Beyond the Nation State: Social Policy in an Age of Globalization

The paper proceeds from the assumption that globalization has placed significant constraints on the autonomy of nation states in the making of social policy. It argues that the post-World War II welfare state represented a social system highly successful in combining economic efficiency and dynamism with equity and solidarity. This historic achievement at the nation-state level is being undermined by economic globalization. It is both necessary and feasible to recreate and institutionalize this mixed system globally. The paper argues that the concept of social rights, which has served as the basic underpinning of the welfare state, has many weaknesses—logical as well as empirical. While the principles of civil and political rights are being consolidated and extended worldwide the principle of social rights is in decay. The paper presents the case for replacing social rights by social standards as the major concept for buttressing systems of social protection. To be applicable globally a social standard must be conceptualized as a level of social development which corresponds to an appropriate level of economic development. Finally, the paper considers the problems and prospects of developing social standards transnationally. It reviews, briefly, the nature and extent of transnational social policy-making by inter-governmental organizations and concludes that despite difficulties of global action advances towards global social standards remain possible.     

Critical Community Practice

How do we conceptualize community development? What are themajor practices and processes behind the development of communities?What is critical community practice (CCP)? What are its fundamentalvalues? What are the objectives of CCP? How is CCP differentfrom the other approaches of community development? How do weoperationalize CCP? Who are the major agents in promoting CCP?Is it true that the process of CCP induces the empowerment ofcommunities? Moreover, how does this process enhance the emancipationof individuals at grassroots level? Finally, what are the     

A new approach: Interrelated two-way clustering of gene expression data

The paper presents a new approach to interrelated two-way clustering of gene expression data. Clustering of genes has been effected using entropy and a correlation measure, whereas the samples have been clustered using the fuzzy C-means. The efficiency of this approach has been tested on two well known data sets: the colon cancer data set and the leukemia data set. Using this approach, we were able to identify the important co-regulated genes and group the samples efficiently at the same time.     

Demography of Indian aging, 2001-2051

India is the second largest country in the world, with 72 million elderly persons above 60 years of age as of 2001, compared to China's 127 million. One of the objectives of this paper is to assess the emerging scenario of elderly for the first half of the 21st century. According to projections, the elderly in the age group 60 and above is expected to increase from 71 million in 2001 to 179 million in 2031, and further to 301 million in 2051; in the case of those 70 years and older, they are projected to increase from 27 million in 2001 to 132 million in 2051. Among the elderly persons 80 and above, they are likely to improve their numbers from 5.4 million in 2021 to 32.0 million in 2051. The increasing number and proportion of elderly will have a direct impact on the demand for health services and pension and social security payments. Mobilizing resources for geriatric care and providing sufficient maintenance for the elderly will emerge as a major responsibility for heath-care providers and pension economists.     

Book Reviews: E.A. Wrigley (ed.), Poverty,Progress and Population., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, XIV+ 463 pp.

Book Review

Book Reviews: E.A. Wrigley (ed.), Poverty, Progress and Population., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, XIV+ 463 pp.     

Book Reviews: Tim Dyson,Robert Cassen,and Leela Visaria (eds.), Twenty-First Century India: Population,Economy, Human Development,and the Environment. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2004, XXii + 414 pp.

Book Review

Book Reviews: Tim Dyson, Robert Cassen, and Leela Visaria (eds.), Twenty-First Century India: Population, Economy, Human Development, and the Environment. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2004, XXii + 414 pp.     

Families of proper generalized neighbor designs

A generalized neighbor design relaxes the equality condition on the number of times two treatments occur as neighbors in the design. In this article we have constructed a new series of generalized neighbor designs with equal block sizes, a series of neighbor designs of Rees [1967. Some designs of use in serology. Biometrics 23, 779–791] and a series of neighbor designs with two distinct block sizes. Two more new series of GN₂ designs are also constructed for even number of treatments. It has been shown that quasi neighbor designs introduced by Preece [1994. Balanced Ouchterlony neighbor designs. J. Combin. Math. Combin. Comput. 15, 197–219] are special cases of generalized neighbor designs with t=2$t=2$. All the designs given here are binary. A new definition—partially balanced circuit design is introduced which is a special case of generalized neighbor designs with binary blocks.     

Estimating the probability of winning (losing) in a gambler's ruin problem with applications

In a classical gambler's ruin problem, the distribution of the number of games lost till ruin is considered, which we call the lost game distribution (LGD). Some applications of LGD in the theory of queues, in the theory of epidemic and in certain clustering and branching models are mentioned. The maximum likelihood estimation of LGD in the framework of modified power series distribution (MPSD), introduced by the author (1974), is studied. The variance and bias of the MLE are given and the actual mean of the MLE is obtained by discussing the negative moments of the MPSD in general. The minimum variance unbiased estimator of θ^k (k≥1) is obtained employing the technique developed by the author (1977) for the class of MPSD.