Optimal demogrants and taxes in a federal welfare state

This paper provides a framework for the simultaneous calculation of optimal commodity and income taxes in a federal framework with demogrants. The optimal income tax rate is shown to depend on a range of demographic and economic variables. Alternative models of fiscal federalism are proposed, and their implications for optimal commodity taxes and demogrants considered. Illustrative empirical evidence on Indian data confirms sensitivity of tax magnitudes to federal specification, and to assumptions about resource transfer between the federal and provincial authorities.Much of the work in this paper was done during my visit to the Scuola Superiore, S. Anna in Pisa (Italy) in the summer of 1991. The paper was revised during my visit to the Economics Research Centre, University of Western Australia, during May/June 1992. I am grateful to the staff and students of both institutions for their hospitality. I also thank two anonymous referees for helpful remarks. The disclaimer applies.     

The strength of primordial ties: Suburban community adaptation to school system retrenchment

Communities and local schools are attached to one another for many other reasons than the purely instrumental objectives of educating children. These highly symbolic interpenetrations of community and school include considerations of diffuse communal identity, religion, and ethnicity. Taken together with different priorities about wider educational goals, these narrower community objectives for local schools put contradictory strains on community-school relations in the heated climate of increased community participation in contracting school systems. Competing claims about the central purposes of local schools become extraordinarily salient parts of the external environment of school districts experiencing contraction, and play a major role in the process of adapting school district organizations to conditions of decline. For many citizens the desire to preserve the local symbolic and non-instrumental roles of neighborhood schools, in particular, may at times outweigh the goal of maintaining quality educational service delivery as seen from the perspective of school managers. For other citizens, the protection of quality programs, serving their children as stepping-stones to the wider society, outweighs considerations of local neighborhood solidarity and identity in adapting to declining enrollments and fiscal strains in the schools.An earlier version of this article was delivered at the 1984 Midwest Sociological Society Annual Meeting in Chicago. I am grateful to Virginia Bartot, Sally B. Kilgore, Gerald D. Suttles, and an anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions.     

Pattern of clustering of menopausal problems: A study with a Bengali Hindu ethnic group

Abstract

We attempted to find out how menopausal problems cluster with each other. The study was conducted among a group of women belonging to a Bengali-speaking Hindu ethnic group of West Bengal, a state located in Eastern India. We recruited 1,400 participants for the study. Information on sociodemographic aspects and menopausal problems were collected from these participants with the help of a pretested questionnaire. Results of cluster analysis showed that vasomotor, vaginal, and urinary problems cluster together, separately from physical and psychosomatic problems.     

Into the Community: A Comparison of Care Management and Traditional Approaches to Resettlement1

The resettlement of people with learning disabilities (mental handicap) from long-stay hospitals has been under way for a number of years in England. This process has generally been dominated by the exigencies of the available services. A needs-led approach, emphasized in recent community care legislation, in which new services are sought on the basis of the specific requirements of service users, has been used infrequently for this purpose. This paper compares the process of implementing a needs-led care management approach to resettlement with the implementation of a more traditional service-led approach. It also suggests some important lessons for the application of a needs-led approach to hospital resettlement.     

A MODEL OF ETHNIC CONFLICT

We present a model of conflict in which discriminatory government policy or social intolerance is responsive to various forms of ethnic activism, including violence. It is this perceived responsiveness—captured by the probability that the government gives in and accepts a proposed change in ethnic policy—that induces individuals to mobilize, often violently, to support their cause. Yet, mobilization is costly and militants have to be compensated accordingly. The model allows for both financial and human contributions to conflict and allows for a variety of individual attitudes (“radicalism”) towards the cause. The main results concern the effects of within‐group heterogeneity in radicalism and income, as well as the correlation between radicalism and income, in precipitating conflict.