Vulnerability to Multidimensional Poverty: Findings from Households in Melanesia

This paper examines vulnerability in two Melanesian small island developing states: Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. With large proportions of the population living semi-subsistence lifestyles in rural areas, consumption poverty is notoriously difficult to measure. The paper therefore departs from the standard approach and assesses household vulnerability to multidimensional poverty. The paper employs cross-sectional data from a household survey. Results indicate that vulnerability is more widespread than poverty and that vulnerability stems more from excess volatility in expected wellbeing than a particularly low expected level of wellbeing, per se. Results point to a pressing need for formal social protection policies to be implemented.     

奥巴马政府对俄政策调整的影响透视

近些年来,布什政府对俄罗斯奉行的"挤压、遏制及削弱"的单边主义政策,致使美俄关系陷入日益"冰化"的状态.奥巴马上台后,呈现出谋求修复和改善与俄罗斯关系的政策调整趋势.美国的这一政策调整不仅有利于缓和美俄在诸如东欧导弹防御系统、北约东扩等重大国际问题上的分歧与矛盾,促进美俄关系的改善,而且有利于提升俄罗斯的国际地位,并将对世界的多极化进程以及中俄关系产生深刻影响.     

科索沃独立的法律困境

从2008年2月17日科索沃宣布独立超,截至2009年8月底,共有62个国家承认科索沃独立,科索沃也已被批准加入国际货币基金组织和世界银行。但是,科索沃的国际地位并未明确,决定其前途的关键国际力量——美国、欧盟和俄罗斯——态度没有任何改变。科索独立的“既成事实”,实际上是由西方炮制出来的,对现有的国际法准则构成严重挑战。     

Vulnerability to Multi-Dimensional Poverty: An Empirical Comparison of Alternative Measurement Approaches

This paper investigates whether different measures of ex-post poverty and ex-ante vulnerability to poverty provide consistent estimates of poverty and vulnerability to poverty across households. Moreover, if there is some heterogeneity in the identification of households as poor and vulnerable, it investigates the degree of mismatch between measures? The ex-post monetary poverty (MP) and multidimensional poverty (MDP) measures are used to identify poor households. Likewise, the ex-ante vulnerability to monetary poverty (VMP) and vulnerability to multidimensional poverty (VMDP) measures are used to identify vulnerable households. Using a large household survey data-set of about 90,000 households from the Punjab province of Pakistan, we find that most of the vulnerable households are accurately identified by the ex-ante measures of vulnerability to poverty. However, the ex-post measures of poverty identify different households as poor. Our results show that 18 percent households experiencing MDP are not captured by the one-dimensional measure of MP. The important implication of this study is that the choice of measures does matter in ex-post poverty identification, but not as much in the identification of ex-ante vulnerability to poverty.     

Enduring Inefficiencies in Counterintelligence by Reducing Type I and Type II Errors Through Parallel Systems: A Principal-Agent Typology

The Wolf in Shadows

Leslie Colitt: Spymaster: The Definitive Story of Markus Wolf: The Real‐Life Karla, His Moles, and the East German Secret Police (Reading, MA: Addison‐Wesley, 1995) 302 p., US$23

Altogether Too Much Zeal

Duane E. Clarridge with Digby Diehl: A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA, New York: Scribner, 1997, 430 p., $27.50

Spying's Delicate Balance

Loch K. Johnson: Secret Agencies: U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, 262 p., $30.00     

Vulnerability and resilience: critical reflexivity in gendered violence research

South Asian women are a focus area for organisations such as the UN, World Bank and WHO, where violence against women severely constrains policy instruments such as the Millennium Development Goals. The field researcher is often invisible in research space, which informs policy in practice. Through critical reflexivity we rupture the silence on researcher vulnerability, foregrounding researcher resilience as the ethical compass in the research space of gendered violence. Through narratives of researchers as development actors in the river of corrosiveness involved in acid violence research, we offer a typology for researcher resilience for consideration in research designs for policy development.