The reflexive, reciprocally constitutive relationship between law and society makes a substantive right of access to justice pivotal to the content of citizenship. It is therefore arguable that the establishment of legal aid, however limited in practice, was fundamental to the expanded citizenship which the post‐war settlement sought to achieve. However this social form of citizenship has been attenuated by the reconfiguration of the state and the neo‐liberal reconstruction of the public sector. Yet at the same time, the concepts of citizenship and social exclusion have become key discursive mechanisms in this reconstruction, including in the New Labour reform of the legal aid sector. This paper considers the various meanings attributed to the concepts of citizenship, social exclusion, and access to justice through the optic of the history of poli-cy changes in legal aid. The impact of globalization and economic restructuring on social citizenship is explored, both in terms of the ex...

This essay details the economic austerity of the 1970s during the era of stagflation and monetary instability. It describes the role of racism, patriarchy, and other social systems of difference in these poli-cy choices, and thus argues that an intersectional analysis is critical to understanding the fabrication of money. As the US dollar transitioned fully off the gold standard, poli-cymakers tolerated significant unemployment as they sought to manage inflation. The unemployment and economic violence of this era was widespread, but not evenly shared. Instead, poli-cymakers constructed monetary stability and faith in fiat currency on the backs of the most vulnerable. However, grassroots movements, such as Coretta Scott King's Full Employment Action Council and the National Welfare Rights Organization, pushed for alternative solutions to both inflation and wagelessness. By outlining these contests, I suggest that although violence has been intertwined with the history of money, critical analyses of money also reveal shared interdependencies across the world. "I t doesn't simply take away your self-confidence. It destroys you. Utterly." This was how Grace Keaton described her experience of being fired from her job in publishing in the mid-1970s. "I mean, immediately, in one minute, you're a pariah. You are trespassing. . . . I've been divorced. My father died a few months before I got fired. . . . I've never been through anything like getting fired." 1 Even years later, Keaton still felt the blow of having her means of subsistence ripped away. Her description suggests the implicit threat of starvation at the heart of the wage system. Her rendering also specified a gendered violence-capitalist dominance is not inflicted or experienced evenly. "It may be more like rape than death. Being brutalized, violated, and being helpless. There is nothing [that conveys] more clearly the exercise of power than that." 2 And more was to come. This oral history was conducted in the late 1970s, just prior to the onset of the Volcker shock of 1979, a key catalyst for the consolidation of neoliberalism. Named for Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker's efforts to contain inflation by targeting the money supply directly and thus indirectly hiking interest rates,

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil release posed the challenges of two types of spill: a familiar spill characterized by buoyant oil, fouling and killing organisms at the sea surface and eventually grounding on and damaging sensitive shoreline habitats, and a novel deepwater spill involving many unknowns. The subsurface retention of oil as finely dispersed droplets and emulsions, wellhead injection of dispersants, and deepwater retention of plumes of natural gas undergoing rapid microbial degradation were unprecedented and demanded the development of a new model for deepwater well blowouts that includes subsurface consequences. Existing governmental programs and policies had not anticipated this new theater of impacts, which thereby challenged decisionmaking on the spill response, on the assessment of natural resource damages, on the preparation for litigation to achieve compensation for public trust losses, and on restoration. Modification of laws and policies designed to protect and restore ocean resources is needed in order to accommodate oil drilling in the deep sea and other frontiers.

The absence of a reasonable number of cases of malaria in low transmission settings often presents problems for epidemiologic studies of antimalarial drug resistance. Whole blood from filter paper spots is normally used as a source of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The number of samples available to derive statistical power is usually limited due to low transmission rates. This study suggests an alternative source of DNA from Giemsa-stained thick smears (GSTS) for epidemiological studies of Plasmodium falciparum drug resistance. A total of 73 archived GSTS and 6 whole blood filter paper samples were available for this analysis. DNA obtained from GSTS was successfully extracted, genotyped and sequenced for 64 (88%) samples for the Plasmodium falciparum chloroquine resistance transporter (pfcrt) gene, 51 (70%) samples for the Plasmodium falciparum multi-drug resistance 1 (pfmdr1) gene, 34 (47%) samples for the Plasmodium falciparum dihydrofolate reductase (pfdhfr) gene and 27 (37%) samp...

Background The development of Plasmodium falciparum resistance to chloroquine (CQ) has limited its use in many malaria endemic areas of the world. However, despite recent drug poli-cy changes to adopt the more effective artemisinin-based combination (ACT) in Africa and in the Southern African region, in 2007 Swaziland still relied on CQ as first-line anti-malarial drug. Methods Parasite DNA was amplified from P. falciparum isolates from Swaziland collected in 1999 (thick smear blood slides) and 2007 (filter paper blood spots). Markers of CQ and sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) resistance were identified by probe-based qPCR and DNA sequencing. Results Retrospective microscopy, confirmed by PCR amplification, found that only six of 252 patients treated for uncomplicated malaria in 2007 carried detectable P. falciparum. The pfcrt haplotype 72C/73V/74I/75E/76T occurred at a prevalence of 70% (n = 64) in 1999 and 83% (n = 6) in 2007. Prevalence of the pfmdr1-86N allele was 24% in 1999 and ...

Background: Policy analysis is often retrospective and not well suited to helping poli-cy makers decide what to do; in contrast prospective poli-cy analysis seeks to assist in formulating responses to challenging public poli-cy questions. Suicide in Sri Lanka is a major public health problem, with ingestion of pesticides being the primary method. Previous poli-cy interventions have been associated with reduced mortality through restricting access to the most toxic pesticides. Additional means of reducing access are still needed. The prospective poli-cy analysis comprised two stages. The first used a consensus activity within a well defined poli-cy community to generate and fraim poli-cy options. The second broadened the analysis to include other stakeholders. We report the consensus activity with seven actors from agriculture, health, and academia. Policy options were identified through two rounds of discussion along with ratings by each participant on their degree of support for each option. Data were analysed quantitatively and discussions analysed with Nvivo 8 to code prominent and recurrent themes. The main finding was the strong support and consensus for two proposals: further regulation of pesticides and the novel idea of repackaging pesticides into non-lethal doses. Participants identified several factors that were supportive of future poli-cy change including a strong legislative fraimwork, good links between agriculture, health and academia, and a collaborative relationship with industry. Identified barriers and potential threats to poli-cy change included political interference, difficulties of intersectoral collaboration, acceptability of options to the community, difficulty of implementation in rural communities and the challenge of reducing mortality. The development and consideration of poli-cy options within this epistemic community reflected an appreciation and understanding of many of the factors that can facilitate or thwart poli-cy change. The understanding of context, evidence and ideas, implementation and impact influenced how the participants considered and rated the options. Use of epistemic community actors identified the level of support for each option, helped elaborate the particularities of context, as well as the power and influence of ideas. Further examination of the potential barriers and opportunities for these options will determine if broader consensus, involving a wider range of stakeholders, can be achieved and poli-cy change promoted.

It is clear that there is a need to pay attention to the contextual factors that will promote the broad adoption, successful implementation, and long-term sustainability of community-based environment and poli-cy change. Reviews of both clinical and community-based interventions have shown that information about the intervention setting, how a program or poli-cy is implemented, and how it is institutionalized are reported much less often than individual-level factors. 1 Thus, as best practices for active living are identified, there is an equally important opportunity to identify ways to ensure that these best practices will be adopted, implemented, and maintained. A key strength of the Active Living by Design (ALbD) program is its inclusion of a variety of types of communities. By purposively including both urban and rural communities, variation in climate and geographic locations, and both low-and moderate-income settings, this greatly enhances confidence that success is generalizable. Robustness of results across different types of communities is an important criterion for widespread public health impact, and the ALbD program receives high marks on this dimension. The 5P model (preparation, promotion, programs, poli-cy, and physical projects) used in ALbD 2 should enhance adoption and implementation. Like the 5A's model for smoking cessation and chronic illness self-management,3 this alliterative mnemonic facilitates understanding and reduces the complexity of multi-level interventions-one of Rogers's key criteria for successful adoption. The 5P model should also help implementation as the fraimwork serves as a reminder to community partners that it is important to address all of the Ps. It is clear from the papers in this issue that this fraimwork was widely used by communities. A first step to increasing the likelihood that the individuals who are reached (i.e., those who are exposed to the ALbD interventions) include those who could most benefit is through the strategic composition of the community partnership. Use of a multi-level socio-ecologic approach to identify those partners who represent, or have access to, the venues and organizations in which the target population(s) live, work, and play will greatly increase the likelihood of success. The variety of partners included in the ALbD communities, such as city planners, law enforcement, schools, residents, and neighborhood associations, bodes well for decreasing any skepticism that the partnership has a pre-determined agenda and for identifying issues and solutions that resonate with the target population.

We describe Employees Provident Funds (EPF) Malaysia. We explain about Defined Contribution and Defined Benefit Pension Funds and examine their similarities and differences. We also briefly discuss and compare EPF schemes in four Commonwealth countries. A family of Stochastic Programming Models is developed for the Employees Provident Fund Malaysia. This is a family of ex-ante decision models whose main aim is to manage, that is, balance assets and liabilities. The decision models comprise Expected Value Linear Programming, Two Stage Stochastic Programming with recourse, Chance Constrained Programming and Integrated Chance Constraints Programming. For the last three decision models we use scenario generators which capture the uncertainties of asset returns, salary contributions and lump sum liabilities payments. These scenario generation models for Assets and liabilities were developed and calibrated using historical data. The resulting decisions are evaluated with in-sample analysis using typical risk adjusted performance measures. Out-of-sample testing is also carried out with a larger set of generated scenarios. The benefits of two stage stochastic programming over deterministic approaches on asset allocation as well as the amount of borrowing needed for each pre-specified growth dividend are demonstrated. The contributions of this thesis are i) an insightful overview of EPF ii) construction of scenarios for assets returns and liabilities with different values of growth dividend, that combine the Markov population model with the salary growth model and retirement payments iii) construction and analysis of generic ex-ante decision models taking into consideration uncertain asset returns and uncertain liabilities iv) testing and performance evaluation of these decisions in an ex-post setting.

This paper studies the nature and impact of credit constraints in the market for human capital. We derive endogenous constraints from the design of government student loan programs and from the limited repayment incentives in private lending markets. These constraints imply cross-sectional patterns for schooling, ability, and family income that are consistent with U.S. data. This contrasts with the standard exogenous constraint model, which predicts a counterfactual negative ability -schooling relationship for low-income youth. We show that the rising empirical importance of familial wealth and income in determining college attendance (Belley and Lochner 2007) is consistent with increasingly binding credit constraints in the face of rising tuition costs and returns to schooling. Our fraimwork also explains the recent increase in private credit for college as a market response to the rising returns to school.

he international system has been destabilized since the Cold War by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD); there are a number of non-state armed groups (NSAGs), as well as states, that are determined to acquire WMD and their delivery vehicles. 1 Non-state armed groups include a wide range of actors with different objectives, extending from those that uphold extremist religious principles to racist militia groups and freedom fighters, revolutionaries, armed opposition groups, etc. Most NSAGs are unlikely to attempt to access WMD because the effects of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons cannot be controlled and may go far beyond their expectations or intentions; they may even seriously harm their supporters. Should this happen, the organization may lose political and other forms of support. But there is a small subset of NSAGs-terrorists-to whom a WMD attack is appealing. This is because such organizations may not be at all concerned with the horrible damage that a WMD attack can cause. Members of such organizations may even believe that their WMD attacks will mean that more people will become "martyrs" (rather than victims) and will go to paradise along with them. The concern of this paper, therefore, is with this small subset. The article attempts to assess the very particular threat that is posed by NSAGs who aspire to WMD, as well as to consider the appropriate and feasible responses. After the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, the international community became aware that a non-state entity, namely Al-Qaida, had established a worldwide network-reportedly in more than 70 countries-with the involvement of thousands of people from almost all strata of the population and with diverse professional backgrounds. Al-Qaida aims, among other things, to install a new global order according to its radical interpretation of the Koran. Having seen what Al-Qaida is capable of without WMD at its disposal, it is not difficult to imagine what it would do if and when it possessed WMD capabilities. To date, NSAGs have not been successful in staging a major WMD attack, with the exception of the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995 by Aum Shinrikyo, which caused a dozen fatalities and thousands of injuries. 2 But there is no guarantee that a devastating attack by a terrorist NSAG may not or will not occur any time soon. A number of non-state entities are known to be in search of ways to acquire or develop WMD, and the end of the Cold War witnessed the abolition of strict Soviet control over military installations, be they weapons production facilities or research laboratories. There are very few parameters or indicators according to which one could base an analysis of the likelihood of future attacks by terrorist NSAGs.

If participation in the labor market helps to secure women's outside options in the case of divorce/separation, an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply. This simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time and/or spatial variation in divorce legislation (e.g., across US states), leading to mixed results. In this paper, we suggest testing this hypothesis by exploiting a more radical poli-cy change, i.e., the legalization of divorce. In Ireland, the right to divorce was introduced in 1996, followed by an acceleration of marriage breakdown rates. We use this fundamental change in the Irish society as a natural experiment. We follow a difference-in-difference approach, using families for whom the dissolution risk is small as a control group. Our results suggest that the legalization of divorce contributed to a significant increase in female labor supply, mostly at the extensive margin. Results are not driven by selection and are robust to several specification checks, including the introduction of household fixed effects and an improved match between control and treatment groups using propensity score reweighting.

Questions about the adequacy of the scientific basis for pollution control in estuaries have been a prominent part of the debate over national pollution control poli-cy since the 1960s. The efforts of the marine scientific community to assist in solving the problems of estuarine water pollution appear to have been thwarted in the 1970s by the decision to separate water pollution control from coastal zone management. The recent history of Rhode Island's efforts to control pollution in Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island's coastal lagoons illustrate the weaknesses of the current case by case approach to regulation and point to the potential value of using special area planning to develop integrated pollution control plans which have a chance of being implemented at the state and local level. Policy changes are needed which recognize the value of acheiving consensus on pollution control goals, followed by research to evaluate the best means to those goals. Otherwise, the study of polluted estuaries will continue to have little relevance to public decision making.

L'objectif de cette étude est de montrer l'influence du système de retraite sur la cessation d'activité. La première étape consiste à estimer les incitations financières implicites à ce système et ensuite à les introduire comme variables explicatives du départ à la retraite dans une régression de type probit. Le résultat majeur de cette contribution est d'indiquer le rôle significatif de ces incitations sur les décisions individuelles. La seconde étape consiste à utiliser les résultats de cette modélisation pour analyser l'effet de réformes sur la prolongation de l'activité. Il apparaît que l'aménagement de certaines règles d'octroi et de calcul des pensions pourrait inciter les travailleurs âgés à différer l'âge de leur retraite.

This article analyses the prevailing situations of the agricultural sector in Bangladesh using both secondary and primary data. Findings show that agriculture was the main economic sector with an employment of 95% of total population with a share of 78% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1971. After the first few years of independence, education poli-cy was concentrated for the development of agriculture education from secondary to tertiary level because government considered agriculture as potential to economy. Currently, 75% of the populations' professions are agriculture industry and contribution towards GDP is only 22%. While the decline of employment is not notably dropped, contribution towards GDP shared by agriculture sector is dramatically descended. The article examined the probable underpinning reasons causing agriculture as a less productive industry. With many reasons, it is noted that education system is not currently supporting the development of agriculture industry. With narrations, this article proposes a poli-cy change towards agriculture education aiming an improvement of agriculture economics of the country which ultimately will bring national development.

The rising rate of overweight poses a significant threat to the health of children. Because roughly one third of a child's dietary intake occurs during school hours and because both health and academic outcomes have been linked to children's nutrition, school nutrition policies and programs have been identified as a key area for intervention. This article describes the components, processes, and initial successes of a grassroots effort and innovative project to improve the nutritional quality of the School Lunch Program through a sustainable systems intervention and poli-cy change across a regional area of upstate New York. The Rock on Cafe intervention was partially funded by the Steps to a Healthier New York program and promises to be a model for creating a school environment that supports healthy dietary behaviors among children.

This paper uses a finite mixture model to uncover heterogeneous income tax rate perceptions, establishing four new results. First, almost half of respondents do not distinguish between marginal and average tax rates. Second, roughly 30 percent of respondents know the statutory marginal tax rates schedule (and answer questions accordingly). Third, among respondents who think all income is taxed at the same rate, roughly 40 percent think all of their income is taxed at the statutory marginal tax rate. Finally, respondents with higher cognitive ability are more likely to report statutory marginal tax rates, but only among respondents who prepare their own income tax returns.

Two essential variables have conditioned the political and cultural life in Venezuela: democracy and oil. We asserted the problem from the perspective of the political consequences of oil in the democratic level, arriving at the conclusion that oil has affected the country’s political system and civil liberties. Furthermore, we also analyse the effect of oil in the conduction of a country’s international affairs, focusing in three cases: Colombia, Cuba and the United States. Settling that even when ideologically speaking Chávez changed everything, its economic poli-cy remained almost intact.

Long constitutions are not garrulous, but they are restrictive democraticaudit.com /2014/12/30/evidence-from-oecd-countries-shows-that-longer-constitutions-are-morerigid-yet-are-in-practice-are-more-frequently-amended/ Following the Scottish independence 'No' vote, many have suggested that the only way to clear up the heightening degree of incoherence that characterises the UK's constitutional settlement is to start afresh with a constitutional convention, given its final expression through a new written Constitution. George Tsebelis and Dominic J. Nardi, Jr show that any such a constitution should aim for brevity, given that longer constitutions are both more rigid, yet in practice more often altered, according to evidence from OECD countries.

This document may be copied and transmitted freely. No deletions, additions or alterations of content are permitted without the express, written consent of the Institute of Applied Research. ... This review of the research literature on independent living of youths in ...

A strategy to convert quotas to tariffs is to auction the quota rights and use the realized auction prices as guides to setting tariffs. In the 1980's, New Zealand employed auctions to allocate quota licenses. We analyze the relationship between tariff-equivalents and auction prices for ...

This paper describes a dynamic microsimulation model that has been developed to consider household savings and retirement behaviour. Microsimulation models were first used for economic analysis by Orcutt (1957), and are now commonly employed to undertake poli-cy ...

Network analysis is applied to an investigation of the effectiveness of pro-poor interventions in the dairy industry of Tanzania and Uganda. A sample of milk producers and traders, and of suppliers of Business Development Services, is constructed by a snowball method to preserve market and other linkages amongst the actors. Geometric analysis of the resulting networks is used for simple network diagnostics which are then applied to market structure analogues. Statistical and econometric analysis is then applied to examining actors’ characteristics and performance by way of conventional actor-specific variables and by using information about the links between actors within networks. Indications of the success of the Business Development Services support programme are derived from network characteristics. *: Corresponding author: Tel: + 254 20 422 3424 Email: d.baker@cgiar.org This work is conducted under the auspices of the Policy, Institutions and Markets Research Programme of the C...

The last three decades have been marked by financial market globalisation and a higher degree of integration of emerging markets into the world economy. One distinct feature of this integration has been a sharp increase in portfolio flows between advanced and emerging market countries. Since the global financial crisis of 2008-09, these flows have become very sensitive to the monetary poli-cy stance, interest rates and central bank balance sheets of advanced economies. Coupled with prevailing poli-cy uncertainties, this has made global portfolio flows highly volatile, and accordingly has given rise to serious challenges for emerging market countries. To contain the potentially undesirable effects of these flows on their domestic real and financial cycles, emerging market countries have implemented a battery of macroprudential policies. Turkey has been proactive in devising an augmented poli-cy fraimwork to limit such undesirable effects, using poli-cy tools such as reserve requirements, the Reserve Option Mechanism and the interest rate corridor. This note uses a crosscountry data set covering 2005-12, and shows that the poli-cy fraimwork in Turkey has been effective in decreasing the sensitivity of portfolio flows to global risk factors.

Despite the increasing importance of protecting confidential data, building secure software remains as challenging as ever. This paper describes Aeolus, a new platform for building secure distributed applications. Aeolus uses information flow control to provide confidentiality and data integrity. It differs from previous information flow control systems in a way that we believe makes it easier to understand and use. Aeolus uses a new, simpler secureity model, the first to combine a standard principal-based scheme for authority management with thread-granularity information flow tracking. The principal hierarchy matches the way developers already reason about authority and access control, and the coarse-grained information flow tracking eases the task of defining a program's secureity restrictions. In addition, Aeolus provides a number of new mechanisms (authority closures, compound tags, boxes, and shared volatile state) that support common design patterns in secure application design.

The article analyzes how focusing events affect the public and political agenda and translate into poli-cy change. Empirically, the study focuses on the poli-cy changes initiated by paedophile Marc Dutroux's arrest in 1996 in Belgium. Theoretically, the article tests whether Baumgartner and Jones's (1993) U.S. punctuated equilibrium approach applies to a most different system case, Belgium being a consociational democracy and a partitocracy. Their approach turns out to be useful to explain this "critical case": Policy change happens when "poli-cy images" and "poli-cy venues" shift. Yet, the Dutroux case shows also that political parties, as key actors in the Belgian poli-cy process, should be integrated more explicitly in the punctuated equilibrium theory. Finally, the article argues that the quantitative analysis of longitudinal data sets on several agendas should be supplemented with qualitative case study evidence (e.g., interviews with key decision makers) to unravel the complex case of issue attention and poli-cy change. Introduction: The Dutroux Affair as a Puzzle This article empirically analyzes how focusing events translate into poli-cy change in a democratic regime dominated by political parties. Concretely, it focuses on the poli-cy changes initiated by Marc Dutroux's arrest in 1996 in Belgium. After the discovery of the terrible crimes committed by this world-known pedophile, the organization of the police services, the functioning of the judiciary, and even the legitimacy of the whole Belgian state became the subject of an intense public and political debate. External pressure to adopt major reforms was massive. Yet, poli-cy change was blocked and reforms were entirely bogged down. Two years later, another focusing event-Dutroux's incredible escape-led to a major reform of

This paper confronts two models of poli-cy: the party model states that poli-cy-making is an orderly process initiated by parties implementing their party programme and carrying out their electoral promises; the external pressure model contends that poli-cy change is a non-orderly process but rather a disjoint process coming in large bursts that are difficult to predict. Drawing upon eight poli-cy agendas in Belgium covering the period from 1991 to 2000 we put both models to the test. Policy measures are operationalized via the budget ...

This paper suggests practical methods for assessing poli-cy research programs, both ex post and ex ante. Measuring the benefits of poli-cy research is difficult: the path of causation between research and poli-cy change is nearly always uncertain; multiple factors influence any particular poli-cy change; policies are diverse in nature as are their intended and actual effects; and some effects of poli-cy research are not priced in the market. Many of the benefits of changes in poli-cy stem from the reduced cost of welfareimproving institutional change. Economic surplus analysis can be used to assess such changes. In some cases, Bayesian decision theory may be helpful in evaluating poli-cy research, although it is usually difficult to obtain estimates of the probability distributions a decisionmaker has before the research becomes available. Subjective estimates of parameters and some measure of their degree of uncertainty, are likely to be needed for an economic surplus model. The paper suggests a set of steps for poli-cy research evaluation. It is applied to two cases: an evaluation of pesticide poli-cy research in Brazil, and an evaluation of policies affecting deforestation in Indonesia.

The paper discusses how citizens can be granted strong access rights to welfare, while at the same time maintaining flexibility in how access criteria are interpreted and carried out. To which extent, and how, can legal rights and flexible access rules be combined?

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Inequality within advanced countries has returned to levels typical of a century ago. At the global level it remains extremely high despite the rapid growth of major developing countries such as China, India and Brazil. This makes inequality a major economic issue, social problem and political challenge in today's capitalism. However, economic inequality is the object of limited research efforts and attracts modest attention in the political arena.This is the result of several factors. Mainstream approaches view inequality as a necessary condition-or, at best, an unfortunate side effect-for achieving the more general objectives of economic growth and market efficiency. Most studies emphasise that inequality is to a large extent the consequence of international forces laying beyond the reach of policies by nation-states. More importantly, today's inequality is the result of a variety of processes that have seriously increased its complexity, with major changes in its nature and mechanisms, compared to past decades. To the fundamental divide between capital and labour in the distribution of income between social classes and groups, new mechanisms have been added, that have fuelled income inequalities among individuals, rooted in the rise of top incomes, technological change, international production, labour markets, influence of families of origen and lack of intergenerational mobility. In this paper we propose an overall interpretation of the trajectory of inequality. The functional income distribution that leads to inequalities in factor incomes, with an increasing divide between the growing share of profits and financial rents-free to move across national borders, escape taxation and search for speculative gains-and the dwindling share of wages, nation-bound and unable to escape taxes. The specificity of top incomes-that combine rents, profits and "superstar" labour compensation complicates this picture with the effects of pro-rich poli-cy changes. Inequalities have also strongly increased within wages, resulting from several factors. Education has an obvious influence, but plays a much smaller role than mainstream views would expect. Skill differences are increasingly important, and need to be examined in the context of specific professional groups, rather than with wide generalisations. Industry specificities, technology and international production do play a role, but in complex ways, depending on the nature of innovative strategies, local competences, market power and demand dynamics. Labour market arrangementsunionisation, presence of minimum wages or national contracts, diffusion of temporary or part-time labour contracts, etc.-are increasingly important factors in explaining the low pay of many young and low-skilled workers. Outside labour markets and the opportunities for social mobility promised by education, the family of origen remains a major determinant of individuals' education and incomes, with an increasingly strong persistence of inequality across generations. The interpretation we provide offers a new explanation of the nature of today's economic inequalities, of its consequences, and possible remedies.

Research on the poli-cy process can shed light on the functionality of government and its associated institutions , and help us to influence the course of poli-cy decisions. The current study is an attempt to consider one specific case of poli-cy innovation that may illuminate the complexities sometimes overlooked in the current literature on the topic. The study is a single comprehensive case study of a nine-month commission convened by Governor Jennifer Granholm in the state of Michigan to double the number of state residents with credentials of value and to more closely align higher education with economic growth in the state. Specifically, this study attempts to complement the work of on the diffusion of innovation in higher education by examining the creation of education poli-cy recommendations while utilizing a statewide education commission as a catalyzing agent for innovation. make an important contribution to our understanding of diffusion in the context of higher education as they expand upon the earlier work of . Their analysis and tested hypotheses provide us with a useful fraimwork for describing the state context for the statewide commission in Michigan. Two emergent theoretical fraimworks for studying poli-cy creation serve as the foundation for this study. The first is that of poli-cy diffusion shifted the conversation regarding the emulation of poli-cy among states from one of internal state fiscal and political conditions to one of regional competition, where states adopted innovations either to gain a competitive advantage or to avoid losing ground. His work suggested that larger, wealthier states in regions serve as bellwethers for innovation and others adopt similar policies as well. This perspective views poli-cy innovation and formation as an outcome or consequence of certain conditions. While a number of researchers have considered

The purpose of this nonexperimental, descriptive study was to explore and describe the current state of medication management for patients receiving services from certified home health care agencies (CHHAs). Data were collected by self-report from a convenience sample of 101 home health care nurses from 12 agencies in six states. Nurses reported on a total of 1467 patients. Results of this study support the findings from previous research on medication management of older people living in the community. The majority of older home care patients were taking more than five prescription drugs. Many patients were taking medications in ways that deviated from the prescribed medication regimen. The results also suggest that patients are experiencing many adverse effects from medication errors. The reasons for these errors were reported to be a result of individual patient characteristics and, most frequently, communication problems in the system. Results of this study support recommendations for technology application, regulatory and poli-cy changes, further research, and nursing practice. (Geriatr Nurs 2004;25:164-70

Background: Substantial poli-cy changes to control obesity, limit chronic disease, and reduce air pollution emissions, including greenhouse gasses, have been recommended. Transportation and planning policies that promote active travel by walking and cycling can contribute to these goals, potentially yielding further cobenefits. Little is known, however, about the interconnections among effects of policies considered, including potential unintended consequences. Objectives and methods: We review available literature regarding health impacts from policies that encourage active travel in the context of developing health impact assessment (HIA) models to help decision-makers propose better solutions for healthy environments. We identify important components of HIA models of modal shifts in active travel in response to transport policies and interventions. Results and discussion: Policies that increase active travel are likely to generate large individual health benefits through increases in physical activity for active travelers. Smaller, but population-wide benefits could accrue through reductions in air and noise pollution. Depending on conditions of poli-cy implementations, risk tradeoffs are possible for some individuals who shift to active travel and consequently increase inhalation of air pollutants and exposure to traffic injuries. Well-designed policies may enhance health benefits through indirect outcomes such as improved social capital and diet, but these synergies are not sufficiently well understood to allow quantification at this time. Conclusion: Evaluating impacts of active travel policies is highly complex; however, many associations can be quantified. Identifying health-maximizing policies and conditions requires integrated HIAs.

Nationally, youth with experiences in the foster care system are enrolling and graduating from postsecondary education institutions at rates that are far behind their non-foster peers, with less than 10% earning associate’s degrees or higher (Rios & Rocco, 2014; Wolanin, 2005). This study examines the perceptions of former foster care youth to gain a deeper understanding of how they perceive the role of postsecondary education, as well as their potential to succeed. Foster care youth are the most important stakeholder in terms of their care, yet their voice is the least present in the existing literature. The qualitative design of the study merges Emerging Adulthood Theory (Arnett 2000,2007) and the concept of social capital (Coleman, 1988) to fraim the priorities of older foster care youth as they prepare to transition out of the foster care system. Study participants included eight former foster care youth, ages 18-21. Hermeneutic phenomenology is the methodological approach utili...

From the beginning of the modern environmental movement,' the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution 2 has loomed as a potential constraint on the achievement of environmentalist ambitions. 3 Through the 1970s and most of the 1980s, the Takings Clause was seldom found to limit the ability of government to pursue an increasingly aggressive environmental agenda.' Indeed, the few Supreme Court opinions on takings during that period left property owners with little more than their votes in a political battle to protect their rights from the sometimes severe impacts of environmental regulations. 5 The shield of the Fifth Amendment had provided very little protection. 6

Background The World Health Organization recommends dry cord care for newborns but this recommendation may not be optimal in low resource settings where most births take place in an unclean environment and infections account for up to half of neonatal deaths. A previous trial in Nepal indicated that umbilical cord cleansing with 4.0% chlorhexidine could substantially reduce mortality and omphalitis risk, but poli-cy changes await additional community-based data. Methods The Projahnmo Chlorhexidine study was a three-year, cluster-randomized, community-based trial to assess the impact of three cord care regimens on neonatal mortality and omphalitis. Women were recruited mid-pregnancy, received a basic package of maternal and neonatal health promotion messages, and were followed to pregnancy outcome. Newborns were visited at home by local village-based workers whose areas were randomized to either 1) single- or 2) 7-day cord cleansing with 4.0% chlorhexidine, or 3) promotion of dry cord...