Financial Stress and Depression Among African Refugees in the Southern United States: A Serial Multiple Mediation Analysis of Financial Self-Efficacy and Financial Anxiety

Abstract

As part of a larger community-based participatory research project exploring the postresettlement challenges of African refugees in the southern United States, our study investigated the phenomenon of financial stress and its relationship to mental health through a mediating chain of factors—financial self-efficacy and financial anxiety. Results revealed the mediating role of financial self-efficacy and financial anxiety on the relationship between financial stress and depressive symptoms. Findings provide discourses around financial stress and mental health in the migration context, critical to recognizing the unique experiences of African refugees and informing culturally responsive programs for financial inclusion and economic integration.     

韩国社会多元文化的现状与多元文化教育的兴起

在经济全球化大发展的趋势下,很多外国人涌入韩国这个由单一民族组成的社会成为移住民。为了让本国人跟外来移民和平共处,韩国政府改变了一如既往的同化主义政策,韩国学术界也陆续提出开展多元文化教育的必要性和具体建议。韩国的多元文化教育从仅针对少数弱势群体和种族进行教育,开始转向针对所有韩国民众进行以平等、自由、正义、尊严为哲学基础的公民素质教育。这种多元文化教育的目的是通过教育,让韩国社会的普通民众和新来的少数移民者及其子女们一起,共同建设平等和睦的和谐社会。本文研究了韩国多元文化社会的形成和多元文化教育的兴起过程,进而了解韩国多元文化社会的现状和多元文化教育的方向。     

Sovereign risk: Gulf sovereign wealth funds as engines of growth and political resource

ABSTRACT

The economic reform agenda moving across the Gulf Cooperation Council states precipitated by the end of a decade-long run of high oil prices, high population growth rates, and costly demands on the provision of generous state services and subsidies has had some unexpected consequences. The reformulation of state-society relations, especially with regard to ideas of how to create economic growth and how to model a future social contract, challenges the accepted literature and construct of rentierism. This essay focuses on one distinctive site of these shifting relations between rentier states and their citizens: the sovereign wealth fund (SWF). SWFs are based upon the shared rents from oil production, but as they have evolved they are also becoming transformative in new national development strategies. Some SWFs now veer from traditional practices of safeguarding wealth to more experimental and high-risk strategies that claim to be able to diversify national economies from oil dependency, while also promising high returns. The current moment of late rentierism heightens questions of ownership and of the state’s role as guardian or steward of society’s wealth. Using SWFs to examine state-society relations and rentierism across the Gulf, this article focuses on the Saudi case.     

The Dilemma of Nuclear Disarmament: The Case of North Korea

ABSTRACT

The Hanoi summit between the US and North Korea failed not because of North Korea’s brinkmanship strategy or its miscalculation of the US position on the denuclearisation talks, but because of a fundamental issue: a dilemma of how much to yield in giving up its military capabilities to expedite the lifting of sanctions. The leadership in Pyongyang has concerns about the ‘deliverability’ of its promises to its domestic audience to ensure deterrence capabilities and economic recovery. The two-level game model explains why both sides keep minimising the range of options for the negotiations, increasing the risk that the talks will break down.     

Autonomy and Egalitarianism

In this article I consider the alleged incompatibility between individual autonomy and the achievement and subsequent maintenance of an egalitarian society. I argue that not only is there no incompatibility, but that it is only where an egalitarian society is in place that a like autonomy can be exercised by each citizen. To make out my case I discuss the three main grounds that have been advanced to show there is such an incompatibility. Opponents of egalitarianism contend that egalitarian goals can only be achieved with losses in autonomy; in particular, losses through infringements on the civil liberties of individual citizens, losses in the scope individuals have to exercise and exploit their own talents and losses in control over the income and wealth to which individuals are entitled as a result of the exercise of their talents. The first of these contentions is dealt with quite briefly but the second and third go to the heart of the matter and accordingly are given fuller discussion. None of the three can be convincingly made out because it is precisely where there are significant inequalities in income and wealth that significant differences exist in the scope individuals have to fulfil their life-plans and thus to exercise their individual autonomy.     

The mechanism of death in whole-body overheating

Data on anatomo-clinical analysis of 36 cases of death due to general overheating of a body are presented. On the basis of these data can be stated that in most cases the effect of high ambient temperature combined with great physical exercise and prolonged exposure to the caused death within short (up to 3 days) periods of time as a result of cessation of CNS functioning. Without physical exercise and direct insolation death usually occurred later (on the average of 5-9 days) from acute renal and renal-hepatic failure. Morphologic changes were unspecific.     

Endogenous changes in the exchange rate regime: A bureaucratic incentive model

Public choice submits that legal changes can be endogenous in such a way that they are manipulated by bureaucrats who want to maximize rents from transactions with various interest groups. This paper takes the change in exchange rate regimes to empirically examine the premise. It offers a two-stage method, in which we first show that the exchange rate is influenced by interest group pressures, and subsequently that the 1990 market average regime (MAR), as a phase-in policy in Korea, was introduced mainly to serve bureaucratic incentives. This method is expected to be useful to a host of countries for various studies attempting to test a possible existence of bureaucratic or other hidden motivations behind any “isolated'' event of policy change.     

Soviet Household Saving Function

In this paper, the Soviet household saving function is estimated using reconstructed data from the unpublished archival material: the Soviet family budget survey data. In addition, a shortage indicator is developed to capture both household purchasing power in comparison with the availability of consumer goods in the official market and the spillover of the household demand for consumer goods from the official retail market to the secondary one. A long-run solution of the Soviet household saving function, which includes a shortage indicator as one of the independent variables, is estimated using these data. The reliability of the long-run solution is confirmed by the short-run dynamics of the Soviet household saving function, which satisfy super-exogeneity, parameter constancy, and several diagnostic tests. The highly significant coefficient of the shortage indicator suggests that Soviet household saving behaviour was affected by shortages of consumer goods during 1965–1989.