There are two distinct components to the economic development activities described in ADOH’s LIHTC program details. The first component is activity that strengthens the economy. This is the quantifiable activity that is the subject of this report. The second component is community building activity which can be both quantitative and qualitative. This is an area that should be considered in the debate but which is not addressed within this report.

Economic convergence was only a matter of time for Ireland. That it happened when it did and in such a short period of time was the result of both thoughtful decision-making on the part of many stakeholders and a favorable set of external economic developments. To continue to achieve rapid economic growth, however, Ireland will not be able to rely on increased labor utilization but must succeed in raising output per worker. This, in turn, will require more entrepreneurial activity and participation higher value-added activities. Ireland will need to participate more in the creation of knowledge and not simply be operational in the application of knowledge-based technologies. Arizona, like Ireland in the 1980s, has an opportunity to change its growth trajectory. Arizona can follow Ireland’s lead today and pursue the returns that can accrue from strategic investments or continue on its current path.

Education decisions are among the most important choices people ever make. So we were surprised and disappointed to see an article so loosely reasoned and reckless in its conclusions as “Five Reasons to Skip College” published in Blank Slate at Forbes.com on April 18, 2006. The article never provides a numerical assessment of the costs and benefits of going to college, uses statistics inappropriately and in a way that biases the conclusions against college, contains conceptual errors on how to evaluate the return on a college education, and greatly exaggerates the only substantive criticism of typical evaluations of the financial worth of a college degree.

High quality early childhood programs have proven effective in raising educational attainment and improving earnings and labor market performance. These results are all the more appealing in light of the general ineffectiveness of adult retraining programs. In the area of crime prevention, sociologists and criminologists have also turned their attention to early childhood intervention programs. In contrast to juvenile treatment programs, early interventions hold special promise in that they are preventative rather than crisis-oriented and take place before anti-social behavioral patterns become entrenched. The purpose of this report is to provide a comprehensive look at the economic issues surrounding early care and education in Arizona.

The theory of factor market distortions deals largely with taxing inputs. However, input subsidies are not only common in manufacturing. For example, U.S. agriculture is heavily dependent on input subsidies.
If water subsidies in the production of California cotton were removed, along with commodity payments, production of cotton in California would likely cease. Likewise, transportation subsidies were common in both the U.S. and Canada, and still prevail in the U.S.

After twenty years of Ag Mediation’s assistance to the American rural areas, there are a number of key developments which I would like to highlight for the Bureau of Land Management and others interested in mediation and dispute resolution. These include background, law, and efforts by states and federal government to focus on mediation as a way of settling disputes. Finally, I would like to enumerate the lessons we have learned.

Contains a dynamic programming algorithm for projecting policy parameters based on a storage model of international markets featuring uncertainty, forward-looking rational expectations and non-negative storage. This algorithm is motivated by the need for a non-analytical solution to the competitive equilibrium in a storage model of U.S. and foreign cotton policy regimes. Obtaining an analytical solution is difficult, except in a limited number of special cases. The numerical solution algorithm essentially consists of multiple nested numerical approximations that reach convergence simultaneously when the relationship between domestic storage and expected farm price achieves stationarity. Given the stationary relationship between storage and expected farm price, we then run the model forward in time (given a sequence of annual realized yield disturbances) under alternative policy regimes representing FACT and FAIR.