Magic Statistics

Letters threatening physical harm are being delivered under cover of night to professional women in Kandahar, Afghanistan.  Others are receiving menacing telephone calls at their work places.

A female employee at a United Nations agency in Kandahar was warned by an unknown caller to leave Afghanistan within half an hour. More than half a dozen female government workers in the southern and western provinces have complained of death threats.

These are a few examples of the rising tide of violence against women in Afghanistan, especially in the south. Five years after the fall of the repressive Taliban regime, women — in particular working women — are increasingly being targeted by extremists.

"When I leave for work in the morning, I don't know if I will be coming home,” one working woman lamented during a Monday-morning meeting at a women's resource centre in downtown Kandahar.

"I change my route every day,” she continued. “I wear a different coloured burka. Everyone has fear.”

They're wearing burkas and still the threats come.  Some bullies won't be happy until the women are all locked away at home with no outside unsupervised human contact.  Welcome to Taliban territory.

Last month's assassination of activist Safia Ama Jan, the director of women's affairs for the province of Kandahar, who was gunned down outside her house as she left for work, put a chill in the hearts of female professionals. It harkened back to the time when the Taliban were in power and women were routinely beaten, mutilated and killed for disobeying their restrictive edicts. The women now say the death threats are on the rise, but local police can do nothing to protect them.

The country's new constitution mandates equal rights for women and girls.  Those rights are not worth much without police and other official enforcement, which is spotty in some parts of Afghanistan.  Violence against women is on the increase in areas where support for traditional Islamic culture remains strong.

The Globe and Mail has started a blog for its foreign correspondents.  In today's post, Jane Armstrong, who wrote the story cited above, describes her experience in Kandahar.  She took an instant dislike to the burka she was warned to wear for the drive from the airport into the city.

My fixer, a Kandahar resident, advised me that it would be fool-hardy to venture into the city dressed in Western clothing.
. . .
I struggled with the filmy garment in the back seat of the car, trying to find the "head" of the robe with its tightly embroidered "window" the only portal from which to see out. It reminded me of the ghost costumes I wore on Hallowe'en when I was kid, with two eyes cut out with scissors.

It turned out the burka is just as limiting to your vision as a Hallowe'en ghost costume. The mesh window blurs the outside world and all peripheral vision is lost.

It's hard to be on guard for suspicious vehicles and potential suicide bombs when 80 per cent of your vision is eradicated.

I stole a glace in the rear-view mirror. The reflection didn't look like me at all. The figure in the mirror was a covered, formless, anonymous figure.

Isn't that the point of the burka?

She yanked it off as soon as she arrived at her destination behind locked gates.

Previous related post: Jack Straw is right about the veil, says daughter of Kashmiri immigrants

An old truism among economists is: Whatever you subsidise, you get more of.  An illustrative instance can be seen by comparing Maine and New Brunswick, adjacent jurisdictions with similar economies: Both are based on fishing, forestry, and tourism; both have incomes below the respective national average; both experience low population growth.

Yet the unemployment rates diverge widely: Maine's is 3.9%, while New Brunswick's is 9.1%.  Now what could account for that?  Globe and Mail business columnist Neil Reynolds discusses one study that came up with an answer.

They differ in one important way. Maine's unemployment insurance program is owned and operated by the state, which requires it to pay its own way. New Brunswick's is owned and operated by the federal government. Could the difference in ownership and management of these programs explain the extraordinary employment gap between these neighbours?

Well, yes, and now we have the academic research confirm [sic] it. Using Maine and New Brunswick as "a dynamic natural experiment," two economists have analyzed the unemployment history of these jurisdictions across 50 years. Chris Riddell (Queen's University) and Peter Kuhn (University of California at Santa Barbara) conclude in a report published earlier this year that Canada's notoriously generous UI benefits are indisputably responsible for New Brunswick's higher level of unemployment. The report is more proof that you get more of what you subsidize — including voluntary unemployment.

Before the 1950s, Maine had higher unemployment than New Brunswick.  After the Canadian federal government took over and expanded the unemployment insurance (UI) benefits program in 1953, unemployment in New Brunswick rose above that in Maine.  Then, when the feds again liberalised the requirements for receiving UI in the early 1970s, New Brunswick's unemployment rate increased still further.

[M]any Canadians came to regard UI as "Lotto 10-40," meaning you needed to work for only 10 weeks to collect UI payments for 40 weeks — and to do so without penalty year after year.

The Canadian UI program thus provides a large subsidy for part-year and seasonal employment that Maine's program does not.  (Maine has not altered its UI benefit rules significantly during this time frame.)

The researchers found the percentage of the labour force working six months or less of the year is two to three times greater in New Brunswick than in Maine.

Messrs. Riddell and Kuhn report this astonishing calculation of UI incentives: For every 10-per-cent increase in UI income for New Brunswickers who worked less than half the year, 10 per cent more people reduced their work to less than half the year.

The calculation is neat but, from an economics perspective, that finding is not surprising.  If you pay people for working only part of the year, you'll get more part-year workers.

Fortuitously, this study corroborates the point I made at the end of this post about differing unemployment rates in Canada and the US.

For access to the full column, click here.

Previous related post: Edmund Phelps wins Nobel for overturning economic myth

For the first time since 1989, an incumbent Yukon government has won re-election to a second term.  Not only that, I triumphed in the office pool by successfully guessing predicting the seat totals for each of the contenders. (My winnings totaled $50.)

The Yukon Party, under the leadership of Premier Dennis Fentie (pictured at right), won 10 seats, the Liberals 5, and the NDP 3.  The Yukon Party thus enjoys an absolute majority in the Legislative Assembly—that is, until MLAs start switching parties, a popular pastime in Yukon politics of late.

With the ballots counted for all 18 ridings, the Yukon Party had captured 40 per cent of the popular vote compared with 35 per cent for the Liberals and 23 per cent for the NDP.
. . .
There were two Independents sitting when the election was called, but the three parties swept the poll.

Voter turnout was 72.3 per cent, down from the traditionally high rate of 78 to 80 per cent. There were 18,659 eligible voters and 13,495 cast ballots, according to Yukon Elections.

All six Yukon Party cabinet ministers, including party leader Fentie, won re-election.  For complete riding-by-riding results, click over to the Yukon Votes 2006 page at CBC.

Previous related posts:

• Globe and Mail finally notices Yukon election—and gets it wrong
• Yukoners heading to the polls

Another self-absorbed hedonistic starlet spouts off.

Everyone should have HIV test twice a year, says Johansson

While most people have a dental check-up every six months, Scarlett Johansson has revealed that she has two HIV tests a year. She said it was "part of being a decent human to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases".

In Ms Johansson's view, then, most people do not qualify as decent human beings.