INCLUSIVE APPROACH

<正>Global integration strategy can address Africa’s infrastructure and employment woes The Silk Road Economic Belt and the21st-Century Maritime Silk Road,better known collectively as the Belt and     

Preventing Local Government Fiscal Crises: Emerging Best Practices

What type of oversight should states exercise over local units in order to prevent fiscal crises? This article discusses a sequence of three best practices that some states use to prevent fiscal emergencies. They first monitor local government finances to predict fiscal distress. After detecting signs of fiscal distress, states actively assist local units in ameliorating the problem. Finally, assistance notwithstanding, if a situation becomes grave, states require local units to take strong remedial measures, including increasing taxes and reducing expenditures.     

Learning from each other: causal inference and American political development

Public Choice - Within political science, a movement focused on increasing the credibility of causal inferences (CIs) has gained considerable traction in recent years. While CI has been...     

Identifying Trajectories of Adolescents’ Depressive Phenomena: An Examination of Early Risk Factors

Few studies have examined risk factors of childhood and early adolescent depressive symptomatology trajectories. This study examined self-report depressive symptomatology across a 6-year time period from 2nd to 8th grade to identify latent groups of individuals with similar patterns of depressive phenomena in a sample of 951 children (440 girls, 511 boys). Analyses, using semiparametric group modeling (SGM), identified 5 trajectory groups for girls and boys: low depressed stables, low depressed risers, mildly depressed stables, moderately depressed changers, and moderately depressed risers. Individual risk factors, with the exception of shy/withdrawn behavior, were significantly different across trajectory group membership for boys and girls, as was low-income status for boys. Boys in the low depressed and mildly depressed stable trajectory groups had significantly higher levels of antisocial behavior, attention problems, and lower social competency compared to girls in similar groups. These results suggest that universal prevention programs implemented in early elementary school that target selected risk factors may be helpful in reducing future adolescent mental health problems, specifically depressive symptomatology.     

Does Wal-Mart reduce social capital?

Social capital has attracted increasing attention in recent years. We use county-level and individual survey data to study how Wal-Mart affects social capital. Estimates using several proxies for social capital—such as club membership, religious activity, time with friends, and other measures—do not support the thesis that “Wal-Mart destroys communities” by reducing social capital. We measure exposure to Wal-Mart two ways: Wal-Marts per 10,000 residents and Wal-Marts per 10,000 residents aggregated over the years since 1979 to capture a more cumulative “Wal-Mart Effect.” We find that the coefficients on Wal-Mart’s presence are statistically insignificant in most specifications.     

Collusion in auctions for emission permits: An experimental analysis

Environmental markets have several institutional features that provide a new context for the use of auctions and that have not been studied previously. This paper reports on laboratory experiments testing three auction forms—uniform and discriminatory price sealed‐bid auctions and an ascending clock auction. We test the ability of subjects to tacitly or explicitly collude in order to maximize profits. Our main result is that the discriminatory and uniform price auctions produce greater revenues than the clock auction, both with and without explicit communication. The clock appears to facilitate successful collusion, both because of its sequential structure and because it allows bidders to focus on one dimension of cooperation (quantity) rather than two (price and quantity).© 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

NGO networks in Central Asia and global civil society: potentials and limitations

Based on research carried out by INTRAC (International NGO Training & Research Centre) in 2006–2007 in four countries of Central Asia for Oxfam–Novib, the article investigates NGO networks and their international links in the context of current theory on civil society and global civil society. Three case studies of NGOs working in service delivery, community development and free media are examined to show the diversity of aims and the potential and challenges of networking in the region. Civil society advocacy at national and international levels is analysed with a fourth case study on the campaign conducted in Kyrgyzstan against joining the World Bank's Highly Indebted Poor Countries programme. This example shows a more radical, alternative mode of civil society activism. The article emphasizes the importance of national- and regional-level networking and poses the question of whether NGOs in Central Asia can shift from their current positions on the periphery of global movements and debates.     

Early Impacts of the Affordable Care Act on Health Insurance Coverage in Medicaid Expansion and Non‐Expansion States

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage in the United States through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, subsidies, health insurance exchanges, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. This paper estimates the causal effects of the ACA on health insurance coverage in 2014 using data from the American Community Survey. We utilize difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences models that exploit cross‐sectional variation in the intensity of treatment arising from state participation in the Medicaid expansion and local area pre‐ACA uninsured rates. This strategy allows us to identify the effects of the ACA in both Medicaid expansion and non‐expansion states. Our preferred specification suggests that, at the average pre‐treatment uninsured rate, the full ACA increased the proportion of residents with insurance by 5.9 percentage points compared to 2.8 percentage points in states that did not expand Medicaid. Private insurance expansions from the ACA were due to increases in both employer‐provided and non‐group coverage. The coverage gains from the full ACA were largest for those without a college degree, non‐whites, young adults, unmarried individuals, and those without children in the home. We find no evidence that the Medicaid expansion crowded out private coverage.