OVERSIGHT AND COMPETITION IN PROFIT VS NONPROFIT CONTRACTS FOR HOME CARE

The paper reports the experience of the State of Illinois using proprietary and nonproprietary vendors to provide in-home services to the elderly. The analysis suggests proprietary vendors were associated with a significant increase in service costs when vendors were allowed to determine service needs of clients. However, such differences disappeared as the state implemented effortso increase political oversight and competition.     

The Human Tissue Act 2004: Innovative Legislation – Fundamentally Flawed or Missed Opportunity?

In November 2004 Royal Assent was finally given to the Human Tissue Act which was passed in response to the organ retention scandals at Alder Hey hospital and other hospitals around the UK. At first glance it may appear to set many of the concerns raised in the Bristol Interim Inquiry and Alder Hey Inquiry to rest. But on closer inspection a more complex position emerges. The paper examines the extent to which it can be regarded as a groundbreaking piece of legislation clarifying a notoriously uncertain area of law or whether in the long term it will be viewed as a fundamentally flawed Act and a missed opportunity.     

Developmental factors related to deviant sexual preferences in child molesters

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between developmental factors and deviant sexual preferences in child molesters. In total, 146 adult males having committed a sexual offence against a child were included in the study. Three types of factors were investigated: negative experiences during childhood, behavior problems during adolescence, and sexual criminal activity in adulthood. Negative experiences and behavior problems were assessed through a semistructured interview. The sexual criminal activity was determined using police records. Sexual preferences towards children were assessed using phallometric assessment. Hierarchical regression analyses suggested the presence of two developmental pathways. The psychosocial deficits pathway is related to a sexual interest for nonviolent sexual stimuli involving children. The sexualization pathway is associated with a sexual interest for violent sexual stimuli involving children. These two pathways are discussed in light of previous empirical findings related to the development of deviant sexual preferences in child molesters.     

Variation in Elderly Friendliness across the U.S. States: Operationalization, Rankings, and Selected Consequences

The United States faces a rapidly growing population of elderlycitizens. To learn more about their prospects, we engage inthree tasks. First, we develop and operationalize a five-dimensionalconcept, "state elderly friendliness," that facilitates assessingvarious political, economic, and social aspects of state environmentsthat influence the well-being of elderly persons. Second, werank states on the five dimensions of this concept. We findlarge differences both within states across various dimensionsand across states on individual dimensions. Third, we demonstratethat differences in states' ranks on our dimensional scalesare associated with sharp variations in particular societaloutcomes of importance for the well-being of various segmentsof the elderly.     

VAT Revenues in the Russian Federation: The Role of Tax Administration in Their Decline

Value added taxes (VATs) are important major revenue sources worldwide, yet keeping these taxes as easy to administer as possible is often overlooked. A poorly administered VAT raises less revenue than possible and can change the very nature of the tax, resulting in unintended economic distortions. This article analyzes the experience with the VAT in the Russian Federation and provides evidence that poor tax administration both contributed to the decline of VAT revenues beginning in 1993 and continues to hamper VAT revenue collection today. Administrative issues must not be ignored when implementing a consumption-based tax like the VAT.     

The political economy of targeting

One of the most widely used method of targeting is to reduce welfare benefits as income rises. Although the need for such targeting is clear enough, it also entails two important difficulties. Firstly, the prospect for the recipients of losing part of their benefits if they were to earn more can be a deterrent to work harder. Secondly, by reducing the number of recipients, targeting reduces the political support for taxation and redistribution. The purpose of this paper is to study the voting equilibrium of the degree of targeting and the level of taxation in an economy where labour supply is variable. The analysis reveals that targeting may be fatal for redistribution even though it rejects strictly less than the richest half of the population, and that it is not possible for a coalition of the extremes to form and reject the middle income group from the welfare system. Moreover, because targeting affects labour supply, we find that Pareto improvements are possible when targeting is either “too low” or “too high”. We also find that voting simultaneously over taxation and targeting is favourable to the poor in the sense that they can converge to their most-preferred policy by successively forming a majority coalition with the rich to increase targeting and with the middle to increase taxation.     

Women,Wives and the Campaign Against Pit Closures in County Durham: Understanding the Vane Tempest Vigil

The majority of the women who campaigned to save the Vane Tempest Colliery from closure in 1993 were involved because of their political understanding and allegiances rather than as a consequence of their practical involvement in mining life. Even those women who were married to miners did not conform to the stereotypical conception of ‘miner's wife’. However, the supporting labour movement and the media persisted in conceptualizing the Women's Vigil through romantic and masculinist discourses of miners and mining communities which could only locate the women as ‘wives’, which confined the campaign within historical stereotypes no longer appropriate to the actual situation and which persistently set the idea of socialism against that of feminism. This not only situated the women's campaign as secondary and subject to that of the NUM but it also subverted the possibilities of the women fully articulating their own experience and understanding within the campaign. The situation was further complicated by memories of the miners' strike of 1984-5 in which women played such an important role. One aspect of this role, that of maintaining mining families in the face of hardship, continued to inform understanding of the women's role in the fight to prevent closure, although it was no longer appropriate.The Women's Vigil engaged with a much wider set of concerns and with a wider range of individuals and groups than did that of the miners themselves. There were serious possibilities for broadening the political campaign around the women's slogan of ‘Jobs, community and environment’ which were never fully exploited because of the difficulties of admitting that women could inhabit any position other than that of ‘miners’ wives'.This experience of the Vane Tempest Vigil indicates the significance and the centrality of gender issues within class based political action.     

Cognitive ability and delinquent behavior among inner-city youth: a life-course analysis of main,mediating, and interaction effects

Drawing on the emerging life-course paradigm in criminological theory, this study examines the relationship between cognitive ability and delinquent behavior within a sample of inner-city youth. The results indicate that net of statistical controls, cognitive ability maintains a robust inverse relationship with the likelihood of the onset of delinquency, the early onset of delinquency, and the persistence of delinquency during the 18-year period covered by the dataset. Furthermore, cognitive ability mediates the effect of concentrated disadvantage on both the onset and early onset of delinquency. Overall, the results of this study suggest that cognitive ability is an important criminogenic risk factor that has important implications for both correctional interventions and the continued development of structural and multilevel theories of crime.