Trade liberalisation,rural poverty,and the environment: global discussions and local cases

Much has been researched and said about the impacts of international trade liberalisation at the country level; but little is known about its social and environmental local-level impacts. Since national averages can mask the existence of winners and losers, national-level studies may be a poor guide to addressing the plight of the rural poor and the environment that are at the core of the agenda of the social and conservation movement. This article compares the international trade-liberalisation debate with the findings of local rural-based case studies in seven countries, co-ordinated by WWF and the World Bank during 2004–2007. It discusses some actions that the conservation and social movement could take to improve the discussion and the practice of trade liberalisation, poverty alleviation, and environmental conservation.     

The Evolving Construct of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): DSM-5 Criteria Changes and Legal Implications

In the DSM-5, the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has undergone multiple, albeit minor, changes. These changes include shifting PTSD placement from within the anxiety disorders into a new category of traumatic and stressor-related disorders, alterations in the definition of a traumatic event, shifting of the symptom cluster structure from three to four clusters, the addition of new symptoms including persistent negative beliefs and expectations about oneself or the world, persistent distorted blame of self or others, persistent negative trauma-related emotions, and risky or reckless behaviors, and the addition of a dissociative specifier. The evidence or lack thereof behind each of these changes is briefly reviewed. These changes, although not likely to change overall prevalence, have the potential to increase the heterogeneity of individuals receiving a PTSD diagnosis both by altering what qualifies as a traumatic event and by adding symptoms commonly occurring in other disorders such as depression, borderline personality disorder, and dissociative disorders. Legal implications of these changes include continued confusion regarding what constitutes a traumatic stressor, difficulties with differential diagnosis, increased ease in malingering, and improper linking of symptoms to causes of behavior. These PTSD changes are discussed within the broader context of DSM reliability and validity concerns.     

Scope of liability: the vanishing distinction between negligence and strict liability

The duty-of-care requirement cannot be used anymore as the touchstone to differentiate negligence from strict liability because it can be found in many forms of the latter. Duty of care is smuggled into strict liability hidden under the scope of liability requirement (traditionally called “proximate causation”). As far as the scope of liability requirement is common to negligence and to many forms of strict liability, there is a fairly large common ground to both liability rules, and consequently the marginal Hand formula is applied to both rules. Indeed, under a negligence rule, the marginal Hand formula is applied twice: first to assess whether or not the defendant did breach his or her duty of care, and, second, to delimit whether or not the defendant’s behavior was a proximate cause of the harm suffered by the victim. However, under a strict liability rule, the Hand formula is applied only once when the proximate causation question is raised. Traditional law and economics analysis has almost always taken the normative question raised by the causation requirement as given, which is a potential major problem due to the importance of scope of liability or proximate causation in legal practice. Defining the scope of liability, that is to say, the boundaries of the pool of potential defendants, is the basic legal policy decision for each and every liability rule. In the normative model presented in this paper, the government first chooses efficient scope of liability, and given the scope of liability, the government then decides the liability rule and damages that guarantee efficient precaution. In the article, most known scope of liability rationales developed by both common law and civil law systems are discussed in order to show the substantial common ground between negligence and strict liability.     

Acculturation and reported intimate partner violence among Latinas in Los Angeles

This study sought to understand the relationship between acculturation and reporting intimate partner violence (IPV) among Latinas. A cross-sectional interviewer-administered survey was conducted at public health care clinics throughout Los Angeles County. Logistic regression was used to estimate the effect of acculturation on reporting IPV. An increasing trend of reporting IPV was observed among Latinas who were more acculturated (chi-square = 41.02, p = .0006). Highly acculturated Latinas were more likely to report IPV compared with least acculturated Latinas (prevalence odds ration = 2.18, 95% confidence level = 0.98, 4.89) and moderately acculturated Latinas were more likely to report IPV compared with least acculturated Latinas (prevalence odds ration = 1.29, 95% confidence level = 0.69, 2.43). Culturally competent IPV prevention programs may be the key to significantly reducing the number of women exposed to this serious public health problem.     

Results of the GEP-ISFG collaborative study on two Y-STRs tetraplexes: GEPY I (DYS461, GATA C4, DYS437 and DYS438) and GEPY II (DYS460, GATA A10, GATA H4 and DYS439)

A collaborative exercise was carried out by the Spanish and Portuguese ISFG Working Group (GEP-ISFG) in order to evaluate the performance of two Y-chromosome STR PCR tetraplexes, which include the loci DYS461, GATA C4, DYS437 and DYS438 (GEPY I), and DYS460, GATA A10, GATA H4 and DYS439 (GEPY II). The participating laboratories were asked to type three samples for the eight markers, using a specific amplification protocol. In addition, two control samples, with known haplotypes, were provided. The results obtained by the 13 different participating laboratories were identical, except for two laboratories that failed to type correctly the same two samples for GATA C4. By sequence analyses, two different GATA C4 allele structures were found. One control sample (allele 21) and two questioned samples (allele 22, correctly typed by all the laboratories, and allele 25) presented the following repeat structure: (TCTA)4(TGTA)2(TCTA)2(TGTA)2(TCTA)n, but different from the one found for allele 26 in one sample included in this exercise, as well as in the second control sample (allele 23), namely (TCTA)4(TGTA)2(TCTA)2(TGTA)2(TCTA)2(TGTA)2(TCTA)n. The collaborative exercise results proved that both Y-tetraplexes produce good amplification results, with the advantage of being efficiently typed using different separation and detection methodologies. However, since GATA C4 repeat presents a complex structure, with alleles differing in sequence structure, efficient denaturing conditions should be followed in order to avoid typing errors due to sizing problems.     

Measuring the economically active population in Mexico in the early 1990s

"This paper refers to problems of definition and measurement of the economically active population in the early nineties in different Mexican sources of information, considering in particular the 1990 Population Census and the 1991 National Survey on Employment. The study analyzes in detail the questions, reference periods, and coding systems of these two and other previous surveys and censuses. Its findings allow us to state that the 1990 Population Census is an adequate source of information for analyzing [the] national full-time salaried work force." (SUMMARY IN ENG)     

Rural Mobilisation and Agrarian Political Economy in Argentina, 2001–2020

In this article, we reconstruct the mobilisations of rural actors both from ‘below’ and from ‘above’ and their connections to Argentina's agrarian political economy between 2001 and 2020. We divide the analysis into three periods and review key protest events and the actions of movements and organisations, paying special attention to two dimensions. First, we consider how rural movements and organisations engaged with institutional politics and the state. Second, we analyse the collective identifications and claims at the basis of coalitions forged within and beyond the rural sector.