Search results for " America."

Rethinking Community Quality of Life in Latin American Countries

2017

The community is a totality which is meaningful to the people that form part of it. In this sense community is more than a geographic concentration; it is a concept that implies the inclusion of diversities and their being allowed to share within it. It is related to social support, intersubjective, participation, consensus, common beliefs, and a joint effort which aims at a major objective: intense and extensive relationships. Quality of life is a multidimensional concept (Bramston 2002) and comprises objective and subjective components (Cummins and Cahill 2000). Quality of life in the community is a specificity of quality of life in general, and community well-being is also a predictor of…

Argentina’s Economic Development and Life Satisfaction Revisited – 1984–2012

2014

At the end of 1983, Argentina returned to democracy. Between 1983 and 2012, Argentina brought better economic and development results as wells as an improvement in the levels of happiness and life satisfaction. Although the macroeconomic cycle was characterized by high volatility, the country GDP per capita was 74 % higher in 2012 compared to 1983, implying an average annual growth rate of 1.9 %, much higher than the average Latin American country. Poverty and income distribution as well as health and education ones notably improved after time intervals of decadence.

Addressing Social Heterogeneity: Comparative Policy and Performance in Latin America

2012

Abstract Social heterogeneity has always been a critical problem in Latin American societies. The paper analyzes how Latin American democratic governments tackle social inequality and what effects these strategies have. Five countries are compared qualitatively-two countries with moderate left governments, following moderate strategies (Chile, Brazil) and two cases with radical left governments, following more radical strategies (Venezuela, Bolivia). In addition, Mexico is included as a control due to its conservative government. Different policy strategies are described and the effects of the policies are analyzed. Do radical efforts yield a better result regarding social equality? The re…

Redes de colaboración y producción científica sudamericana en medicina clínica, ISI Current Contents 2000-2009

2012

Background International collaboration is increasingly used in biomedical research. Aim To describe the characteristics of scientific production in Latin America and the main international collaboration networks for the period 2000 to 2009. Material and methods Search for papers generated in Latin American countries in the Clinical Medicine database of ISI Web of Knowledge v.4.10 - Current Contents Connect. The country of origin of the corresponding author was considered the producing country of the paper. International collaboration was analyzed calculating the number of countries that contributed to the generation of a particular paper. Collaboration networks were graphed to determine the…

Regional Inequality in Latin America: Does It Mirror the European Pattern?

2020

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the comparative evolution of regional inequality over the course of the historical economic development processes in four countries of South West Europe—France, Italy, Portugal and Spain—and nine countries of Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Our analysis, which goes back to the nineteenth century, shows that regional income inequality has followed over time what appears now to be an N-shaped evolution in both regions. However, both experiences differ markedly and we identify the main stylized facts of these trajectories. First, Latin America begun the period with higher levels of regional i…

Do firms share the same functional form of their growth rate distribution? A statistical test

2014

We introduce a new statistical test of the hypothesis that a balanced panel of firms have the same growth rate distribution or, more generally, that they share the same functional form of growth rate distribution. We applied the test to European Union and US publicly quoted manufacturing firms data, considering functional forms belonging to the Subbotin family of distributions. While our hypotheses are rejected for the vast majority of sets at the sector level, we cannot rejected them at the subsector level, indicating that homogenous panels of firms could be described by a common functional form of growth rate distribution.

“A certain amount of ‘recantation’”: On the origins of Frank H. Knight’s antipositivism

2016

The aim of this paper is to investigate in some detail the origins of Knight’s antipositism and to assess the main influences that brought him to a change in methodological perspective after 1921. As importantly, what follows is also an attempt to increase our general understanding of the methodological debates taking place during the early decades of the last century and to shed new light on the inherently pluralistic character of US interwar economics. This paper is organized as follows: the first section outlines Knight’s methodological views as presented in his early works; the second section discusses Knight’s “recantation” and his attack on behavioristic social science; the third sect…

Money Doctoring After World War II: Arthur I. Bloomfield and the Federal Reserve Missions to South Korea

2009

In this paper we analyse the scientific contributions of the New York Fed economist Arthur I. Bloomfield. A Canadian born economist, in 1941 Bloomfield took his PhD in economics at the University of Chicago, under the supervision of Jacob Viner and then joined the staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as a Research Economist and stayed there until 1958. In this position, Bloomfield combined scholarly research on recent economic history and international financial and banking problems with active service as a member of various committees and commissions, both in the United States and abroad. While on leave from the Fed, he accepted appointments as a consultant and advisor to various …

Springboarding: a new geographical landscape for European foreign investment in Latin America

2011

Assessing the performance of the Latin American and Caribbean banking industry: Are domestic and foreign banks so different?

2015

AbstractThis paper studies the relative performance of domestic and foreign banks in the Latin American and Caribbean banking industry. Data Envelopment Analysis is used to compute technical efficiency scores for the years 2001 and 2013. Our main contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we assess performance at the level of the management of specific production factors. On the other hand, we distinguish program efficiency from managerial efficiency, which allows us to evaluate whether the differences in technical efficiency between national and foreign banks are due to the use of different technologies (program efficiency) or, conversely, differences in the managerial capacities of manager…