Ethnic Minorities in Northern Mountains of Vietnam: Employment,Poverty and Income

The Italian National Statistical Office is implementing a new project for computing sub-national Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) on a regular basis, which is based on an appropriate use of existing Consumer Price Index (CPI) data and new sources of data. Concerning the use of CPI data, in this paper the role of the Country Product Dummy (CPD) method for compiling sub-national PPPs at Basic–Heading (BH) level is analysed together with the specific issues that arise in this context, such as the need to take spatial autocorrelation among price relatives into account. The results of various experiments based on CPI data concerning 7 BHs and 19 Italian regional chief towns are presented and discussed with the aim of exploring the performance of various CPD models and analysing to what extent the type and characteristics of the data affect the estimates obtained. The statistical uncertainty associated with the ranks derived from the regional PPPs was then calculated by means of a simulation procedure. Our findings prove to be interesting and confirm that methods and CPI data for spatial comparisons are reciprocally influenced.     

Linking green space to health: a comparative study of two urban neighbourhoods in Ghent, Belgium

This paper investigates the nature of the relationship between the greenness of the local environment and the health and well-being of its inhabitants by looking at a number of possible mediators within the same study: physical activity, perceived stress, ability to concentrate, social cohesion and neighbourhood satisfaction. Data were collected through a survey of residents in two neighbourhoods that differ objectively in green space provision, but which are largely similar in demographics, socio-economic factors, housing conditions and other environmental characteristics, apart from green space. Of the three dependent variables of interest: self-reported general health, bodily functioning and general well-being (happiness), it was self-reported happiness that differed significantly between the two neighbourhoods, with greater happiness in the greener neighbourhood. Amongst the possible mediators, people??s satisfaction with their neighbourhood differed significantly: those living in the greener neighbourhood were more satisfied. Mediation analysis indicated that neighbourhood satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between neighbourhood greenness and happiness. Among the specific (environmental and social) neighbourhood qualities asked about, perception of neighbourhood greenness was found to be the most important predictor of neighbourhood satisfaction. Additional analysis showed that the view from the living room??green or not green??fully mediates the relationship between neighbourhood greenness and neighbourhood satisfaction. This study underscores the importance of nearby green space for people??s overall well-being and suggests the need for green space to be evaluated in terms of visual proximity, that is, whether and how it is experienced from the street and the home.     

A consistency algorithm based on information theory

This paper provides a geometric‐mean solution to the consistency problem of multidimensional demographic projection models, based on the constrained minimization of an entropy function. A comparison with the existing harmonic‐mean solution yields many similarities and almost no differences: both solutions satisfy the properties of availability, monotonicity, homogeneity, competition, and symmetry, and, for both solutions, there is a convenient one‐to‐one relationship between adjustments in aggregate numbers of events, on the one hand, and age‐specific numbers of events, on the other hand. However, one major advantage of the geometric mean is that its corresponding distance function is firmly based on (information) theory.     

Educational credentials and external effects: A test for the Netherlands

This paper proposes and uses a new test to discriminate between on the one hand the human capital model and on the other hand the credentialists and signalling models. Previous tests used only one source of variation between years spend in education and obtained degrees. Most use the variation among degree holders in the number of years they spend at school and some use the variation in the degrees obtained given the years spend in school. This paper uses both sources of variation in a combined method. It further tests the Stiglitz model of signalling, which hypothesizes that signalling will have positive external effects against other signalling and credentialist model, which hypothesize that signalling, will have negative external effects. Dutch data from the Amenities and services utilisation surveys of 1999 and 2003 (AVO’99, AVO’03) conducted by the ‘Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau’ of the Netherlands is used to test the hypotheses.The main findings of the analysis is that on the one hand degrees are seen as a credential, i.e. the effects of educational degrees outweigh the effect of years of education, but that on the other hand investments in education lead to positive external effects. So the social return of education is higher than the private return, supporting Stiglitz (1975) idea of signalling.     

Reviewing the latest national policies and services for people with severe mental health disorders in government-funded institutions in Vietnam,and policy recommendations for service improvements

The aim of this paper is to provide the international community with a broad and updated picture of key policies and services for people with severe mental health disorders in Vietnam. In particular, the paper (1) reviews the most important national policies governing care for people with mental health disorders, (2) reviews the status of free-of-charge care provided to people with severe mental health disorders in a network of government-funded facilities across the nation and (3) discusses the future policy directions of Vietnam regarding people with mental health disorders.     

The implications of irreversibility in emergency response decisions

The irreversibility effect implies that a decision maker who neglects the prospect of receiving more complete information at later stages of a sequential decision problem will in certain cases too easily take an irreversible decision, as he ignores the existence of a positive option value in favour of reversible decisions. This option value represents the decision maker's flexibility to adapt subsequent decisions to the obtained information. In this paper we show that the economic models dealing with irreversibility as used in environmental and capital investment decision making can be extended to emergency response decisions that produce important irreversible effects. In particular, we concentrate on the decision whether or not to evacuate an industrial area threatened by a possible nuclear accident. We show in a simple two-period evacuation decision model that non-optimal conclusions may be drawn when evacuation is regarded as a `now or never decision'. The robustness of these results is verified by means of a sensitivity analysis of the various model parameters. The importance of `options thinking' in this decision context is illustrated in an example.     

The Domain and Interpretation of Utility Functions: An Exploration

This paper proposes an exploration of the methodology of utility functions that distinguishes interpretation from representation. While representation univocally assigns numbers to the entities of the domain of utility functions, interpretation relates these entities with empirically observable objects of choice. This allows us to make explicit the standard interpretation of utility functions which assumes that two objects have the same utility if and only if the individual is indifferent among them. We explore the underlying assumptions of such an hypothesis and propose a non-standard interpretation according to which objects of choice have a well-defined utility although individuals may vary in the way they treat these objects in a specific context. We provide examples of such a methodological approach that may explain some reversal of preferences and suggest possible mathematical formulations for further research. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Social–ethnic school composition and disengagement: An inquiry into the perceived control explanation

In many Western countries, increasing levels of immigration have raised concerns over the outcomes of social–ethnic segregation in schools. This study relates social–ethnic school composition to students’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive disengagement. While previous research mostly remains atheoretical, this current study investigates the applicability of the perceived control explanation, with the expectation that attending low socioeconomic status (SES) schools and schools with a higher proportion of ethnic minority pupils lowers students’ perceived control and hence produces disengagement. Multilevel analyses on data from the Flemish Educational Assessment, consisting of 11,759 students in 83 Flemish secondary schools, show that students in lower SES schools are more likely to disengage behaviorally and emotionally from school. This association is, as expected, mediated by feelings of perceived control. Higher ethnic minority concentration, however, yields lower disengagement, especially for ethnic minority students. The implications are discussed.     

Fight or Flight? Factors Influencing Child Welfare Workers' Propensity to Seek Positive Change or Disengage from Their Jobs

ABSTRACT

This cross-sectional study tests a theory-driven, conceptual model examining factors supporting or hindering child welfare workers' (n = 359) efforts to speak up (voice) or disengage psychologically (neglect) or physically (exit) from their jobs. Based on path analysis results, key findings indicate that workers who feel included in decision-making are more likely to exercise voice and less likely to engage in neglect. In contrast, workers who experienced supervisory and organizational support are less inclined to exit. The findings should be instructive to scholars and practitioners interested in capturing how employees' responses to stressful and complex work environments are expressed.     

Non‐take up of the supplemental child benefit for children with a disability in Belgium: A mixed‐method approach

Families with disabled children run a great risk of being poor. Although policies providing poor families with financial benefits should be effective in reducing poverty, the actual effectiveness is often jeopardized by the issue of non‐take up (NTU). Yet, NTU of benefits aimed at disabled children is for the most part uncharted territory. In this article, we fill this gap using a mixed‐methods approach to (a) estimate the magnitude and characteristics of NTU in the Belgian “supplemental child benefit” by drawing on a large‐scale administrative dataset on childhood disabilities and (b) explore the determinants of NTU by means of semistructured interviews with experts and parents. We estimate an NTU rate of at least 10%, a substantial figure given that the benefit is not income tested. This mainly concerns children with “less visible disabilities” (autism spectrum disorder and other intellectual and psychological disorders) and results from insufficient information provision about the benefit's existence and eligibility criteria; process costs, for instance, the complexity of the procedure; and the way the scale to assess a child's disability is constructed.