Predatory,developmental, and other apparatuses: A comparative political economy perspective on the Third World state

Disappointment over the contributions of Third World state apparatuses to industrial transformation and the increasing intellectual dominance of neoutiliarian paradigms in the social science has made if fashionable to castigate the Third World state as predatory and rent seeking. This paper argues for a more differentiated view, one that connects differences in performance to differences in state structure. The incoherent absolutist domination of the klepto-patrimonial Zairian state are contrasted to the embedded autonomy of the East Asian developmental state. Then the internal structure and external ties of an intermediate state — Brazil — are analyzed in relation to both polar types. The comparative evidence suggests that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong sense of corporate identity and a dense set of institutionalized links to private elites.     

Academically successful drug users: an oxymoron?

The present study examines substance use among academically successful students. The data were collected in two discrete anonymous surveys of 2,288 ninth-grade and 2,653 eleventh-grade California students, and 1,043 ninth-grade and 862 eleventh-grade students from a large suburban county. Over 70 percent of the academically successful students from both samples reported some type of drug use. These successful students were divided for comparison into three groups according to their involvement with drugs: abstainers, conventional users, and high-risk users. The analyses indicated that the negative association between drug use and academic achievement may be counter-balanced by mediating factors identified in the study. These factors included high "educational aspiration," "parent educational level," and "emotional stability."     

The identification of distribution form II

The concept of distribution form developed in Brenner and Fraser (1980) is modified and extended to cover the more general context involving a class of distribution for form. This extension underlies the choice of a particular structural model for the three-parameter Weibull in Evans, Fraser and Massam (1982). The extended definition of distribution form is based on the requirement of objectivity in modelling (Fraser 1979). Three characterizations of this objectivity each require that the class of response presentations have closure under composition and thus be expressible in terms of a group. In particular, this implies that empirical support would not observationally be available for that generalization of a structural model called astructured model (Fraser 1972; the term functional model has been used inappropriately by Bunke, 1975 and Dawid and Stone, 1982).     

Sources of immigrants' language proficiency: Australian results with comparisons to the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America

Recent research on immigrants in the Federal Republic of Germany and the US suggests that their amount of education, the country in which they attained it, and their labor force experience both before and after migrating all have important effects on their skills in the language of the host country. This paper explores those influences on the English language proficiency of 4 groups of immigrants to Australia: 1) those from Northwestern Europe, 2) Eastern Europe, 3) the Mediterranean basin, and 4) the Third World. The data are drawn from the 1% public use sample of the 1981 Australian census. The models are flexible ordinary least squares specifications that permit a variety of curvilinear na interaction effects. The results generally parallel those for the Federal Republic of Germany and the US. 1 important difference from the US is that the harmful effect of foreign labor experience is greater than the beneficial effect of labor force experience in the host country.     

Economic aspects of Singapore's selective family planning policy

In the mid 1980s Singapore instituted a selective family planning policy which encouraged poorly educated women to prevent pregnancy while university graduates were discouraged from using family planning. The intent of this policy was to restructure the population and the economy into a more skill-intensive industrial society and to produce effective leaders for the future governing of the country. Monetary incentives were offered to both groups of women for their compliance with the policy, including grants to poor women agreeing to undergo steriliaztion. This study undertakes a cost benefit analysis of this family planning policy, taking into account parameters of economic growth, marginal value product of labor, and the consumption levels. Results of this analysis suggest that society may benefit more by prevention the birth of a potential university student than by preventing the birth of a potential primary school graduate. However, this study does not take into account the value of educated citizens in technical advancement which would raise the productivity of the uskilled workers in the country, nor some of the real economic conditions in Singapore such as the virtually unlimited availability of labor from other Asian countries (who come without dependents and are expatriated when they become unproductive). Training cost and the timing of benefits are critical to the outcome of this analysis. It is shown that, under some reasonable conditions, the selective family planning policy might not be economically warranted.     

Characterization of Historical Methane Occurrence Frequencies from U.S. Underground Natural Gas Storage Facilities with Implications for Risk Management,Operations, and Regulatory Policy

Defining a baseline for the frequency of occurrences at underground natural gas storage facilities is critical to maintaining safe operation and to the development of appropriate risk management plans and regulatory approaches. Currently used frequency-estimation methods are reviewed and broadened in this article to include critical factors of cause, severity, and uncertainty that contribute to risk. A Bayesian probabilistic analysis characterizes the aleatoric historical occurrence frequencies given imperfect sampling. Frequencies for the three main storage facility types in the United States (depleted oil-and-gas field storage, aquifer storage, solution-mined salt cavern storage) are generally on the order of 3 to 9 × 10^–2 occurrences, of all causes (surface, well integrity, subsurface integrity) and severities (nuisance, serious, catastrophic), per facility-year. Loss of well integrity is associated with many, but not all, occurrences either within the subsurface or from there up to the surface. The probability of one serious or catastrophic leakage occurrence to the ground surface within the next 10 years, assuming constant number of facilities, is approximately 0.1–0.3% for any facility type. Storage operators and industry regulators can use occurrence frequencies, their associated probabilities and uncertainties, and forecasts of severity magnitudes to better prioritize resources, establish a baseline against which progress toward achieving a reduction target could be measured, and develop more effective mitigation/monitoring/reduction programs in a risk management plan.     

“Spokes in the wheel” and how policy gains can diversify a social movement

ABSTRACT

Activists often use their resources to pursue protective legislation, like anti-discrimination or environmental protection laws, and the results are often compromised versions of what they wanted. This process of political institutionalization requires ongoing and robust mobilization to strengthen these resulting policies or prevent them from being rescinded all together. Therefore, to understand the pros and cons of political institutionalization we must understand the recursive effects between policy reform and consequent mobilization. Quantitative and qualitative data on the animal advocacy movement, a movement existing for over a century, are used to explore the effects of policy gains on consequent mobilization and explore whether policy gains were followed by de-escalation of protest forms. The findings indicate that policy gains for animal welfare do not de-escalate mobilization, both in terms of the use of disruptive collective action and proliferation of organizations. The article explores the ways that infighting over the terms of policy reform may be an important factor in diversifying the movement.     

Underprotection of Unpredictable Statistical Lives Compared to Predictable Ones

Existing ethical discussion considers the differences in care for identified versus statistical lives. However, there has been little attention to the different degrees of care that are taken for different kinds of statistical lives. Here we argue that for a given number of statistical lives at stake, there will sometimes be different, and usually greater, care taken to protect predictable statistical lives, in which the number of lives that will be lost can be predicted fairly accurately, than for unpredictable statistical lives, where the lives are at stake because of a low‐probability event, such that most likely no one will be affected by the decision but with low probability some lives will be at stake. One reason for this difference is the statistical challenge of estimating low probabilities, and in particular the tendency of common approaches to underestimate these probabilities. Another is the existence of rational incentives to treat unpredictable risks as if the probabilities were lower than they are. Some of these factors apply outside the pure economic context, to institutions, individuals, and governments. We argue that there is no ethical reason to treat unpredictable statistical lives differently from predictable statistical lives. Moreover, lives that are unpredictable from the perspective of an individual agent may become predictable when aggregated to the level of a societal decision. Underprotection of unpredictable statistical lives is a form of market failure that may need to be corrected by altering regulation, introducing compulsory liability insurance, or other social policies.