Extreme poverty alleviation through community-based entrepreneurship: PRODECO in Paraguay

Community-based entrepreneurship projects have been advocated as a potential approach to alleviate extreme poverty as they provide opportunities for income generation and capacity enhancement. This practical note provides an overview of the PRODECO project undertaken jointly by the Paraguayan government and the World Bank (1999–2008) in three southern departments of Paraguay (Itapúa, Misiones, and Ñeembucú). It describes and analyses the context, scope, operations, and results of this project, and identifies five main lessons related to frequent challenges faced by this approach; on size, access to skills, distance from government agencies, pace, and technology.     

Small state or minor power? New Zealand’s Five Eyes membership,intelligence reforms,and Wellington’s response to China’s growing Pacific role

ABSTRACT

This article uses the lens of small state theory to assess New Zealand’s role in the Five Eyes Alliance and Wellington’s implementation of intelligence reforms in the last seven years that are intended to help the country deal with a transformed security environment. In this context, New Zealand decision-makers have become increasingly concerned about growing Chinese influence in the South Pacific region and in New Zealand itself. It is clear that the New Zealand’s response to these developments resembles that of a minor power rather than a classical small state.     

Acknowledging the Suffering Caused by State-Mandated Sexual Violence and Crimes: An Assessment of the Iraqi High Tribunal

The Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), as a mechanism of transitional justice, took upon it a pioneering role within the Middle Eastern Region by prosecuting and convicting several high-ranking members of the former suppressive regime in Iraq. As part of this work, the IHT confronted the widespread impunity for and disregard of gender-based crimes, such as rape and other sexual violence, and took steps towards reforming the sector through its progressive statute and the specific acknowledgment of gender crimes within its judgments. It will be the aim of the following article to extend academic writings on Iraq, the IHT and gender, by providing insights into how the tribunal dealt with the issues of rape and sexual violence, the surrounding circumstances and how successful the IHT's recognition of these crimes proved for transitional justice in Iraq.     

Encounters with Europe in an Era of Domestic and International Turmoil: Is Turkey a De-Europeanising Candidate Country?

Abstract

This article provides a novel conceptual framework to understand the impact of the European Union on Turkish politics and policies in the aftermath of the opening of accession negotiations in 2005. It argues that the post-2005 developments in Turkey not only attest to lesser and more limited Europeanisation, but also entail a process that is increasingly gaining momentum in the country and which is referred to as ‘de-Europeanisation’.     

Legislative success in open sky congresses: weak gatekeeping prerogatives and the loss of majority support

In legislatures with weak gatekeeping institutions and constrained plenary time, scheduling rules and majority requirements explain inter-party differences in the consideration and approval of law initiatives. In this paper a mixture survival model is used to analyse legislative success in a legislature with very weak gatekeeping prerogatives, the House of Representatives of Uruguay. Evidence is provided that the loss of majority support depletes plenary time more rapidly and yields an ideological drift that benefits the median voter of the House. The results inform recent debates on the endogenous formation of a plenary schedule in open sky legislatures.     

Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment

Estimates of the incidence of victim gun use from the National CrimeVictimization Survey (NCVS) are consistently lower than are those fromother studies. To examine the divergence, we conducted a survey that gaugedthe impact of methodological differences between the NCVS and the otherstudies. For half of the sample, we asked questions from the NCVS, followedby questions from the other surveys. For the other half of the sample, wepresented the questions in the reverse order. We examined two hypotheses:(1) survey methods account for the divergent results, and (2) the questionscover unrelated activities. The results provided some support for the firsthypothesis, but respondents also reported many more defenses to thequestions from the other surveys than to the NCVS questions. Consistent withthe second hypothesis, this suggests that the NCVS and the other surveysmeasure responses to largely different provocations.     

Equating U.S. Tax Treatment of Dividends and Capital Gains for Foreign Portfolio Investors

The U.S. tax law equates the tax rate on dividends and long‐term capital gains on stock owned by U.S. citizens and residents. However, the taxation of these two types of rewards in the hands of foreign portfolio investors remains dramatically different from each other, with the capital gain being fully exempt. Several reasons support this article's proposal to no longer exempt these gains. Extending finance theory and prior normative tax research, this article argues that foreigners’ portfolio dividends and capital gains should be taxed in the same manner because they are economically equivalent and emanate from the same source. Three recent empirical developments also support repeal of the foreigner's exemption. First, there is now extensive use by U.S. corporations of stock repurchases—which are taxed to selling shareholders as capital gain—as a form of corporate payout that was in the past primarily accomplished through dividends. Second, foreign ownership of U.S. stocks has continued to increase, with an estimated one‐third of these stocks owned by foreigners. Third, the modern tax compliance environment—including aspects of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act that apply to foreigners—reduces past congressional and academic concerns about enforcing the taxation of foreigners’ portfolio gains.     

Physical,Social, and Perceived Availabilities of Alcohol and Last Month Alcohol Use in Rural and Small Urban Communities

This study seeks to provide a greater understanding of the factors that determine the perceived availability of alcohol and its role in predicting adolescents’ alcohol use. Participants were 151,703 7th–12th grade students (50% female) from a sample of 219 rural communities across the United States, with oversampling for predominantly Mexican-American and African-American communities. Multilevel analysis was used to estimate the perceived availability of alcohol as a function of physical and social availability measures and individual and community-level control variables. Physical availability was measured as the number of alcohol outlets in the community and whether beer and wine were sold in non-liquor stores. Social availability measured the availability of alcohol from social or family groups. Last month alcohol use was then estimated as a function of physical, social and perceived availabilities and control variables. Physical availability had little relationship to perceived availability or recent alcohol use while social availability was a strong predictor of both. Perceived availabilities at the individual and community levels were significant in predicting last month alcohol use. The findings suggest that altering both perceived and actual availability of alcohol can potentially have strong effects on the levels of adolescent alcohol use.