A global count of the extreme poor in 2012: data issues,methodology and initial results

The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity (PPP) conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the World Bank’s international poverty line. In revising the line, we have sought to minimize changes to the real purchasing power of the earlier $1.25 line (in 2005 PPPs), so as to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the World Bank’s twin goals – which were set with respect to that line. In particular, the new line was obtained by inflating the same fifteen national poverty lines – originally used by Ravallion et al. (World Bank Econ. Rev. 23(2): 163–184 2009) to construct the $1.25 line – to 2011 prices in local currency units, and then converting them to US dollars using 2011 PPP conversion factors. With a small approximation, this procedure yields a new international poverty line of $1.90 per person per day. In combination with other changes described in the paper, this revision leads to relatively small changes in global poverty incidence for 2011: from 14.5 % using the old method to 14.1 % using the new method. In 2012, the new reference year for the global count, we find 12.7 % of the world’s population, or 897 million people, are living in extreme poverty. There are changes in the regional composition of poverty, but they are also relatively small. This paper documents methodological decisions taken in the process of updating both the poverty line and the consumption and income distributions at the country level, including issues of inter-temporal and spatial price adjustments. It also describes various caveats and limitations of the approach taken.     

The FARSEEING real-world fall repository: a large-scale collaborative database to collect and share sensor signals from real-world falls

Background

Real-world fall events objectively measured by body-worn sensors can improve the understanding of fall events in older people. However, these events are rare and hence challenging to capture. Therefore, the FARSEEING (FAll Repository for the design of Smart and sElf-adaptive Environments prolonging Independent livinG) consortium and associated partners started to build up a meta-database of real-world falls.

Results

Between January 2012 and December 2015 more than 300 real-world fall events have been recorded. This is currently the largest collection of real-world fall data recorded with inertial sensors. A signal processing and fall verification procedure has been developed and applied to the data. Since the end of 2015, 208 verified real-world fall events are available for analyses. The fall events have been recorded within several studies, with different methods, and in different populations. All sensor signals include at least accelerometer measurements and 58 % additionally include gyroscope and magnetometer measurements. The collection of data is ongoing and open to further partners contributing with fall signals. The FARSEEING consortium also aims to share the collected real-world falls data with other researchers on request.

Conclusions

The FARSEEING meta-database will help to improve the understanding of falls and enable new approaches in fall risk assessment, fall prevention, and fall detection in both aging and disease.

     

Der Einfluss der Gruppengröße auf die Aktivität von Parteimitgliedern

In this paper, we aim to test Olson’s (The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1965) assumptions of group size effects on free-riding tendencies in political parties. Multilevel analyses of the Deutsche Parteimitgliederstudie (German Party Membership Study) 2009 reveal that for members of the CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, the assumed negative relationship between the number of party members in the district association and their individual level of activity can only be shown for the eastern states of Germany. Moreover, we show that selective incentives are not suitable for reducing the negative impact of a increasing membership figure, while normative incentives are associated with an increasing free-riding tendency with increasing number of members in the western and eastern Bundesländer. Our results only partly support the assumptions on collective action problems and point to a need for further theoretical and empirical research on group size effects and on the role incentives’ play in explaining the activity in political parties.     

Kontexteffekte in Familien – Angleichung von Paaren und intergenerationale Transmission am Beispiel Religiosität

The present contribution shows conceptual and methodological approaches for the study of social context effects within families. Family members mutually constitute the social context in which family behavior and personality development take place. Social influence in families becomes evident empirically in family members’ significant similarity concerning a wide variety of characteristics. The present study focuses on intrafamily convergence with regard to religiousness. In an empirical illustration, both (a) horizontal intracouple alignment and (b) vertical intergenerational transmission processes are examined. Besides the finding that experiences during religious socialization in the parental home have a stronger impact than partner influences in adulthood, our analyses show that social context effects are more pronounced the stronger the cohesion of the respective interaction dyad is (e.g., according to measures of relationship quality).     

Social Networks and Social Settings: Developing a Coevolutionary View

One way to think about social context is as a sample of alters. To understand individual action, therefore, it matters greatly where these alters may be coming from, and how they are connected. According to one vision, connections among alters induce local dependencies—emergent rules of social interaction that generate endogenously the observed network structure of social settings. Social selection is the decision of interest in this perspective. According to a second vision, social settings are collections of social foci—physical or symbolic locales where actors meet. Because alters are more likely to be drawn from focused sets, shared social foci are frequently considered as the main generators of network ties, and hence of setting structure. Affiliation to social foci is the decision of central interest in this second view. In this paper we show how stochastic actor–oriented models (SAOMs) originally derived for studying the dynamics of multiple networks may be adopted to represent and examine these interconnected systems of decisions (selection and affiliation) within a unified analytical framework. We illustrate the empirical value of the model in the context of a longitudinal sample of adolescent participating in the Glasgow Teenage Friends and Lifestyle Study. Social selection decisions are examined in the context of networks of friendship relations. The analysis treats musical genres as the main social foci of interest.     

Physician Migration in the Global South between Cuba and South Africa

Transnational physician migration has concerned states' health and migration policies for many years. Recent developments have increased attention to the outcomes of these flows in the global south, where physician emigration is undermining public health policies. Cuba's exporting of medical professionals presents an alternative dynamic, based upon both an ideology of humanitarian solidarity and a need to secure hard currency earnings. The benefits and challenges arising from a bilateral agreement between Cuba and South Africa to supply Cuban doctors to South Africa and training at the Latin American Medical School (ELAM) for South African medical students are addressed. The benefits of skills enhancement and professional development are noted, as well as the economic benefits for both the Cuban government and individual doctors, while concerns with the appropriateness of the medical training provided at ELAM for the South African health context and the sustainability of the current policy are discussed.

Policy Implications

• Strategic bi‐lateral agreements offer a productive route towards more sustainable management of skilled migration.
• When migration agreements include skills training, attention is needed to ensure the training provided is appropriate to the destination context: attention needs to be paid to the appropriateness of the medical training afforded to South African medical students in Cuba for health requirements in South Africa.
• International migration agreements can form part of a broader policy suite aimed at realizing public health and other development priorities. However, attention must be paid to the suitability and sustainability of the outcomes of these practices.

     

The Virtues of Participation without Power: Campaigns,Party Networks,and the Ends of Politics

Following Francesca Polletta's call to reconsider participatory democracy in a new millennium, this article analyzes and makes a normative case for institutional and partisan forms of participation without decision making. I draw on field research and interviews conducted over the last decade on Democratic Party campaigns to argue against contemporary denunciations of partisanship and critiques of institutional participation by radical democrats. First, this article discusses the opportunities available for citizens to participate in electoral politics. Volunteering is often limited to fund‐raising and instrumental voter contacts given the constraints of electoral institutions. Although campaign volunteerism is a fundamentally limited form of civic engagement, institutional and partisan participation has democratic value. Campaigns are institutionally linked to political parties that offer distinct moral, ideological, and policy choices to citizens. Recent analytical and empirical work shows that contemporary political parties are constituted by relatively coherent networks of civil society and social movement organizations that devote considerable resources to electoral politics to shape primary and general election outcomes and advance their agendas in governance. This reveals electoral participation to be tightly linked to larger partisan dynamics and institutional sites of power.     

Socio-psychological barriers for peace making and ideas to overcome them / Barreras sociopsicológicas para la paz e ideas para superarlas

Intensive and violent intergroup conflicts that rage in different parts of the world are real. These conflicts center over disagreements focusing on contradictory goals and interests in different domains and must be addressed in conflict resolution. It is well known that the disagreements could potentially be resolved if not the powerful socio-psychological barriers which fuel and maintain the conflicts. These barriers inhibit and impede progress towards peaceful settlement of the conflict. They stand as major obstacles to begin the negotiation, to continue the negotiation, to achieve an agreement and later to engage in a process of reconciliation. These barriers are found among both leaders and society members that are involved in vicious, violent and protracted intergroup conflicts. They pertain to the integrated operation of cognitive, emotional and motivational processes, combined with a pre-existing repertoire of rigid supporting beliefs, world views and emotions that result in selective, biased and distorted information processing. This processing obstructs and inhibits the penetration of new information that can potentially contribute to facilitating progress in the peace-making process. The paper elaborates on the nature of the socio-psychological barriers and proposes preliminary ideas of how to overcome them. These ideas focus on the unfreezing process which eventually may lead to cessation of adherence to the repertoire that supports the continuation of the conflict, its evaluation and arousal of the readiness to entertain of alternative beliefs that support peace making.