Health facility characteristics and the decision to seek care

Utilisation of healthcare facilities is low in many developing areas. One possible explanation is that treatment costs, in time or money, are high. Another is that parents perceive treatment benefits to be low. We combine Philippines DHS data with a subsequent facilities survey in order to examine these issues with respect to treatment for respiratory infections and diarrhoea in young children. Controlling statistically for the selectivity of the initiating illness, we find that the staffing level of nearby health facilities is a determinant of the probability that parents take their ill children for curative care.     

Evaluating impacts for competing land use alternatives

Public sector decisions concerning land use can benefit from a consistent accounting of economic values represented in alternative uses. While conventional economic valuation may not represent all interests bearing on optimal land use, ignorance or misuse of economic principles in the decision process may lead to socially undesirable outcomes. We make use of an impact assessment technique based on the U.S. Forest Service Micro IMPLAN model to compile and measure the economic consequences of alternative agricultural land use. This approach provides consistent measurement of economic impacts based on quantified linkages among the different sectors represented in Hood River County, Oregon. An orchard and a golf course are compared in terms of the magnitude and distribution of direct, indirect, and induced economic impacts arising from alternative uses of a designated land parcel. While the results are not generalizable to specific applications, the approach highlights the key economic variables that generate economic benefits in alternative uses.     

New Region,New Story: Imagining Mobile Subjects in Transnational Space

This paper investigates the changing relations between citizens and Europe's internal borders by seeing these relations as objects of governmentality of mobilities. It focuses on the particular discursive space of one transnational ‘corridor in the making’, studying how, through practices of visioning and strategy-making, governmental actors make new transnational governmental territories by breathing life into the imagined mobile subjects of these future territories. These mobile subjects play a central part in the politics of emergent transnational governmentalities and in legitimising potential border-crossing infrastructures. In a case study of the COINCO project (Corridor of Innovation and Co-operation), linking Oslo, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Malmö and Berlin, it is shown how deconstructing imagined mobile subjects reveals the will to power over mobility and sheds light on how governmental practices are remaking European borders.     

Intelligence Failures: What Are They Really and What Do We Do about Them?

Intelligence failures occur for more reasons than just sloppy tradecraft and are often attributable to decision-makers as well as to the intelligence community. Before exploring the subjective nature of intelligence failures, this article first discusses three foundational concepts underlying them: process vs. product, fact vs. judgment, and prediction. It then outlines major components of intelligence failures: accuracy, surprise, and the role of decision-makers, particularly unrealistic expectations and the use or non-use of intelligence. The article concludes with a discussion of what the intelligence community and decision-makers can do to deal with these three components.     

Reducing crime by remediating vacant lots: the moderating effect of nearby land uses

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Place-based blight remediation programs have gained popularity in recent years as a crime reduction approach. This study estimated the impact of a citywide...     

How Politics Shapes the Growth of Rules

This article examines the impact of politics on governmental rule production. Traditionally, explanations of rule dynamics have focused on nonpolitical factors such as the self‐evolvement of rules, environmental factors, and decision maker attributes. This article develops a set of hypotheses about when, why, and how political factors shape changes in the stock of rules. Furthermore, we test these hypotheses on a unique, new data set based on all Danish primary legislation and administrative rules from 1989 to 2011 categorized into 20 different policy domains. The analysis shows that the traditional Weberian “rules breed rules” explanations must be supplemented with political explanations that take party ideology and changes in the political agenda into account. Moreover, the effect of political factors is indistinguishable across changes in primary laws and changes in administrative rules, a result that challenges the depiction of the latter rule‐making process as more or less disconnected from the political domain.     

Foreign Direct Investment and economic transition: Panacea or pain killer?

This article sets out to make an assessment of the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and economic growth in transition countries through a review of the empirical record to date. The first part reviews the phases of transition in combination with policy efforts to attract FDI. In the second part, different growth studies across levels of analysis are juxtaposed to better understand the overall growth impact of FDI in transition countries. Since foreign firms have a large direct effect on performance at the level of the firm it is often assumed that they automatically contribute to the economic growth of host countries. The missing link in this discussion is the concept of ‘trickle down’. Superior direct effects in terms of productivity and profitability are hypothesised to trickle down to the host country both as spillovers, or catalysing effects on local firms, and through the expected increase in income that such direct and indirect effects in combination will generate through labour income and taxes. The review shows that such trickle down effects are quite fragile in terms of being demonstrated to exist in transition countries. Combined with widespread usage of tax holidays, subsidies and acquisition discounts, it is not certain that positive direct effects equate with economic growth in these countries.     

后工业社会福利国家的压力增加了还是减少了？

尽管对现代福利国家的比较研究已使我们获得了对福利国家如何应对由内因和外因带来的压力拥有了丰富的认识，但对后工业社会这些压力的性质和潜在的含义还不甚明了。在研究的文献中，学者们探讨了诸多对福利国家产生压力的各种社会现象，诸如：全球化、欧洲化、人口的统计规律、个体化和变迁中的劳动力。全球化和欧洲一体化作为外在压力，其对福利国家的影响尚有待证明，而人口老龄化、劳动人口的相对下降、工作年限的缩短、多样化的家庭和个人生活方式等内生压力对福利国家造成的影响要重要得多。压力在后工业社会并不是像大家通常所认为的那样被福利国家消解了或重构了，相反，对福利国家而言，真实情况是压力更多了而不是减少了。     

Fiscal Federalism and International Capital: The Effects of Fiscal Federalism on Foreign Direct Investment and Sovereign Dept Ratings

Although the study of federalism has become one of the most intensely studied areas in economics and political science, no consensus has emerged on the impact of fiscal federalism on macroeconomic performance. I focus on one specific element of the debate‐ the role of fiscally federal institutions in allowing a country access to international capital markets. In an empirical analysis of 60 countries from 1975‐1995 I find fiscal federalism has no clear impact on inflows of foreign direct investment. In an examination of the impact of federalism on sovereign debt ratings for 40 countries from 1980‐1998, I find that fiscal federalism is associated with lower levels of sovereign debt risk.