Dynamics of Corruption and Citizens’ Trust in Anti-Corruption Agencies in Three South Asian Countries

The comparative analyses of citizens’ trust in Anti-Corruption Agencies (ACAs) in three countries’ (Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) indicate that despite ACA’s low level of effectiveness in curbing corruption, trust level varies. The Nepalese ACA has higher level of trust than Bangladesh and Sri Lanka which is earned by targeting mainly lower level public officials. Though it fails to reduce the level of corruption in Nepal; citizens tend to trust ACA more. This is because of higher visibility of ACA’s activities. Such findings indicate about the methodological challenge to use ‘trust’ as a proxy to measure institutional performance.     

Separability between own food production and consumption in Turkey

Complete markets imply the separation of food production and consumption decisions such that they can be modeled to occur sequentially and can be studied independently. Separation is very often assumed implicitly in empirical studies of food demand. If there is such separation, then food sourced within the household should not have any influence upon the budget share of each food group. Using this insight, this paper first develops a procedure to test for the separation of household food production and consumption decisions. Furthermore, it incorporates the testing procedure into the Almost Ideal Demand Systems model and utilizes survey data from 2003 for Turkey for empirical testing. It concludes that the separation assumption is unwarranted for Turkey. Next, it investigates the extent of bias in elasticity estimates when the separation assumption is unwarranted. It concludes that ignoring the nonseparation of consumption and production decisions in rural areas leads to significant overestimation of food expenditure elasticity for dairy products and eggs and own-price elasticity for bread and cereals.     

A Better Alternative to Non-parametric Approaches for Adjusting for Covariate Measurement Errors in Logistic Regression

In this article, we propose a flexible parametric (FP) approach for adjusting for covariate measurement errors in regression that can accommodate replicated measurements on the surrogate (mismeasured) version of the unobserved true covariate on all the study subjects or on a sub-sample of the study subjects as error assessment data. We utilize the general framework of the FP approach proposed by Hossain and Gustafson in 2009 for adjusting for covariate measurement errors in regression. The FP approach is then compared with the existing non-parametric approaches when error assessment data are available on the entire sample of the study subjects (complete error assessment data) considering covariate measurement error in a multiple logistic regression model. We also developed the FP approach when error assessment data are available on a sub-sample of the study subjects (partial error assessment data) and investigated its performance using both simulated and real life data. Simulation results reveal that, in comparable situations, the FP approach performs as good as or better than the competing non-parametric approaches in eliminating the bias that arises in the estimated regression parameters due to covariate measurement errors. Also, it results in better efficiency of the estimated parameters. Finally, the FP approach is found to perform adequately well in terms of bias correction, confidence coverage, and in achieving appropriate statistical power under partial error assessment data.     

The Impact of Deviations from Desired Hours of Work on the Life Satisfaction of Employees

We estimate an ordinal logistic multilevel model to examine the determinants of the life satisfaction of employees in Europe. Data drawn from the European social survey reveals that deviations from desired hours of work (measured as the absolute difference between the actual and preferred weekly number of hours) reduce overall life satisfaction, but the effect is smaller in countries with higher unemployment rates. We interpret this finding as evidence that in environments where anxieties about job security are high, having a job brings about a certain level of life satisfaction regardless of the gap between the actual and preferred time spent in the labor market. We also find no statistically significant difference between male and female employees with regard to the impact of the work hours mismatch. This finding suggests that the gender differences which would have been expected in this context are already incorporated in the respondents’ subjectively determined desired hours of work. In fact, further examinations confirm that ‘desired hours’ are associated with both socio-demographic characteristics (in particular, gender) and preferences for labor market work.     

Simulated annealing procedure for scheduling competing tasks in flexible manufacturing

This paper presents a simulated annealing SA procedure heuristic for the problem of scheduling N tasks on a machine equipped with an automatic tool changer to minimize the makespan time. The problem is first formulated as a symmetric travelling salesman problem TSP . A local search heuristic procedure is developed, then embedded into SA algorithm to enhance its performance. The implemented SA heuristic has the following features: an exponential acceptance function with non-monotonic cooling schedule, heuristic pre-processing, and a neighbourhood of changing the sequence of a small number of tasks and named the k-interchange procedure. The algorithm is compared with an exact solution method on a set of practical-sized problems. The proposed algorithm performed very well in terms of solution quality and computation time.     

Book Review: Civil Society in Yemen: The Political Economy of Activism in Modern Arabia,by Sheila Carapico. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 1998

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

De-politicization of the partisan forces in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

ABSTRACT

The paper explores possible means to achieve reform in the highly politicized security sector of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq. We maintain that the de-politicization of the KRG’s security forces is crucial for the future stability and prosperity of an independent Kurdish state. One option is to accomplish reform as part of a unified, state-building process supported by an outside actor, specifically the United States. Alternatively, the KRG would preserve the existing, de-facto division between the ‘KDP dominated zone’ controlled by Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and a ‘PUK dominated zone’ controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Gorran Movement. The two zones would agree to a federal arrangement, working together to gradually develop shared policies on issues of national security, economic development, and foreign policy, while maintaining autonomy over local issues. Our article seeks to situate the KRG case study within the literatures of post-conflict environments, state building, and state security reform (SSR). The approaches we have suggested here for the depolitization of KRG security forces will be relevant for the foreseeable future if KRG continues to be a part of federal Iraq or becomes an independent state.     

Regression analysis of zero-inflated time-series counts: application to air pollution related emergency room visit data

Time-series count data with excessive zeros frequently occur in environmental, medical and biological studies. These data have been traditionally handled by conditional and marginal modeling approaches separately in the literature. The conditional modeling approaches are computationally much simpler, whereas marginal modeling approaches can link the overall mean with covariates directly. In this paper, we propose new models that can have conditional and marginal modeling interpretations for zero-inflated time-series counts using compound Poisson distributed random effects. We also develop a computationally efficient estimation method for our models using a quasi-likelihood approach. The proposed method is illustrated with an application to air pollution-related emergency room visits. We also evaluate the performance of our method through simulation studies.     

Structural social work and the compatibility of NGO approaches: a case analysis of Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC)

This article offers a comparative analysis between the ideological orientation of structural social work (SSW) and the programmatic orientation of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). SSW sees social problems as arising from specific socio-economic contexts rather than from the failings of individuals. This perspective recognises that patriarchy is a central feature of life in Bangladesh. BRAC analyses poverty, broadly defined, from a perspective that is political, making use of feminist principles. By assessing SSW as it pertains to the programme coverage of BRAC, this article presents the consistencies and inconsistencies of the approaches. Yet, SSW and BRAC share a common objective of shifting the locus of power to facilitate the empowerment of marginalised communities.