Market cycles,power politics and the latest North – South energy trade conflict

Energy trade periodically aligns Northern importing – consuming countries against predominantly Southern producing – exporting countries. Conflict appears to follow a cyclical pattern, whereby Northern firms invest in developing Third World hydrocarbon resources to meet consumer demand until market conditions enable unilateral efforts by host sovereigns to augment fiscal take and ownership share and to impose output restrictions, thereby elevating prices and revenues. Although markets eventually correct themselves, major consuming-country governments, to the extent that seller's markets attributable to exporter actions harm short-term consumer welfare and alternative options for restoring buyer's markets are lacking, have varying incentives to support military intervention. Shifting market conditions and power balances suggest six ideal-typical energy trade conflict strategies. Finally, to the extent that exporting states succeed in converting higher hydrocarbon revenues into energy-intensive economic growth, co-operative phases within this conflict pattern could yield to increasingly zero-sum inter-consumer rivalry.     

产业扶贫缘何难以为继:目标嵌入与行动“脱嵌”--基于一个地方案例

产业扶贫在脱贫攻坚与乡村振兴的进程中面临难以为继的困境。以项目制为基础的产业扶贫方式使政府得以将企业作为国家资本“代理”嵌入贫困村参与扶贫;为了激发村庄的内生发展能力,地方政府以政治精英下沉嵌入和村庄内生嵌入的方式,引导扶贫干部、合作社、大户三大重要的扶贫力量参与到产业扶贫中,带动贫困村产业发展和解决贫困问题。但基层政府对“短平快”效果的追求、企业纯粹逐利进入、村庄共生关系淡化及贫困户被动的策略性接受,破坏了这种嵌入性带来的结构性转变,造成产业扶贫中产业发展与脱贫目标的靶向偏离、贫困户实际创收有限、产业扶贫难以为继,形成一种脱嵌式产业扶贫。因此须构建一套完整的对产业扶贫参与主体的监督、考核、激励机制,努力探索开发扶贫目标下农户能普遍获得资源和项目成果公平性分享的制度安排,以期实现乡村产业兴旺、农民生活富裕。     

SHOULD JUDGES CLOSE THE GATE ON PAS AND PA?

Parental Alienation Syndrome and Parental Alienation are evolving clinical concepts. They are controversial. Their limits, the limits of the legal system, and recent developments in the use and admissibility of expert evidence call into question the appropriateness of their use within the trial process.     

Is ABCM Destined for Success or Failure in the Federal Government?

The days of ballooning federal budgets are over. Today, both the president and Congress continue to strive for a balanced budget, while encouraging federal agencies to improve service delivery of the various programs and entitlement benefits provided to their customers. Stakeholder involvement and public opinion about how agencies run their "businesses" are increasingly scrutinized. Trends such as competition for service delivery through franchizing, privatization, and outsourcing are causing an entirely new way of looking at how support and program services are managed. This article explains how the success or failure of activity-based costing management (ABCM) is dependent upon its ability to link the resolution of these external factors with internal business needs, while providing government managers with a better understanding of how to use ABCM to steer their organizations into the future. We also describe the current and future status of ABCM installations at various federal entities where ABCM was recently introduced and where interviews, conducted a year ago, were updated to describe how ABCM is helping these entities align external factors to internal needs. These federal entities are the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Financial Management Service, and the Veterans Benefits Administration.     

Troubled Waters: The Unifying Influence of Conservation and Public Health on the Access Provisions of the Marine and Coastal Access Act

The Marine and Coastal Access Act, amongst its other aims, is intended to ‘build on existing access legislation to create a route around the coast of England’ (Foreword to the Draft Marine Bill, HMSO 2008). As such the Act can be seen as a continuation of the access objectives of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, and possibly as a vindication of the success of the original Act. The broad objectives of access, land management and conservation are present in both pieces of legislation, though it remains to be seen whether the access provisions of the Marine Act will enjoy the same level of funding as those of the CROW Act. This paper investigates the origins of the Marine Act, and in particular the power and influence of tourism, nostalgia and environmentalism on the emergence of this legislation.     

Predictive Efficacy and the Preventive Detention of Dangerous Sexual Offenders: Contributions from Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory

Behavioral scientists are regularly summoned by the legal system to make predictions about the likelihood of future dangerous behavior (i.e., violence prediction/risk assessment). In recent years, such efforts have been subjected to considerable scrutiny as, despite the evolution of risk assessment instruments, social scientists have yet to demonstrate the ability to predict violence with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Yet concerns with predictive efficacy may be rooted in the limitations of prediction itself. Nonlinear dynamical systems theory (i.e., chaos theory) and quantum physics jointly paint a picture of human behavior as fundamentally unpredictable; in their light, we are asked to question whether future violence can ever be predicted with a tolerable level of error. In this article, I provisionally explore this very issue, particularly as it appears in the context of decisions concerning the disposition of criminal sexual offenders.