Kennedy Men and the Fate of the Alliance for Progress in LBJ Era Brazil and Chile

The experiences of US ambassadors to Brazil and Chile in the 1960s, Lincoln Gordon and Ralph Dungan, exemplify the contradictory nature of US commitment to reform in Latin America in that decade. Brazil and Chile were two of the three countries which received the most Alliance for Progress money; their leaders were men whom the US ambassadors strongly supported. These countries, however, were heading in diametrically opposite political directions, one toward increasingly despotic government and the other toward greater democracy. In both cases, the ambassadors could claim to be pursuing Kennedy's Alliance goals in the Johnson years even as US interest in the region waned.     

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.     

Powerhouses or pretenders? Debating China's and India's emergence as technological powers

Abstract

Are China and India emerging as innovative technological powerhouses in the twenty-first century? This essay reviews the interdisciplinary debate that has been inspired by this question in recent years. It begins by considering recent studies that are relatively impressed with China's and India's recent accomplishments and potential in this regard. Next, it reviews works that are less impressed with their track records and prospects. It then considers a series of more equivocal studies that remain more or less undecided about China's and India's technological trajectories. The final section evaluates the debate as a whole and proposes new directions for scholarship in this field.     

Aviation Security,Risk Assessment,and Risk Aversion for Public Decisionmaking

This paper estimates risk reductions for each layer of security designed to prevent commercial passenger airliners from being commandeered by terrorists, kept under control for some time, and then crashed into specific targets. Probabilistic methods are used to characterize the uncertainty of rates of deterrence, detection, and disruption, as well as losses. Since homeland security decisionmakers tend to be risk‐averse because of the catastrophic or dire nature of the hazard or event, utility theory and Monte Carlo simulation methods are used to propagate uncertainties in calculations of net present value, expected utility, and probabilities of net benefit. We employ a “break‐even” cost‐benefit analysis to determine the minimum probability of an otherwise successful attack that is required for the benefit of security measures to equal their cost. In this context, we examine specific policy options: including Improvised Physical Secondary Barriers (IPSBs) in the array of aircraft security measures, including the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), and including them both. Attack probabilities need to exceed 260 percent or 2.6 attacks per year to be 90 percent sure that FAMS is cost‐effective, whereas IPSBs have more than 90 percent chance of being cost‐effective even if attack probabilities are as low as 6 percent per year. A risk‐neutral analysis finds a policy option of adding IPSBs but not FAMS to the other measures to be preferred for all attack probabilities. However, a very risk‐averse decisionmaker is 48 percent likely to prefer to retain FAMS even if the attack probability is as low as 1 percent per year—a level of risk aversion exhibited by few, if any, government agencies. Overall, it seems that, even in an analysis that biases the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, far too much may currently be spent on security measures to address the problem of airline hijacking, and many spending reductions could likely be made with little or no consequent reduction of security.