Social Budgeting in Transition Economies

The first part of this paper portrays social budgeting as a pivotal tool in national social governance. The second explains the meaning of social budgeting, which, essentially, consists of two elements: a database and a set of interdependent tools for projecting social protection revenue and expenditure. The third part discusses the particular needs of the transition economies with respect to the financial planning of social protection, and it is argued that countries need models for social budgeting as a technical, non-ideological tool in order to prudently run social protection systems which are income redistribution mechanisms of potentially vast dimensions. The fourth part broadly explains the modular structure of the model, the advantage of this structure being that modules can intelligently be used as stand-alone submodels. It also further discusses the particular advantages of social budgeting in countries in transition and includes a number of examples of technical adjustments that would have to be made to the model structure when applying it in the context of transitional economies. The two main reasons for such adjustments are identified as the fast change of their socio-economic fabric over the past decade and the (related) changes in the collection and flow of data. The fifth part briefly presents social budget modelling projects implemented in central and eastern Europe, particularly focusing on the examples of Ukraine and Poland. Scenario simulations and policy experiments are presented and discussed. The conclusions summarize the advantages of social budgeting, using the ILO Social Budget Model (or a variant of it) in national and international contexts, and indicate the conditions required for successful implementation.     

Demographic scenarios by age,sex and education corresponding to the SSP narratives

In this paper, we translate the five narratives as defined by the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) research community into five alternative demographic scenarios using projections by age, sex and level of education for 171 countries up to 2100. The scenarios represent a significant step beyond past population scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change context, which considered only population size. The definitions of the medium assumptions about future fertility, mortality, migration and education trends are taken from a major new projections effort by the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, while the assumptions for all the other scenarios were defined in interactions with other groups in the SSP community. Since a full data base with all country-specific results is available online, this paper can only highlight selected results.     

A synergetic view of institutions

In this paper we attempt to demonstrate how, in the course of human cooperation, compulsions and forces come into existence which compel individuals into regularities of behavior. These behavioral regularities are labelled institutions; the approach selected is called synergetic, since it considers institutions to be the result of combined human actions. The compulsions and forces which emerge from human cooperation are generated by the individuals' dependencies, struggles for independence, and preferences. Whereas individuals act freely as subjects, they become objects under the compulsions and forces of compressed social interdependence.     

Experimental evidence on case-based decision theory

This paper starts out from the proposition that case-based decision theory (CBDT) is an appropriate tool to explain human decision behavior in situations of structural ignorance. Although the developers of CBDT suggest its reality adequacy, CBDT has not yet been tested empirically very often, especially not in repetitive decision situations. Therefore, our main objective is to analyse the decision behavior of subjects in a repeated-choice experiment by comparing the explanation power of CBDT to reinforcement learning and to classical decision criteria under uncertainty namely maximin, maximax, and pessimism-optimism. Our findings substantiate a predominant significantly higher validity of CBDT compared to the classical criteria and to reinforcement learning. For this reason, the experimental results confirm the suggested reality adequacy of CBDT in repetitive decision situations of structural ignorance.     

Do maternal health problems influence child's worrying status? Evidence from the British Cohort Study

Conventional methods apply symmetric prior distributions such as a normal distribution or a Laplace distribution for regression coefficients, which may be suitable for median regression and exhibit no robustness to outliers. This work develops a quantile regression on linear panel data model without heterogeneity from a Bayesian point of view, i.e. upon a location-scale mixture representation of the asymmetric Laplace error distribution, and provides how the posterior distribution is summarized using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Applying this approach to the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS) data, it finds that a different maternal health problem has different influence on child's worrying status at different quantiles. In addition, applying stochastic search variable selection for maternal health problems to the 1970 BCS data, it finds that maternal nervous breakdown, among the 25 maternal health problems, contributes most to influence the child's worrying status.     

Groups in contact: Meta‐representations,interobjectivity, and cultural incompatibilities

This analysis departs from social identity being part and parcel of the system of social representations a group holds. Additionally, social identity is seen as being affectively laden with religious or other deeply ingrained ideological beliefs. These systems delimit the space of norms and behaviours where people socially construct the objects defining the local world as an objectively given. The local objectifications differ between groups and cultures and pose a problem for interaction and communication between members of different groups. Inter‐group discrepancies must be bridged by establishing a shared representational space and interobjective understanding. This understanding can be reached if both interactants mutually develop meta‐representations that allow them to grossly anticipate what to expect from the other and to orient their actions accordingly. But there is a catch in establishing interobjectivity: even if the interactants manage to overcome semantic and cognitive barriers, their interaction and open‐minded communication will be blocked if the two objectivities are ethically or affectively incommensurable. I illustrate this process by suggesting that native Europeans will feel blocked to establish interobjective acceptance for example with proponents of a slave holder culture whose values are incommensurable with European ideas of human equality. Accepting a slave holder's worldview would threaten the European's identity. A similar process seems to govern devout conservative Muslims living in 'gated communities' and enclaves in European cities who try to maintain their identity by avoiding regular contact with the non‐Muslim majority. Such contact would threaten their identity if their worldview and sharia rules were measured by the standards of human rights. Native Europeans on the other hand, will feel their own cultural objectivity to be incompatible with traditional Islam that does not equally observe human rights. The implications of such processes are discussed in terms of migrants' integration, multiculturalism, and socio‐political psychology.     

Intensive family preservation services in Flanders: an outcome study

Set up as a one-group pre-test–post-test follow-up design, this study examines the outcomes of intensive family preservation services (IFPS) in Flanders addressing the following research questions: Does IFPS make a significant difference concerning (1) the interaction between parent and child? (2) social support as experienced by the parent? (3) stress and empowerment of the parent? and (4) the strengths and difficulties of the minor? Families seem to indicate that their family situation is more manageable, although still, professional help is needed. Parents feel more resilient about the situation and indicate that they can get along with their child better than before the crisis intervention. Parents still feel uncertain about the future and about their role as a parent. There seems to be no indications that their level and quality of social contacts have changed. Further research is suggested to provide more in-depth information about the conditions associated with processes of change during an IFPS intervention.     

Lottery pricing under time pressure

This article investigates how subjects determine minimum selling prices for lotteries. We design an experiment where subjects have at every moment an incentive to state their minimum selling price and to adjust the price, if they believe that the price that they stated initially was not optimal. We observe frequent and sizeable price adjustments. We find that random pricing models cannot explain the observed price patterns. We show that earlier prices contain information about future price adjustments. We propose a model of Stochastic Pricing that offers an intuitive explanation for these price adjustment patterns.