Bank capital buffer releases,public guarantee programs,and dividend bans in COVID-19 Europe: an appraisal

European Journal of Law and Economics - We analyse the recent policy decisions made by the European Central Bank and the national authorities related to capital and shareholders’ remuneration...     

The flip side of fashion: Used clothing exports to the third world

Since the early 1970s, western countries have increasingly recycled their second‐hand clothes by exporting to the Third World. In response, some LDC governments have banned used clothing imports to protect their domestic textile industries. This article, after reviewing the structure and evolution of world used clothing trade, examines the consequences for Africa's largest importer, Rwanda. In this low‐income country, with its small domestic textile industry, displacement is minimal and imported used clothing offers a modest but rare policy lever for directly increasing national income as well as incomes of the rural poor.     

Functional policy actions: Agency activities subsequent to budgeting

This study considers numerous non-budgetary measures of policy activity (called functional actions) that are conducted by agencies as they seek to implement their programs. Relationships found in earlier research among maturity, coalitions, and budgetary variables with the functional actions of agencies are extended here through a subsample test of the data and through the utilization of functional actions as independent as well as dependent variables. These functional actions are considered important because they directly affect the lives of citizens, seem manipulable by agencies, and represent a crucial first step in evaluating both the governmental and societal impact of agency programs. Data for eight federal agencies from fiscal years 1960 through 1971 were usedincorporating percentages and simple bivariate correlation coefficients. While the findings remain tentative,numerous implications are suggested for agency behavior and for the empirical study of public policy.     

THE LIMITED ROLE OF CHANGING AGE STRUCTURE IN EXPLAINING AGGREGATE CRIME RATES*

Changes in the age structure are shown to have a limited impact on aggregate crime rates. Even the dramatic transformation of the age distribution accompanying the baby boom shifted crime rates by no more than 1 % per year. Projected changes in the age distribution between 1995 and 2010 will lead to slight declines in per capita crime rates. These results are at odds with recent predictions of an impending demographically driven crime wave. Such predictions have focused exclusively on a rise in juvenile crime and ignored the offsetting decreases among adults.