Financial inclusion and green economic performance for energy efficiency finance

Economic Change and Restructuring - Financial inclusion is fundamental for increasing the nation’s performance and green economy has emerged as one of the dominant factors to ecological...     

Life domains and crime: A test of Agnew's general theory of crime and delinquency

Purpose

This study presents a preliminary test of Agnew's general theory of crime and delinquency. This study examines whether each of the five life domain variables at the core of Agnew's theory is related to recidivism, whether there is a non-linear relationship between the life domains and recidivism, and whether the five life domains interact in causing recidivism.

Methods

Data were derived from the baseline survey of the Maryland Boot Camp Experiment and through a criminal records check conducted by the Maryland Department of Public Safety.

Results

Overall, the results lend weak support for Agnew's general theory. In particular, only two of the five life domains, having a bad job and being a high school dropout, are significantly correlated with recidivism. Further, with the exception of the peers domain, there is neither a linear nor a non-linear relationship between the life domains and recidivism. The results also reveal that none of the two-way bivariate interactions are significant in a multivariate linear probability model.

Conclusions

Although our findings are not supportive of Agnew's (2005) general theory of crime, the theory contains many other implications that we simply did not have the data to address.     

Rent-seeking and economic governance in the structural nexus of corruption in China

This article examines the sources of widespread rent-seeking practices and their relations to corruption in China. It argues that rent-creation and seeking are difficult to eliminate because they have become institutionalized as the constitutive parts of economic governance. Using case studies drawn from a number of industrial sectors, this study shows that the creation and allocation of economic rents has become a major policy instrument used by various levels of governments to manoeuvre industrial plans and development priorities. At the same time, the discretionary power exercised by state agents in implementing development priorities has created mounting opportunities for exchanging rents with bribes. The result is a structural nexus between economic governance, rent-seeking and corruption that defy administrative measures aiming at achieving a clean government in China. This study is part of a research project on the Politics of Rent-seeking and Economic Privileges in China. The project is funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education.

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Community participation and local government capacity in Vietnam: Conditions for coproduction

With Public Administration Reform in Vietnam comes more local government responsibility for policy making. Building on the results of a multiple case study research on housing and infrastructure upgrading projects in four cities of Vietnam, it has been confirmed that the community participation and local government capacity in urban housing and infrastructure upgrading projects are positively related. The level of community participation in urban housing and infrastructure upgrading projects is influenced by local government capacity, and in turn, it has effects on the outcomes. There are some important aspects for the enhancement of the level of community participation. These are effective leadership, the financial resources aspect, and communication/information exchange. Moreover, based on the patterns of community participation in urban upgrading projects, it has been found that participation is strongly supported by government actors in these four cases, and a process of coproduction between the local government and the affected communities has taken place.     

Intimate Partner Violence Screening in a Women Veterans’ Health Clinic: Assessing Feasibility

Women presenting for care within a suburban Department of Veterans Affairs Hospital (VA) were screened for intimate partner violence (IPV). This study aimed to explore the feasibility of screening for IPV within a VA women’s health clinic, assess how well the screening measure captured women veterans’ experiences of IPV, and compare clinical correlates of IPV in women veterans who have and have not experienced IPV. Of 96 eligible women, 93 (97 %) answered a self-report question regarding experience of lifetime IPV and 72 (75 %) participated in a standardized screening. Among participants, 42 (47 %) reported experiencing past or current IPV, and of those, 11 (25 %) reported that they were currently experiencing IPV, and 31 (70 %) reported that they had experienced IPV in their past. Screening for IPV among women veterans in a women’s health clinic is feasible and identifies women who experience IPV, offering opportunities for referral and intervention.     

Organised Informality and Suitcase Trading in the Pearl River Delta Region

ABSTRACT

Suitcase trade is a common activity along state borders in Asia. Existing scholarship has often viewed such suitcase trade as locally embedded activities characterised by informality. This article contends that this perception underestimates the diversity and complexity of suitcase trade. This is illustrated with a case study of the Pearl River Delta region of southern China, where thousands of suitcase traders carry goods across the borders between mainland China and its two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao. Several patterns of operation run in parallel, ranging from petty traders working alone to highly-organised group operators. While each individual transaction is small scale and based on informal networks, the entire chain of operations is run by syndicates that are highly organised, commercial, with well-defined divisions of labour, and on a large scale. We describe such a combination of organisational competence and informal networks as “organised informality.” The concept allows us to expand the analytical horizon to cover those cross-border exchanges that incorporate modern commercial practices in otherwise non-formal settings. It also bridges the oft-criticised dichotomies of formal-informal and licit-illicit.