To be continued . . . Syntheses and trends in follow-up of quality assurance in West European higher education

The authors report on West European trends in follow-up arrangements of national quality assurance procedures. They argue that external quality assurance ought to adopt a broader conception of quality than is now often the case. Next, the general public ought to have a guarantee that external quality assurance is valid (through meta-evaluation) and has consequences (through follow-up arrangements). Follow-up currently is not well developed in many European countries in a formal sense, but is receiving more attention as external quality assurance is maturing. Finally, the authors link national quality assurance to the European dimension; an international network could fulfil important functions in making quality assurance transparent and credible across Europe. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Provisional Court Protection in Administrative Disputes in Europe: The Constitutional Status of Interim Measures Deriving from the Right to Effective Court Protection. A Comparative Approach

Abstract: Interim protection in remedies against the public administration has proved to be one of the key issues in today's justice. In effect, the slowness of judicial proceedings means that final judicial decisions cannot guarantee the rights and interests of the litigants any more, because those decisions arrive too late. Thus, effective judicial protection is at stake. On the other hand, public administrations have traditionally disposed of privileges, one of the most important of them being the so‐called executive character of administrative acts. The national debate on the equilibrium between both principles—effective judicial protection and the executive character of administrative acts—needs to be exported to the Community law context. Community law should therefore learn from national experiences, as other legal orders, such as the Spanish one, have done, turning to comparative law in order to improve their own model of interim protection.     

Investment Treaty Arbitration as a Species of Global Administrative Law

The article outlines a simple thesis: that international investmentarbitration – pursuant to regional and bilateral investmenttreaties – offers the clearest example of global administrativelaw, strictly construed, yet to have emerged. We present thisthesis by explicating four key features of investment treaties:they permit investor claims against the state without exhaustinglocal remedies; they allow claims for damages; they allow investorsto directly seek enforcement of awards before domestic courts;and they facilitate forum-shopping. Our argument is that, owingto this unique conjunction of features, the regulatory conductof states is, to an unusual extent, subject to control throughcompulsory international adjudication. Having highlighted thesefeatures, we then claim that investment arbitration is bestanalogized to domestic administrative law rather than to internationalcommercial arbitration, especially since investment arbitrationengages disputes arising from the exercise of public authorityby the state as opposed to private acts of the state. Further,we claim that the linkages between investment arbitration anddomestic legal systems are more direct and more closely integratedthan other forms of international adjudication in the publicsphere. For these reasons, we argue that the emerging regimeof investment arbitration is to be understood as constitutingan important and powerful manifestation of global administrativelaw.     

Birth spacing as a family strategy: evidence from 19th century Leuven, Belgium

This article investigates the hypothesis that 19th-century working class families in Leuven, Belgium, were controlling their fertility by means of birth spacing for household economic reasons. Detailed life-course data were collected in order to construct, on one hand, a set of covariates that represent the influences of natural fertility on birth intervals and, on the other, a number of family variables that represent the hypothetical, household economic motivation to space births. The findings strongly suggest that birth intervals were not merely a function of natural fertility differences and that family strategic spacing behavior also played a role.     

New Nonlinear Approaches for the Adjustment and Updating of a SAM

Many structural relationships should be taken into account in any reasonable adjustment and updating process. These structural relationships are mainly represented by ratios of different types, such as technical coefficients or the proportion of the cell value in relation to its row or column total. We believe that in many cases (either because of lack of information or when the time elapsed for the estimation of a social accounting matrix is not long enough to allow for any significant structural change) the updating process should try to minimize the rela- tive deviation of the new coefficients from the initial ones in a homogeneous way. This homogeneity would mean that the magnitude of this relative deviation is similar among the elements of each row or column, therefore avoiding the concentration of the changes in particular cells of the SAM. In this work, we propose some new adjustment criteria in order to obtain a more homogeneous relative adjustment of the structural coefficients. These criteria combine the adjustment method proposed by Matuszewski et al. (1964) with other deviation functions. Each of the adjustment criteria proposed leads to a nonlinear optimization problem which is reformulated as a linear program. We test the usefulness of this proposal by comparing its results with the ones obtained by more standard approaches and we are able to show that these approaches tend to produce a less homogeneous pattern of coefficient adjustment, under certain circumstances, than the ones we put forward.     

Allele frequencies of nine STR loci—D16S539, D7S820, D13S317, CSF1PO, TPOX, TH01, F13A01, FESFPS and vWA—in the population from Alagoas, northeastern Brazil

The polymorphism of nine STR loci has been studied in a sample of 598 individuals from the population of Alagoas, Northeastern Brazil. Determination of the allele frequencies as well as of several commonly used statistics in forensic and paternity testing were defined. The most polymorphic loci were TH01 and D7S317. The exact test demonstrated that the nine loci analyzed in the population have no deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium (P>0.05).