The International Adoption Experience: Do They Live Happily Ever After?

This study presents the perspective of parents who adopted children internationally and their now adult adopted children regarding the impact of international adoption on their lives. Areas explored include adaptation of the child and family, challenges experienced along the way, influence on various aspects of their lives, parent-child relationship, rewards and regrets associated with the adoption experience, recommendations for those considering international adoptions, and an adjective that would describe their journey. The outcome illuminates the success of international adoptions and the life-changing bond that is formed when parents and children transcend all boundaries to form a family to call their own.     

The local turn in migration management: the IOM and the engagement of local authorities

Migration management subsumes a set of discourses and institutions that aim to coordinate states’ regulation of international migration. However, this paradigm is increasingly recognising the importance of the local scale and its actors. This ‘local turn’ in migration management underlines the necessity for local actors to adapt in order to gain resilience to migration shocks. Grounded theoretically in the Cultural Political Economy approach, this paper examines how the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is trying to engage local actors in a neoliberal spatio-temporal arrangement. This arrangement reduces the complexity of migration by apprehending the global as the domain of relentless migration flows and the local as a field where pragmatic and partnership-based solutions can be implemented by local actors. To illustrate this arrangement, this paper focuses on the 2015 IOM’s Conference on Migrants and Cities which gathered representatives from local authorities. This conference is an attempt to semiotically and extra-semiotically steer local migration policies. And through an analysis of the opening speech of the Director General of the IOM, this paper explores how this event offers local actors appropriate models of perception, (inter)action and being.     

Some orthogonal expansions for the logistic distribution

We expand a continuous random variable as a sum of a sequence of un-correlated random variables. These variables are principal components of a Bernoulli process, as well as principal dimensions in continuous metric scaling on a particular distance function. We obtain expansions for the uniform, exponential and logistic distributions. A goodness-of-fit application is given.     

Addressing the impact of foster care on biological children and their families

This study explores from a dual perspective the impact of the fostering process on biological children in the home. Ten foster parents and their biological children were interviewed separately. The impact of foster care on the psychological, educational, and social well-being of biological children and their relationship with parents and siblings were examined. The exploration reveals a paradoxical and life-changing process as seen through the eyes of biological children and their parents.     

The Opportunities for Adopting Inflation Targeting in Tunisia: a Cointegration Study and Transmission Channels of Monetary Policy

The major aim of this paper is to analyze, at a first stage, the trend of inflation in Tunisia, then to conduct an overview of inflation measures and, to develop a simple inflation forecasting by applying the Box and Jenkins (Time series analysis: forecasting and control. Holden day, San Francisco, 1976) method. It is essential to understand the dynamics of the core and global inflation, and to explore the relationships that may undermine cointegration inflation via the Engle and Granger (Econometrica 55:251–276, 1987) and Johansen (J Econ Dyn Control 12:231–254, 1988) methods on control variables during a recent monthly period, ranging from 1996 to 2006. Concerning the Tunisian case, and by retracing the similar study conducted by Ndiyae and Badji (Les déterminants de l’inflation au Sénégal: Approche par les fonctions de consommations, Agence nationale de la statistique et de la méthodologie, 2008), the results have shown the existence of just a single cointegration relationship between the variables concerning a short term and long-term dynamics. Moreover, within the same spirit, a structural analysis based on structural VAR of Blanchard and Quah (Am Econ Rev 79:655–673, 1989) method has managed to identify the shocks impact on the supply and demand variables on the consumer prices index through the study of transmission channels of monetary policy. The outcomes have exposed that the relatively low impact degree of control variables on inflation in Tunisia is consistent with those carried out by Gupta and Komen (Time aggregation and the contradictions with causal relationships: can economic theory come to the rescue? 2008).     

On the dynamic cumulative residual entropy

Recently, Rao et al. [(2004) Cumulative residual entropy: a new measure of information. IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 50(6), 1220–1228] have proposed a new measure of uncertainty, called cumulative residual entropy (CRE), in a distribution function F and obtained some properties and applications of that. In the present paper, we propose a dynamic form of CRE and obtain some of its properties. We show how CRE (and its dynamic version) is connected with well-known reliability measures such as the mean residual life time.