The Canadian temporary visa programme as an alternative to the European guest worker scheme

This article analyzes Canada's employment visa program, through which foreigners enter the Canadian labor market for relatively short time periods. It further demonstrates some major differences between this policy and the European guest worker scheme. Governments in Western Europe viewed guest workers' benefits as preventing wages and inflation from rising, allowing profits and investments to increase, and sustaining economic growth. A question to consider is whether guest workers' demands on social services, in relation to their tax and other contributions, exceed those of the indigenous population and thus reduce their profitability. Canada, in contrast, has avoided the need to provide services for the children of foreign workers or jobs for their spouses by limiting visa length to a maximum of 1 year. The majority of employment visa holders to Canada enter without dependents. Another difference is the far smaller scope of the Canadian program. Canada's employment visa program provides only about 0.5% of total employment, whereas guest workers in European countries may comprise up to 23% (Switzerland). The occupations of service and teaching account for the majority of workers included in the Canadian visa program, while manufacturing subsumes a large share of European guest workers. It is important to stress that, with relatively low levels for permanent immigration to Canada, the employment visa program rivals that flow as a yearly contributor to labor supply, indicating a need for closer attention to the evaluation of this policy.     

The unemployment insurance compensation experience of immigrants in Canada, 1980-1988

This paper utilizes a new data set, compiled by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Revenue Canada and Statistics Canada, to examine the unemployment experience of Canadian immigrant cohorts over the time period 1980 to 1988. Using the records of unemployment insurance benefits of persons who immigrated to Canada in those years and who filed income tax returns, the unemployment experiences of those people are compared by landing year, gender, level of education, language ability, and country of last permanent residence. The determinants of the proportion of each immigrant cohort that received unemployment insurance benefits are estimated by relating the proportions to landing year, duration of time in Canada, and labour market conditions. Briefly, we find no obvious influences on UI receipt behaviour following the immigration reforms of 1982. However, the recession of 1981–82 had a major impact on incomes which did not recover until 5 or 6 years later. Nevertheless, more generous UI benefits did raise slightly the likelihood of UI receipts. Received: 5 December 1995 / Accepted: 14 August 1996     

Maintaining autonomy: The plight of the American skid row and Japaneseyoseba

This article applies a social order analysis to both the classic American skid rows and the Japaneseyoseba (day labor pools) and finds that many of the resources that were available in the American skid rows such as casual labor, affordable SRO-style housing, reciprocal bonds of friendship, and cheap eateries are still available in the Japaneseyoseba. However, as urban America faced economic and ecological changes in the post WWII era which eventually lead to the demise of skid row communities and consequently the evolution of a largely public assistance dependent “new” homeless population, the communities of the Japaneseyoseba currently face similar threats to their livelihood largely due to the sharp decrease in demand for day labor since the onset of theHeisei recession in 1991. Additionally, policy recommendations for the Japanese to preserve the resources of theyoseba communities are made in light of similar historical experiences in the United States.     

A Convolution Estimator for the Density of Nonlinear Regression Observations

Abstract. The problem of estimating an unknown density function has been widely studied. In this article, we present a convolution estimator for the density of the responses in a nonlinear heterogenous regression model. The rate of convergence for the mean square error of the convolution estimator is of order n ^?1 under certain regularity conditions. This is faster than the rate for the kernel density method. We derive explicit expressions for the asymptotic variance and the bias of the new estimator, and further a data‐driven bandwidth selector is proposed. We conduct simulation experiments to check the finite sample properties, and the convolution estimator performs substantially better than the kernel density estimator for well‐behaved noise densities.     

The Piñata syndrome

The Pi?ata Syndrome is manifested by physician lounge grumbling and griping; sniping at medical and administrative leadership; resistance to examining best practices; refusal to hold colleagues responsible for their behavior, and general melancholy. This disease is characterized by grousing physicians who do not enjoy the practice of medicine and if self treated will leave medicine. It is accompanied by patients who receive inappropriate care and caring. The treatment, which can result in an excellent prognosis, is self-administered and must be vigorously pursued to avoid chronic Pi?ata Syndrome, a professional death.     

The United Kingdom's international migration in the inter-war period: Theoretical considerations and empirical testing

Summary At the theoretical level, the paper has two aims: to develop a three-country migration model and to incorporate British emigration schemes of the 1920s into it. The model is tested on data of U.K. emigration to Canada, the U.S.A. and Australia from 1920 to 1936.     

U.S. Transracial Adoption Trends in the 21st Century

A number of researchers have called attention to the lack of information available on transracial adoption at the national level. This project was a concerted effort to identify detailed informational about transracial adoption in the United States from nationally representative data sources. The 2000 U.S. Census and 2008–2012 American Community Survey data were analyzed to identify information about the number of young adoptees adopted transracially in the population, the proportion of transracial adoptions that are international, which racial groups adopt transracially, and which racial groups are transracially adopted in the 21st century.     

Performance appraisal in the age of TQM

Performance evaluation is often used as a tool to determine salary adjustment as well as an opportunity to improve job performance. When inappropriately applied, performance evaluations may be perceived as being unfair, wasteful, and demeaning. In some organizations, there has been a trend to break down job functions to their most detailed level, weight each activity, judge it, and then add up all the invalid numbers to achieve a more invalid judgment of a person's performance. This non-Gestalt evaluation is an inspection philosophy that has not served manufacturing or health care very effectively. Over the past four years, we have evolved a performance evaluation process at Minneapolis Children's Medical Center for physicians in both patient care and management roles. In this article, we will describe the evolution to the present system and discuss its dovetailing with customer service-driven continuous quality improvement efforts and our plans to improve the process.     

The unemployment insurance compensation. Usage of Canada's immigrants in selected provinces, 1981-1988

This paper explores the relationship between province of residence and the use of unemployment insurance (UI) among immigrants who landed in Canada during the period 1981-88.
Use of a new data set, the Longitudinal Immigration Data Base, overcomes the restriction that other data sets are cross-sectional only in nature or do not identify birthplace.
Our principal conclusion is that more generous UI benefits and poorer economic conditions than the Canadian average have a positive impact on the fraction of immigrants who receive UI. In addition, the province of residence has a separate effect on the likelihood of claiming UI, perhaps due to mobility costs.
Because national immigration policies have a differential impact across provinces, it is understandable that provincial policy makers wish to have greater influence over federal immigration policies.     

A critical survey on the status of multiple criteria decision making theory and practice

This paper seeks to review and to contrast the main streams of thought in Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) theory and practice, without attempting to review all MCDM methods in detail. The main purpose is to identify pitfalls in the usage of various approaches, and to suggest approaches which are most robustly and effectively useable, especially by the non-expert in MCDM methodology. Problem areas in MCDM still requiring further research are also discussed.