Frontiers of social policy in Europe and America

The cumulative growth of social programs and public income distribution is leading to a grave need for policy harmonization, i.e., efforts to take into account interdependencies across formerly distinct areas of public and private activity. This need is particularly severe with regard to income support programs, labor market relations and taxation systems. While any fundamental backlash against the welfare state is unlikely, so too is any comprehensive solution through negative income taxation or other abstract forms of economic planning. Prospects for coping with problems of policy harmonization differ among nations, but all countries face the challenge of building consensus around noneconomic values lying at the heart of social policy. Without this cushion of legitimacy, increased policy complexity and higher public expectations threaten to overwhelm democratic political systems.     

Factors affecting postmortem tooth loss

Unassociated human bones are a particular problem during the exhumation of mass graves and a factor that limits anthropological and paleopathological analyses from archaeological contexts. Extensive anthropological literature has focused on the complex taphonomic factors that influences bone assemblages, but little attention has been paid to postmortem tooth loss and factors affecting this process. The following study focuses upon the influence of different factors on postmortem tooth loss. Three samples were investigated in the study: a medieval church cemetery containing 110 individual skeletal remains, and two samples from a series of mass graves made within the same time period in 1999, containing 402 bodies. The frequency of postmortem tooth loss was analyzed relative to postmortem interval for each sample, excavation methods, age distribution, and presence of bone loss associated with periodontal disease. Our results indicate that the degree of alveolar bone loss significantly affected both antemortem and postmortem tooth loss and that the frequency of postmortem tooth loss has the strongest correlation to time since death. These findings suggest that additional care should be taken when exhuming remains from older contexts.     

Using state-level simulations in a political economy model of US trade policy

Most analyses of US congressional votes on trade policy identify political and economic factors, and general economic conditions as significant factors. In this paper we examine whether simulated state-level impacts of trade policy changes obtained from an applied general equilibrium model explain recent US Senate votes on trade bills. We find that simulated gross state product effects are good predictors of recent trade-policy votes. Our model-based measures of trade sensitivity perform slightly better in statistical terms than the more traditional economic measures. For the Senate as a whole, import considerations have a larger impact on senate voting than export considerations.     

FROM BAVARIA TO BOKHARA TO ISLE BREWERS: THE EXTRA-ORDINARY LIFE AND TIMES OF DR THE REVD JOSEPH WOLFF,DD

Hugh Leach is the Society's Historian and the author of Strolling About on the Roof of the World: The First Hundred Years of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, Routledge Curzon, 2003.

This article is based on a Library Talk given to the Society in February 2007.