Ten years after Beijing

For fifteen years, in the north of the state of Israel, a women's organization existed in which Israeli Jewish and Israeli Palestinian women activists worked together for peace and justice in a careful and challenging dialogue across difference. “Bat Shalom of the North” was the subject of research by the author in 1996. In this article she reports on her return in 2012 to re-interview former members. Applying the feminist concept of “transversal politics” she analyzes the organization's trajectory, radicalization and eventual closure in the context of a failed peace process and increasing violence in the region. Their perspective on Israel's oppression of its Palestinian minority led the surviving members of Bat Shalom of the North in its final days to envision not a “two-state solution” to the Israel Palestine conflict but a single, inclusive, multicultural and democratic country, in which subject identities are built not on a feeling of belonging to land, language or religion but on shared adhesion to human and democratic rights.     

Concepts of choice and motivation in the discourse on the globalization of higher education

This paper reviews the findings of a participatory research project conducted with Nepali high school and university students. It examines the feelings and motivations of those students who leave the country in pursuit of higher education, and those who intentionally, or due to circumstances, stay in Nepal. An analysis of the latter is particularly important to the shifting discourse on higher education to the global South. This study promotes the inclusion of those students, and institutions, of higher education in developing nations who have been excluded from the discourse on globalization.     

Nonprofit mission statement focus and financial performance

Mission statements have been adopted nearly universally in nonprofit organizations. Their ubiquity is based on a presumption that a well‐designed mission statement is linked to better organizational performance because it provides a framework for decision making, influence over staff and volunteer motivation, and a mechanism for signaling organizational legitimacy to stakeholders. Despite collective confidence in mission statement utility, the relationship between mission statements and performance has received minimal attention. In this exploratory study we measured several attributes of mission statements in women's rights nonprofit organizations, with particular attention to the degree to which the statement focuses on organizational purpose and the relationship between focus and several measures of organization financial performance. The findings indicated that mission statements with a more focused geographic scope were associated with lower overhead ratios. In contrast, mission statements that identified more target client groups were associated with larger one‐year increases in contribution. Despite the statistical significance, the relationships were weak, calling into question common assumptions about the importance of the mission statement to a nonprofit organization.     

Asymmetric impact of inflation and unemployment on poverty in Pakistan: new evidence from asymmetric ARDL cointegration

The current study is intended to examine the asymmetric impact of inflation and unemployment on the poverty of Pakistan over the period of 1970 to 2016 by applying asymmetric Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration approach. The results revealed the presence of long-run asymmetries among inflation, unemployment and poverty. These findings also confirmed the atypical reaction of poverty to negative and positive shocks in unemployment and inflation. Furthermore, findings also confirmed negative and significant association among health expenditures (HE), population growth and poverty. The findings of the study have relevant implications for policymakers interested in the asymmetric relationship among inflation, unemployment and poverty in Pakistan.     

Nonparametric maximum likelihood computation of a <Emphasis Type="Italic">U</Emphasis>-shaped hazard function

A new algorithm is presented and studied in this paper for fast computation of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimate of a U-shaped hazard function. It successfully overcomes a difficulty when computing a U-shaped hazard function, which is only properly defined by knowing its anti-mode, and the anti-mode itself has to be found during the computation. Specifically, the new algorithm maintains the constant hazard segment, regardless of its length being zero or positive. The length varies naturally, according to what mass values are allocated to their associated knots after each updating. Being an appropriate extension of the constrained Newton method, the new algorithm also inherits its advantage of fast convergence, as demonstrated by some real-world data examples. The algorithm works not only for exact observations, but also for purely interval-censored data, and for data mixed with exact and interval-censored observations.