Unemployment,Social Policy and Public Opinion

This paper examines causes of unemployment in Australia as perceived by leaders in government, business and trade unions, and by the workforce. A distinction is drawn between structural explanations which emphasise economic conditions and job shortages, and individualistic explanations which ‘blame the victim’. The results show that government and union leaders give most weight to structural explanations, while business leaders and workforce groups place relatively greater weight on individualistic interpretations. This suggests that attempts to improve policy responses to unemployment may benefit not just by appealing to those who actually make policy decisions, but by attempting to improve the general climate of opinion about unemployment.     

Asymptotic properties of the maximum-likelihood estimator for a class of birth-and-death processes admitting a unique stationary distribution

The asymptotic properties of the maximum-likelihood estimator of the parameter vector for a class of birth-and-death processes admitting a unique stationary distribution are studied. Also, it is shown that identifiability of the parameter vector with respect to the likelihood implies that the Fisher information matrix is of full rank. Two special cases of biological interest are presented. One of these, the exponential birth-and-death process, is proposed as a more appropriate model of density dependence than the logistic process.     

Rural policy into the 1990s — Self help or self deception

Self help has increasingly become a popular policy option in the search for solutions to the problems of deprivation in rural Britain, although there is little evidence to suggest that this approach has ever been the subject of vigorous analysis or evaluation.Although a number of arguments have been advanced in support of self-help policies, such justifications often owe more to popular imagery than to any objective or robust evaluation of a range of policy alternatives. Indeed, this paper suggests that many of these supporting arguments are based on false images of the structure of rural society and of the real causes of rural deprivation.Despite a growing volume of objective evidence which emphasises the limitations of self help policies, however, the paper argues that they will continue to proliferate because they have now become a powerful factor on the legitimation of the social and economic policies of central and local government in Britain. They have also become a powerful legitimising force for a growing number of rural statutory and non-statutory agencies whose existence depends to varying degrees on the political and financial support of central and local Government.