Introduction to the Special Issue on Property Rights in India: Theory and Practice.

This paper examines optimal policy for foreign exchange (FX) reserve management without commitment. The stylized linear-quadratic model incorporates three key elements: (i) fear of floating, (ii) forward-looking exchange rates, and (iii) the cost of reserve management. The paper first analyzes two benchmark optimal policies: the Ramsey policy (with commitment) and the Markov-Perfect policy (without commitment). It then proposes a sustainable plan that addresses the time inconsistency in reserve management. By following this plan, the government without commitment achieves the Ramsey outcome in equilibrium.

The American University offers courses in the study of Africa among different disciplines and also Africa area studies on an interdisciplinary basis.

It is recognized that there is a need for people who have a specialized discipline in one aspect of Africa, such as anthropology, linguistics, history, economics, or political science. There is also a need for a “general practitioner” (interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary) approach. Students are given the opportunity to pursue either procedure, or a combination of these procedures.

A student may study for an M.A. in African area studies, or for an M.A. or Ph.D. in international relations, government and public administration, business administration, or in one of the other disciplines in The American University, with an emphasis on Africa. A student may also study for an M.I.S. (Master of International Service), with an emphasis on Africa.

The larger proportion of the graduate students in African studies have already had some professional experience in Africa and come here for either strengthening special needs or for more general breadth for their future work related to Africa. The American University provides an opportunity for a flexible program to meet particular needs as well as general interests of students.

The African Studies Program at The American University in Washington, D.C. has the special advantages of close association with African embassies, U.S. government departments, and the United Nations, in addition to research facilities of the Library of Congress. Students here also have the opportunity for contact with scholars who are specializing in other ares of the world which are having increasing relationships with Africa - - including Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

This article makes two important contributions. Firstly, it provides valuable insights into the motivations of working-class migrants in the second half of the nineteenth century, adding a new dimension to a scholarship focused on studies of forced migration or middle-class empire building. Its analysis of a rich body of published and unpublished letters from former institutionalized children reveals the primacy of financial gain in the migration decision and shows that working-class Britons saw the world beyond the British Isles as a space of opportunity, where they could leverage their mobility in pursuit of profit. Secondly, by arguing that juvenile emigrants need to be viewed as a heterogeneous body where age and gender made a difference in terms of experience, the article provides an important new perspective on institutional migration that has implications for wider literatures on childhood and youth. The average age of the boys studied for this article was sixteen and the research shows that they were active participants in the emigration process, shaping their own futures through their diverse decisions. Recognizing this significantly undermines the modern discourses of blame and victimhood that dominate the historiography and encourages us to re-evaluate our approach to nineteenth-century juvenile migration.

The Africa collections at Stanford University are housed largely in the University Library, the library of the Food Research Institute, and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. Although the major portion of the material is found in the Hoover Institution, the other two libraries constitute important resources. Special collections are located in the Branner Library (Geology), the Cubberley Library (Education), the Lane Medical Library, and the Law Library. The curator of the Hoover Africa Collection assists all university libraries by recommending titles of old and new items so that the various collections develop in all fields.

The University Library buys widely in the African field but accepts primary responsibility for all African material before 18 70 and in the areas of art, ethnography, geography, linguistics, literature, religion, sociology, statistics, and technical documents. The Government Documents Division receives general statistical annuals and bulletins from all African countries and statistical reports of foreign trade from most countries. An effort is made to acquire all census and development-planning material. Most departmental reports are also received. The Documents Division was long an official depository for British government documents and thus contains an outstanding collection of parliamentary debates, blue books, command papers, Foreign Office papers, and annual reports of the Colonial Office from the early nineteenth century. For France the debates of the Assemblée Nationale are held from 18 71 and the Journal Officiel from 1914; for Germany the Reichstag debates are complete from 1867. These together with the depository publications of the United Nations make a substantial collection of material relevant to Africa.

This paper explores the impact of return-to-office (RTO) mandates on workplace inequality, particularly within the context of recent shifts in federal policies. The rapid adoption of remote and hybrid work, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, offered significant benefits in terms of flexibility and work-life balance. However, recent regulatory changes, including RTO mandates, threaten to reverse these gains, disproportionately affecting women, caregivers, employees with disabilities, and low-wage workers. This paper critically examines the equity implications of RTO mandates and offers recommendations for industrial-organizational psychologists, organizational leaders, and policymakers to develop equitable, evidence-based approaches to remote and hybrid work that promote employee well-being and organizational effectiveness.

In September and October of 1964, I visited the various centers once forming links in the archival system of French West Africa. Contrary to what occurred in Equatorial Africa, the French left these archival holdings in place, except for current material which was shipped to the rue Oudinot (Ministry of Colonies) in Paris. The center of the West African system was the Archives of the Government-General in Dakar (later the High Commission). Based originally on the Senegalese holdings, this archive became an independent agency of the federal government and was the parent organization of subsidiary archives for Senegal, Mauritania, Soudan, Upper Volta, Niger, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. It was parallel in structure to the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (IFAN), which also had its headquarters in Dakar and maintained subsidiary centers for each territory. In some cases, the archives and IFAN centers were amalgamated (during World War II) and the history of the two organizations is often inseparable. This survey is an attempt to describe the establishment and development of these archival centers, how their material was organized and can be used for research, and their current status in the independent countries.

This article considers a three-dimensional latent factor model in the presence of one set of global factors and two sets of local factors. We show that the numbers of global and local factors can be estimated uniformly and consistently. Given the number of global and local factors, we propose a two-step estimation procedure based on principal component analysis (PCA) and establish the asymptotic properties of the PCA estimators. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that they perform well in finite samples. An application to the dataset of international trade reveals the relative importance of different types of factors.

Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE) model with households’, firms’, and banks’ default calibrated for Portugal, we assess the impact of some prudential policy measures adopted to mitigate COVID-19 economic effects: the flexibility measure and the dividends pay-out restriction. The joint use of the measures reinforces the support for credit achieved using the flexibility measure only and reduces the effort of banks to rebuild capital buffers once the pandemic crisis is over. Given the recovery and the measures’ withdrawal, we also consider distinct paths for replenishing capital buffers. Shorter transitions strengthen banks’ resilience, but longer transitions may be more suitable to ensure a smooth flow of lending to the economy.

This paper proposes a conceptual model of decision-making tying specific preferences to broader individual goals. Specifically, we consider terminal goals, representing fundamental objectives, and instrumental goals, serving as complexity-reducing intermediate steps toward achieving terminal goals and determining eventual preferences. Notably, the hierarchical goal structure allows for contextual misalignments between different instrumental goals, which may lead to suboptimal decisions – as evaluated from an outside perspective. Thus, applied to the discussion about nudging and paternalism, the model provides a methodological justification for paternalistic interventions as it is compatible with arguments in favour of interventions aimed to correct such choices.

Understanding consumers’ food wasting behaviours is crucial to reducing food waste. This study aimed to adapt the Food Wasting Behaviours Questionnaire (FWBQ) to Turkish and evaluate its validity and reliability. A cross-sectional study was conducted with 421 adults, preceded by a pilot study with thirty individuals to assess the intelligibility of the questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed on a subsample of 219 participants, followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on an independent subsample of 202 participants. Reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha (CA), and test-retest reliability was evaluated with the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) in a separate group of 100 participants. As a result of EFA, a six-factor structure emerged – diverging from the original five-factor model of the FWBQ – indicating that in the Turkish context, planning meals and planning shopping behaviours formed distinct dimensions. Three items with low factor loadings (< 0·30) were excluded, and the final version included twenty-seven items with a total explained variance of 57·3 %. CFA confirmed good model fit, and internal consistency was strong (CA = 0·700 to 0·924). Test-retest reliability was also high (ICC = 0·787 to 0·896). In conclusion, the Turkish version of the FWBQ is a valid and reliable tool for assessing a wide range of food wasting behaviours. The emergence of a sixth factor highlights the importance of cultural context in shaping food management routines and has implications for cross-cultural comparisons and future adaptations.

In the introduction for their recent state-of-the-art volume on English at the grassroots, Meierkord and Schneider (2021) point out the recurrent problem of Creolistic study not being fully incorporated into the World Englishes paradigm, arguing, like Mufwene (1997; 2001) and others, that English-based Creoles are best viewed as varieties of English ‘and, as such, require their integration into existing models and theories, too’ (11). Further work which seeks to overtly integrate Creole varieties within studies of English at the grassroots – the ‘new player in the World Englishes paradigm’ (Buschfeld 2001, 25) – has not been quickly forthcoming, though, with most of the work in the field focusing on ‘typical’ multilingual settings. In an attempt to remedy this, the current paper discusses the language situation in Trinidad, the last island in the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles. In Trinidad, Trinidadian English Creole (TEC) and Trinidadian English (TE) interact in a complex where English might be best viewed as a second dialect (ESD), rather than in one of the prototypical ENL, ESL, or EFL situations of acquisition or use (cf. Deuber 2014). After an exploration of the limited research that has been done on language use and social class in Trinidad, this paper compares those previous findings on morphosyntactic features with new data from short semi-structured interviews conducted with speakers who can be described as grassroots.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a significant health threat to people in corrections facilities due to communal living, inability to social distance, and high rates of comorbidity among incarcerated populations. Combined with the First Step Act of 2018, which granted incarcerated individuals seeking compassionate release access to the courts, the pandemic increased the number of people in federal prisons petitioning for early release due to health risk. Analysis of federal compassionate release case law throughout the pandemic reveals inconsistent judicial reasoning related to COVID-19-based requests. Inconsistently interpreted compassionate release factors include vaccination status, COVID-19 reinfection, and the “degree” of extraordinary circumstances considered. Varied application among federal districts produced inequitable access to compassionate release. Therefore, this analysis provides insight into how an unclear policy can create disparate public health outcomes and considerations for compassionate release determinations in future times of uncertainty, such as a pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, pandemic-driven nationalism surged in China, exemplified by widespread mockery and disparagement of India’s handling of the crisis in Chinese cyberspace. Adopting a linguistically grounded approach, this study scrutinizes how India is discursively constructed as an inferior Other amid COVID-19. It conducts a linguistically informed discourse analysis of a highly viewed text on Zhihu (China’s largest online Q&A platform). Drawing mainly on Halliday’s transitivity theory, this study unpacks the linguistic features in the chosen text, which, within a discourse of modern medicine, depicts the Indian people as trapped between hopelessly passive and absurdly overactive in the face of the pandemic. The text also casts the Indian government as an impotent foil to the Chinese government, a representation situated within a discourse of strong-state pandemic governance. By interrogating the non-official social media text through a linguistic lens, this study contributes to understanding China’s representational politics of Othering the non-West within the intertextual nexus between official and non-official spheres. It also contributes to making sense of the multidimensionality and ambivalence underlying Chinese national identity-making as well as “Orientalism within the ‘Orient’” in the Chinese context.