Meeting basic needs in Asia,Part I: Government capacity and performance

Questions concerning the distribution of income and wealth, and access to services have attracted increased attention during the 1970s to complement the earlier emphasis on the promotion of macro-economic development. This article provides a comparative review of service needs in Asia. It presents an inventory of the types of services provided by, or through, government, and assesses their adequacy for rural development. It explores problems with mobilizing resources and delivering services, and it identifies arrangements that appear most effective. The article emphasizes the problem of extending the coverage, and increasing the quality, of social and productive support services for vast rural populations and it stresses that more appropriate ways must be found of delivering services that are needed. A second article, to appear in the next number of Public Administration and Development, reviews ways of improving the capacity of governments and local communities to provide services needed by rural populations.     

TV tip-over morbidity and mortality in children

Twenty-eight non-fatal cases of TV related injuries were noted in San Diego in the 2 years prior to September 2008. We reviewed the scene, witness reports, past history, and autopsy findings from three fatal cases and distinguished them from abusive head trauma. The recent literature was also reviewed. Our fatal cases resulted from TVs falling on small children and causing severe head injury. The literature review showed increasing injuries and deaths relating to TV tip-over, TV stands and dressers. Most of the fatalities were head injuries in small children. The reporting methods may not be complete or accurate. Some authors in the literature review suggested preventive measures so as to decrease these injuries. Forensic scientists should become familiar with these injuries and measures so that they may communicate effectively with their communities.     

List of Contributors

In this paper we extend earlier work on the effects of disparate retirement rates on the partisan composition of the contemporary House of Representatives (1954–2006). Gilmour and Rothstein had posited that the Grand Old Party's (GOP) ‘permanent minority’ status in the House between 1954 and 1994 was the principal cause of this differential. Contrary to expectations, we find that even after their takeover of the House in 1995, Republican Members of Congress (MCs) continued to leave the chamber voluntarily at higher rates than their Democratic colleagues, both to retire completely from public life and to seek higher office. Ceteris paribus, even as the GOP made considerable offsetting gains in its ability to re-elect incumbents and to retain open seats, this continued disparity significantly attenuated the size of their legislative majority and contributed to their ousting as the majority party in the elections of 2006. We conclude the paper with some speculations regarding the reasons for the persistence of relatively high rates of Republican retirements.     

The dynamics of committee outliers: Evidence from the house of representatives, 1951–90

In this study, we enter the on‐going debate on committee outliers by addressing two important points. First, we dispute the conventional wisdom that committee outliers are best identified and evaluated using traditional tests of statistical significance. Contesting the appropriateness of such tests, we contend that any observed difference between chamber behaviour and floor behaviour may be substantively significant and use raw mean differences between Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores to examine differences between the full House of Representatives and its committees. Second, we attempt to integrate the committee outlier literature into the broader literature on the historical development of the House by using data from 20 Congresses over four decades (1951–90). This longitudinal analysis indicates that there have been interesting dynamic changes in the prevalence of committee outliers across time and committee types in patterns that are consistent with both the principal‐agent framework and the more general literature on congressional change and reform. Many of these important changes are not obvious when relying solely on traditional tests of statistical significance to examine committee outliers.     

The impact of parental homeownership on children's outcomes during early adulthood

Abstract

Whether children benefit from being raised in a home owned by their parents has important policy implications and has been the topic of much scholarly debate. We match Panel Study of Income Dynamics data with census tract data to examine the impact of childhood experiences on adult outcomes for children followed over three decades. This allows us to document a wide range of characteristics.

For children born between 1968 and 1974, we analyze data on their first 18 years and also various outcomes when they are between 25 and 31 in 1999. We control for a comprehensive set of observable parental characteristics and develop a method to control for unobservable child characteristics together with an instrumental variable for the remaining selection problems. Parental homeownership status and children's college education and home‐ownership status are closely related, although the former is generated partially by the greater residential stability associated with homeownership.     

Developmental patterns of sex differences in delinquency among African American adolescents: A test of the sex-invariance hypothesis

This paper addresses a developmental issue concerning longitudinal patterns of sex differences in delinquency. Hirschi and Gottfredson argue that the age-delinquency relation is invariant across sex and that sex differences in delinquency are invariant over time as well. A combination of these two propositions generates a hypothesis, called here the sex-invariance hypothesis, that sex differences in delinquency are invariant over developmental stages of adolescents. To test the sex-invariance hypothesis, nine waves of panel data collected from a representative urban sample of African American adolescents are analyzed. The overall findings show that sex differences in delinquency tend to vary as the subjects grow older, rather than remain constant as the invariance thesis posits. Specifically, sex differences in delinquency peak at the age of 15 and thereafter declines with age. We also find that parental supervision significantly explains sex differences in delinquency for younger adolescence, but not for older adolescence.     

Cardiac rupture in acute myocardial infarction: a reassessment

Cardiac rupture as a complication of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) has been described as occurring infrequently. Because of the recent dramatic decrease in autopsy rates, the authors believe that current studies do not accurately represent the frequency of this catastrophic complication. Autopsy protocols and archived histologic slides of patients with AMI were retrospectively reviewed to determine whether the frequency of cardiac rupture, as a complication of AMI, is altered when a non-hospital-based patient cohort after autopsy is evaluated. This review yielded 153 cases of 41 women and 112 men, whose postmortem examinations revealed gross and histologic evidence of AMI. Cardiac rupture was present in 30.7% of these cases. Of the 47 patients with rupture, 35 had no relevant medical history. The remaining 12 patients had various medical conditions. None of the patients in the rupture group had previously treated symptoms related to coronary artery conditions. Whereas women constituted 26.8% of the total AMI group, they had a cardiac rupture rate of 61%. By contrast, men with AMI had a cardiac rupture rate of 19.6%. All patients in the cardiac rupture group had heart weights over the predicted expected weight as a function of body weight. Age, gender, and heart weight were significant factors associated with cardiac rupture, whereas body mass index was not significantly related. When these factors were evaluated jointly, age was a significant explanatory factor for rupture among both men and women, whereas body mass index and heart weight were significant for men but not for women. When the rupture sites occurred on the left ventricular myocardium, the anterior wall was affected in 21 cases (45%), the posterior wall in 18 (38%), the lateral wall in 4 (9%), and the apex in 3 (6%). The right ventricular myocardium ruptured in 1 case (2%). Most of the patients had severe multivessel coronary artery disease. Histologic study of the specimens showed that the majority of ruptures occurred between 24 and 72 hours after myocardial infarction. This study showed a frequency of cardiac rupture of 30.7% in patients with AMI and sudden death according to medical examiner's records. These findings confirm and reinforce the importance of postmortem examination and autopsy as an adjunct to clinical medical practice.