The performance of the income protection system for older adults in Ecuador and future challenges

The objective of this article is to analyse the performance of Ecuador’s pension system and the challenges it will face in the future. Over the last 13 years, the pension system has made significant advances in terms of coverage and adequacy. However, demographic ageing is straining the financial sustainability of the contributory scheme. In this context, a number of public policy areas are identified, in terms of parameters and structures, which, together with the expansion of non-contributory coverage, could provide a more equitable and sustainable scheme.     

Work and Care Strategies of European Families: Similarities or National Differences?

This paper examines the work and care strategies chosen by full‐time working families with children in Finland, Italy, Portugal and the UK. It asks whether European families in different countries, facing the same problems of balancing employment and childcare responsibilities, respond to their situations in similar ways. An increase in dual‐earner families where both parents work full‐time represents a general employment trend in today's Europe. Also, within families with children, such employment patterns are now more common than they were previously. National differences may therefore not any longer be as marked as often indicated by country‐based surveys. The qualitative data from the SOCCARE Project offer a way to examine this issue. The focal point of the paper is to make a comparative analysis of couples in similar work and care situations. Using their working hours as the common denominator, this paper analyses their daily childcare arrangements and how these are impacted by gender roles, working schedules, flexibility of workplace, income levels, parents’ educational background and availability of care facilities. The paper concludes that European families’ work and care strategies have many similarities whereby national differences may not be as marked as often indicated by contemporary research.     

论加强社会工作与创新社会管理体靛

社会工作是创新社会管理体制的关键环节.因为加强社会工作是化解社会工作的重要手段,是健全社会利益协调机制的客观要求,是实现弱势群体权益保护的有力杠杆.要加强社会管理,创新社会管理体制,就必须大力推进社会工作的快速发展.要推进社会工作的快速发展,就必须坚持政府主导,实现社会工作的专业化、职业化发展;整合社会资源,建立以社区...     

The challenge of pension reform in Georgia: Non‐contributory pensions and elderly poverty

Georgia's national social security system offers almost universal non‐contributory basic pension coverage. The basic pension has, to date, proved effective in dealing with old‐age poverty. But Georgia's fiscal constraints and ageing population also highlight the importance of improving the pension system, in order to ensure its sustainability. This article presents policy reform choices, which suggest that, in Georgia, pension reform might include increasing the statutory retirement ages and reducing the generosity of benefits through means testing. The case of the Georgian non‐contributory basic pension might hold value for some low‐ and middle‐income countries that are considering the implementation of, or expanding coverage under, a non‐contributory pension programme.     

宋人笔记与宋代科举制度研究

《宋史·选举志》、《宋会要·选举》和《文献通考·选举考》等是研究宋代科举制度最基本、也是最可靠的史料,但由于体例和其他一些原因,上述诸书也都存在着这样或那样的缺憾,使我们无法窥探宋代科举制度的全貌及其对宋代社会的巨大影响。本文在分析上述诸书不足的基础上,重点探讨了宋人笔记中有关科举史料对宋代科举制度及相关问题研究的重要意义。     

Multiple partitioning of multiplex signed networks: Application to European parliament votes

For more than a decade, graphs have been used to model the voting behavior taking place in parliaments. However, the methods described in the literature suffer from several limitations. The two main ones are that 1) they rely on some temporal integration of the raw data, which causes some information loss; and/or 2) they identify groups of antagonistic voters, but not the context associated with their occurrence. In this article, we propose a novel method taking advantage of multiplex signed graphs to solve both these issues. It consists in first partitioning separately each layer, before grouping these partitions by similarity. We show the interest of our approach by applying it to a European Parliament dataset.     

Estimation of system reliability for exponential distributions based on L ranked set sampling

Abstract

In the case where strength and stress both follow exponential distributions, this paper considers the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the system reliability based on L ranked set sampling (LRSS). The proposed MLE is shown to have existence, uniqueness and asymptotic normality, and its asymptotic variance is obtained by the Fisher information matrix of LRSS. The values of asymptotic relative efficiencies show that the proposed MLE is always more efficient than the MLE using simple random sampling (SRS). However, the MLE using LRSS cannot be written in closed form. Therefore, the modified MLE is proposed using the technique replaced some terms in the maximum likelihood equations by their expectations. The newly modified MLE using LRSS is shown to be superior to the MLE using SRS. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a real data set on metastatic renal carcinoma study.     

A sampling plan for one-shot systems considering destructive inspection

Abstract

The paper is concerned with an acceptance sampling problem under destructive inspections for one-shot systems. The systems may fail at random times while they are operating (as the systems are considered to be operating when storage begins), and these failures can only be identified by inspection. Thus, n samples are randomly selected from N one-shot systems for periodic destructive inspection. After storage time T, the N systems are replaced if the number of working systems is less than a pre-specified threshold k. The primary purpose of this study is to determine the optimal number of samples n*, extracted from the N for destructive detection and the optimal acceptance number k*, in the sample under the constraint of the system interval availability, to minimize the expected cost rate. Numerical experiments are studied to investigate the effect of the parameters in sampling inspection on the optimal solutions.     

How do countries choose their monetary policy frameworks?

This paper investigates the determinants of countries’ choices of monetary policy framework. A brief narrative focused on groupings of countries motivates an econometric analysis which draws on previous work on the determinants of exchange rate regimes, bringing in standard factors as well as the trade networks of potential anchor currency blocs and the financial market depth that are emphasised in the narrative. The model turns out to be able to predict three quarters of countries’ choices, and there is no obvious systematic pattern in the errors. The results have important implications for how countries should choose their monetary policy frameworks.     

城市社区老人心理健康服务现状调查——来自重庆市主城社区的调查数据

以重庆市主城社区老人为调查对象,从老人的基本情况、心理健康状况、心理健康服务需求、心理服务支持系统等方面的调查数据进行详细分析,得出了家庭、邻里同辈群体是老人心理健康的重要支持系统、需要建立完善的城市社区老人心理健康服务体系等结论。