约旦社会保障制度改革及其启示

和世界上大多数国家一样,约旦也面临着越来越严重的人口老龄化问题。为此,约旦政府在社会保障领域实施了三项重要的改革措施。一是参数式改革,即不改变现有制度的性质,只是调整具体的参数;二是整合碎片化制度改革,把公务员和军事人员纳入全国统一的社保制度中来;三是未雨绸缪,积极开展公共预筹积累制改革,融资模式由现收现付制逐步过渡到部分积累制,不断完善投资管理体制。这三项改革不仅符合世界银行提倡的改革模式,而且这三项改革措施之间的相互配合与协调,有力地推动了约旦社保制度的改革和发展,具有极强的借鉴意义。     

The value of being precise

This study investigates how individuals assess imprecise information. We focus on two essential dimensions of decision under uncertainty, outcomes and probabilities, and their respective precision. We believe the precision of information is highly relevant in the investment setting, as reflected in the well-known “home (familiarity) bias”, and the outcome and probability dimensions, separately or jointly, may affect investors’ knowledge of uncertainty and perceived risk of the investment options, and subsequently affect investors’ choices. To test this conjecture, we conducted three experiments. Our results show that 1) participants demonstrate a pattern of preference for precision and aversion of extreme vagueness and associate vagueness with higher perceived risk and lower investment (experiments one and two); 2) participants prefer vague outcome information to vague probability information (experiment two); 3) familiarity indeed positively affects the precision of estimated values, but this association is stronger for the outcome dimension than for probabilities (experiment three). Our results confirm that precision in information, especially in the outcome dimension has an impact on investors’ resource allocation choices.     

Strategic Framing of Adat in Land-Acquisition Politics in East Sumba

This article is about the strategic use of adat arguments in the politics of large-scale land acquisition. While customary (adat) communities are commonly depicted as small local minorities living in the forests and being guardians of the environment, in many situations such communities occupy a majority position within the district. Majority adat communities are internally differentiated into categories of actors with varying and conflicting interests. This article focuses on Sumba in eastern Indonesia, where state and adat powers are not opposed but historically aligned. We analyse how five common ways of framing adat in Sumba are currently being deployed in land-acquisition politics, in situations supporting plantation land acquisition or protesting against farmers’ land dispossession. We draw attention to what we call ‘strategic adat framing’ as a political activity. The article calls for analysing the historical and social context of local deployments of adat for understanding the impact of current government pro-adat policies.     

Why We Should Refocus Our Efforts to Improve Care in Nursing Homes

No abstract available for this article.     

Global standards for social work education and training

This paper explores the ways in which social workers can be helped to acquire the wider understanding of relevant legal frameworks which is currently necessary for child-centred practice, given the influence of an ecological perspective on such practice. It arises from the development of a module on child care social work and the community for the Post Qualifying Child Care Award by members of the Law and Social Work Departments at Brunel University. The authors believe that to reach beyond a tokenistic acknowledgement of the ecological perspective requires an understanding and experience of the complex layers which make up the widening and complex social worlds of the child. The paper explains how social workers were encouraged to appreciate both the ever-widening circles of potentially relevant law and the different roles through which law operates. It concludes that a deeper engagement with the legal implications of an ecological dimension to practice would make such practice more effective and would also help combat social exclusion and discrimination.     

The Family and Medical Leave Law

Abstract

This essay asks whether the Family and Medical Leave Law (1993) is feminist social policy, as it was touted to be by its political supporters. The study takes three approaches to feminism outlined by Lorber in her 2001 text, Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics, which considers women in their roles as mothers and workers. Data taken from a Department of Labor FMLA utilization study are then analyzed in the context of these three approaches to feminism. I conclude that the FMLA is not feminist in a substantive way despite its symbolic value.     

Testing Wagner's Law in India: A cointegration and causality analysis

The present study empirically analyzes the validity of Wagner's Law for Indian economy. With the use of annual time series data from 1970–71 to 2013–14, all the six versions of Wagner's Law have been analyzed to test the relationship between government expenditure and gross domestic product. Wagner's Law states that the economic growth is the causative factor of the growth of the public expenditure. The study applied the unit root test and cointegration test to find the long-run relationship between government expenditure and gross domestic product. The present study employed the various econometric techniques such as unit root test, cointegration, and causality analysis for empirical analysis. The empirical analysis under study inferred mixed results of Wagner's Law for Indian economy, where four versions, namely Peacock, Gupta, Guffman, and Musgrave, found valid for Indian economy. The study concluded that the Wagner's Law is valid for the Indian economy except the Pryor and Mann Versions of the Wagner's Law.     

Risk minimization for an insurer with investment and reinsurance via g-expectation

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the study of a risk-based optimal investment and proportional reinsurance problem. The surplus process of the insurer and the risky asset process in the financial market are assumed to be general jump-diffusion processes. We use a convex risk measure generated by g-expectation to describe the risk of the terminal wealth with investment and reinsurance. Under the aim of minimizing the risk, the problem is solved by using techniques of stochastic maximum principles. Two interesting special cases are studied and the explicit expressions for optimal strategies and corresponding minimal risks are derived.     

论新时期我国科普工作面临的形势和挑战

文章结合学习贯彻十六大精神和<中华人民共和国科学技术普及法>,通过对加强科普工作、提高国民科学素质之必要性与国际国内背景的分析,对我国公众科学素养偏低和封建愚昧思想以及反科学、伪科学活动时有发生的现状与成因的剖析,以及对科普自身存在问题的剖析,多视角论述了新时期我国科普工作面临的形势、挑战和任务.     

天道与元气：王符政治哲学思想的形而上依据

与以往的天道观相比,王符《潜夫论》中的天道观肯定宇宙万物是由“元气”生成,否定了宇宙有始的论调;认为“元气”的衍生没有任何外在的作用,与官方正统神学目的论划清了界限;强调元气本源论有个发展、演化的表现过程。