Multicriteria Decision Aid to support Multilateral Environmental Agreements in assessing international forestry projects

The three Rio Conventions—the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification—face the challenge to create synergies at different levels. The objective of this article is to describe how we have assessed synergies between the Rio Conventions at the project level in the forest sector. Since the complexity of the decision problem is high, we adopted the Multicriteria Decision Aid approach, which can provide a broad insight into the decision problem and find a compromise solution to a problem with multidimensional and conflicting criteria including social, economic and environmental features. The ELECTRE TRI model was used for assessing synergies at the project level, and has been a useful tool to quantify the performance of afforestation and reforestation projects into three categories (synergistic, reasonably synergistic, and not synergistic). For the first time, afforestation and reforestation projects have been assessed in a comprehensive way through decision criteria that reflect global and local interests using a non-compensatory multicriteria method.     

The Effectiveness of Administrative Reform in New Democracies

Practitioners and scholars of postcommunist politics disagree on the accomplishments of administrative reforms in new Eastern European democracies. The transformation of the public sector after 1989 has aimed to consolidate the democratic process and enhance economic development. Skeptics, however, argue that administrative reforms face serious challenges in the context of economic liberalization, insufficient capacity for modernization, and cultural legacies of the past. The authors judge reform effectiveness by testing the impact of civil service reform on government transparency and foreign direct investment. The results of the empirical analysis confirm that once reform is adopted, administrations become more effective at reducing corruption and attracting investment. Despite the delays and difficulties of implementation, the adoption of reform is important in and of itself, and countries can expect positive results sooner than skeptics predict.     

Cross‐Border Shopping and State Use Tax Liabilities: Evidence from eBay Transactions

Online commerce presents consumers with a convenient way of shopping outside of their local jurisdiction, and this online purchase decision is capable of affecting in significant ways the sales and use tax collections of state governments. However, the actual revenue impact has proven difficult to estimate. There is considerable work that examines the revenue impact of seller compliance with sales taxes. However, there is little work on buyer compliance with use taxes. In this paper, we investigate the potential impact of cross‐border shopping on state use tax liabilities of buyers, using data from the largest online consumer‐to‐consumer and business‐to‐consumer marketplace, eBay.com . We collect our own data on actual cross‐border shopping transactions from eBay, focusing upon a “representative” commodity classification and a “typical” day; these data consist of nearly 21,000 eBay listings generated by roughly 7,000 individual sellers with over 9,000 buyers. These data allow us to examine the extent of actual, not estimated, cross‐border shopping by buyers, and the subsequent potential impact of this cross‐border shopping on state use tax liabilities. Our results indicate that cross‐border shopping is highly prevalent on eBay, with out‐of‐state purchases accounting for on average 94 percent of the volume of a state's purchase transactions. Even so, given the limited volume of eBay‐based transactions relative to total sales transactions, the likely impact of cross‐border transactions on state use tax revenue streams is quite low, at least at present, typically less than one percent of actual state sales tax revenues.     

Reciprocal policy diffusion: the regulation of executive compensation in the UK and the US

Because of popular and political pressure, governments have been compelled to regulate ‘excessive’ executive compensation and search both a policy and political solution. In this paper, I seek to establish the mechanisms of policy learning, competition, and emulation by examining American and British regulatory policies of executive compensation that show evidence of reciprocal diffusion, i.e. from the US to the UK and vice versa. The evidence suggests that during the past two decades, the extent of reciprocal policy diffusion varied and was primarily driven by policy learning. Using published government reports, press releases, public hearings, newspaper articles, and interviews, I demonstrate that reciprocal learning occurred because one country's policymakers and practitioners explicitly discussed and/or referred to the practices in the other country when deciding to adopt a specific policy solution to the problem of excessive executive pay. I discuss the implications for the literature on diffusion and point out avenues for future research. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

STAR METRICS and the Science of Science Policy

STAR METRICS is a data platform that is being voluntarily and collaboratively developed by U.S. federal science agencies and research institutions to describe investments in science and their results. It initially emerged as a result of reporting requirements associated with the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; it has developed in response to a recognized need to begin to systematically document federal investments in science and their immediate and long‐term results. The eventual goal is to draw information from existing data on scientific and economic activities as well as from research institutions' and federal science agencies' systems to provide data that can be used for a more scientific analysis of science investments and their outcomes.     

Analyzing Brazilian vehicle documents for authenticity by easy ambient sonic-spray ionization mass spectrometry

Using desorption/ionization techniques such as easy ambient sonic-spray ionization mass spectrometry (EASI-MS), it is possible to analyze documents of Brazilian vehicles for authenticity, providing a chemical profile directly from the surface of each document. A method for the detection of counterfeit documents is described, and the falsification procedure is elucidated. Forty authentic and counterfeit documents were analyzed by both positive and negative ion modes, EASI(±)-MS. EASI(+)-MS results identified the presence of (bis(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate plasticizer and of dihexadecyldimethylammonium biocide in both types of documents. For EASI(-)-MS results, the 4-octyloxybenzoic acid additive ([M + H](+): m/z 249) is present only in counterfeit documents. It was also found that counterfeit vehicle documents are produced via Laserjet printers. Desorption/ionization techniques, such as EASI-MS, offer therefore, an intelligent way to characterize the counterfeiting method.     

Determination of an effective housekeeping gene for the quantification of mRNA for forensic applications

The potential application of mRNA for the identification of biological fluids using molecular techniques has been a recent development in forensic serology. Constitutively expressed housekeeping genes can assess the amount of mRNA recovered from a sample, establish its suitability for downstream applications, and provide a reference point to corroborate the identity of the fluid. qPCR was utilized to compare the expression levels of housekeeping genes from forensic-like body fluid stains to establish the most appropriate assessment of human mRNA quantity prior to profiling. Although variability was observed between fluids and individuals, results indicated that beta-2 microglobulin exhibited the highest expression for all body fluids examined and across donors. A one-way analysis of variance was performed for housekeeping gene variability between donors (at the α, 0.05, significance level), and the results indicated significant differences for semen, vaginal secretions, and menstrual blood.     

Forensic medical diagnostics of chronic narcotic intoxication based on the morphological findings

The objective of the present work was to develop the forensic medical criteria for chronic narcotic intoxication based on the results of morphological studies. The internal organs from 179 cadavers were available for the examination following death from acute poisoning with narcotic substances or as a result of chronic narcotic intoxication. The studies were carried out with the use of routine histological staining techniques and an immunohistological method. The data obtained provided a basis for the development of criteria to be employed in forensic medical diagnostics of acute poisoning with narcotic drugs and chronic narcotic intoxication. These criteria include ischemia of cerebral neurons, pulmonary emphysema with the formation of foreign body-type granulomas and fibrin/erythrocyte thrombi, morphological signs of ventricular fibrillation, the picture of bacterial endocarditis, follicular hyperplasia of the lymphoid organs, chronic portal hepatitis, and nodular degeneration of the adrenal cortex associated with its atrophy.