Developing Age-Friendly Cities: Case Studies From Brussels and Manchester and Implications for Policy and Practice

Developing environments responsive to the aspirations of older people has become a major concern for social and public policy. Policies and programs directed at achieving “age-friendly” communities are considered to require a wide range of interventions, including actions at the level of the social and physical environment. This article compares the age-friendly approaches of two European cities, Brussels and Manchester, with a particular focus on policies and initiatives that promote active aging in an urban context. The article examines, first, the demographic, social, and multicultural contexts of Brussels and Manchester; second, the way in which both cities became members of the World Health Organization Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities; third, similarities and differences in the age-friendly approaches and actions adopted by both cities; and fourth, opportunities and barriers to the implementation of age-friendly policies. The article concludes by discussing the key elements and resources needed to develop age-friendly cities.     

关注利益相关者与实现民营外贸企业成功转型的关系研究

入世后,我国民营外贸企业得到了迅猛的发展,目前已基本完成了"量"的积累,进入了全面转型和提升"质"的阶段。民营外贸企业要突破当前的发展困境,必须关注企业的内外部利益相关者,只有得到他们的充分理解与大力支持,才能成功实现企业的转型。     

General C. L. Chennault

Because of recent legislation, many students with mild disabilities enroll in high school social studies courses in general education rather than special education settings. Therefore, teachers may have students with learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, communication disorders, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder in their history, geography, economics, and political science courses. Typical characteristics of these students include lowlevel reading and writing skills, processing problems, memory disorders, language problems, organizational deficits, and behavioral problems. These characteristics present challenges for the students and social studies teachers; however, there are strategies that will help the students succeed. The author summarizes the disability categories and related characteristics and describes textbook, writing, memory, organizational, and instructional modifications to address the challenges.     

Employers' perspectives on benefit conditionality in the UK and Denmark

This article examines the under-explored demand-side of active labour market policies (ALMPs). Based on interview data from a comparative study of the UK and Denmark, the paper analyses employers' perspectives and experiences of ALMPs. In both countries, employers were favourably disposed towards employing unemployed jobseekers but held negative views on conditionality. First, benefit conditionality led to employers receiving large numbers of unsuitable and unfiltered job applications, with associated negative resource impacts. Second, employers perceived this as a product of ‘box ticking' and compliance targets. Finally, employers criticised policy and media rhetoric for focusing solely on the supply-side and for problematizing unemployed candidates. The paper argues that these crucial, but neglected, employer perspectives demonstrate that the current benefit conditionality regime in the UK risks irrevocably ‘tarnishing' candidates, which undermines, rather than enhances, their chances of securing employment through ALMPs. This unique dataset provides further evidence that the current direction of policy requires urgent and radical re-thinking.     

Evaluating social investment in disability policy

Disability policy in European countries is displaying a shift towards social investment: increasing human capital and access to the labour market. The reasoning that underlies this transition is that disabled persons would benefit from mainstream employment, but are impeded in traditional policy by deficiencies in labour supply and demand. However, the shift towards more activating policies in many countries is accompanied by a decline in social protection. It is unclear whether social investment may effectively promote the employment chances of disabled persons within this context. The present research examines this question through a quantitative, cross-sectional, multilevel analysis on microdata from 22 EU countries. Our findings suggest greater activation to predict lower employment chances, while reducing passive support shows mixed effects. Conversely, measures for facilitation in daily life predict greater employment chances, as do measures for sheltered work. These findings raise questions over the value of social investment for disabled persons—and underline the need to overcome broader barriers in the labour market and in society.     

A primal dual active set with continuation algorithm for high-dimensional nonconvex SICA-penalized regression

The smooth integration of counting and absolute deviation (SICA) penalty has been demonstrated theoretically and practically to be effective in nonconvex penalization for variable selection and parameter estimation. However, solving the nonconvex optimization problem associated with SICA penalty in high-dimensional setting remains to be enriched, mainly due to the singularity at the origin and the nonconvexity of the SICA penalty function. In this paper, we develop a fast primal dual active set (PDAS) with continuation algorithm for solving the nonconvex SICA-penalized least squares in high dimensions. Upon introducing the dual variable, the PDAS algorithm iteratively identify and update the active set in the optimization using both the primal and dual information, and then solve a low-dimensional least square problem on the active set. When combined with a continuation strategy and a high-dimensional Bayesian information criterion (BIC) selector on the tuning parameters, the proposed algorithm is very efficient and accurate. Extensive simulation studies and analysis of a high-dimensional microarray gene expression data are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.     

Europeanisation and the Youth Guarantee: The case of France

In 2013, the European Council approved the Youth Guarantee (YG) to counteract youth unemployment. Because of its specific features, the YG is useful for understanding whether the EU has triggered policy change in national youth unemployment policies. Contrary to most of the literature on similar topics, we focused in this study on the effect of this specific European measure rather than on broader EU strategies or policies. The study contributes to the literature by qualifying the degree of fit/misfit and suggesting a counterfactual analysis, using the case of France. We first situate the article within the broader Europeanisation debate and present our research design. The second section introduces the policy structure of the YG and investigates youth unemployment policy in France, prior to and after the European initiative. The third section discusses whether the French youth unemployment policy would have been developed in the same way without the YG. A final section concludes.     

The impact of the European Youth Guarantee on active labour market policies: A convergence analysis

The European Union’s (EU) Youth Guarantee aims to improve the labour market situation of young people. Rather than prescribing a uniform policy model, it acknowledges that supportive measures need to align with national, regional and local circumstances. It thus seeks to promote mutual policy learning through the open method of coordination. As an innovative measure, the EU has deployed funding programmes to support the domestic measures related to the Youth Guarantee. We therefore examined in this study whether this mix of recommendations and financial incentives has entailed a convergence of member state policies. Our analysis of policy outputs for the period 2007?2014 yields a mixed empirical picture. There is catching‐up convergence regarding policies’ sectoral coverage but increasing divergence concerning the number of adopted policy instruments. The first two years of financial incentives did not produce any effect on enhancing policy experimentation among less active member states. We offer an optimistic and a pessimistic interpretation of these findings.     

Expediting youth's entry into employment whilst overlooking precariousness: Flexi‐employability and disciplinary activation in Hong Kong

With an emphasis placed on supply‐side interventions such as skills training and incentives enhancement, active labor market polices (ALMPs) are strongly promoted by international organizations and widely adopted across different welfare regimes to boost employment rates. This article first presents the under‐examined relationship between ALMPs and employment precariousness, which has posed a challenge to the neoliberal notion of employability and activation. Youth‐focused employment policies tend to speed up employment entry whilst downplaying the risk of precariousness and the importance of job quality, and thus further reinforcing the belief that engaging in precarious employment is tolerable if not inevitable. The article then examines the case of Hong Kong, which illustrates that its relatively low rate of youth unemployment may conceal the unfavorable employment conditions confronted by youth. It is argued that the service‐led employment policies and short‐term vocational training define the employability of young workers in terms of labor flexibilities. The coined phase of “flexi‐employability” is characterized by promoting youth's readiness for, and adaptability to, the volatilities and changing demands of the labor market. Arguably, the disciplinary approach to youth activation would only strengthen the work‐first principle by enforcing young people to take up jobs available and leave welfare as soon as possible, but without thoroughly addressing the risks and insecurities generated by the labor market in undermining their well‐being.     

基于C／S和B／S混合模式的多媒体电子阅览室管理系统设计

高职院校多媒体电子阅览室是用户获取信息和学习的重要场所,如何能进一步完善和发展它需要有效的管理系统和具有更高素质的管理队伍。从网络化、一体化、多元化的理念出发,采用三层C/S和B/S两种混合模式,在用户管理,资源管理,安全管理三个方面展开论述,为现代多媒体电子阅览室提出了方便实用、安全有效的管理系统设计方案,以供大家探讨。