社会主义本质与中国社会主义发展新模式

社会主义发展模式是体现社会主义本质的重要载体。中国模式的主旨是解放和发展生产力,制度依托是坚持生产资料公有制主体地位,突出特色是市场经济与社会主义相结合,价值理念是人的自由全面发展和共同富裕。中国模式是中国共产党人对社会主义的伟大创造和贡献,它是动态发展的,并将随实践的变化而变化和发展。     

Unintended Consequences of Local Sales Tax: Capitalization of Sales Taxes into Housing Prices

Local governments are under pressure to look for alternatives to property taxes as their main revenue source. One response has been to adopt local sales taxes. Prior studies offer little guidance on whether and how much local governments enhance their revenue capacity with local sales taxes. This article unveils the underlying mechanisms by exploring the capitalization of sales taxes into housing prices as a property tax base measure. The empirical analysis reveals a capitalization of local sales taxes into housing prices, indicating the reduction of property tax bases in higher sales tax areas from the long-term perspective. The findings suggest that a sales tax rate increase might not raise local revenue capacity as much as policymakers intend.     

The Dynamics of Enlargement in International Organizations

Most international organizations (IOs) expand their membership over the course of their lifespan. Although these enlargements tend to be heralded as normatively positive — for the IOs themselves, for the new members, and for cooperative outcomes more generally — expansions can also lead to conflicts in the organization. What conditions lead to enlargement rounds that reshape an organization in unexpected ways? We argue that, depending upon the diversity of the initial group of countries, members may vote to admit new entrants that can tilt organizational decision-making in unexpected directions. We anticipate fewer enlargements with lesser impact on the character of the organization among organizations that have either a smaller range of founding members or a relatively even initial dispersion. We develop an agent-based model that accounts for the complex decision-making environment and social dynamics that typify IO accession processes. The model helps us explain how the nature of decision-making in organizations can shift following enlargement, likely changing the organization’s output and goals.     

Capitalism,Technology and Work: Interrogating the Tipping Point Thesis

Post-work politics, with a focus on universal basic income, rather than an agenda of saving jobs and improving the quality of work, has been a growth area on the left. This article challenges the views of proponents that their claims are ‘on trend' with developments in markets and technology. It does so by examining two supposed ‘tipping points' concerning crises in the production of value in capitalism and in the availability of and attachment to work. Through a rigorous examination of available evidence, the article demonstrates that the stories contained in post-work discourses about business models, technologies, labour markets and workers are not empirically sustainable. Suggestions are then made about what more credible accounts of actually existing capital, technology and labour might look like, and what the direction of alternative, progressive policy agendas might be.     

Advances in Osteometric Sorting: Utilizing Diaphyseal CSG Properties for Lower Limb Skeletal Pair-Matching

Pair-matching of bilateral elements is a major component of resolving commingled remains both in forensic and bioarchaeological contexts. This study presents a new method of osteometric pair-matching of the lower limbs which relies on 3D digital models of the femur and tibia bones. The proposed method, which is accompanied by a freely available open-source implementation, automatically computes a number of osteometric variables including cross-sectional geometric properties from an assemblage of left and right bone antimeres and calculates probabilistically the appropriate matching pairs as well as single elements, whose bones antimere is not present in the given assemblage. The method has been extensively tested on a skeletal sample comprising 396 femurs and 422 tibias from the Athens collection. Our results in testing commingled assemblages with no disparity show that the method’s sensitivity is 1 for sorting femurs and 0.997 for sorting tibias, whereas in assemblages with moderate disparity the sensitivity is 0.999 and 0.992 respectively. Our results further indicate that sensitivity is unaffected by the size of the commingled assemblage although the percentage of identified true matching pairs drops as the number of commingled elements increases. This means that all identified antimeres matched to an individual are still very accurately sorted despite not every individual being identified in very large assemblages. The proposed method can facilitate the sorting process of commingled remains both accurately and efficiently, while leaving a very small percentage of unsorted elements that may require further techniques for further individualization.     

Dynamic latent trait models: An application to Latin American banking crises

Dynamic latent trait models combine information from a variety of manifest variables, possibly measured on different scales, that are presumed to be indicators of an unobserved latent phenomenon, while allowing appropriate consideration of the longitudinal character of time series. I use a Bayesian dynamic latent trait model of banking sector financial accounts measured at the country/quarter level to build an indicator of banking system robustness in Latin America. As a methodological innovation, I extend dynamic latent trait models to take into account country-specific effects of bank regulatory regimes through hierarchical modeling of factor loadings. I suggest how these models can be applied to other types of phenomena—for example to combine existing political regime indicators to build a more informative measure of democracy.     

Stature Estimation Formulae for Nigerians

Abstract:  In stature estimation, long limbs and the stature formula of Trotter and Gleser easily come to mind. In the recent past, a lot of workers have established formulae specific to their populations using whole length of limbs, fragmented bones, circumference of long bones, and even length of the vertebrae. We have in this work used tibia length, height of subjects, and the regression models to establish formulae specific to Nigerians. We measured height and tibia length of 200 (96 male and 104 female) adult Nigerians. The tibia length was measured from upper limit of the medial condoyle to the tip of medial malleolus using a measuring tape calibrated in meters while the height of individuals were also measured using meter scales. All measurements were made by one person, to avoid interobserver error, and repeatedly until a constant value is obtained. We obtained general formulae for males and females which compares favorably with that of Duyar and Pelin, and can be relied upon.     

Alcohol-Related Mortality Risk in Natural and Non-Natural Death Cases

Abstract:  Determination of the associations between alcohol influence and sudden natural death represents challenges for medicolegal investigations. The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of alcohol influence in medicolegal autopsies. In our study of natural and non-natural deaths cases (5496 total: 4045 males, 1451 females) were examined. Blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) were detected by headspace gas chromatographic method. We investigated the alcohol-related mortality using hierarchical log-linear statistical models. Severe BACs were detected among suicidal victims in the oldest age group (>65 years) (In F  = 0.442) and among the homicide victims between the age of 40–65 years (In F  = 0.234). Correlations we found between manner-of-death and sex suggested that the rate of males in accidents (ln F  = 0.140) and the rate of females in homicides (ln F  = 0.193) were higher. It was concluded that the accurate statistical mortality database may provide a huge support for the determination of alcohol effects on human health and mortality.     

General Deterrence and International Conflict: Testing Perfect Deterrence Theory

Since general deterrence necessarily precedes immediate deterrence, the analysis of general deterrence is more fundamental to an understanding of international conflict than is an analysis of immediate deterrence. Nonetheless, despite a few exceptions, the quantitative literature has ignored the subject of general deterrence, focusing almost exclusively on situations of immediate deterrence. My purpose in this essay is to fill this evidentiary gap by subjecting a recently developed theory of general deterrence—Perfect Deterrence Theory—to a systematic test by examining general deterrence from 1816–2000. The results indicate that the predictions of perfect deterrence theory are strongly supported by the empirical record.     

Conclusion – Building Regions from Below: Has the Time Come for Regionalism 2.0?

In a changing world ridden with crises and characterised by a general redistribution of power, regional organisations need to reinvent themselves. Equally, the study of regionalism has to reject its traditional Eurocentrism to embrace new conceptual categories in order to describe more effectively the variety of regional processes across the world. Against this background, this article looks at the European project and its current crisis before discussing other regional ‘experiments’ in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which rest on different principles but also manifest considerable shortcomings. The analysis points to the need to look at regionalism with a critical eye, emphasizing the undeniably important achievements but also the hidden threats that a certain model of regional integration (for instance, the classical top-down elite-driven process adopted by the EU founding fathers) can pose to the sustainability of regional cohesion and the adaptability of this model to other areas of the world.