Decentralization and access to social services in Colombia

Decentralization is meant to improve access to public services, but relatively few studies examine this question empirically. We explore the effects of decentralization on access to health and education in Colombia using an original database covering over 95 % of Colombian municipalities. We show that decentralization improved enrollment rates in public schools and access of the poor to public health services. In both sectors, improving access was driven by the financial contributions of local governments. Small increases in own-shares of spending led to surprisingly large increases in the access of the poor in both sectors. Our theoretical model implies that where local information dominates productive efficiency, elected local governments will provide services better tailored to local needs. Decentralizing such services should increase their use by the public. Together, theory and empirics imply that decentralization made the Colombian state more accountable. It provided local officials with the information and incentives they need to allocate resources in a manner responsive to voters’ needs and improve the impact of public expenditures.     

Decentralization as a constraint to Leviathan: a panel cointegration analysis

This paper extends the empirical literature about the effects of fiscal decentralization on the growth of government along three dimensions. It distinguishes between the effects of the level of decentralization from the way local governments finance their expenditures (common pool versus own resources); it uses a panel cointegration approach to separate the long run effects of decentralization from the short run dynamics; and it extends and revises the datasets generally used in these empirical analyses. The results show that the amount of revenue raised by sub-national governments leads to a long-term fall in the size of government but grants have the opposite effect. In addition, a greater decentralization of expenditure leads to greater overall spending. When the short-term is considered these influences work slowly, as the speed of adjustment towards the desired government size is relatively sluggish. In addition, in the short run, there is also a clear effect from the role of local revenue raising powers that stimulates the growth of government. These results appear robust to changes in the composition of the variables, countries and periods included the sample.     

Swiss worlds of welfare

Are there different worlds of welfare in Swiss cantons, analogous to different national welfare state regimes? Are the welfare regimes made up of functionally related sub-regimes in the field of employment, education, taxation and social security, as argued in recent analyses of ‘varieties of capitalism’? And can the variations between such cantonal welfare regimes be explained by the same politico-institutional variables that account for the development of national welfare states? These are the guiding questions of this article. We find strong empirical evidence for large inter-cantonal variation in welfare state policies. The sub-regimes are not functionally connected, however. Their variation is related to different sets of variables, indicating a weak functional link between them. Developments and causal structures are specific to the various subregimes. In addition, it is socio-economic and not politicoinstitutional variables that have had the strongest imprint on the overall structure of cantonal welfare regimes.     

Towards agonistic peacebuilding? Exploring the antagonism–agonism nexus in the Middle East Peace process

Many contemporary conflicts are framed as antagonistic and difficult to resolve because of their zero-sum framing among the disputants. This article addresses the antagonism–agonism nexus and the political and contested nature of building peace. It has a three-fold aim: (1) to critically assess the interplay between constructive and destructive dynamics; (2) to analyse the circumstances under which conflict may move from antagonism to agonism; and (3) to advance the novel notion of agonistic peacebuilding. The Middle East Peace process is used as a critical case of intractable conflict to elucidate the enabling and restraining conditions for agonistic peacebuilding.     

Implantation of radio frequency identification device (RFID) microchip in disaster victim identification (DVI)

The tsunami catastrophe of December 2004 left more than 200,000 dead. Disaster victim identification (DVI) teams were presented with the unprecedented challenge of identifying thousands of mostly markedly putrefied and partially skeletised bodies. To this end, an adequate body tagging method is essential. Conventional body bag tagging in terms of writing on body bags and placing of tags inside body bags proved unsatisfactory and problem prone due to consequences of cold storage, formalin (formaldehyde) embalming and body numbers inside storage facilities. The placement of radio frequency identification device (RFID) microchips inside victim bodies provided a practical solution to problems of body tagging and attribution in the DVI setting encountered by the Austrian DVI team in Thailand in early 2005.     

Suicide by pencil

We report an unusual suicide, committed with a common pencil. A 72-year-old male inflicted himself a penetrating thoracic wound while being hospitalized for a hip prosthesis operation. Although the patient was immediately operated, the cardiac injury appeared to be fatal. Cases of suicidal penetrating wounds of the anterior chest wall are rare and they are mostly inflicted by knives, glass fragments, or other sharp instruments. The potential danger of a pencil should be taken into consideration, especially in psychiatric hospitals and imprisonment facilities. We examined the legislation in Italy and Finland concerning the regulation of privacy in special care institutions.     

Can corruption foster regulatory compliance?

The legal and economic literatures overwhelmingly support the notion that regulatory compliance is always less in the presence of corruption. This paper departs from those literatures and shows that, whenever public officials are paid fixed wages, an increase in corruption may actually foster compliance. The conditions that make this possible are laid down in a theoretical model. Empirical evidence that corroborates the theoretical findings is provided using firm-level data for 26 transition economies.     

Possible Fatal Acetaminophen Intoxication with Atypical Clinical Presentation

Acetaminophen or paracetamol, a commonly used over‐the‐counter analgesic, is known to elicit severe adverse reactions when taken in overdose, chronically at therapeutic dosage or, sporadically, following single assumptions of a therapeutic dose. Damage patterns including liver damage and, rarely, acute tubular necrosis or a fixed drug exanthema. We present a case of fatal acetaminophen toxicity with postmortem blood concentration 78 μg/mL and unusual clinical features, including a visually striking and massive epidermolysis and rhabdomyolysis, disseminated intravascular coagulation and myocardial ischemia. This case is compared with the most similar previous reports in terms of organ damage, clinical presentation, and cause of death. We conclude that a number of severe patterns of adverse effects to acetaminophen are emerging that were previously greatly underestimated, thus questioning the adequacy of the clinical spectrum traditionally associated with acetaminophen intoxication and leading to the need to review this spectrum and the associated diagnostic criteria.     

Virtuous Interactions in Removing Exclusion: The Link between Foreign Market Access and Access to Education

We outline a methodology which aims to give an answer to the widespread demand of impact analyses by regulators or by funding agencies which need to evaluate the current and past performance of development projects and may lack time series evidence. We devise a retrospective panel data approach to evaluate the dynamics of the effects of fair trade affiliation on the schooling decisions of a sample of Thai organic rice producers across the past 20 years. We find that the probability of school enrolment in families with more than two children is significantly affected by fair trade affiliation years. We try to ascertain whether our finding is robust to endogeneity of producers' choices of local cooperative affiliation and adoption of organic techniques. The significant difference between pre- and post-fair trade affiliation performance documents that fair trade participation generates a significant break in the schooling decisions of affiliated households.