To track the sensitivity of regional growth to international flows, shift-share components can be decomposed into import, export, and domestic market segments and a productivity component. By merging data on regional employment, national employment and output, and international trade, dynamic shift-share analysis is used to compare the experience of U.S. regions for the period from 1978 to 1986. Some regions, like New England and the Pacific, have relatively positive industrial mixes for both export and domestic market growth, while others, particularly the East North Central region, have negative ones. Dynamizing the model with annual data does not necessarily minimize the gap between national and regional growth rates, and results, especially for the competitive shift component, remain sensitive to subperiod designation. Regions have different stakes in national trade policy, and some would do better to target domestic rather than overseas markets.

This paper examines the functioning of the household economy and family labour supply over a five‐year period among a panel sample of poor households in Madras using an event history methodology. The research focused on the key role women play in sustaining poor households despite constrained labour market choices. Women's earnings from daily self‐employed work activities provided a substantial and steady component to total household income which tended to fluctuate with the earnings and family pool contribution of casually employed males. As economic stress events hit the family over time, women helped by increasing earnings, adding on secondary jobs, utilizing their earning status to obtain loans from a variety of sources, sacrificing their subsidized business loan for family debt repayment, and foregoing personal expenditures and leisure. At the same time women also managed the increasingly more difficult tasks of fulfilling basic needs of the household such as food, fuel and water collection, sanitation and childcare with less resources of time. Development policies must reflect the fact that women are central to individual family survival and as a whole they are key actors in the adjustment process to the crises in employment occurring in the local and national economy.

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The Internal Learning System or ILS is a participatory impact assessment and planning system for microfinance and livelihood programmes primarily designed to meet the learning needs of programme participants, village groups and operational field staff. The medium of the system's pictorial impact diaries or workbooks is an empowering tool for poor, illiterate participants and village groups to track and analyse changes in their lives and to use the understanding to alter their strategies as they participate in the economy and interact with actors and institutions in the wider community. Field staff use the system to track the patterns of lagging and excelling performance across participants and village groups and to analyse the reasons for the variation in impact performance. Programme managers at field team and headquarter levels benefit from the internal learning by staff and participants to 'improve' programme processes, while also using it to meet additional impact assessment objectives including 'external proving' to funders that the programme is having its intended impact. Because of its participatory nature in which participants themselves keep their own impact diary or workbook, not only tracking changes in their lives but also troubleshooting negative outcomes, planning remedies and reflecting on training inputs, ILS can also help enhance empowerment outcomes. This paper presents quantitative results and qualitative experiences of economic and social empowerment outcomes from a large Indian microfinance organization that has been using the system in a large field trial over the past two years.

Using an expanded shift share technique to impute international trade-related industrial job change, the extent to which structural changes in trade and defense spending appear to explain state economic performance differentials is explored. The findings show there is limited support for the "trade perimeter" argument, but strong support for the hypothesized relationship between military procurement spending and state trade performance. To the extent that defense commitments, especially to private sector procurement and R & D, have operated as an informal industrial policy, particularly by guaranteeing strong domestic sales, they have enabled a significant number of states peripheral to the traditional industrial heartland to build a strong international trade posture. The conclusion offers observations on the economic development implications of these findings.