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Econometrics, as a total subject, is older than macroeconometric model building and deserves a separate historical inquiry. Early investigations of demand–supply functions, income distributions, family budgets, cost, and production functions have been the subject of historical study. The joint founding of the Econometric Society and the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics represented the beginnings of major steps forward from the 1930s. In addition to some of the papers presented at the Cowles Foundation anniversary party, there have been some separate studies by scholars from the group. More than ten years ago, a seminar was organized to compare models to appreciate their differences and to look for commonalities. In a first phase, the Model Comparison Seminar looked at distributions of multipliers across macroeconomic models, and the outcome of common applications of control theory. This chapter reviews briefly the focal points of interest during the historical period of macroeconometric model development.

Economic forecasts differ because forecasters use different macroeconomic models. However, even if everyone used the same model, all forecasts would not be identical. Most forecasts reflect a complex interaction among three elements. Unfortunately, little is known about the relative importance of these elements. This chapter addresses three kinds of question. The initial stage of the Model Comparison Seminar's project, starting in early 1986, has been the collection of relevant data, a laborious and time-consuming part of the project. The following results are a preliminary report on an ongoing effort. The conclusions, based on the limited experience so far, must be regarded as highly tentative. Any success that has been achieved should be largely credited to the modelers who participated in this exercise. This chapter compares model solutions based on different sets of conditioning information. In general, a model can be thought of as a conditional statement about the relationship between inputs (Xs) and outputs (Ys), or Y = f(X).

The Model Comparison Seminar has produced some striking findings. The differences in the properties of the major macroeconometric models are much bigger than one might have expected given their emphasized theoretical foundations, or given the similarity of the published economic forecasts. F. Gerard Adams and Lawrence Klein conclude that there is “considerable, one might even say astonishing,” variation in the behavior of models “largely intended for the same purposes.” Roger Brinner and Alert Hirsch refer to these sharp differences as “disturbing, particularly insofar as models share a common theoretical basis.” Stephen McNees shows that the models themselves agree much less on forecasts than do the forecasters: the forecasts of the exogenous policy variables and the ad hoc adjustments serve to make the different models' forecasts much more similar than they would be if the models alone accounted for the differences in forecasts.

In 2005, China participated for the first time in the International Comparison Program (ICP), which collects primary data across countries on the prices for an internationally comparable list of goods and services. This chapter examines the implications of the new Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rate for China's poverty rate and how it has changed over time. It provides estimates with and without adjustment for a likely sampling bias in the ICP data. Using an international poverty line of US$ 1.25 at 2005 PPP, the results show a substantially higher poverty rate for China than past estimates, with about 15% of the population living in consumption poverty, implying about 130 million more poor by this standard. The income poverty rate in 2005 is 10%, implying about 65 million more people living in poverty. However, the new ICP data suggest an even larger reduction in the number of poor since 1981.

Designs on currency are often seen as markers of political change, with the change in images at independence seen as a visual representation of the new nation. However, most studies have explored these issues in only one country, and focussed on the relationship between the new nation and its former colonial power. Here a comparative approach is taken, examining the design of coins for newly-independent Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to uncover the regional, as well as the domestic, international and transnational, dimensions of this change. Examining the process of designing and producing coins for these African countries, and the individuals and organisations (including the Bank of England and the Royal Mint) involved, shows that coin design and production changed only gradually during the period of decolonisation. It also demonstrates that the various political and commercial interests of the individuals and organisations involved affected the choices made about what images appeared on coins after independence. The chapter concludes by briefly considering the legacy of these debates in contemporary decisions about the designs for African currencies.

This chapter sets out the key arguments of Cultures of Decolonisation. It begins by exploring the existing historiography of decolonisation, before explaining the value of the interdisciplinary and transnational approach taken in the volume. It then delineates the authors’ approach to reframing the role of culture in decolonisation, highlighting three main arguments and strands of investigation. First, a claim is made for the agency of culture in a process more often understood through a political-economic lens; second, the value of focusing on the role of cultural institutions in decolonisation is emphasised; and third, the chapter contends that it is crucial to recognise the transnational and comparative character of cultures of decolonisation (and of decolonisation itself).

What characterizes a good translation of a philosophical text? Is there scholarly consensus about which translation, medieval or modern, of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed is best? To the extent that most scholars can agree as to the best translation, is this also the opinion of students and laymen? In Israel, some readers prefer for various reasons the 2002 Hebrew translation of Michael Schwarz, some the 1972 Hebrew translation of Rabbi Yosef Qafih, and some the classic early thirteenth-century translation of Samuel Ibn Tibbon. There are arguments to be made for preferring each one of them, and there is no consensus as to which is the best. In English, the situation is somewhat similar, although the “classic” and oft-considered “authoritative” translation by Michael Friedländer dates back only to 1881–85. Yet over the past decade or so, several learned scholars have independently of each other considered translating the Guide anew into English, while various arguments have been made in support of the need for a new English translation. Such arguments are relevant to the topic of this essay because they bring to the fore contemporary views on the question, what truly is most desired in a translation of Maimonides’ Guide?

In Chapters 4 and 5, we used four organizational life cycle models to develop predictions for the trajectories of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s appropriations over the forty-year period from their births in 1970 through 2010. In this chapter, we review findings from our studies of the CEQ and EPA, and we offer a general assessment of the power of the theoretical agency life cycle models. We also employ a framework we developed for comparing the models and for classifying the key variables in those models. This framework provides a means to move beyond the constraints of the existing literature, in which life cycle models are placed in either the “internalist” or “externalist” camps. We framed our study of the CEQ and EPA with two general views of what happens to public organizations during the process of implementing public law. One view is that the life of the executive branch organization will be relatively stable and untroubled as its leaders and professional staff pursue the organization’s statutorily assigned mission. The underlying presumption here is that all of the important political questions related to the tasks assigned to the agency have been addressed in the public law itself. Consequently, the work of the agencies will be largely technical and uncontroversial. The alternative view is that the political struggle over the passage of the laws the agencies are supposed to implement continues during the implementation stage of the policymaking process. The supporters of the law, inside and outside government, support the agency and its efforts. The opponents of the law, however, not only oppose the agency but also attempt to derail, or at least delay implementation of, the law. Thus, an agency’s trajectory over time, in the form of its resources for and vigor in support of its assigned implementation tasks, will depend in large part on the balance of power, inside and outside government, between those who support and oppose the agency.

This chapter develops a comparative framework for analyzing state land strategies across cities. This framework focuses on two fundamental variables that differentiate societies—the relative autonomy of land managers from non-state sources of social influence, and the extent of state control of urban land markets, specifically through state ownership of land. The chapter develops a basic typology of land management regimes: a political economy of the land grab (represented in the case studies by Indonesia); a political economy of state capitalist urban planning (represented by China); and a political economy of ‘occupancy urbanism’ (represented by India).

This chapter is based on reflections on doing ethnographic research. It argues the centrality of comparisons of the ethnographer’s personal experiences with that of the setting in which they are researching. First it examines more closely a theme raised in earlier chapters, about how HBOS staff sometimes questioned the idea of Scottish/English differences by mobilising other axes of difference based on region, class, gender, and so on. It then looks especially at some of the similarities in institutional change going on in the university sector compared with the HBOS case, and uses this as a basis to speculate about more general trends of change in large organisations and society as a whole, in both commercial and non-commercial sectors.

The Introduction argues for a new way of taking seriously the truth claims of ancient traditions of life and explains why the chosen three Stoics and three Christians best exemplify these claims. It goes on to show why more existentially engaged philosophical reflection is needed when it comes to the problem of “comparison” in modern religious studies.

This chapter begins the discussion in Part 3 of the promise and perils of comparison between different strong traditions of life. Using the work of thinkers and scholars such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Abraham Malherbe, and Troels Engberg-Pedersen, the chapter argues that the dominant modern way of comparing traditions is irreparably flawed. It then advocates for a new way of thinking through similarity/difference when it comes to incompatible and incommensurable truth claims.

The first chapter turns to Tagore, whose auto-translations stand as examples of degraded art both because translations fail to meet the criteria of aesthetic originality and because the critical consensus around Tagore’s English works is that they fail to transmit the beauty and flair of their Bengali originals. Rather than discount Tagore’s translations, I centralize them and examine how he turned unglamorous, second-order acts of literary production, such as compilation, translation, and editing, into modernist strategies for preserving linguistic difference and partial unintelligibility as a style of transnational contact across imperial lines of power. Through my close readings of Nationalism (1916) and The Home and the World (1919), I show how Tagore treated his Bengali originals not as hermetically-sealed, finished works of art, but rather as repositories of material. Their translation and rearrangement into English allowed him to mediate between utopian internationalisms that dreamed of perfect communication between nations and autarkic nationalisms that argued for the cultural self-sufficiency of the nation as a marker of its readiness for sovereignty. Against both these more absolutist positions of globalism and nationalism, Tagore’s auto-translations intervene with a model of national autonomy that precludes cultural organicism and a model of internationalism that makes imperfect communication a feature of globalized collectivity with which to grapple rather than an obstacle to overcome.

By way of analyzing the health doctrine of Dr. Zhuang Shuqi 莊淑旂 (1920-2015), arguably the most popular author of traditional medicine in contemporary Taiwan, this paper discovers a surprisingly close alliance between gender role and traditional medicine, an alliance that she created on the basis of the allegedly traditional practice of viewing food as medicine. Instead of promoting the general idea that food has health benefits, Dr. Zhuang used her own personal tragedies to argue for the provocative idea that inappropriate intake of food is what causes people to fall victim to cancer. As each food functions like a double-edged sword, both the major cause of and a powerful tool for coping with cancer, preparing food in the kitchen, in her eyes, becomes comparable to handling effective and dangerous drugs in the “family pharmacy.” As the result, Dr. Zhuang urged housewives to identify themselves with the role of the “family pharmacist” and to take responsibility for the health of the whole Family.”

This chapter fixes some even rational parameter p/q as usual. It shows that the pixelated spacetime slices of capacity 2p are combinatorially equivalent to certain of the tilings from P. Hooper's Truchet tile system [H]. Section 7.2 describes the Truchet tile system. Section 7.3 states the main result, the Truchet Comparison Theorem. One can view the Truchet Comparison Theorem as a computational tool for understanding some of the pixelated spacetime diagrams. Section 7.4 uses the Truchet Comparison Theorem to get more information about the surface Σ‎(p/q) from Corollary 6.6. Section 7.5 proves a curious result from elementary number theory which underlies the Truchet Comparison Theorem. Section 7.6 puts together the ingredients and proves the Truchet Comparison Theorem.

This chapter presents a positive program of comparison. In doing so, it criticizes the method and presuppositions of mimesis criticism (spearheaded by Dennis Ronald McDonald). Mimesis criticism compares texts on the basis of assuming direct genetic causations. A better theory vouches for polymorphous influence based on dynamic cultural interaction. Also treated is the notion of gospel genre, the identity of the evangelists, the themes of their gospels, and brief biographies of five contemporary Greco-Roman historians who serve as major sources of data: Diodorus of Sicily, Plutarch, Suetonius, Philostratus, and Iamblichus.

The economic growth and development of a country depend on a solid infrastructure and the robustness of systems that have been put in place. Together, these constitute a nation’s “engine of growth” and include housing, water, electricity, transportation, communication, and construction. It is postulated that the cost of doing business in Africa is much higher than in other regions, largely because of the poor quality of its infrastructure and to accessibility constraints. The distribution of price levels of these economic drivers, which contribute to the cost of doing business in Africa. Price level indices (PLIs) have been calculated to provide a comparison of the cost of selected infrastructure components across African countries. The data were collected from the 2005 round of the International Comparison Program (ICP) in Africa, covering 48 out of a total of 52 countries and 22 major aggregates of the national accounts.