'Implementing an indicator': Operationalising USAID's 'Advocacy Index' in Zimbabwe

This article focuses on performance measurement in the democracy and governance (DG) programme of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in its Zimbabwe mission. The article tells the story of one qualitative indicator used for measuring progress, namely the 'Advocacy Index'. It traces the history of this indicator, from rationale and concept through the early stages of implementation. The article discusses the problems of quantitative measurement and observes that there have been a number of suggested 'qualitative' responses. It goes on to describe the introduction of the Advocacy Index by the USAID mission and the responses of its Zimbabwean partners, and draws out some tentative lessons and questions raised by the experience.     

Beyond the “Norm Entrepreneur” Model: Rwanda,Darfur, and Social Sanction among UN Diplomats

When investigating why state decision makers opt for intervention in the heart of armed violence abroad, many scholars refer to new humanitarian norms appearing among state officers, particularly within the UN. In these approaches, “norm entrepreneurs”, and the high risks of public opprobrium they are supposed to induce, stand at the front stage of normative change. Compliance with newly promoted normative ideas seems totally bereft of professional risks, though. This paper intends to bring back in a dimension of norms that is central in sociology: social sanction. Investigating how social sanctions are practically enacted among diplomats at the United Nations precisely provides useful data to detect the many norms that prosper beyond—and before—normative enterprises, and to assess why the humanitarian idea and the recent “responsibility to protect” still have weak normative effects, practically speaking. The international failures in Rwanda and more recently in Darfur deserve re-examination in this prospect.     

Save the poor, shoot some bankers

Bilateral or multilateral organizations control about 90% of official overseas development assistance (ODA), much of which is wasted. This note traces aid failure to the daisy chain of principal-agent-beneficiary relationships linking rich donors to aid bureaucrats to poor recipients. Waste results when aid middlemen (un)intentionally misdirect ODA. Waste can be reduced by clarifying domestic goals for ODA, using fewer middlemen with greater intrinsic motivation, empowering recipients, and/or replacing bureaucracy with markets.     

An economic analysis of the post World War II decline in the Japanese crime rate

Since the end of World War II there has been a dramatic decrease in reported Japanese crime. Adult arrest rates have fallen steadily since the early 1950s and juvenile arrest rates have fallen since the early 1960s. An economic analysis of crime predicts that crime rates depend upon returns to crime relative to returns in legal pursuits and the certainty and severity of punishment. Regression analysis is used to test this theory using Japanese data. The empirical results indicate that the economic model does not outperform alternative naive models. However, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that increases in returns to legitimate work diminish both adult and juvenile crime. Unemployment affects some adult crimes but has little impact on juvenile crime. The share of the population in poverty has no significant impact on either type of crime. Increases in the certainty of punishment deters adult crime but there is little evidence that increases in either the certainty or the severity of punishment deter juvenile crime. There is weak evidence to support the hypothesis that increases in the severity of adult punishments deter crime.     

Chloroquine distribution in postmortem cases

Chloroquine concentrations in blood and tissues were examined in overdose and non-overdose cases to determine appropriate ranges for interpretation. Twenty-nine literature overdose cases and 8 non-overdose literature cases were compared with this laboratory's findings. The results indicate significant postmortem redistribution of chloroquine. Combining this laboratory's results and the literature results indicates that using a liver concentration of 150 mg/kg as a cutoff between overdose and non-overdose concentrations properly identified 30 of the 34 published cases containing liver chloroquine and 19 of the 20 presented cases.