Social security: Indispensable solidarity

Social security must be considered not as an economic burden, but as a collection of mechanisms for collective solidarity based on the principle of income redistribution. The economic and social transformations that the various regions of the world are going through, in particular the globalization of the economy, are making social security increasingly necessary. Instead of yielding to proposals for the privatization of schemes — a formula that is less efficient and more expensive — we should be protecting and improving social security; developing it in those countries where its position is still weak; and stressing that, while its objectives are humane and social, it brings economic benefits too.     

Insularity and Governance: The Case of French Polynesia

Insularity, smallness and remoteness help explain specific tendencies noted in the governance of French Polynesia, a partially self-governing French overseas territory in the South Pacific, with a population of 220,000. Professional relations tend to become personalized, and impersonal and impartial procedures are hard to apply. The market for experts is small: some people are able to claim a monopoly on some type of expertise and then defend it by every means. Solidarity is vertical, not horizontal, which makes for a fragile democracy.     

Optimal Ordering Policies for Inventory Problems With Dynamic Information Delays

Information delays exist when the most recent inventory information available to the Inventory Manager (IM) is dated. In other words, the IM observes only the inventory level that belongs to an earlier period. Such situations are not uncommon, and they arise when it takes a while to process the demand data and pass the results to the IM. We introduce dynamic information delays as a Markov process into the standard multiperiod stochastic inventory problem with backorders. We develop the concept of a reference inventory position. We show that this position along with the magnitude of the latest observed delay and the age of this observation are sufficient statistics for finding the optimal order quantities. Furthermore, we establish that the optimal ordering policy is of state‐dependent base‐stock type with respect to the reference inventory position (or state‐dependent (s, S) type if there is a fixed ordering cost). The optimal base stock and (s, S) levels depend on the magnitude of the latest observed delay and the age of this observation. Finally, we study the sensitivity of the optimal base stock and the optimal cost with respect to the sufficient statistics.     

Economic Evaluation of Systems that Expedite Inventory Information

Information delays exist when the most recent inventory information available to the Inventory Manager (IM) is dated. Such situations arise when it takes a while to process the demand data, count the inventory, and pass the results to the IM. We show that the optimal total inventory‐related cost decreases when the length of the information delay decreases. The amount of the decrease is an important datum for an IM interested in considering whether or not to invest in reducing the delay. The investment is required to finance design and acquisition of an information (collection and dissemination) system that can reduce the information delay. Such systems include phone calls, business meetings, and the use of information collection mechanisms such as radiofrequency identification tags.     

Multilevel modelling of survey data: impact of the two-level weights used in the pseudolikelihood

Approaches that use the pseudolikelihood to perform multilevel modelling on survey data have been presented in the literature. To avoid biased estimates due to unequal selection probabilities, conditional weights can be introduced at each level. Less-biased estimators can also be obtained in a two-level linear model if the level-1 weights are scaled. In this paper, we studied several level-2 weights that can be introduced into the pseudolikelihood when the sampling design and the hierarchical structure of the multilevel model do not match. Two-level and three-level models were studied. The present work was motivated by a study that aims to estimate the contributions of lead sources to polluting the interior floor dust of the rooms within dwellings. We performed a simulation study using the real data collected from a French survey to achieve our objective. We conclude that it is preferable to use unweighted analyses or, at the most, to use conditional level-2 weights in a two-level or a three-level model. We state some warnings and make some recommendations.     

"Who believes most in me and in my recovery": the importance of families for persons with serious mental illness living in structured community housing

In this article, the authors report on qualitative findings on the role of family in supporting recovery for mental health consumers living in structured, community housing in a large Canadian city. Despite living separately from families and relying heavily on formal services, residents identified their families more often than mental health professionals, friends, and residential caregivers as those who most believe in them and their recovery. Families supported recovery by providing affection and belonging, offering emotional and instrumental support, and by staying actively involved with residents. Families are a vital, untapped resource for social workers in promoting independent living.     

Correction to: Optimality of deductible: a characterization,with application to Yaari’s dual theory

Theory and Decision -