Search

The author responds to comments by Monica Das Gupta on a research paper previously circulated by the author. In the paper the author attempted to link gender imbalance in Asia to the prevalence of the hepatitis B virus. The author argues that women who are carriers of the virus give birth to more male children than those who do are not. She also argues that 45 percent of the gender imbalance can be attributed to hepatitis B. Das Gupta argues that the hepatitis B explanation is unlikely to be significant, since sex ratios in China differ over time, and among families in ways that evidence the couple's preferences.

Focusing on the resilience of distinctive local consumption cultures, this paper challenges some of the more sweeping claims that have been advanced in the name of ‘globalization’. Thinking about a ‘globalizing’ rather than a fully ‘globalized’ world encourages us to examine the deeply contested nature of the concept and to explore the geographically uneven nature of recent economic, political and cultural transformations. This paper approaches globalization as a site of struggle rather than as an established fact, emphasizing the need for empirically grounded studies of the impact of ‘globalization’ on consumer cultures in different geographical contexts. The paper examines the way that producers have ‘customized’ their products for different markets (drawing on evidence from China and South Africa). It then reviews case study evidence from three contrasting consumption cultures: consumption and ‘public culture’ in India, ‘consumer nationalism’ in China, and ‘artful consumption’ in Russia. The paper concludes by identifying some current debates and outlining some directions for future research, including a re-emphasis on consumption and material culture; an exploration of consumption as social practice; the delineation of commodity-specific consumption cultures; and some reflections on the political, ethical and methodological issues that are being raised in contemporary consumption research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate Zipf's Law on the size distribution and Gibrat's Law on the growth of sub-national populations in China, India and Brazil. We reject Zipf's Law for India, but not for China and Brazil; a log normal distribution also fits Brazil well, but not China and India. Gibrat's Law holds for Brazil; that is, lagged population is the best predictor of current population in Brazil. In China, market potential is an important predictor of population growth, while in India both crop area and market potential are important. Our results show that there is a diversity of experiences across countries, and we speculate that this diversity maybe caused by differences in the characteristics of the three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]