The Ambiguity of Return Migration: Prolonged Crisis and Uncertainty in the Life Strategies of Young Romanian and Latvian Returnees

Drawing on qualitative research, this study endeavours to identify the determinants of return migration of young Romanians and Latvians in light of the most recent global economic crisis (GEC). The decision-making patterns of young returnees are examined by three main research questions. How do macro-events, such as the GEC, interfere with individual biographies creating specific return experiences? What can we say about the “crisis returnees”, their migration motivations and re-adaptation in the origin country? What are the main challenges of young adults facing life strategies in such uncertain periods? Data are drawn from 51 in-depth interviews with Romanian and Latvian young adults, carried out in late 2015 and early 2016. Findings show that return migration is associated with economic conditions, family life, feelings of homesickness, and re-adaptation experiences. Our results also confirm that youth transitions and migration have become more diversified and complex in the context of the economic crisis.     

Romanian social workers facing the challenges of neo-liberalism

ABSTRACT

With a history of almost 90 years, professional social work in Romania once flourished up until World War II. The Communist Party disbanded the profession in 1968 and it was reinstated after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Within the context of the socio-economic transition from a centralised to a free-market economy, Romanian social policy and social work have evolved from a Marxist/socialist-type ideology, one that advocates for state intervention, to a libertarian/neo-liberal-type ideology, which promotes both state withdrawal from welfare provision and individuals taking responsibility for their own welfare. These two trends continue to co-exist subject to sometimes divergent forces such as international institutions and internal Romanian social pressures. Using a qualitative approach, we explore how Romanian social workers are adapting to the neo-liberal realities and identify three types of perceived challenges: 1. those related to regulation, 2. linked with collaboration in social work activity and 3. those related to the social worker-client relationship. Under neo-liberal pressures, the social worker's role of agent of social change becomes marginalised in daily practice, leaving little power to influence agency policies that negatively impact clients.     

Testing the acculturation of the 1.5 generation in the United States: Is there a “critical” age of migration?

Review of Economics of the Household - Existing research shows that on average first-generation immigrants earn less than native-born workers in the United States, especially during their first...     

1.61-approximation for min-power strong connectivity with two power levels

Given a directed simple graph \(G=(V,E)\) and a cost function \(c:E \rightarrow R_+\), the power of a vertex \(u\) in a directed spanning subgraph \(H\) is given by \(p_H(u) = \max _{uv \in E(H)} c(uv)\), and corresponds to the energy consumption required for wireless node \(u\) to transmit to all nodes \(v\) with \(uv \in E(H)\). The power of \(H\) is given by \(p(H) = \sum _{u \in V} p_H(u)\). Power Assignment seeks to minimize \(p(H)\) while \(H\) satisfies some connectivity constraint. In this paper, we assume \(E\) is bidirected (for every directed edge \(e \in E\), the opposite edge exists and has the same cost), while \(H\) is required to be strongly connected. Moreover, we assume \(c:E \rightarrow \{A,B\}\), where \(0 \le A < B\). We improve the best known approximation ratio from 1.75 (Chen et al. IEEE GLOBECOM 2005) to \(\pi ^2/6 - 1/36 + \epsilon \le 1.61\) using an adaptation of the algorithm developed by Khuller et al. [SIAM J Comput 24(4):859–872 1995, Discr Appl Math 69(3):281–289 1996] for (unweighted) Minimum Strongly Connected Subgraph.     

Adapting private family time in child protective services decision-making processes

The Family Group Conference (FGC) is grounded in a rights-based framework, whereby children and their families have the right and responsibility to be primary decision-makers when child protection issues arise, and the statutory agency has the responsibility to convene the entitled members of the family network to lead the decision-making. A distinct core component of FGC—private family time (PFT)—allows families to discuss the information and formulate their responses and plans privately during conferencing. This paper describes how a large child welfare agency in the United States adapted PFT in two ways: (1) including a parent advocate (PA) and (2) abbreviating the amount of time allowed for this discussion. Given the lack of empirical research on the PFT component, this qualitative exploratory study sought to understand the functions and perceived impacts of PA-supported PFT during initial child protective services (CPS) conferences at which decisions of child removal or placement were being contemplated. PFT served multiple beneficial functions and impacted families in several positive ways: families gained greater awareness of safety concerns, felt empowered and confident in the preferred safety and service plan, became increasingly engaged and involved in the case decision-making process and ultimately felt less apprehensive.     

Spectral estimation for locally stationary time series with missing observations

Time series arising in practice often have an inherently irregular sampling structure or missing values, that can arise for example due to a faulty measuring device or complex time-dependent nature. Spectral decomposition of time series is a traditionally useful tool for data variability analysis. However, existing methods for spectral estimation often assume a regularly-sampled time series, or require modifications to cope with irregular or ‘gappy’ data. Additionally, many techniques also assume that the time series are stationary, which in the majority of cases is demonstrably not appropriate. This article addresses the topic of spectral estimation of a non-stationary time series sampled with missing data. The time series is modelled as a locally stationary wavelet process in the sense introduced by Nason et al. (J. R. Stat. Soc. B 62(2):271–292, 2000) and its realization is assumed to feature missing observations. Our work proposes an estimator (the periodogram) for the process wavelet spectrum, which copes with the missing data whilst relaxing the strong assumption of stationarity. At the centre of our construction are second generation wavelets built by means of the lifting scheme (Sweldens, Wavelet Applications in Signal and Image Processing III, Proc. SPIE, vol. 2569, pp. 68–79, 1995), designed to cope with irregular data. We investigate the theoretical properties of our proposed periodogram, and show that it can be smoothed to produce a bias-corrected spectral estimate by adopting a penalized least squares criterion. We demonstrate our method with real data and simulated examples.     

Impact of funding and value added on Spanish venture capital-backed firms

This paper contributes to the literature on the effect of venture capital (VC) on the economic development of areas in which those specialized investors are active. The work focuses on the separate consideration of two effects that are supposed to explain the superior performance of a large sample of Spanish VC-backed firms, namely funding and value-added services provided by VC managers to their investee firms. The results show that funding is significant regardless of the stage of development of the investee firm. The value added, however, is only significant for the subsample of firms at the expansion stage.     

Reverse logistics drivers: empirical evidence from a case study in an emerging economy

Academic and corporate interest in reverse logistics (RL) has risen considerably in recent years. In this context, the objective of this study was to identify the drivers that enable RL practice in an emerging economy. Firstly, international peer-reviewed publications on RL were used to develop a RL environment framework representing the main RL internal and external influences. Secondly, a case-based research was conducted in a large manufacturing company located in Southern Brazil. The results indicated that the most cited driver in the RL literature, the government and legislation, was not a main influence on the studied company. Environmental legislation is still limited in the country and struggles to provide incentives to increase materials recycling. An economic factor related to materials value recovery was also found to drive the backward flow. Finally, knowledge of the RL driving forces may support industries to better implement and manage reverse flows and to bridge the gap between existing and future solutions for reverse supply chains.     

Global Environmental Change and Historical Transitions

What do transition processes in rural areas in Thailand, biomass consumption in nineteenth-century Austria and the ecology of hunter-gatherers have to do with the appropriation of plant production and global environmental change? More than one might think of in the first place. They are part of a scholarly discourse on our changing relations with the environment. We argue that global change can be analysed in terms of transitions between major modes of subsistence and try to document this with several case studies.