Book Review: Ankush Agrawal and Vikas Kumar, Numbers in India’s Periphery: The Political Economy of Government Statistics

Ankush Agrawal and Vikas Kumar, Numbers in India’s Periphery: The Political Economy of Government Statistics. Cambridge University Press, 2020, 416 pp., $120.00. ISBN: 9781108486729 (Hardback).

Strengthening Local Governance of Secondary Forest in Peru

Natural forest regrowth is critical for restoring ecosystem services in degraded landscapes and providing forest resources. Those who control tenure and access rights to these secondary forest areas determine who benefits from economically charged off-farm opportunities such as finance for forest restoration, selling carbon credits, and receiving payment for ecosystem services. We explore multiple dimensions of secondary forest governance in Peru, where the lack of official government statistics of the extent, geography, and ownership, coupled with low state capacity, prevents the development of governance structures that could stimulate their sustainable management. In this paper, we review the challenges to secondary forest governance, and the opportunities to strengthen it, focusing on beneficial outcomes for smallholder farmers. We characterize secondary forest types, extent, and persistence in Peru, followed by a presentation of the social dimensions of their governance. We identify four entry points for government to take action: national mapping of the socio-geography of second growth forest, regularize the property rights of untitled landholders, relax forest regulations, and provide incentives, not sanctions, for secondary forest management. Overall, we recommend folding secondary forest governance into a landscape approach. In Peru, strengthening local forest governance could help to drive benefits of climate change mitigation incentives directly to local forest stewards.

Evidence of a Threshold Size for Norwegian Campsites and Its Dynamic Growth Process Implications—Does Gibrat’s Law Hold?

Although campsites are an important segment of the tourist sector, few applied articles have analyzed their growth path and tested Gibrat’s Law for firms within this industry. This knowledge can be of importance to the authorities when analyzing the regional impacts of growth in this sector. With government statistics from the last decade, we use a GMM framework to test the stricter version of Gibrat’s Law, which consist of three parts: the campsites’ growth trend, how they carry over success and failure, and how volatile their size is. The first and third part are rejected for Norwegian campsites, leading to a rejection of Gibrat’s Law. To see if firms of different sizes follow different dynamics, we split the sample in three parts. Here, we find evidence of a threshold size, as large campsites follow a fundamentally different dynamic than small and medium campsites. Specifically, large campsites gain no stability in revenue by further increases in size, whereas they carry over success/failure across years. The opposite is true for the rest of the sector. Gibrat’s Law is rejected on at least one count for each of the sub-samples. Lastly, we supplement the analysis with economy-wide and firm-specific variables to test further hypotheses.

Mystical Sects on Territory of Tobolsk Province of 18th — Early 20th Centuries: Distribution and Number of Followers

The article is devoted to the study of the history of the mystical sectarianism spread on the territory of the Tobolsk province in the 18th — early 20th centuries. The main groups of mystical sects in the Tobolsk province are revealed. The features of the sects’ doctrine are characterized. The socially dangerous nature of the activities of Eunuchs, causing physical and moral harm to persons involved in the sect, is characterized on specific historical material. The authors come to the conclusion about the relativity of government statistics on the number of sectarians in the region. The nature of the interaction of sectarian communities with the state, as well as the implementation of confessional policy on the territory of the province is presented in the work. Analysis of forensic sources allows us to conclude that the use of severe punishment, including imprisonment, deprivation of all rights of the state and exile to remote areas of the country, largely contributed to the departure of Eunuchs from the practice of castrating their followers, the use of less cruel methods of achieving “bodily purity”. The dynamics of the degree of distribution and the nature of the settlement of sectarians are considered. The research was carried out on the basis of the analysis of the complex of legislative, statistical and record keeping sources of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (Moscow) and the State Archive in Tobolsk.

Describing the impacts of COVID-19 on the labor market in Japan until June 2020

The Labor Force Survey, a large-scale government statistics, and the causal forest algorithm are used to estimate the group average treatment effect of the COVID-19 on the employment status for each month from January to June 2020. We find that (1) because of the seasonality in employment status at monthly level, whether we use January 2020 as the base month for comparison, as done in most of the studies or whether we use the same month last year as the base comparison group makes a large difference; (2) whether we include those who are absent from work among the employed or not makes a large difference in the measure of the impact of COVID-19 and its changes; (3) if we use the employment measure which does not include those who are absent from work among the employed, 25–30% among the employed are adversely affected and that 10% of the employed experienced more than 10% decline in employment probability in April, 2020; (4) those who are the most affected by the COVID-19 are those who are unemployed or work part-time in the hotel and restaurant industry and service occupations; (5) in addition, younger and female respondents are more affected than are older and male respondents; and (6) we observe no clear differences in the impacts of COVID-19 with respect to living location, education status, and firm size among the most affected.

“Hush, Girl! Don’t Share Your Family Troubles with the Outside World”

Domestic abuse is a significant problem in Sri Lanka with government statistics showing that 17% of ever-married women between the ages of 15 to 49 have experienced some form of domestic abuse. However, this number could be higher in reality, given the prevalence of physical and emotional abuse in situations where partners live together without being married, in situations where the woman is under 15 years of age (Sri Lanka has a 2% child marriage rate), and due to low self-reportage. Although Sri Lankans can only be married after they reach 18 years of age, the war and economic conditions have resulted in a high number of child marriages in recent times. In this paper, I look at two main questions: What is the correlation between child marriage and the beginning of abuse? What is the correlation between pregnancy and the beginning of abuse? The paper draws from desk research. The paper looks only at physical abuse: It is acknowledged that the arena of emotional abuse was recognized only in 2005 after the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act was introduced in 2005 and that even now, such abuse is not given the prominence it deserves in conversations on domestic abuse. However, it was not possible in this research to examine emotional abuse due to time and resource constraints and also because even today the aspect of domestic physical abuse is also not accepted as a problem in Sri Lanka. Keywords: Domestic abuse; intimate partner violence; silencing women in intimate partnerships, child marriages, marital rape

Accuraatheid van de door de Vlaamse overheid gepubliceerde statistiek van de doodsoorzaken: een forensische benadering

A study into the accuracy of the published cause of death statistics by the government of Flanders, Belgium The cause of death (COD) stated on death certificates is the key component to compose COD statistics in Belgium. The aim of the study was to ascertain whether CODs of homicides as confirmed by autopsy by the Department of Forensic Sciences (DoFS) at the University of Leuven were reported as such in government statistics. Out of 455 autopsies performed by the DoFS between 01/01/2010 and 31/12/2013, 64 medicolegal homicides were retained, which in turn were cross-referenced with a provided list of all deaths in the same period by the government. Applying the ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision) methodology to the study population, 97% of the attained codes fell under the section ‘Assault’. This concerned only 78% when coded by the government. The remaining were located under the less specific section ‘Event of undetermined intent’. One homicide was coded by the government as a death by natural causes and one death was not accounted for. Specific training for physicians on correctly filling out death certificates, a more user-friendly certificate and systematic feedback of autopsy findings to government agencies are proposed in order to increase the accuracy of COD statistics.

Employment of senior citizens in the Russian Federation: characteristics of trends and opportunities for implementation

Providing employment opportunities for senior citizens in the context of increasing life expectancy of the  population is worldwide recognized as a necessary condition for active aging. Solution of this problem is mainstreamed due to raising the retirement age. The goals of this research is to describe the trends in the sphere of employment of senior citizens in the Russian Federation, which includes people of retirement and pre-retirement age, as well as assess the possibilities of implementing work activity of “age” employees. The problem of employment of Russian senior citizens is examined via analysis and systematization of the government statistics and secondary analysis of the data of monitoring and one-time sociological research (Russian monitoring of economic situation and public health, online surveys of employers and job applicants, local regional studies). The acquired results reveal the existing contradiction between the increasing motivation of senior citizens to continue work activity and inability of the system of social production to ensure necessary opportunities for its implementation. The steps taken by the government on providing legal guarantees for employment of the senior citizens, namely people of pre-retirement age, have not yet yielded the desired results. Having analyzed the factors that promote or impede the employment of senior citizens, the authors conclude on the need of the following issues to be addressed as a matter of urgency: interest of the employers in providing employment for senior citizens, and overcoming ageist stereotypes in the society that unreasonably reduce the value of labor capacity of “age” employees.

Evaluating irrigated rice yields in Japan within the Climate Zonation Scheme of the Global Yield Gap Atlas

The Global Yield Gap Atlas (GYGA) is an international project that addresses global food production capacity in the form of yield gaps (Yg). The GYGA project is unique in employing its original Climate Zonation Scheme (CZS) composed of three indexed factors, i.e. Growing Degree Days (GDD) related to temperature, Aridity Index (AI) related to available water and Temperature Seasonality (TS) related to annual temperature range, creating 300 Climate Zones (CZs) theoretically across the globe. In the present study, the GYGA CZs were identified for Japan on a municipality basis and analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed on irrigated rice yield data sets, equating to actual yields (Ya) in the GYGA context, from long-term government statistics. The ANOVA was conducted for the data sets over two decades between 1994 and 2016 by assigning the GDD score of 6 levels and the TS score of 2 levels as fixed factors. Significant interactions with respect to Ya were observed between GDD score and TS score for 13 years out of 21 years implying the existence of favourable combinations of the GDD score and the TS score for rice cultivation. The implication was also supported by the observation with Yg. The lower values of coefficient of variance obtained from the CZs characterized by medium GDD scores indicated the stability over time of rice yields in these areas. These findings suggest a possibility that the GYGA-CZS can be recognized as a tool suitable to identify favourable CZs for growing crops.