Browsing by Author "Rimlinger, Gaston V."
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Item An analysis of some aspects of Public Law 480(1963) Wilder, Ronald Parker; Rimlinger, Gaston V.Public Law 480, the Trade Development and Assistance Act, was passed by the 83rd. Congress in July, 1954, for the purpose of utilizing surplus agricultural commodities to further the foreign policy of the United States. The Act provides that surplus agricultural commodities shall be sold for foreign currencies, with the proceeds of the sales used for trade development, economic development, the payment of U. S. obligations abroad, and other uses which promote U. S. foriegn policy. The majority of P. L. 480 exports are shipped under Title I, sales for foreign currencies. The rationale behind the use of surplus agricultural commodities to promote economic development in receiving countries is the following: The U. S. sells agricultural commodities to underdeveloped countries. It then grants or loans the majority of the local currency proceeds back to the country involved to be used in its development program. The additional investments undertaken as a result of the grants and loans create new income, part of which are spent on the agricultural products supplied by P. L. 480. Thus, P. L. 480 provides additional resources for the receiving countries, and enables them to undertake a greater amount of investment than would be possible in the absence of the food aid. Food aid through P. L. 480 can increase the rate of economic development in the receiving country by increasing the rate of capital formation and by increasing the efficiency of the use of capital. It increases the rate of capital formation by freeing foreign exchange, redistributing income, and by reducing inflationary inflationary pressures which tend to curtail capital formation. It increases the efficiency of the use of capital by furthering education and technical training. There are several problems which seem likely to accompany the use of food aid to promote economic development. The two most serious problems are first, that surplus food imports tend to decrease agricultural prices in the receiving country, and second, that the local currencies generated by P. L. 480 Title I transactions tend to be inflationary in the receiving country. The inflation problem is compounded by the lags which frequently occur between the shipment of the agricultural commodities and the transfer of the local currencies back to the receiving country. It is very likely that P. L. 480 will continue in the next decade, due to the continued existence of the U. S. farm surplus. Because of its apparent success in promoting economic development, and because of its negligible effect on the U. S. balance of payments, it will continue to be a popular form of economic assistance. To the extent that it has delayed the end of the government subsidy in agriculture, however, it is probably doing the U. S. a disservice.Item Economics of alternative physician remuneration systems(1968) Marshall, Frances L. Lightsey; Rimlinger, Gaston V.In this thesis the nature of the market for physicians' services has been examined and the implications of its characteristics have been analyzed for the three basic systems of payment: fee-for-service, capitation, and salary. Because of the fact that the services provided are not homogeneous, the presence of external economies, and the informational inequality between patient and doctor, the market diverges significantly from that of the perfectly competitive model. A model was developed for the determination of the physician's equilibrium income under a fee-for-service system. Further analysis showed that the doctor will act as a market divider and will practice price discrimination among individual patients in the specialist market. His ability to affect the level of demand for his services leads to the greatest increase in his welfare when he performs inefficiently with respect to society as a whole, performing only those services whose price is greater than his estimate of the satisfaction he would derive in the future if the service were not performed. As a result, the price will increase and this price increase will spread through the system as a whole. The physician will innovate if and only if the cost or innovation is less than or equal to the expected increase in his income minus the amount of income necessary to compensate for the expected increase in disutility involved. If a third party provides part or all of the remuneration, the effects of the doctor's ability to induce demand are greatly magnified. A second model was developed to show the physician's equilibrium income under a capitation system. In this system, the quantity of services demanded is only minimally related to the price, and the doctor's marginal revenue for performing any given service is zero with respect to the present income period and patient list. Some limits must be set on the patients' ability to change doctors. Pressure also arises for a classification of patients and graduated levels of capitation payments; the system tends to become more closely related to a fee-for-service system. In addition, some patients must be assigned to physicians, and enforcement of minimum standards of care may be necessary if competition among doctors is weak. Referral of patients and use of related health facilities will be encouraged unless specific limits are placed upon them. Finally, the salaried system was analyzed in relationship to the capitation and fee-for-service systems. The salaried system alone necessarily involves an employer-employee relationship, and development of bargaining strength becomes the dominant financial goal of the doctor. His ability to induce demand will be used as it was in the capitation system. The incentive to utilize related services, to perform research, to innovate, and, indeed, to perform with respect to almost all other criteria will depend upon the emphasis placed upon these items by the employer. Because of differences in the perspectives of the physician, the third party, and the patient, a salaried system implies the need for machinery to resolve differences among the three perspectives. The three systems were then compared with respect to the risks and the accounting costs involved. For the physician, the level of total income becomes more certain with prepayment of fees, still more so with capitation payments, and most of all with a salary. In contrast, as this becomes more certain, uncertainty as to the amount of disutility undergone for any particular level of income is increased. Minimal accounting costs are incurred in a salaried system, and these costs increase for capitation, and especially for fee-for-service. Total cost may be made predictable within each system, but only with greater administrative costs in the capitation and especially the fee-for-service systems.Item Land use regulations as a form of market segmentation(1984) Hajjar, Paul; Mieszkowski, Peter; Rimlinger, Gaston V.; Cooke, Timothy W.This thesis presents a theoretical model of Land Use Regulations (LUR) as a form of market segmentation. It focuses on private restrictive covenants and considers only the aspect of the separation of uses that they contain. The model concludes that the legal possibility of imposing a constraint on the conversion of land from one use to another allows a developer to increase the total value of a tract beyond the case where such restrictions were unfeasible. According to the model, price differentials between various land uses are due to the constraint on supply imposed by the LUR. In a second step, the model incorporates other possible causes for price differentials namely externality and locational factors -- fiscal aspects are neglected because of the Houston specific conditions -- and compares eight possible combinations of effects on land markets. Using the prices of lots in various subdivisions of the Houston area, and the indeniable existence of LUR in all of them, we are able to eliminate all hypotheses not containing the market segmentation element presented. The thesis concludes that while locational and externality aspects affect the land markets and cause certain price differentials, the actual distribution of these price differences cannot be rationalized by externality and locational aspects alone. Introducing a market segmentation rationale in combination with the above mentioned aspects allows us to explain the distribution of prices differences observed in our examples.Item Social Insurance and Manpower Policy in the Soviet Union(Rice University, 1962-07) Rimlinger, Gaston V.; Electronic version made possible with funding from the Rice Historical Society and Thomas R. Williams, Ph.D., class of 2000.Item Undocumented workers in Houston's construction industry(1985) De Maria, Cristina; Huddle, Donald L.; Rimlinger, Gaston V.; Soligo, RonaldThe impetus to formulate immigration policy, recently evident in the Carter and Reagan Administrations, cornes from a growing awareness -- both public and private -- of the phenomenon of illegal migration, which nowadays has emerged as a most pressing issue. The same issue motivates the present study. The concern, however,is not with illegal migration at the national level, but rather at the local level specifically, undocumented workers in one of Houston's most powerful industries: Construction, The purpose of this study is to provide an insight into the demographic characteristics, country of origin, employment patterns, wage and working conditions, public services participation, duration of stay and ties in the U.S., in order to assess the impact of undocumented workers gainfully employed in Houston's labor market. The current study is unlike previous studies which considered only apprehended aliens. Undocumented workers in this sample were young, disadvantaged adults who came from Latin America to find employment. One out of three respondents had been in the U.S. for one or more years and their work had helped them to support at least one dependent in their homeland. Undocumented workers had significantly less education than their U.S. fellow workers and most of them had no technical training (the majority before coming to the U.S. had worked in agricultural and blue-collar activities). Most illegals were unskilled or semi-skilled workers in their most recent construction job. Undocumented workers prefer the kind of job that will allow them to earn the most money in the least possible time. By coming to Houston, the illegal worker encountered better job opportunities and less possibility of being detected by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) than if they had stayed near the border or in small towns. The time of permanency for the majority of respondents is linked to their experience in avoiding detection and their ability to secure a job. Knowing about these characteristics and the illegal workers' performance in the labor market provides important leads on their impact or. U.S. society and in the formulation of a sensible immigration policy. This study propose a major emphasis on continuous cooperation with those countries which constitute the major source of undocumented workers, to improve their economies and their capacity to control their migrant's outflow.