to thank the organizers of the RESER conference for their invitation to present these views.

We review the theoretical and empirical literature on commitment devices. A commitment device is any arrangement, entered into by an individual, with the aim of making it easier to fulfill his or her own future plans. We argue that there is growing empirical evidence supporting the proposition that people demand commitment devices and that these devices can change behavior. We highlight the imp...

1Department of Health Care Sciences, UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Dallas, TX 75390, USA 2Research Center for Neural Engineering, The Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China 3School of Energy Systems, Lappeenranta University of Technology, 53851 Lappeenranta, Finland 4The Robotics Research Group, College of E...

I evaluate India's transition from an inward-oriented development strategy to greater participation in the world economy. While tariff rates have decreased significantly over the past decade, India is still one of the more autarkic countries. Despite improvement over the past in export performance, India continues to lag behind its Southand East Asian neighbors. Second, official debt flows have...

Of the diverse factors motivating technological change, one factor that has received increasing attention in the recent past has been the protection of intellectual property rights. Given fairly recent changes in the international policy ethos where a regime of stronger intellectual property protection has become a fait accompli for most developing countries, it is of some significance to ask w...

This study presents a comparative analysis of farmers’ organisations in Korea and Taiwan during 1950-80 in order to help us understand the role of group behavior in affecting development outcomes. It highlights the linkages between group behavior, parastatal organisational structures and economic performance. The paper examines the historical and political economy contexts that led to the creat...

This paper constructs China’s capital stock, which is used in conjunction with a labor variable to estimate a Cobb-Douglas production function for the Chinese economy. Two panels of data are used – one for capital formation and one for sources of investment finance. Both national and provincial data are used for these two panels, thus giving a total of four capital-stock series. The Cobb-Dougla...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effects of the implementation of critical pathway (CP) in stroke patients treated at a single university hospital. METHODS A retrospective medical review collected data from 497 patients who had suffered acute stroke in the rehabilitation center. Stroke outcomes were compared between before and after the implementation of CP based on factors including demographic fac...