African solutions to African problems and the Ebola virus disease in Nigeria

Africa grapples with the world's most serious public health crisis, but this article shows that there are public health solutions that work in the African setting. When the Ebola virus disease outbreak was announced in Nigeria in July 2014, some public health specialists worried that an apocalyptic outbreak would sweep through the vast slums of Lagos. The words “Ebola” and “Lagos” in the same sentence were viewed as a dangerous combination, due to the large population of Lagos and the inefficient health care system in the city. Contrary to this view, the outbreak of Ebola virus disease was successfully contained in Nigeria. This article focuses on the factors that were responsible for this success. It examines strategies developed within Nigeria that help to ensure the successful containment of the disease. The paper identifies lessons that can be learnt by other countries from the Nigerian experience.     

Pay to protect: Examining the factors of the use of market-based instruments for local water sustainability

Given the myriad of policy instruments aimed at enhancing water quantity conservation available to municipalities, what drives them to opt for a market-based instrument (MBI)? MBIs can be effective and efficient policy instruments to enhance water quantity conservation, but there is little known about why municipalities utilize them. This study hypothesizes that three contextual elements influence a municipality's use of an MBI: the natural, political, and structural environment. The results from two logistic regression models suggest that in a municipality suffering a higher drought level, both a conservative political environment and operating under a council-manager form of government (with the effect more pronounced under a non-council-manager form) will increase the likelihood that it will use an MBI to address water conservation.     

Living in the world risk society

Abstract

In a world risk society, we must distinguish between ecological and financial dangers, which can be conceptualized as side effects, and the threat from terrorist networks as intentional catastrophes; the principle of deliberately exploiting the vulnerability of modern civil society replaces the principle of chance and accident.     

Finance and Demand for Skill: Evidence from Uganda

We explore the empirical interaction between firm growth, financing constraints, and job creation. Using a novel small-business survey from Uganda, we find that the extent to which small businesses expand skilled employment as their sales and profits increase is significantly related to access to external funding, while the hiring of casual and family workers is not. The results are robust to the inclusion of various firm level controls, region and sector fixed effects. We support our findings by providing empirical evidence on the relationship between planned hiring and firms’ access to finance.     

Strategic Involuntary Teacher Transfers and Teacher Performance: Examining Equity and Efficiency

Despite claims that school districts need flexibility in teacher assignment to allocate teachers more equitably across schools and improve district performance, the power to involuntarily transfer teachers across schools remains hotly contested. Little research has examined involuntary teacher transfer policies or their effects on schools, teachers, or students. This article uses administrative data from Miami‐Dade County Public Schools to investigate the implementation and effects of the district's involuntary transfer policy, including which schools transferred and received teachers, which teachers were transferred, what kinds of teachers replaced them in their former schools, and how their performance—as measured by their work absences and value‐added in math and reading—compared before and after the transfer. We find that, under the policy, principals in the lowest performing schools identified relatively low‐performing teachers for transfer who, based on observable characteristics, would have been unlikely to leave on their own. Consistent with an equity improvement, we find that involuntarily transferred teachers were systematically moved to higher performing schools and generally were outperformed by the teachers who replaced them. Efficiency impacts are mixed; although transferred teachers had nearly two fewer absences per year in their new positions, transferred teachers continued to have low value‐added in their new schools.