Perspectives on Regional and Enterprise Marginality: Dairying in Michigan's North Country1

Abstract Dairy farmers in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, an economically marginal rural region, are encumbered by contextual constraints that are not similarly faced by their downstate counterparts. However, this does not mean that they are any less ambitious or less efficient in dealing with the resources available to them. Indeed, dairying and similar small-scale economic enterprises in this and other marginal contexts may be quite competitive and sustainable if appropriate sociopolitical supports are instituted and, in the case of dairying, if marketing orders and regulatory policies are formulated and implemented in light of their impact upon the economic growth and viability of the wider region. To explore this issue, we consider the situations, basic characteristics, and restructuring trends over time of dairy farms in three upstate localities as compared with that of a downstate dairy farming community.     

Rail safety and rail privatization

Privatisation of the state-owned British railway system was completed in 1997. The following 6 years saw four serious fatal train accidents, leading to 49 deaths. These were the train collisions at Southall in 1997 and Ladbroke Grove in 1999, each caused by trains passing red signals, and the derailments at Hatfield in 2000 and Potters Bar in 2002, each caused by defective track. Has safety been compromised by the sell-off of the railways? Andrew Evans looks at the evidence and asks has privatisation led to more accidents?     

Gambling participation in Australia: findings from the national Household Expenditure Survey

Regression modeling is used to predict gambling patterns in Australia on the basis of the unit record files underlying the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Household Expenditure Survey of 6,892 households. The four largest categories of gambling expenditure are examined, namely: lottery tickets, lotto-type games and instant lottery (scratch cards), TAB (pari-mutuel wagering) and related on course betting, and poker (slot) machines and ticket machines. Determining factors analyzed include the source and level of household income, family composition and structure, welfare status, gender, age, ethnicity and geographic location. Apart from the determinants of expenditure varying widely across the different types of gambling activity, the results generally indicate that the source of household income is more important than the level of income and that household composition and regional location are likewise significant in determining gambling expenditure.      

Disability and identity: the challenge of epilepsy

Through examining the case of people with epilepsy (which, as we demonstrate, has an ambiguous status in relation to both popular and academic conceptions of disability) we explore the fluid, negotiable and contingent nature of identity and, in particular, the identification as ‘disabled’. Disability, we argue, cannot be reduced to either biology or social oppression, or even primarily to biological or social factors: it is the outcome of a complex interaction between a multiplicity of factors – biological, environmental, social, psychological, cultural and political – which will interact and be experienced differently by different people, at different times and in different situations. Rather than conceiving of disability in ‘all or nothing’ terms and of differing explanations as competing and mutually exclusive, it would be more productive to see them as partial and potentially complementary contributions to the better understanding of a complex and multifarious reality.     

Public Assistance Use among U.S.‐Born Children of Immigrants1

U.S.‐born children of immigrants may be less likely to receive some social services than are children of native‐born parents if foreign‐born parents who are themselves ineligible are less likely to apply on their children's behalf. We use retrospective data from a sample of about 2,400 lowincome households in three U.S. cities to determine whether children with foreign‐born caregivers are less likely than children with native‐born caregivers to receive benefits from any of five programs over a two‐year period: TANF, SSI, Food Stamps, Medicaid, and WIC. The most significant disparities between children of citizen and noncitizen caregivers are in TANF and food stamp use.     

Can a Munro-Inspired Approach Transform the Lives of Looked after Children in England?

This discussion paper will examine the lessons from the Munro Review relevant for looked after children. Although the Munro Review focuses on child protection, we will argue that some of its key principles have relevance for understanding looked after childhoods. The Munro Review provides an analysis of the current state of the child protection system, challenging bureaucratised practice and arguing for a reclaiming of professional social work identity, knowledge and understanding. There are three key principles of the Munro Review that this paper will focus upon. The first two are the recognition that risk cannot be eradicated and the bureaucratisation of practice is an inadequate response to the demand for public accountability. The third principle is that ethical integrity lies at the heart of services for children in public care. The key message of this paper is that a Munro approach can transform looked after childhoods. However, the current ‘child protection’ model of social work in England may prevent this shift in social work practice.     

Bayesian Variable Selection Under Collinearity

In this article, we highlight some interesting facts about Bayesian variable selection methods for linear regression models in settings where the design matrix exhibits strong collinearity. We first demonstrate via real data analysis and simulation studies that summaries of the posterior distribution based on marginal and joint distributions may give conflicting results for assessing the importance of strongly correlated covariates. The natural question is which one should be used in practice. The simulation studies suggest that posterior inclusion probabilities and Bayes factors that evaluate the importance of correlated covariates jointly are more appropriate, and some priors may be more adversely affected in such a setting. To obtain a better understanding behind the phenomenon, we study some toy examples with Zellner’s g-prior. The results show that strong collinearity may lead to a multimodal posterior distribution over models, in which joint summaries are more appropriate than marginal summaries. Thus, we recommend a routine examination of the correlation matrix and calculation of the joint inclusion probabilities for correlated covariates, in addition to marginal inclusion probabilities, for assessing the importance of covariates in Bayesian variable selection.     

The Role of Legal System and Socioeconomic Aspects in the Environmental Quality Drive of the Global South

The increasing environmental challenges associated with the Global South is potentially associated with the socioeconomic changes amid potential institutional deficiencies such as the weak or inefficient environmental regulation. Thus, this twenty-first century challenge has increasingly necessitated more climate action from the Global South as championed by the developed economies. On this note, examines the environmental aspects of law and order (LO) vis-à-vis legal system and socioeconomic (SE) indexes of the Political Risk Services for a panel of 80 selected Global South countries over the period 1984–2014. Additionally, by employing the economic growth vis-à-vis the Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDPC) as additional explanatory variable, the study employs the more recent experimental techniques of Mean Group Estimator (MG), the Augmented Mean Group Estimator (AMG) and the Common Correlated Effects Mean Group (CCEMG). Importantly, with the more efficient CCEMG, the study found that the strength of the legal system in the Global South (although not statistically significant) is a crucial factor to mitigated carbon emission in the panel countries. However, the study found that an improved socioeconomic condition and economic expansion is detrimental to the Global South’s environmental quality. Furthermore, the Granger causality result implied that each of LO, SE and GDPC exhibits a feedback relationship with carbon emissions. Hence, the study suggests the need for a stronger implementation of environmental regulations through a revitalized legal system and some concerted socioeconomic policies that address poverty and unemployment among other factors.