The OECD and “The Rest”: Analyzing the Limits of Policy Transfer

Abstract

Prompted by the rise of the emerging economies and the growing importance of the G20, the OECD has formally announced its intention of establishing itself as a key actor in global policy coordination. As part of this ambition, it has embarked on cultivating closer relations with five G20 countries it designated as key partners through the so-called “Enhanced Engagement” programme: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. This article mobilizes concepts from the policy transfer literature to explain why the OECD’s attempts to increasingly involve all five countries in its policy have fallen short of its original ambitions, and also why the transfer of its policy work has been uneven across policy and country issue.     

The Incidence and Impact of Family Violence on Mental Health Among South Korean Women: Results of a National Survey

This representative national survey examined incidence of husband-to-wife violence in the past year, lifetime exposure to parental violence, and the relationships between victimization experiences of family violence and mental health among South Korean women (N = 1,079). The major findings were that incidence rate of husband-to-wife violence among Korean women was 29.5%, which was much higher than those of other nations, and that their experiences of physical violence by husbands in the last year and lifetime verbal abuse by parents had strong associations with the mental health of victims. The findings suggest that preventive intervention programs for male perpetrators as well as domestic violence victims with mental health problems and comprehensive interventions for Korean couples are urgently needed. In addition, parents should be educated about how to modify their children’s behavior without physical punishment or verbal abuse.

Multivariate analysis for estimating the age of a bloodstain

Our objective is to provide crime laboratories with a technique for estimating the age of a bloodstain. Toward that goal, we have used multiplexed, real-time RT-PCR (or qPCR) to determine the relative stability of different-sized segments of the same RNA species as well as differences in stability between two different RNAs' change over time in bloodstains. Our results indicate that a multivariate analysis of the changing ratio of the different RNA segments can be used to differentiate between samples of different ages in the defined population. Bloodstains from 29 of 30 donors could be partitioned into different ages using this technique. Although further improvements will be required before this approach can be implemented in crime laboratories, the multivariate analysis holds promise of providing a reliable approach for temporally linking a bloodstain to the commission of a crime or excluding a bloodstain as being irrelevant to the case in question.     

Numerical classification of curvilinear structures for the identification of pistol barrels

This paper demonstrates a numerical pattern recognition method applied to curvilinear image structures. These structures are extracted from physical cross-sections of cast internal pistol barrel surfaces. Variations in structure arise from gun design and manufacturing method providing a basis for discrimination and identification. Binarised curvilinear land transition images are processed with fast Fourier transform on which principal component analysis is performed. One-way analysis of variance (95% confidence interval) concludes significant differentiation between 11 barrel manufacturers when calculating weighted Euclidean distance between any trio of land transitions and an average land transition for each barrel in the database. The proposed methodology is therefore a promising novel approach for the classification and identification of firearms.     

Educated Mothers,Well-Fed and Healthy Children? Assessing the Impact of the 1980 School Reform on Dietary Diversity and Nutrition Outcomes of Zimbabwean Children

We scrutinise the causal influence of schooling on child dietary diversity and nutrition in Zimbabwe using the exogenous variability in schooling prompted by the 1980 education policy, a natural trial fitting a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We established that a one-year of learning promotes dietary diversity and nutrition even after accounting for plausible mediating factors. Also, education is more liable to impact dietary practices and nutrition through improvements in health knowledge, literacy, wealth and prenatal care utilisation. These findings suggest that promoting schooling access to girls in resource-poor nations might have far-reaching implications on feeding practices and consequently child nutrition.     

The curse of dimensionality in Voting Advice Applications: reliability and validity in algorithm design

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) offers voters a simplified means by which to estimate their alignment with the candidates contesting a given election. But are the outputs generated by such applications both reliable and valid? While they differ greatly in design and degree of sophistication, most VAAs share a distinctive element that serves as their defining feature: an aggregation algorithm. Aggregation algorithms are the source of a VAA's legitimacy and yet no formal framework for their evaluation has as yet been agreed upon. We posit a dimensionality reduction technique as a corrective to recognised shortcomings in the dominant approaches to VAA design. We then test our model within a proposed framework for evaluating the validity and reliability of VAA algorithms.     

Examining the links between animal abuse and human violence

Empirical research has increasingly found evidence for the coexistence of animal abuse and various forms of interpersonal violence. Some researchers have even argued for a specific version of this relationship, namely, that individuals tend to move from violence toward animals, particularly in childhood, to subsequent violence toward humans. Others have suggested that the evidence for this graduation or progression hypothesis is weak and inconsistent, and that an approach to animal abuse that focuses on the link is misguided. This article begins by reviewing the research on the connections between animal abuse and interhuman violence. Then it critically assesses the evidence for and against the link, and discusses the issues and challenges facing future research in this area.     

Family Violence and Dating Violence in Korea

The purpose of this study is to examine the antecedents of dating violence. The paper hypothesizes that the relationship between family of origin violence and dating violence will be mediated by neutralizing beliefs. To test this hypothesis, a survey was conducted of 510 college students in Seoul and Kyung-gi provinces in South Korea. Partner violence and child abuse in the family of origin were associated with college students’ perpetration of dating violence. That relationship was mediated by neutralizing beliefs. The same results were found for both male and female students. Based on the findings, this study presents practical suggestions for intervening in dating violence.