International Cooperation to Manage High‐Skill Migration: The Case of India–U.S. Relations

Highly skilled people are among the most valuable factors of production in the contemporary world economy. Some have characterized the competition among nations for these people as a “brain drain” or “war for talent,” which imposes significant costs on the countries of emigration. However, the distribution of costs and benefits that results from high‐skill migration is not necessarily zero‐sum or fixed. It may be altered through international cooperation, producing a self‐reinforcing “win–win” scenario for sending and receiving countries. Bilateral cooperation, focused on specific sectors affected by migration, is the most promising approach for realizing such a scenario. This paper explores the prospects and potential for such cooperation between India and the United States, which comprise what is probably the world's largest high‐skill mobility relationship. After sketching the broad contours of the relationship, we explore the prospects for mutually beneficial cooperation in three specific fields of high‐skill migration: information technology services, medicine and nursing, and graduate education.     

U.S. MBA and Management Training Programs in Central and Eastern Europe

The transfer of the American model of management education to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is the subject of this paper. It specifically looks at the impact of a U.S. government-funded program to promote linkages between U.S. business schools and institutions in the CEE region. In 1990, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was authorized by the Congress to develop a program to assist the countries of the CEE region in their transition from command to market economies. This would consist of training and education in economics and management in nine countries from the Baltic states in the north to Albania in the south. This program, known as the Management Training and Economics Education Project (MTEEP) would include twelve grants amounting to nearly $100 million to eleven U.S. universities that would partner with 14 local institutions of higher education. The paper does not purport to contribute to theoretical literature, but rather to chronicle a trend in technology transfer. The author maintains that over a 10-year period MTEEP has contributed to a significant transfer of educational technology in the form of management education, especially in the establishment of MBA and executive MBA programs as well as management training programs.     

A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability

Examining onsets of political instability in countries worldwide from 1955 to 2003, we develop a model that distinguishes countries that experienced instability from those that remained stable with a two-year lead time and over 80% accuracy. Intriguingly, the model uses few variables and a simple specification. The model is accurate in forecasting the onsets of both violent civil wars and nonviolent democratic reversals, suggesting common factors in both types of change. Whereas regime type is typically measured using linear or binary indicators of democracy/autocracy derived from the 21-point Polity scale, the model uses a nonlinear five-category measure of regime type based on the Polity components. This new measure of regime type emerges as the most powerful predictor of instability onsets, leading us to conclude that political institutions, properly specified, and not economic conditions, demography, or geography, are the most important predictors of the onset of political instability.     

Regulation through titling laws: A case study of occupational regulation

This case study examines a form of occupational regulation infrequently examined in academic literature – titling laws. These laws regulate who may legally use a phrase, or title, to describe their work to the public. Focusing on the interior design industry, this article demonstrates how industry leaders use titling laws as the first step in a push for full occupational licensure. In so doing, they allege a need for regulation out of concern for public health and safety, but as data in this case study indicate, there appears to be no threat to public health and safety from unregulated interior designers. Instead, designers advocate for increased regulation of their own industry, through the evolution of titling laws to full licensure, due to the benefits it affords them.     

Regulatory Errors with Endogenous Agendas

How do a regulator's decisions depend on the characteristics and strategies of its external clients? We develop a theory of approval regulation in which an uninformed regulator may veto the submission of a better‐informed firm. The firm can perform publicly observable experiments to generate product information prior to submission. We find that when experimentation is short, Type I errors (approving bad products) are more likely for products submitted by firms with lower experimentation costs (larger firms), while Type II errors (rejecting good products) should be concentrated among smaller firms. These comparative statics are reversed when experimentation is long. We perform a statistical analysis on FDA approvals of new pharmaceutical products using two different measures of Type I error. We find consistent support for the counterintuitive hypothesis that, under particular conditions, errors are decreasing in the size of the firm submitting the product.     

THE CHANGING NATURE OF RURAL AMERICA1

Rural regions are changing, both in terms of economic dispersal and population patterns. Rural growth is attributed to technological innovation, improving capacity to deal with impending problems as well as improving quality of life, and intercommunity linkage. For some communities, this means the prospects of indigenous economic development.