Firms in developing countries typically cite credit constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment. In a recent survey of African businesses by the World Economic Forum (1997), credit constraints were cited as the third most important obstacle to doing business. The first and second obstacles listed were macroeconomic instability and political instability. Credit constraints were claimed to be even more important than infrastructure. In a similar survey of businesses in Africa by the World Bank, the primary complaint of domestic owned businesses was credit constraints. However, foreign firms did not cite credit constraints as a problem. Rather, they cited access to foreign exchange as their primary obstacle to doing business. In addition, it its not uncommon to hear development financiers complain about the lack of bankable projects.
The refugee experience is one of violence. Refugee women, men and children endure and survive extremes of physical and emotional violence that most of us cannot even begin to imagine. The very basis of being a refugee is that you have been persecuted in your own country and have had to flee for your safety. You can not return because of a genuine fear that if you do, the persecution will continue. Across the world, many people die as a result of persecution. The violence that constitutes persecution is either state based violence, perpetrated by military, police, or other state officials such as doctors in hospitals, teachers and bureaucrats, or it can be violence from other sections of society, such as religious bodies, guerrilla groups and sectional interests, which the state is powerless or unwilling to prevent. It includes physical, sexual and gender based violence, institutional violence, emotional violence, the violence of discrimination and exclusion and torture, and the violence of entrenched class systems and of racism.
These are the violences which refugees experience and which force them to leave their homelands, their families and all that is familiar. They risk dangerous journeys and uncertain futures in the hope of finding a place of safety and a freedom from violence and persecution.
Monetary policy reaction functions typically assume that interest rates relate linearly to the gap between actual and desired values of inflation and output (see e.g. Taylor, 1993; Clarida et al, 2000). Nonlinear policy rules emerge from either asymmetric central bank preferences (e.g. Nobay and Peel, 2003) or a nonlinear (convex) aggregate supply or Phillips curve (e.g. Dolado et al 2005), or still when central banks follow the opportunistic approach to disinflation (Aksoy et al, 2006). Dolado et al (2004) discuss a model, which comprises both asymmetric central bank preferences and a nonlinear Phillips curve. Another strand of the monetary policy literature, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models (see e.g. Smets and Wouters, 2003) make use of linear policy reaction function.
