US foreign aid and economic policy concessions*

Why do donors continue to provide foreign aid despite its failure to help poor countries over the past several decades? While some scholars argue that foreign aid is purely for humanitarian purposes, others assert that such aid serves as a tool to pressure recipient countries into accepting policy concessions. In this study, we subject these arguments to empirical testing using a dataset that integrates the amount of US aid and economic policies of recipient countries for 1995–2012. The findings suggest that aid decisions correspond to the interests of the United States, such as policy concessions in economic and business liberalization. However, an increase in US aid is not directly associated with further economic reforms in recipient countries. We conclude that US foreign aid programmes are strategic in nature and successful not in alleviating economic problems in recipient countries but, at the very least, in buying their policy compliance.     

Citizens' views in four jurisdictions on placement policies for maltreated children

Citizens' opinions on child protection public policy are a key dimension of the legitimacy of a political order. We have conducted a survey vignette on a representative sample of citizens (N = 4,003) in England, Finland, Norway, and California, USA. The findings show that citizens' opinions are clearly in favour of adoption (75%) rather than long‐term foster care (25%). Context may partly explain the findings, as the responses of the majority of Anglo‐American respondents are in line with practice in their countries but for the Nordic respondents, there is a substantial discrepancy between citizens' opinions and on‐going child protection practices.     

Life-course effects on marital disruption

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, between 1969 and 1978, the change in the percentage of marital disruption among 3372 families is decomposed into: (1) an increase of 1.7 percent due to the direct effects of age at first marriage; (2) a decrease of 1.1 percent from changes in the relative age at first birth; and (3) a 2.7 percent increase stemming from changes in the internal structure of the families. The maldaptation of concepts from the life-course perspective is demonstrated to have led to the expectation of somewhat different findings, and for the confusion regarding the roles of life-cycle and life-course events in precipitating marital instability. The results strongly suggest the use of greater discretion in the formulation and use of different classes of events within the life-course framework.     

Public Policy and Diffusion of Innovation

Marketers have traditionally studied diffusionof innovation with a primary focus on theindividual consumer as a unit of analysis, themajor types of findings being characteristicsof adopter categories and opinion leadership. We propose that this perspective is notadequate from a macromarketing perspective, inwhich the goals are to set public policy forsocietal good or to create an environment whichenables the diffusion of an innovation in a waythat no single marketer could do alone. Insetting public policy which can enable (orinhibit) diffusion of innovation for societalgood, a system composed of a mass socialinfrastructure, a competitive infrastructure,and a technical infrastructure should beconsidered.     

Enhancing participatory research with the community oriented primary care model: A case study in community mobilization

Refining Participatory Research with the methodology of Community Oriented Primary Care (COPC), sociologists, medical providers and other “professionals” were able to assist the people of a small, rural county in western Appalachian North Carolina create a “community health consortium.” The consortium grew out of a research process funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which included some 40 interviews with community groups that articulated health problems and barriers to health care. The consortium then undertook action projects, which in turn enhanced networking between community groups and agencies while reducing mistrust between them. The consortium empowered people to articulate their realities, needs and became a force for change able to make demands on political office holders and decision makers. Despite its democratic origins and ideology, the consortium needs to do more to extend its outreach to include the marginal and disenfranchised.     

The closed-loop supply chain network with competition,distribution channel investment,and uncertainties

In this paper, a closed-loop supply chain network is investigated with decentralized decision-makers consisting of raw material suppliers, retail outlets, and the manufacturers that collect the recycled product directly from the demand market. We derive the optimality conditions of the various decision-makers, and establish that the governing equilibrium conditions can be formulated as a finite-dimensional variational inequality problem. We establish convergence of the proposed algorithm that can allow for the discussion of the effects of competition, distribution channel investment, yield and conversion rates, combined with uncertainties in demand, on equilibrium quantity transactions and prices. Numerical examples are provided for illustration.