Measuring credibility of compensatory preference statements when trade-offs are interval determined

This paper studies how an overall fuzzy preference relation can be constructed in the compensatory context of the simple additive difference model, when imprecision on the trade-offs has to be taken into account. Three credibility indices of preferences are analysed and illustrated by a numerical example. Arguments are presented supporting the use of the third index, for which an interesting transitivity property (which was an open problem) is proved.     

The ascendancy of primary care: permanent or temporary?

The conventional wisdom strongly suggests a health care provider food chain for the future: Primary care physicians (PCPs), principally family practitioners, on the top playing the lead role, distantly followed by specialists, with hospitals and other ancillary services even further down the line. Is this a reasonable expectation? Will PCPs dominate the new systems? Or will they be but one of many equally necessary components of these developing integrated health care delivery organizations? Looking at the various models now developing, it would seem that future integrated delivery systems will utilize both PCPs and specialists, but with strong augmentation from a diverse assortment of other health care professionals, including nonphysician providers, educators, and administrators. To separate the illusion of primary care dominance of the coming health care system from the likely reality, we should first determine what is driving the apparent present demand for primary care physicians. Next, we will examine the possible and probable reactions to that demand from an economic standpoint and from the points of view of both health care professionals and the public. Finally, we must try to picture how health care provider organizations of the future are likely to look and how they will integrate their health care professionals.     

Drawing households and other living spaces in the process of assessment and psychotherapy

This paper introduces a drawing technique developed by the author for use in the assessment and treatment of individuals and families. The client is invited to draw a floor plan of his or her home or apartment, or an aerial view of un outdoor area. The drawing is then discussed and considered as a means of understanding critical elements of the experience of life space. The material derived is discussed from the eerspectives of family systems, psychodynamic, and abuse treatment theories, with special reference to notions of family structure, boundary, the self, and memory. Emphasis is placed on the actual physical layout of the home, as well as the subjective experience of it. Applications of the drawing technique for exploring memories are illustrated. Case examples are presented from clinical trials with children and adults in residential treatment, inpatient, and outpatient settings.The Heller Financial Corporation generously supports the development of household and spatial drawings for treatment and prevention. A version of this paper was presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the American Association of Psychiatric Services for Children, New Orleans, February 26, 1992. The author wishes to thank Robert B. Bloom, Ph.D., Excutive Director of JCB, for supporting the development of ideas and techniques discribed in this paper.     

International migration: demographic and socioeconomic consequences in the United Kingdom and Europe

"This article evaluates the consequences of international migration since World War II, with particular reference to Great Britain. It emphasizes the substantial differences between the origins and responses to immigration in the United Kingdom and that of the rest of Western Europe." It is found that "people of non-European origin from Commonwealth countries have predominated in postwar immigration to the United Kingdom. That migration neutralized the previously dominant pattern of emigration and increased U.K. population by about 3 million people through immigration and higher fertility, with only slight effects upon the age distribution."     

Recent migrations from Morocco to Spain

"This study addressed the problem of the Moroccan immigration into Spain within the context of South-North movements, focusing on analyzing provisional data from the last immigrant regularization in the country completed during the end months of 1991."     

Dynamic reliability models with conditional proportional hazards

A dynamic approach to the stochastic modelling of reliability systems is further explored. This modelling approach is particularly appropriate for load-sharing, software reliability, and multivariate failure-time models, where component failure characteristics are affected by their degree of use, amount of load, or extent of stresses experienced. This approach incorporates the intuitive notion that when a set of components in a coherent system fail at a certain time, there is a jump from one structure function to another which governs the residual lifetimes of the remaining functioning components, and since the component lifetimes are intrinsically affected by the structure function which they constitute, then at such a failure time there should also be a jump in the stochastic structure of the lifetimes of the remaining components. For such dynamically-modelled systems, the stochastic characteristics of their jump times are studied. These properties of the jump times allow us to obtain the properties of the lifetime of the system. In particular, for a Markov dynamic model, specific expressions for the exact distribution functions of the jump times are obtained for a general coherent system, a parallel system, and a series-parallel system. We derive a new family of distribution functions which describes the distributions of the jump times for a dynamically-modelled system.     

A cultural economy perspective on service sector migration in the global city: the case of Hong Kong

This article argues that in order to fully understand the geography of labour migration to global cities, it is necessary to consider economic forces in conjunction with mediating socio-cultural influences. Support for this argument is based on an examination of the pattern of migration to Hong Kong, a city which plays a significant role in the world economy.
Reported here are the results of an analysis of recently released 1996 by-census data, and the authors' interviews with foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. These findings have shown that highly skilled immigrant workers were drawn largely from developed countries, the main sources of inward investment in this city, while less skilled immigrants were drawn from less developed neighbouring labour markets.
While the geographical pattern of immigration followed broadly that predicted from Hong Kong's position in the world economy, the results have revealed that cultural influences such as language and social networks are also important in shaping the economic roles of migrant workers.     

Do Migrants Worsen the Current Account?

There is some concern in Australia that immigration contributes to a widening of its current account deficit. Several cross-section studies have found that migrant households have a lower saving rate than the local born households. In conjunction with a well-known national income identity that the current account deficit is equal to the excess of investment over saving, such findings have been interpreted by many to mean that the migrants contribute to increasing the level of foreign liabilities at a rate greater than that by the local-born.
However, it should be realized that immigration impacts on the economy in a complex way through various demand and supply side channels. Its direct and chain effects on such variables as the current account are spread over both the short and the long term. These effects are neither unidirectional nor always easy to isolate. The final outcome, which is the sum total of all the effects, is uncertain, and cannot be fully understood from a knowledge of cross-sectional saving performance alone.
This article utilizes aggregate time series data to investigate the relationship between the current account and immigration. It finds that although an increase in net migration tends to raise the current account deficit, the longer term effect of immigration on the current account is negligible.     

Power, Politics, and the Framing of Environmental Illness

The medical community, along with other government agencies, has created its own frame of environmental illness. This frame has been generally accepted by the American public. In this paper we discuss framing in general and the factors related to how the environmental illness frame has been constructed and maintained. We offer a brief history of the medical institution and illustrate the frame with its definitions of environmental illness. Qualitative data from a study of Oak Ridge, a contaminated community located in Tennessee, are examined to analyze the consequences of challenging the environmental illness frame. Implications for future research are discussed.