Governance,economy, and foreign aid

Much of the current donor discussion of governance takes place outside of a historical or theoretical context. This article locates the governance issue within recent political science, development management, and institutional economics literature. The review focuses on accountability, participation, transparency, and predictability or the rule of law, and includes a discussion of the impact of these variables upon economic performance. It concludes that donors can best assist good governance to develop by helping to foster conditions under which developing societies can push their governments to deliver the accountability, transparency and rule of law that sustainable development requires. Deborah Brautigam is assistant professor in the department of political science at Columbia University. She has written and published on various aspects of foreign aid and development, in particular, on China’s foreign aid program in West Africa. Her current research is on the comparative politics of industrial adjustment in Asia and Africa.     

Attribution of crime motives biases eyewitnesses’ memory and sentencing decisions

In court, the basic expectation is that eyewitness accounts are solely based on what the witness saw. Research on post-event influences has shown that this is not always the case and memory distortions are quite common. However, potential effects of an eyewitness’ attributions regarding a perpetrator’s crime motives have been widely neglected in this domain. In this paper, we present two experiments (N?=?209) in which eyewitnesses were led to conclude that a perpetrator’s motives for a crime were either dispositional or situational. As expected, misinformation consistent with an eyewitness’ attribution of crime motives was typically falsely recognised as true whereas inconsistent misinformation was correctly rejected. Furthermore, a dispositional vs. situational attribution of crime motives resulted in more severe (mock) sentencing supporting previous research. The findings are discussed in the context of schema-consistent biases and the effect of attributions about character in a legal setting.     

Effects of obesity on talar micro- and macro-morphology

The addition of information regarding obesity status to the forensic anthropological biological profile could significantly contribute to the identification of human skeletal remains since over 40% of the U.S. adult population is currently obese. This study examines the differences in talar shape and trabecular bone structure between obese and non-obese individuals. A sample of 20 obese and 20 non-obese divided evenly by sex was selected from the Texas State University Donated Skeletal Collection. Tali were imaged using x-ray computed tomography (voxel size: 28–38.7 μm). Image stacks were processed to produce binary images as well as trabecular thickness and spacing maps. Landmark-based geometric morphometric analyses were conducted to quantify shape variation. Shape coordinates were used to locate 100 geometrically homologous volumes of interest within each talus. Bone volume fraction, trabecular thickness, and trabecular spacing were extracted at each volume of interest. Within each sex, a one-way ANCOVA was used to determine if significant differences exist between obese and non-obese individuals in trabecular bone after controlling for age. The size of the talus as well as subtle aspects of shape were found to distinguish the sexes. The results further indicate that bone volume fraction significantly differs between obese and non-obese males. In females, bone volume fraction is correlated with age but does not differ between obese and non-obese. The study demonstrates that bone microstructure is a promising approach to estimating body mass or body mass index category but age effects diminish the potential for the talus to be used alone.     

Polanyi in Brussels or Luxembourg? Social rights and market regulation in European insurance

The decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union to ban sex discrimination in insurance has shown the potential reach of the principle of non‐discrimination. This paper discusses the different positions taken by participants in the policy process leading up to the decision, in order to reveal the potential and limitations of non‐discrimination as the basis for market‐regulatory social policy. It is shown that the European Commission's initial support for prohibiting insurance discrimination faltered with the realization that the measure would have little efficacy as a distributive social policy. It was left to the Court to assert that non‐discrimination rights are constitutive for European markets, regardless of their functional and instrumental limitations. The Court's focus was on the market‐integrative potential of rights as sources of norms for the conduct of insurance relationships. It is argued that this form of constitutive regulation is distinct from distributive social policy as it does not require that outcomes are egalitarian, but, rather, that the processes governing market relations should respect fundamental rights.     

Rhetoric and Reality: Can Ukraine Create an Effective Navy to Protect its Interests in the Black Sea?

Abstract

Since the ‘Orange Revolution’ Ukraine has been engaged in a comprehensive programme of naval transformation aimed at building an effective coastal defence navy able to protect its maritime interests in the Black Sea: an efficient and well run Ukrainian coastal navy that is inherently defensive in orientation can maintain good order at sea and protect Ukraine's security and can also make an important contribution to regional security and stability. Over the last few years Ukraine has been making steady progress in developing a balanced, flexible and deployable coastal navy able to engage in a full spectrum of defence activities. However, continued progress is likely to be hampered in the medium term by the high cost of naval transformation, the challenges of democratic consolidation and friction between Russia and Ukraine in the Black Sea.