(Un?)Healthy Politics: The Political Determinants of Subnational Health Systems in Brazil

How does political competition shape institutions that govern the expansion of social policy subnationally? Brazilian states have shown a surprising variation in the design of their public health institutions, which regulate the distribution of health resources and citizen access to public health care. While many states have experienced fragmentation, some have remained highly centralized and discretionary, and only a select few have established a coordinated system based on power sharing and rules‐based distribution. Accounts that link public health care expansion to federal government imposition, the presence of the public health care movement, and leftist parties cannot fully explain this variation. Instead, in the three Brazilian states examined here, the nature of subnational political competition triggered different institution‐building strategies. The findings indicate that plural political competition yielded incentives for limiting state‐level discretion and for sharing power with municipal governments, while political concentration reinforced the attraction to centralized and discretionary policymaking.     

墨西哥跨国公司之路

墨西哥经济在20世纪80年代后半期由封闭向开放模式转变所带来的一个直接后果就是大型私有企业的跨国公司化①.但是,发展模式的转变不是墨西哥企业集团向国际市场扩张能力增强的唯一原因.本文将展现墨西哥最具活力的私人企业在不同时期中为适应新的国际竞争机制、在全球化进程中占据有利地位而采取的全方位战略,并将这些阶段与墨西哥的经济形势相结合.     

Basic Personal Values Underlie and Give Coherence to Political Values: A Cross National Study in 15 Countries

Do the political values of the general public form a coherent system? What might be the source of coherence? We view political values as expressions, in the political domain, of more basic personal values. Basic personal values (e.g., security, achievement, benevolence, hedonism) are organized on a circular continuum that reflects their conflicting and compatible motivations. We theorize that this circular motivational structure also gives coherence to political values. We assess this theorizing with data from 15 countries, using eight core political values (e.g., free enterprise, law and order) and ten basic personal values. We specify the underlying basic values expected to promote or oppose each political value. We offer different hypotheses for the 12 non-communist and three post-communist countries studied, where the political context suggests different meanings of a basic or political value. Correlation and regression analyses support almost all hypotheses. Moreover, basic values account for substantially more variance in political values than age, gender, education, and income. Multidimensional scaling analyses demonstrate graphically how the circular motivational continuum of basic personal values structures relations among core political values. This study strengthens the assumption that individual differences in basic personal values play a critical role in political thought.     

Success Factors in Canadian Academic Spin-Offs

In the last 20 years Canadian university produced some 1200 spin-off companies, out of which 5–6% are still independent and quoted in the stock exchanges. This study analysed these public companies in terms of industry, technologies, regions, universities and growth. The paper finds that the growing companies of the 2000s are most often not in biotechnology, in spite of their frequent support by venture capital. Conversely spin-off companies that grew had often obtained patents and received support from the Industrial Research Assistance Program, a support program for R&D in smaller firms, managed by the National Research Council of Canada.     

Analysis of cognitive inhibition and flexibility in juvenile delinquents

Executive functions are still developing during adolescence. It is important to analyse if juvenile delinquency is related to a delay in the development of these functions. The objective of this study was to analyse cognitive inhibition and flexibility, two components of executive functions, in juvenile delinquents. Participants were 81 males, 17.46 ± 1.60 years old. Three groups were compared: a juvenile delinquent inmate group (IG), an age-paired group (APG), and an age- and education-paired group (AEPG). A modified Stroop task was used to assess cognitive inhibition and flexibility. The IG and the AEPG (low-education adolescents) had significantly more difficulties than the APG on inhibition; the IG and the AEPG had no significant differences. No group differences were found on flexibility. Since all low-education adolescents have difficulties on inhibition, these difficulties are not an exclusive characteristic of juvenile delinquents. Analysis of cognitive processes in juvenile delinquents must control for education to determine how specific are the difficulties found in these adolescents.     

Emerging,and old,dilemmas for food security in Latin America

The present text offers a summary of some of the crucial food security problems in Latin American (LA) countries. This region, like many others in the globe, confronts such as food safety difficulties. The summary offers also an analysis of some technologically based solutions for LA food security issues. As a general call, the present review article calls for a collaborative and transdisciplinary approach to think deeper about how to solve food security problems, putting the focus on enabling technologies within a context of social, market, and global trends to achieve food and nutritional security. The review is positioned far from techno‐optimisms and, at the same time, away from purely economic‐based solutions. Conversely, this review embraces the whole complexity that brings economy‐nature‐technology triad. Embracing such complex relationships between technology, nature and the socio‐economy aspects of food security LA issues. Such complexity also triggers a need for a solution that considers a renewed approach to sustainability in the whole food value chain from production to consumption. Sustainability in the value chain opens up a much‐needed approach to LA food security that broadens, and refresh, our understanding of this fundamental socio‐economic and technical phenomena.