In this paper, we introduce a unique dataset derived from a survey conducted among 450 Syrian refugee workers and the owners/managers of the firms in which they are employed in Istanbul, Turkey. We utilise this data to investigate the connection between the wage-productivity gap and perceived economic and social discrimination. The findings of the study indicate that individuals facing a wider wage-productivity gap tend to report higher levels of economic and social discrimination. These results remain consistent even after incorporating various variables at both the worker and firm levels into the analysis. These findings imply potential policy recommendations that policymakers should take into account.

Since its introduction in the early 2000s, legislation relating to the voting rights of Italians abroad has enabled millions of residents of voting age outside of Italy to engage in homeland elections and elect their own MPs. The inclusion of Italian citizens abroad in the Italian polity has nevertheless translated into a patchy electoral engagement. This article does not intend to provide an analysis of the voting choices in Italy's overseas constituency. Instead, it delves into external vote dynamics to provide insights into overseas Italians’ abstention in parliamentary elections and referenda. After summarising the history of the introduction of Italy's peculiar model of external voting, drawing on the results of an online survey of Italians abroad, the article examines the factors influencing turnout, with specific attention to the eligible voters’ personal characteristics. It also focuses on the attitude of Italians abroad towards possible reforms aiming at increasing electoral participation. It concludes that country of birth and Italian language skills are among the most relevant variables not only to assess what fosters or inhibits external voting, but also to gauge the opinion of voters residing outside Italy about proposals to reform the procedures regulating the exercise of suffrage from abroad.

Pesticide handling is a critical component of many food supply chains yet labor markets for pesticide handlers are little studied. This study uses data from the U.S. national survey to show that relative to other farmworkers, pesticide handlers get paid 15% more. To understand this premium, matching techniques are used to identify workers who are observationally equivalent in every way except pesticide handling. Using these methods, approximately half of the wage premium can be related back to observable characteristics, including crop type, geographic location, legal work authorization, education, experience, and other personal characteristics.

Large-scale population surveys have been an important source of data for the study of migration, and in many countries provide the only widely accessible data on migrants’ characteristics and outcomes after they arrive. For immigration policymakers, however, official survey data have some important limitations. Nonresponse to surveys is particularly likely to affect newly arrived migrants, biasing analysis toward more settled populations who have different characteristics (e.g., different fiscal costs), and hindering analysis of how integration outcomes evolve after arrival. Survey data are not well suited to capturing the dynamics of a mobile population, particularly among groups of migrants who spend substantial periods outside the country. And perhaps most importantly, official survey data usually identify migrants by country of birth and nationality (and sometimes self-reported reason for migration) but rarely include information on a person’s legal status either at arrival or at the time of data collection. This significantly limits the possibilities for evaluating policy and the impacts of policy changes: the characteristics of migrants coming for different reasons can vary enormously, so policymakers should be cautious about assuming that aggregate evidence on migrants or migration will be relevant to the specific routes on which they are taking decisions. This article illustrates some of these problems in practice showing how official survey data in the United Kingdom have been unable to answer one of the key questions facing the government, namely how many and which EU citizens need to apply to secure their residence rights after Brexit.

In developing countries, problems such as malnutrition and food insecurity are shifting from rural to urban areas because of rapid urbanization. However, regional variations in alimental food consumption within urban settings have often been ignored. Using survey data, our study examines regional patterns of expenditure on fresh vegetables, fruits, and peanut products in urban households of Ghana. After accounting for socioeconomic and demographic factors, food expenditure on fresh vegetables and peanut products and income elasticity vary significantly across major cities. Food distributors may adjust their marketing strategies, while policy makers should pay attention to possible disparities in urban areas.

This paper finds strong evidence of a positive relationship between currency risk premia and real exchange rate swings, significant at the 1% if not 0.1% level, for three US$ exchange rate samples. The risk premia are measured using survey data on traders' exchange rate forecasts. This circumvents the need for an auxiliary hypothesis of rationality and enables more direct focus on risk behavior. The analysis is conducted using the I(2) cointegrated VAR, which allows for time-varying trends in the variables. Evidence of persistent changes is found for interest rates, prices, and nominal and real exchange rates. Interest rate shocks appear to drive the system, whereas expectations are correcting only in the longer run.

Social exclusion is a dynamic multi-dimensional process that is interactive in nature. The complex interplay between domains, whereby each domain can act as a determinant, indicator and/or outcome of social exclusion, hinders understanding of the process and the mechanisms through which social exclusion exists. This article highlights the need to disentangle these pathways and move beyond descriptive accounts of social exclusion, presenting a new working framework that allows direct hypothesis testing of these between-domain relationships. Whilst this working framework can be applied to any population, this article focuses on older adults. Life events that can drive social exclusion such as bereavement and changes in health are more likely to occur in later life, and occur more frequently, increasing the risk of social exclusion for this population. Rooted in the new working framework, this article presents the construction of later life social exclusion measures for use with Understanding Society – the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study. The validity of these measures are considered by examining the characteristics of those aged 65 years and over who score the highest, and therefore experience the greatest level of exclusion. This new working framework and developed social exclusion measures provide a platform from which to explore the complex relationships between domains of social exclusion and ultimately provide a clearer understanding of this intricate multi-dimensional process.

The small Indian mongoose is among the worst of invasive alien species, yet the implications of managing the species are poorly understood. To address concerns of interest to practitioners and policymakers, we analyze survey data to document the impacts of this species in Fiji and conduct a cost-benefit analysis of management approaches that are both culturally appropriate and readily implementable: live trapping, kill trapping, and hunting. We find that the monetized benefits of kill trapping exceed the benefits of live trapping and hunting. Still, all of these management options are preferred to the status quo of no management.

Using trout producer survey data and the contingent valuation method, we estimate willingness to pay for a potential insurance policy. The survey was conducted in 2005 across the United States; 268 producers completed the survey instrument, resulting in a response rate of 81 percent. Design of the contingent valuation method takes into account two coverage levels and four premium rates. Using standard willingness-to-pay techniques, we assess the premium rate that producers with varying practices and regions are willing to pay for two different coverage levels of insurance. In general, trout producers appear willing to pay premium rates of 2 to 11 percent for these coverage levels.

This paper derives a time-varying model to examine the dynamic interdependencies between realized and expected inflation. The results show inflation expectations at the short and long horizon have been uncorrelated over the past three decades, which is consistent with the anchored inflation expectations hypothesis. There is also little evidence that changes in realized inflation have been the result of self-fulfilling variations in the expectations of economic agents. Despite high commodity prices and above-trend inflation, expectations since the financial crisis in 2008 have not become unhinged from fundamentals.

This article builds on recent work entitled The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett suggesting that Japan is one of the most harmonious affluent countries in the world, whereas the United Kingdom (UK) is one of the most unequal and hence disharmonious. In particular, the article revisits The Spirit Level evidence according to which Japan is a more equitable society in terms of income than any other industrialised country, but especially contrasts with a country such as the UK. The article provides a brief review of appropriate data in both Japan and the UK that could be used for the analysis of income inequality and identifies the best available microdata that would be most suitable for this purpose: the Japanese National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure microdata and the UK Family Resources Survey and Household Below Average Income survey microdata. It then presents a comparative analysis of income inequality measures in Japan and the UK and a discussion of the income distribution in both countries based on these data sets over the past twenty years. The findings suggest that the UK is much more unequal than Japan in terms of income distribution.

The aim is to analyse political participation among senior citizens in the West-Finnish region Österbotten/Pohjanmaa by using data from the 2005 GERDA (gerontological regional database) survey. The first research question related to patterns of political participation and the extent to which older people in this region engage in voting and non-institutionalised forms of participation. Secondly, the driving forces behind different dimensions of participation were assessed on an individual level by using a modified variant of the civic voluntarism model as suggested by Verba and colleagues. The results show a high propensity to vote among elders in this region, but they also suggest that so-called non-institutionalised participation is likely to become more common in the future. Moreover, even though the results support the so-called resource theory of political participation, the fit of the multivariate models were modest, which necessitates further research in order to understand fully the driving forces behind political participation of older people in this specific region.

The forests of western Amazonia support high site-level biological diversity, yet regional community heterogeneity is poorly understood. Using data from line transect surveys at 37 forest sites in south-eastern Peru, we assessed whether local primate assemblages are heterogeneous at the scale of a major watershed. We examined patterns of richness, abundance and community structure as a function of forest type, hunting pressure, land-management regime and geographic location. The primate assemblage composition and structure varied spatially across this relatively small region of Amazonia (≈ 85 000 km2), resulting from large-scale species patchiness rather than species turnover. Primate species richness varied among sites by a factor of two, community similarity by a factor of four and aggregate biomass by a factor of 45. Several environmental variables exhibited influence on community heterogeneity, though none as much as geographic location. Unflooded forest sites had higher species richness than floodplain forests, although neither numerical primate abundance nor aggregate biomass varied with forest type. Non-hunted sites safeguarded higher abundance and biomass, particularly of large-bodied species, than hunted sites. Spatial differences among species assemblages of a relatively generalist taxon like primates in this largely undisturbed forest region imply that community heterogeneity may be even greater in more species-rich taxa, as well as in regions of greater forest habitat diversity.

Periodic shortfalls of organic food have been commonplace in the USA. Shortages, created when demand grows faster than supply, have been exacerbated by relatively slow growth of certified organic farmland (in comparison to growth in retail sales) over the past decade. Organic intermediaries, referred to as handlers in the US national organic standards, work with farmers and other handlers in moving organic products along the supply chain, and are often the first to feel the effects of tight supplies at the farm level. These firms have a variety of mechanisms available to procure needed ingredients when organic products are in short supply: contracts with suppliers, encouraging suppliers to transition to organic, working with suppliers to increase their output, working with new suppliers, providing technical assistance with organic standards and production methods, and making less than load shipment arrangements with suppliers. Survey data collected from certified organic handlers are used to identify characteristics that make it more likely that an organic handler will undertake activities with suppliers to affect the supply of organic products. Handlers most likely to work with their suppliers had been in business for longer periods of time, bought from growers or grower cooperatives, and were more likely to be wholesalers. Handlers who consider price as important were less likely to undertake activities with their supplies to increase the supply or flow of organic products.

This article is focused on one of the most relevant novelties in the Italian electoral market of the past decade: the emerging phenomenon of intermittent abstentionism. Rather than an increase in overall abstentionism rates, aggregate and survey data show a clear increase in the number of floating voters who swing between voting and non-voting. After a description of the characteristics of intermittent abstensionists, the article discusses the relationship between different electoral systems at different levels of government and territorial differentiation as far as voting participation is concerned. It then discusses the impact of intermittent abstentionism on the results of the 2006 general election where the parties’ electoral campaigns appear to have been aimed at mobilising intermittent abstensionists. The article concludes with some considerations of the Italian electoral cycle, particularly in relation to the changes generated by the run-up to the 2008 elections.