Poverty reduction is one of the key goals of development policy in Egypt. The country’s experience in this regard has been positive and between 1990/1991 and 1999/2000 the poverty rate fell from 24.3 to 16.7 percent (United Nations and Ministry of Planning, 2004).
The country is on-track to achieve its long-term goal of reducing the poverty rate to 6 percent by 2022. A number of factors make Egypt’s progress remarkable and will likely make continued progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target increasingly difficult. In particular rapid population growth will mean that in 2050 127.4 million Egyptians will share already scarce land and water resources. The current population to arable land ratio of 7.5 is perhaps the highest in the world and water, at only about 926 cubic meters per capita of renewable freshwater available (FAO, 2001) is also a serious constraint.
n Tolstoy’s oeuvre, illness often serves as a moment of revelation about profound questions of human existence and the limits of knowledge and positivist science. Levin facing the problem of death at the sight of his brother, stricken with tuberculosis, and Ivan Il’ich reconsidering his entire life in the process of his prolonged, lethal illness are perhaps the most intense and memorable examples. My goal in this paper, however, is to focus on an entirely different and seemingly banal example of illness in Tolstoy: banal both because the disease is successfully cured and because it is a traditional literary topos, almost a cliché. The disease in question is the love-sickness from which Kitty Shcherbatskaia suffers and recovers in Part II of Anna Karenina. A close examination of the way her illness is presented in the novel and how her medical evaluation and the process of her recovery are depicted sheds significant light on Tolstoy’s position on the limitations of the positivist understanding of the human being.
The topos of love-sickness has a long history, both in medicine and literature. Its roots in the Western literary and medical traditions and the interaction between the two are explored in detail in Massimo Ciavolella’s comprehensive study, La “Malattia d’Amore” dall’ Antichità al Medioevo. To summarize briefly, the scientific concept of love-sickness has its roots in the Hippocratic theory of humors, later developed by Galen, the Platonic doctrine of the tri-partite structure of the soul, and the Aristotelian psychology and physiology of passion.
Many observers have noted the historical differences between U.S. corporate bankruptcy procedures and those in other countries. The U.S. law has been described as “debtor-friendly,” oriented towards reorganizing the existing company (i.e., giving the debtor a second chance), and accustomed to deviating from contractual payoff priorities.
The traditional bankruptcy procedures in many other developed countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Sweden are described, in contrast, as “creditor-friendly,” favoring the liquidation of the debtor’s assets to pay off creditors in the order of their priority. A relatively large literature has arisen debating the relative merits of each system.
