Unity and Alliance: The Financial Future of Greater China

Greater China has been separated and divided for over a century. The reunification of Hong Kong and Macao on the eve of the New Millennium has paved the way for Greater China to reunify as a single economy with a single internationalized currency. History shows that financial and monetary collaborations are essential to the future of Greater China in the global arena. We argue that collaboration might begin with a common board in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei for Greater China enterprises to list and trade in one synchronized market. The common board would also facilitate public and private bonds in support of the infrastructural development and globalization of Greater China enterprises. Due to its established financial market, system and culture, Hong Kong would be the undisputed home of the Greater China Enterprises Board. Financial collaboration would advocate monetary alliance when the Chinese renminbi is fully convertible. When the time comes, the offshore renminbi based in Hong Kong would become the counterpart of the Eurodollar in London. The Asianyuan, as it might be called, would be the truly internationalized and globalized renminbi.     

Domestic credit and the balance of payments in Ghana: A comment

This article provides evidence from a randomised control trial conducted among potato farmers in Ecuador about the impact of mobile phone text messages on farmer knowledge about and adoption of integrated pest management (IPM) practices. Using psychological constructs, we examine competing explanations for non-standard decision-making leading to low adoption of beneficial agricultural technologies. Farmers who received text messages have significantly higher knowledge and are more likely to adopt most IPM practices than those in the control group. Findings provide evidence that text messages lead to behavioural changes by reducing inattention and sub-optimal heuristics in the face of complex decisions.     

“These People Have an Irrevocable Right to Self-Government”: United States Policy and the Palestinian Question, 1977–1979

Upon entering office, Carter Administration officials placed a heavy emphasis on integrating human rights into United States foreign policy. They also sought to contain festering Arab–Israeli tensions in the Middle East. The intersection of these two issues was the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This article examines the Administration's attempts to solve that conflict and to bring peace to the region. It argues that policymakers developed a sincere dedication to safeguarding Palestinian rights, but that their understanding of those rights was limited in scope and defined through the lens of United States security and strategic interests. In spite of a good-faith effort to satisfy Palestinian desires while maintaining a constructive relationship with Israel, the Administration ultimately failed to alter the status quo because of regional developments. As Washington's strategic thinking changed, so did the urgency of Palestinian rights.     

How to Make a Terrorist Out of Nothing

R v G concerns the controversial offence of collecting or recording information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. We comment on a number of deficiencies in that judgment and investigate the proper approach that ought to be taken to that offence under the Human Rights Act 1998.     

MMPI-2 profiles in civilian PTSD: an examination of differential responses between victims of crime and industrial accidents

The authors studied MMPI-2 profiles of workers (N = 83) diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a control group comprising workers with chronic pain (N = 40). Significant differences were seen in profiles between the PTSD groups and the control group, and the authors compared the PTSD profiles according to exposure to two different kinds of traumatic incidents: industrial accidents or criminal events. They found differences in profile elevations based on the type of event: The level of distress and fear is greater in PTSD victims of crime, and the results also suggest that victims of crime are more suspicious and guarded compared with accident victims. Theoretically based reasons for the differences in profile elevations between the two PTSD groups are discussed.     

Improving police response to persons with mental illness: a multi-level conceptualization of CIT

The large numbers of people with mental illness in jails and prisons has fueled policy concern in all domains of the justice system. This includes police practice, where initial decisions to involve persons in the justice system or divert them to mental health services are made. One approach to focus police response in these situations is the implementation of Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT). The CIT model is being implemented widely, with over 400 programs currently operating. While the limited evidence on CIT effectiveness is promising, research on CIT is limited in scope and conceptualization-much of it focusing on officer characteristics and training. In this paper we review the literature on CIT and present a conceptual model of police response to persons with mental illness that accounts for officer, organizational, mental health system and community level factors likely to influence implementation and effectiveness of CIT and other approaches. By moving our conceptualizations and research in this area to new levels of specificity, we may contribute more to effectiveness research on these interventions.     

Trust,regulation, and redistribution why some governments overregulate and under-redistribute

For many social scientists, government intervention is linked to low levels of social trust and corruption, while others associate it with high trust and low corruption. We aim to reconcile these contrasting views by distinguishing the opposing effects of trust on two alternative types of government intervention: regulation and redistribution. We argue that distrusting individuals demand more governmental regulation (H1) but less government redistribution (H2), and this could be one of the mechanisms explaining why countries with low levels of trust tend to both overregulate and under-redistribute. And the effects of trust on policy preferences are conditional on the quality of institutions. The higher the level of quality of government in a particular region, the more high-trusting individuals will like government redistribution and dislike government regulation that restricts the operations of free markets (H3). We test these hypotheses with data from the latest round of the European Quality of Government Index (EQI) survey, which covers 77,000 individuals from 185 regions of 21 EU member states.