No Country Left Behind? Performance Standards and Accountability in US Foreign Assistance

The accountability movement in public policy hails a new programme for US foreign assistance – the Millennium Challenge Account established in 2004 with the aim of ‘picking winners’ for grants among developing countries based on their demonstrated quality of governance. This article uses the MCA's own rating system to dispute its claim to know in advance which countries are best positioned to meet major development goals. High governance scores alone bear little or no relationship to growth in national income or decline in poverty. Attempting to measure public‐policy performance limits the range of choice available to policy‐makers, and may inadvertently limit true performance.     

Evaluating the Simplified Conjoint Expected Risk Model: Comparing the Use of Objective and Subjective Information

The simplified Conjoint Expected Risk (CER) model by Holtgrave and Weber posits that perceived risk is a linear combination of the subjective judgments of the probabilities of harm, benefit, and status quo, and the expected harm and benefit of an activity. It modifies Luce and Weber's original CER model—that uses objective information to evaluate financial gambles—to accommodate activities such as health/technology activities where values of the model variables are subjective. If the simplified model is a valid modification of the original model, its performance should not be sensitive to the use of subjective information. However, because people may evaluate information differently when objective information is provided to them than when they generate information on their own, the performance of the simplified CER model may not be robust to the source of model-variable information. We compared the use of objective and subjective information, and results indicate that the estimates of the simplified CER model parameters and the proportion of variance in risk judgments accounted for by the model are similar under these two conditions. Thus, the simplified CER model is viable with activities for which harm and benefit information is subjective.     

Exploitation in Contemporary Capitalism: An Empirical Analysis of the Case of Taiwan

Abstract

Using data for manufacturing firms in Taiwan, we developed a measure of exploitation and analyzed its prevalence in the labor force. Our results indicated that almost two-thirds of the firms in our sample exploit at least some of their workers. For these firms, the average profit rate is 34 percent, but three-fourths of this figure derives from the expropriated wages of their workers. Female and blue-collar workers are the largest groups that are underpaid relative to their productivity (that is, exploited). Managers, professionals, and workers with seniority are not exploited by our definition because our data showed that these groups are paid according to the market value of their productivity, at least on average. Our analysis demonstrates the feasibility of the empirical investigation of exploitation, which should be further considered in future research.     

Adaptive sampling without replacement of clusters

In a common form of adaptive cluster sampling, an initial sample of units is selected by random sampling without replacement and, whenever the observed value of the unit is sufficiently high, its neighboring units are added to the sample, with the process of adding neighbors repeated if any of the added units are also high valued. In this way, an initial selection of a high-valued unit results in the addition of the entire network of surrounding high-valued units and some low-valued “edge” units where sampling stops. Repeat selections can occur when more than one initially selected unit is in the same network or when an edge unit is shared by more than one added network. Adaptive sampling without replacement of networks avoids some of this repeat selection by sequentially selecting initial sample units only from the part of the population not already in any selected network. The design proposed in this paper carries this step further by selecting initial units only from the population, exclusive of any previously selected networks or edge units.     

Testing for Circular Reflective Symmetry about a Known Median Axis

Circular data arise in many contexts, a particularly rich source being animal orientation experiments. Often, in the analysis of such data, a fundamental question of scientific interest is whether the underlying distribution is reflectively symmetric about some specific axis. In this paper, the situation in which the axis of interest is known to be a median axis is considered and a simple, asymptotically distribution- free test for circular reflective symmetry against skew alternatives is developed. The results from a simulation study lead to a testing strategy incorporating the new test and the circular analogue of the modified runs test of Modarres & Gastwirth (1996). The application of the testing strategy is illustrated using circular data arising from two animal orientation experiments.     

符号正义与公共行政 ——基于语言游戏的正义视角

公共行政是正义研究的重要领域。传统理论多采用罗尔斯、诺齐克和沃尔泽等人为正义提供的客观标准。但这些标准不仅在理论上相互冲突,而且在公共行政的实践中也常常会导致模棱两可的判断。本研究旨在提出一种符号正义的观念,来指导当代公共行政的理论与实践。这种观念认为正义并不存在中立客观的标准,而是被群体共享的信念和实践所建构。研究者只有将正义置于特定语言游戏的背景中,才能真正理解其发生和运作。因为和正义相关的不同语言游戏之间只存在家族相似性,所以公共行政必须面对相互冲突的复杂环境。符号正义的观念能够为这种公共行政问题的复杂性提供必不可少的分析框架。     

Testing circular symmetry

The author addresses the problem of testing circular data for reflective symmetry about an unknown central direction and proposes a simple omnibus test based on the sample second sine moment about an estimation of this direction. Under quite general conditions, for an underlying distribution which is reflectively symmetric, the large‐sample asymptotic distribution of the test statistic is standard normal. Randomization and bootstrap variants of the test are also introduced, and the operating characteristics of different versions of the test are investigated in a Monte Carlo study. The large‐sample and bootstrap versions of the test are applied in the analysis of two illustrative examples drawn from the circular statistics literature.     

Range management and production on the fringe: The Caldenal, Argentina

North American problems in coming to terms with the management of the semi-arid Plains environment are well known. Less documented are those of Argentina's equivalent on the fringe of the Humid Pampas. Argentine agricultural aid and research has been focussed on the Humid Pampas, and little understanding of the special problems of the dry zone is apparent. Issues of production and conservation are in urgent need of attention. In addition to the limits posed by the natural environment, a number of human factors affect the ability of ranchers to produce from the dry lands. In a field study of the Caldenal, some indications are that the factors are different from other environments in Latin America. Large properties are not less productive per hectare than small, and standard technology does not guarantee good results from ranching. Tenant farming is not a problem, but there is an impoverished group, those ranchers without other means of earning a livelihood. A recommendation is for encouragement to be given to larger ranch units, and for more research into relevant technology, which is likely to include conservationist measures, whose introduction to the ranches should be financially supported.