning of colonization, the pre-colonial kingdoms have been under the watchful eyes of the rulers who, by making them heritage, lay claim to their power. The author sets out the idea that the king, as a representation of pre-colonial authority builds himself up through images of power, which nourish democratization and the processes of decentralization in contemporary Benin. Thus, she looks closely at Louis Marin's concept of representation as power through a few portraits of kings, who emerged after the National conference discussing it in the context of Claude Lefort's theory of the locus of power in democracy as an empty space.
Keywords: Tall, royauté, patrimoine, démocratie, représentation, pouvoir, Bénin, Tall, Kingship, Heritage, Democracy, Representation, Power, Benin, Tall, realeza, patrimonio, democracia, representación, poder, Benín
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36633.More information
AbstractAfter fifty years of catching up to the U. S. level of productivity, since 1995 Europe has been falling behind. The growth rate in output per hour over 1995-2003 in Europe was just half that in the United States, and this annual growth shortfall caused the level of European productivity to fall back from 94 percent of the U. S. level to 85 percent. Fully one-fifth of the European catch-up (from 44 to 94 percent) over the previous half-century has been lost over the period since 1995.Disaggregated studies of industrial sectors suggest that the main difference between Europe and the U. S. is in ICT-using industries like wholesale and retail trade and in securities trading. The contrast in retailing calls attention to regulatory barriers and land-use regulations in Europe that inhibit the development of the ‘big box' retailing formats that have created many of the productivity gains in the U. S. For many decades, the U. S. and Europe have gone in opposite directions in the public policies relevant for metropolitan growth. The U. S. has promoted highly dispersed low-density metropolitan areas through its policies of building intra-urban highways, starving public transit, providing tax subsidies to home ownership, and allowing local governments to maintain low density by maintaining minimum residential lot sizes. Europeans have chosen different policies that encourage high-density residential living and retail precincts in the central city while inhibiting the exploitation of ‘greenfield' suburban and exurban sites suitable for modern ‘big box' retail developments.The middle part of the paper draws on recent writing by Phelps: economic dynamism is promoted by policies that promote competition and flexible equity finance and is retarded by corporatist institutions designed to protect incumbent producers and inhibit new entry. European cultural attributes inhibit the development of ambition and independence by teenagers and young adults, in contrast to their encouragement in the U. S. While competition, corporatism, and culture may help to explain the differing transatlantic evolution of productivity growth, they reveal institutional flaws in both continents that are inbred and likely to persist. The final section of the paper identifies the roots of the favorable environment for innovation in the U.S. compared to Europe. Elements include an openly competitive system of private and public universities, government subsidies to universities through peer-reviewed research grants rather than unconditional subsidies for free undergraduate tuition, the world dominance of U.S. business schools and management consulting firms, strong U.S. patent protection, a flexible financial infrastructure making available venture capital finance to promising innovations, the benefits of a common language and free internal migration, and a welcoming environment for highly-skilled immigrants.
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36634.More information
This paper seeks to reexamine monetary implications of financial dualism. Improving the framework of Sidrauski (1967), Montiel (1991), Agénor and Alper (2009) with decentralized deposits for which, agents have preference (Ary Tanimoune, 2007), we derive the deposit supply of non-financial agents on the fundable market. We show that both deposit interest rates of microfinance institutions (MFI) and bank have the same direct or indirect effect on the decentralized deposit supply; this effect depends on a critical value of interest rates differential. The expected substitution effect of the rise of bank deposit interest rate holds if and only if rates differential is less than this critical level. Then, we conclude that deposit interest rate policy of banking sector remains ineffective when interest rates differential between the two subsectors is relatively low. With this theoretical anchoring, not only the finding qualifies the proposition of Eboué (1990) that decentralized deposits reinforce bank financing activities by best savings mobilization for productive investment issue, but also, it gives some explanation of the financial liberalization policies failures in less developed countries. Moreover, the model enables us to establish inverse relation between decentralized deposits supply and interest rate in the money market.
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36635.More information
The courts have remained the Holy Grail for Amazigh activists in Morocco who seek institutionalized legitimacy for Tamazight (« Berber ») and an end to language discrimination and Arabic dominance in administrations. There is no official state policy for handling legal affairs in the indigenous Tamazight language ; Arabic instead dominates legal matters. Yet as I argue in this article, the « state » is comprised of individual civil servants, including judges and clerks, many of whom do use regional Tamazight varieties in the course of their work, including the task of registering customary marriages through mobile courthouses, which I examine here as the result of fieldwork and interviews. Judges' language practices and ideologies merit our attention in any assessment of the political economy of language in Morocco, particularly given the high status and respect granted to these state representatives. Court personnel navigate political necessities according to local constraints and opportunities – including linguistic ones – and in so doing help shape the broader political economy of language in Morocco.
Keywords: Hoffman, économie de la langue, idéologies langagières, langue et droit, tribunaux, droits des peuples indigènes, genre, Amazight, Imazighen (Berbères), tamazight, Maroc, Hoffman, Political Economy of Language, Language Ideologies, Language and Law, Courts, Indigenous Rights, Gender, Amazight, Imazighen (Berbers), Morocco, Hoffman, economía de la lengua, ideología lingüística, lengua y derecho, tribunales, derechos de los pueblos indígenas, genero, Amazight, Imazighen (Bereberes), tamazight, Marruecos
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36636.
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36637.More information
This essay sheds light on the multitude of ways in which photography can be used to research health and vulnerabilities by drawing upon three research projects conducted in Brazil. In the first research project, photography is a documentary source used to explore the definitions of insanity and normalcy in the context of psychiatric clinics throughout different periods, and to capture more recent local creative experiences in the context of the Brazilian psychiatric reform. Then, on the basis of an account consisting of choreographic images of bodies who work in tidal waters, photography allows readers to broaden their understanding of the daily work of island shellfish harvesters. Lastly, we share the experiences of an action research project that organized self-portrait workshops for Black youth living in a working-class district of Salvador, to promote healthy physical and sexual practices and ethnic-racial and gender-based empowerment. By taking a careful look at groups subject to social invisibility, vulnerability or a certain degree of stigmatization, these projects uncover social and political inequalities that have been shaped by history. These echoed experiences enhance the heuristic and sensitive dimensions of photography, whose place in research contributes towards preserving the ability to imagine and create, so necessary to moving beyond the methodological imitation that is captured in the production of knowledge.
Keywords: Photographie, santé, vulnérabilité, corps, mouvements, imagination, Photography, health, vulnerability, body, movement, imagination
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36638.More information
ABSTRACTThe objective of the present research is to test whether Canadian mutual funds which charge subscription fees achieve higher performance than those which do not, in order to compensate their shareholders for such fees. Indirectly, the research is also a test of the efficiency hypothesis in the mutual funds market.To compare the performance of mutual funds which charge subscription fees to those that do not, measures such as Jensen's alpha, Sharpe and Treynor indices, have been used, as well as significance tests developed by Jobson and Korkie (1981) on differences of performance measures. The data covered 226 Canadian mutual funds and 75 months from JuIy 1981 to September 1987.The results show that there is no significant relationship between subscription fees and performance. They confirm the results of past studies that mutual funds who charge subscription fees do not realize better performance than those that do not. That mutual funds which charge subscription fees, in some cases up to 9% of the invested amount, still attract a relatively large volume of individual investors' funds is an indication of a non negligible degree of inefficiency in the Canadian mutual funds market.
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36639.More information
Surveillance process related to economic policies was established in the franc zone after the monetary adjustment of 1994. This article proposes to analyze not only the theoretical foundation and the intricacities of this experience, but also an evaluation considering the convergence requirements and the convergence of the real economy. It analyses, in addition to this, the problems facing a balanced policy-mix in this monetary union.
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36640.More information
The creation at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde of La nef des sorcières, a play comprising texts by seven authors, is recognised as a key moment in the emergence of militant feminist theatre during the 1970s and 1980s. The reception of the show and the published text shows that the attention of the public and critics was directed particularly toward the feminist themes conveyed by the play and the commentary it contained about the workings of patriarchy in women's private lives. However, the objective of the authors and actors was much broader than simple social commentary. It was not their intention to reduce the space of theatre to a mere political platform. Luce Guilbeault, who initiated the project and was involved as director, author and actor, wanted like the others, in addition to stirring discussion, to shake up theatre's sexist foundations, enlarge the space of the collective imaginary, transform the masculinist symbolic order of Québec culture, and open wide audience's horizons of expectations. When her Actrice en folie suffers a loss of memory and tears off her costume at the time she first comes on stage, it is an opening onto an experimental show and the invention of new kinds of theatricality in the feminine. It is a radical interrogation of the canonical practices, codes, rules, languages, and conventions for acting and structuring theatre. These traditions have been functioning for millennia to make possible the aestheticisation of dominant sexist fantasies and ideologies.