Farm size ‐ farm productivity re‐examined: Evidence from rural Egypt

A major component of the economic rationale for redistributive land reform is the empirically observed inverse relation between farm size and farm productivity. A major policy implication of this statistical relationship, frequently suggested, is for a small farm bias in agricultural development strategy. This article examines the hypothesis that while the above inverse relation may hold in the static context of a relatively backward agriculture, it breaks down with advancing levels of technological innovation, and to show, using primary data from village surveys, that this latter process has indeed been taking place in the context of rural Egypt. The article points out some of the conceptual and methodological confusion of earlier studies.     

Can the best interests of young people be met in residential care? An Ireland case study

The search for factors essential to the achievement of congruence in residential youth care services in Ireland led to the discovery of five critical success factors, each of which affects all three organizational levels of such services. These critical factors included: needs-led, not regulation-driven, care; senior managers with workforce responsibility require domain expertise; shared vision and purpose across three organizational levels; practice-led planning and service development; and bureaucratic policies and practices that are congruent with corporate parenting obligations to provide developmental care that serves each child's best interests.     

Defending Victims of Bullying in Early Adolescence: A Multilevel Analysis

Adolescents’ defending behaviors in school bullying situations is likely determined by individual characteristics, social status variables, and classroom/school contextual factors operating simultaneously in the peer ecology. However, there is little research on defending behavior that utilizes this multilevel approach. This study investigated how students’ willingness to defend victims of bullying was affected by feelings of empathy, perceived popularity, and classroom-level perceived prosocial norms. Participants were 1373 adolescents (40% girls, Mage: 14?yrs) from 54 classrooms in six middle schools in South Korea. These youth reported on their feelings of empathy and how prosocial they perceived their classmates to be. Peer-ratings and peer nominations were used to estimate defending behaviors and which students were perceived as popular. Multilevel analyses showed that participants were more likely to defend victims when they had greater empathy and perceived popularity and when classroom-level prosocial norms were higher. The findings have implications for interventions to reduce school bullying and for studying defending behavior in multiple cultural contexts.     

New Zealand's public sector management reform: Implications for the United States

This article describes the reforms to the functions of central government in New Zealand that have been introduced since 1985. It sketches the political and economic situation which motivated the changes to the systems of public management. Some of the theoretical influences that provided insights to the advice given to the government by its officials are noted. The essential elements of the system are described briefly. The results are summarized in terms of how the ideas were implemented, the extent of their acceptance, the impact on managerial behavior, and the effects on government in terms of the objectives that were originally set out. Some tentative suggestions are made regarding the messages that might be drawn from the New Zealand experience that are relevant to the reforms of the government of the United States.     

Do financial incentives help low‐performing schools attract and keep academically talented teachers? Evidence from California

This study capitalizes on a natural experiment that occurred in California between 2000 and 2002. In those years, the state offered a competitively allocated $20,000 incentive called the Governor's Teaching Fellowship (GTF) aimed at attracting academically talented, novice teachers to low‐performing schools and retaining them in those schools for at least four years. Taking advantage of data on the career histories of 27,106 individuals who pursued California teaching licenses between 1998 and 2003, we use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the unbiased impact of the GTF on the decisions of recipients to begin working in low‐performing schools within 2 years after licensure program enrollment. We estimate that GTF recipients would have been less likely to teach in low‐performing schools than observably similar counterparts had the GTF not existed, but that acquiring a GTF increased their probability of doing so by 28 percentage points. Examining retention patterns, we find that 75 percent of both GTF recipients and nonrecipients who began working in low‐performing schools remained in such schools for at least four years. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Constructing loyalism: politics,communications and peace in Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland peace process has provided the space for the emergence of an articulate loyalist politics which has had implications for the traditionally obstructive and negative representations of unionist discourse. During talk and negotiations which led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, leaders of the Progressive Unionist Party and the Ulster Democratic Party (both political wings of loyalist paramilitary groupings) voiced positions which assisted the possibilities for building constitutional change based along more moderate lines than those associated with dominant unionism. However, have the news media been receptive to such articulations and, if not, what problems have they created for the communication of loyalist positions? By considering such questions, this article explores the development of loyalism and loyalist communications in the early years of peace in Northern Ireland.     

Allocating resources among AIDS research strategies

One of the central questions facing policy-makers is how to allocate limited federal funds among alternative AIDS research strategies. A rational answer requires judgments about both the prospects of scientific progress and the societal value of research outcomes. Using a decision-analytic approach, this paper examines the marginal returns from additional funding of basic biology, epidemiology and mathematical modeling, vaccine development and testing, treatment development and testing, and behavioral and social science. A survey of a recent Institute of Medicine Committee on AIDS was conducted to elicit scientific judgments on the prospects for scientific progress in each of the five areas. The scientists were quite capable of transcending their disciplinary orientation as reflected in the dominant sentiment in favor of more behavioral and social science research. A comparison of the actual FY 1987 AIDS research budget with the budgets recommended by the scientific experts also suggests that basic biological research deserves greater emphasis.This research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the form of a grant to the Health Science Policy Working Group of the Harvard Division on Health Policy, Research and Education.