Economic policy decisions require comparisons of the gains and losses from policy choices to different people. If those gains can be valued in monetary terms, than all that is needed is a comparison of the value of income to different persons, which can be weights in cost-benefit analysis. An objective comparison of the value of income to different people has been long sought but never found. I propose that when money to be allocated is controlled by a group of people with equal control over that money, then a hypothetical auction for transfers of income between people can produce a collective judgment about the value of income that provides suitable weights, and is morally defensible in cases where the decision is made by the group collectively, e.g. when making government policy choices. I provide a method for calculating such weights from observed choices about distributing income, and discuss several desirable properties that they have.
{"title":"Making Interpersonal Comparisons of the Value of Income With a Hypothetical Auction","authors":"Stephen R. Schmidt","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3404991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3404991","url":null,"abstract":"Economic policy decisions require comparisons of the gains and losses from policy choices to different people. If those gains can be valued in monetary terms, than all that is needed is a comparison of the value of income to different persons, which can be weights in cost-benefit analysis. An objective comparison of the value of income to different people has been long sought but never found. I propose that when money to be allocated is controlled by a group of people with equal control over that money, then a hypothetical auction for transfers of income between people can produce a collective judgment about the value of income that provides suitable weights, and is morally defensible in cases where the decision is made by the group collectively, e.g. when making government policy choices. I provide a method for calculating such weights from observed choices about distributing income, and discuss several desirable properties that they have.","PeriodicalId":316250,"journal":{"name":"SRPN: Social Economics (Topic)","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123616631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Growing necessities for human sustenance remain always the matter of top priority of human thought process since the existence of human civilisation for its betterment. Notion of self and social betterment compelled the individuals and components of societies to make investment in kind and capital to forms the human capital for cultivating the capabilities essential for better sustenance. As human civilization travelled from ancient to modern era, it has got mind boggling transformation with the use of human capital. But when it measure on the ground of sustenance of whole, investment in human capital formation and the way it has been used for betterment, not portray sufficiency in itself. The reason been for this insufficiency is that, political systems or ruling power of respective nation subordinated the promotion of formation of human capital and used it somehow exclusively for their betterment only. On the contrary individual also deprived of imbibing human capital in them or by parent in their offspring’s as they were kept aloof from resources needed for infusing capabilities. This paper thus is the effort to propose the new line of thinking for investment in human capital, rational utilization and formation of capabilities and expand the horizon of investment and formation human capital from skill and knowledge to social endosmosis, Global Common Public Religious Code, Uniform Righteous Primary Education Accords, International Funds for Resources Utilization, Worldwide Opportunity Protecting Accords.
{"title":"Modelling Human Capital for Sustenance of Whole – Judicious Outlook","authors":"A. Dongre","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3465504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3465504","url":null,"abstract":"Growing necessities for human sustenance remain always the matter of top priority of human thought process since the existence of human civilisation for its betterment. Notion of self and social betterment compelled the individuals and components of societies to make investment in kind and capital to forms the human capital for cultivating the capabilities essential for better sustenance. As human civilization travelled from ancient to modern era, it has got mind boggling transformation with the use of human capital. But when it measure on the ground of sustenance of whole, investment in human capital formation and the way it has been used for betterment, not portray sufficiency in itself. The reason been for this insufficiency is that, political systems or ruling power of respective nation subordinated the promotion of formation of human capital and used it somehow exclusively for their betterment only. On the contrary individual also deprived of imbibing human capital in them or by parent in their offspring’s as they were kept aloof from resources needed for infusing capabilities. \u0000 \u0000This paper thus is the effort to propose the new line of thinking for investment in human capital, rational utilization and formation of capabilities and expand the horizon of investment and formation human capital from skill and knowledge to social endosmosis, Global Common Public Religious Code, Uniform Righteous Primary Education Accords, International Funds for Resources Utilization, Worldwide Opportunity Protecting Accords.","PeriodicalId":316250,"journal":{"name":"SRPN: Social Economics (Topic)","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116876047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-11-05DOI: 10.47992/ijmts.2581.6012.0027
P. Kumar
Higher education institutions strive to produce quality professionals, who would be intellectually robust, emotionally balanced, and economically productive, socially committed and spiritually satisfied so that they make meaning in their lives and contribute to the society. Teachers have a big role in maintaining this. Teacher quality influences curriculum, provides leadership, and promote student progression. Curriculum delivery and pedagogy should incorporate multitude of learning experiences and innovative learning methodologies. So much so the faculty should be exposed to advance knowledge and skill through a variety of ways which would be mutually complementary for both the teacher and the taught. Their capacities should be developed and all the more periodically recharged for sustained results. This paper discusses capacity building through establishing sustainable mechanisms to improve quality in teaching as reflected in the values and culture of the institution.
{"title":"Capacity Building for Quality Enhancement in Higher Education","authors":"P. Kumar","doi":"10.47992/ijmts.2581.6012.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47992/ijmts.2581.6012.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Higher education institutions strive to produce quality professionals, who would be intellectually robust, emotionally balanced, and economically productive, socially committed and spiritually satisfied so that they make meaning in their lives and contribute to the society. Teachers have a big role in maintaining this. Teacher quality influences curriculum, provides leadership, and promote student progression. Curriculum delivery and pedagogy should incorporate multitude of learning experiences and innovative learning methodologies. So much so the faculty should be exposed to advance knowledge and skill through a variety of ways which would be mutually complementary for both the teacher and the taught. Their capacities should be developed and all the more periodically recharged for sustained results. This paper discusses capacity building through establishing sustainable mechanisms to improve quality in teaching as reflected in the values and culture of the institution.","PeriodicalId":316250,"journal":{"name":"SRPN: Social Economics (Topic)","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125484099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The dichotomy in the economics of transition literature with regard to the reform speed (Gradualist vs Radical Approach) and reform strategy (incremental reform vs structural reform) fails to capture the essence of the transitional process of a transitional economy that was ever under the control of planned economic system. In this paper, we construct a system dynamics model to provide a unified theoretical framework to illustrate that reform speed and reform strategy are inherently intertwined. We propose 4 optimal reforming combinations between reform speed and reform strategy to track the transitional trajectories of different transitional economies since 1980s. These 4 optimal reforming combinations are: (1) Incremental reform in radical speed. (2) Incremental reform in gradualist speed. (3) Structural reform in radical speed. (4) Structural reform in gradualist speed. In this paper, we demonstrate that a transitional economy would adopt one of the aforementioned 4 optimal reforming combination if and only if it minimizes the reforming cost incurred during the shock period of radical reform as well as the dual track period of gradualist reforms. Several factors in our model affecting these 4 optimal reforming combinations are also discussed. These factors include the spillover effect (both vertical and horizontal) of a newly established reforming promotion sector on other old sectors in a transitional economy, the endogenous reform damping coefficient determined by one transitional economy‟s initial conditions and the reform damping coefficient determined by the dual track system during the gradualist reform process.
{"title":"Toward a Unified Theory of Economic Reform","authors":"J. Shen, Xiaojie Liu, Jun Zhang","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3038372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3038372","url":null,"abstract":"The dichotomy in the economics of transition literature with regard to the reform speed (Gradualist vs Radical Approach) and reform strategy (incremental reform vs structural reform) fails to capture the essence of the transitional process of a transitional economy that was ever under the control of planned economic system. In this paper, we construct a system dynamics model to provide a unified theoretical framework to illustrate that reform speed and reform strategy are inherently intertwined. We propose 4 optimal reforming combinations between reform speed and reform strategy to track the transitional trajectories of different transitional economies since 1980s. These 4 optimal reforming combinations are: (1) Incremental reform in radical speed. (2) Incremental reform in gradualist speed. (3) Structural reform in radical speed. (4) Structural reform in gradualist speed. In this paper, we demonstrate that a transitional economy would adopt one of the aforementioned 4 optimal reforming combination if and only if it minimizes the reforming cost incurred during the shock period of radical reform as well as the dual track period of gradualist reforms. Several factors in our model affecting these 4 optimal reforming combinations are also discussed. These factors include the spillover effect (both vertical and horizontal) of a newly established reforming promotion sector on other old sectors in a transitional economy, the endogenous reform damping coefficient determined by one transitional economy‟s initial conditions and the reform damping coefficient determined by the dual track system during the gradualist reform process.","PeriodicalId":316250,"journal":{"name":"SRPN: Social Economics (Topic)","volume":"384 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126035436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Government subsidies for higher education suffer from serious design defects that contribute to seemingly contradictory problems — (1) too few individuals earn college degrees because the United States underinvests in prospective students and (2) too many students enroll in bad schools that leave them and society worse off than before they enrolled. Why would students overinvest in bad schools while underinvesting in education generally? Regarding underinvestment, many scholars have commented on how current aid is poorly targeted and fails to adequately encourage potential students who would otherwise not enroll in and graduate from an institution of higher education to do so. Regarding overinvestment, while many theories have been proposed, such as misleading advertising, an important but overlooked reason is that too high a percentage of student aid ends up encouraging prospective students to invest in bad schools. This misdirected aid exacerbates other problems that can lead prospective students to enroll in bad schools and can even be the sole reason a student chooses to enroll in a bad school. And while government regulations do attempt to prevent bad schools from receiving aid, those regulations are not working. To succeed, policymakers need to clearly define what a bad school is and understand bad schools’ root causes. After proposing a definition (a school in which the aggregated matriculating students’ estimated return, including personal consumption, is negative), I argue that bad schools are generally caused by two problems — unprepared students and underperforming schools. Schools target unprepared students who will not benefit from enrolling to obtain government aid. Unprepared students enroll due to a combination of market failures and badly designed subsidies. Schools are also able to underperform compared to their peers because of the flawed design of subsidies and related market failures. Current government regulations somewhat target these problems, but struggle due to the lack of a coherent underlying philosophy and a failure to more directly target the underlying issues. After discussing how the design of subsidies contributes to the problems, I propose possible reforms, including adding several indicators of school performance to the Government’s Gainful Employment Rule, which currently has just one real proxy (debt-to-earnings).
{"title":"Education Subsidies and Bad Schools: Breaking the Causal Link","authors":"Jack L. Millman","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3028235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3028235","url":null,"abstract":"Government subsidies for higher education suffer from serious design defects that contribute to seemingly contradictory problems — (1) too few individuals earn college degrees because the United States underinvests in prospective students and (2) too many students enroll in bad schools that leave them and society worse off than before they enrolled. Why would students overinvest in bad schools while underinvesting in education generally? Regarding underinvestment, many scholars have commented on how current aid is poorly targeted and fails to adequately encourage potential students who would otherwise not enroll in and graduate from an institution of higher education to do so. Regarding overinvestment, while many theories have been proposed, such as misleading advertising, an important but overlooked reason is that too high a percentage of student aid ends up encouraging prospective students to invest in bad schools. This misdirected aid exacerbates other problems that can lead prospective students to enroll in bad schools and can even be the sole reason a student chooses to enroll in a bad school. And while government regulations do attempt to prevent bad schools from receiving aid, those regulations are not working. To succeed, policymakers need to clearly define what a bad school is and understand bad schools’ root causes. After proposing a definition (a school in which the aggregated matriculating students’ estimated return, including personal consumption, is negative), I argue that bad schools are generally caused by two problems — unprepared students and underperforming schools. Schools target unprepared students who will not benefit from enrolling to obtain government aid. Unprepared students enroll due to a combination of market failures and badly designed subsidies. Schools are also able to underperform compared to their peers because of the flawed design of subsidies and related market failures. Current government regulations somewhat target these problems, but struggle due to the lack of a coherent underlying philosophy and a failure to more directly target the underlying issues. After discussing how the design of subsidies contributes to the problems, I propose possible reforms, including adding several indicators of school performance to the Government’s Gainful Employment Rule, which currently has just one real proxy (debt-to-earnings).","PeriodicalId":316250,"journal":{"name":"SRPN: Social Economics (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130047061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andreas G. F. Hoepner, S. Dimatteo, Joe Schauld, Peiling Yi, Mirco Musolesi
Less than 100 firms worldwide are recognised by Bloomberg to report accurate greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, tens of thousands of people are talking and tweeting about climate change every day. How can this attention be converted into accurate action? We propose that sustainable data science might help, specifically that ‘emotional nowcasting’ of societal responses to sustainability related statements as expressed on Twitter. First, we differentiate between various types of corporate sustainability performance data and highlight the challenge that corporate greenwashing and a potential lack of financial independence of the assessor from the assessed poses for these data sets. Second, we adopt Lampos and Christianini’s (2012) emotional nowcasting with two case studies of an emotionally non-ambivalent context, the football matches England vs. Germany and England vs. USA at the 2010 world cup. These case studies serve as a proof of concept for emotional nowcasting. Finally, we discuss the potential for emotional nowcasting to mitigate the pandemic of greenwashing currently experienced in sustainability communication. We conclude that emotional nowcasting can serve as one test of greenwashing which is on its own though not necessarily sufficient.
{"title":"Tweeting about Sustainability: Can Emotional Nowcasting Discourage Greenwashing?","authors":"Andreas G. F. Hoepner, S. Dimatteo, Joe Schauld, Peiling Yi, Mirco Musolesi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2924088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2924088","url":null,"abstract":"Less than 100 firms worldwide are recognised by Bloomberg to report accurate greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, tens of thousands of people are talking and tweeting about climate change every day. How can this attention be converted into accurate action? We propose that sustainable data science might help, specifically that ‘emotional nowcasting’ of societal responses to sustainability related statements as expressed on Twitter. First, we differentiate between various types of corporate sustainability performance data and highlight the challenge that corporate greenwashing and a potential lack of financial independence of the assessor from the assessed poses for these data sets. Second, we adopt Lampos and Christianini’s (2012) emotional nowcasting with two case studies of an emotionally non-ambivalent context, the football matches England vs. Germany and England vs. USA at the 2010 world cup. These case studies serve as a proof of concept for emotional nowcasting. Finally, we discuss the potential for emotional nowcasting to mitigate the pandemic of greenwashing currently experienced in sustainability communication. We conclude that emotional nowcasting can serve as one test of greenwashing which is on its own though not necessarily sufficient.","PeriodicalId":316250,"journal":{"name":"SRPN: Social Economics (Topic)","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125741520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The essay examines the anthropological, legal, and semiotic implications of a new method for healthcare, precisely, “e-Health.” In many respects, telemedicine constitutes an extraordinary improvement that could solve many of the problems resulting from geographical distance between patients and doctors. Despite the benefits of providing medical assistance through an intensive use of e-Health, however, there are potentially serious pitfalls. These primarily stem from the apparent immediacy of the images transmitted and displayed by IT devices. Seeing the body of the remote patient synchronically represented on the desktop conveys the idea of an actual proximity. In other words, the visual representation could be (mis)taken for a real presence, as if the patient were “here and now” before the doctor’s eyes. However, geographical distance often includes a cultural remoteness between the two sides of the medical relationship. The patient’s body and its disease are not mere empirical data, but rather epitomes of a web of experiences; they are constituted by a multifaceted relationship with life environments. These relations move through experiential landscapes, projected across space and time, and are semiotically summarized and translated in the phenomenon of “disease,” the object of healthcare. Gaining knowledge of the “semiotic clouds” underlying the patient’s bodily conditions is a very difficult task which doctors usually accomplish through their cultural continuity with the universe of sense and experience lived by the people asking for their assistance. While telemedicine can annihilate physical distances through the immediacy of its remote images, unfortunately it is not equally efficacious in bridging cultural distances. On the contrary, its immediacy could lead to a false conviction that what the doctors see on the desktop is all that they need to understand about the patient’s conditions. This assumption could, however, lead to dangerous diagnostic mistakes due to the doctor’s belief that his environmental and cultural imagery is the same as that of the patient.The idea that images, taken in their iconic appearance, can convey a whole empirical reality is to be radically confuted, precisely to enable a positive exploitation of all the possibilities potentially offered by telemedicine. To illustrate the pitfalls encapsulated in the presupposition that seeing is synonymous to understanding, I trace a sort of brief history of the iconization of concepts. My cognitive journey begins with prehistorical cave paintings and unfolds to include contemporary comics. The path of the representative function through the ages demonstrates the relationship between the textual and figurative elements of communication, and at the same time, the human tendency (gradually increasing) to transform the semiotic/graphemic representational sequences into symbolic/conceptual synthetic images. This process accompanied the creation of bounded cultural circuits of com
{"title":"Body Topographies and Health Geographies: e-Health, Intercultural Medicine, Legal Chorology","authors":"M. Ricca","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2872632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2872632","url":null,"abstract":"The essay examines the anthropological, legal, and semiotic implications of a new method for healthcare, precisely, “e-Health.” In many respects, telemedicine constitutes an extraordinary improvement that could solve many of the problems resulting from geographical distance between patients and doctors. Despite the benefits of providing medical assistance through an intensive use of e-Health, however, there are potentially serious pitfalls. These primarily stem from the apparent immediacy of the images transmitted and displayed by IT devices. Seeing the body of the remote patient synchronically represented on the desktop conveys the idea of an actual proximity. In other words, the visual representation could be (mis)taken for a real presence, as if the patient were “here and now” before the doctor’s eyes. However, geographical distance often includes a cultural remoteness between the two sides of the medical relationship. The patient’s body and its disease are not mere empirical data, but rather epitomes of a web of experiences; they are constituted by a multifaceted relationship with life environments. These relations move through experiential landscapes, projected across space and time, and are semiotically summarized and translated in the phenomenon of “disease,” the object of healthcare. Gaining knowledge of the “semiotic clouds” underlying the patient’s bodily conditions is a very difficult task which doctors usually accomplish through their cultural continuity with the universe of sense and experience lived by the people asking for their assistance. While telemedicine can annihilate physical distances through the immediacy of its remote images, unfortunately it is not equally efficacious in bridging cultural distances. On the contrary, its immediacy could lead to a false conviction that what the doctors see on the desktop is all that they need to understand about the patient’s conditions. This assumption could, however, lead to dangerous diagnostic mistakes due to the doctor’s belief that his environmental and cultural imagery is the same as that of the patient.The idea that images, taken in their iconic appearance, can convey a whole empirical reality is to be radically confuted, precisely to enable a positive exploitation of all the possibilities potentially offered by telemedicine. To illustrate the pitfalls encapsulated in the presupposition that seeing is synonymous to understanding, I trace a sort of brief history of the iconization of concepts. My cognitive journey begins with prehistorical cave paintings and unfolds to include contemporary comics. The path of the representative function through the ages demonstrates the relationship between the textual and figurative elements of communication, and at the same time, the human tendency (gradually increasing) to transform the semiotic/graphemic representational sequences into symbolic/conceptual synthetic images. This process accompanied the creation of bounded cultural circuits of com","PeriodicalId":316250,"journal":{"name":"SRPN: Social Economics (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128460376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Welfare states are struggling with slow economic and job growth, fiscal pressures from rising benefit costs, demographic changes, and fears of structural economic transformation and job losses caused by information technology and computerization. This combination of factors has led some analysts to explore new ways to deliver welfare state benefits, or reconfigure them. But others speculate that existing welfare state policies have run their course, and cannot be easily repaired to cope with these multiple challenges, especially in the face of slower and less labor-intensive economic growth. Some advocates are calling for introducing a universal basic income (UBI), either as a floor to provide a basic level of subsistence, as a complement to existing welfare state policies, or in some cases as a replacement for the welfare state. Much of the current interest in UBI stems from a belief that technology is rapidly eliminating jobs faster than new ones can be created, and future job growth will be much lower. But the evidence on technological displacement seems too uncertain to justify major disruptions in the welfare state. Rather, the UBI debate might better focus on the over thirty-year strengthening of business’ economic power relations over labor.
{"title":"Universal Basic Income and the Welfare State","authors":"Richard M. McGahey","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2863954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2863954","url":null,"abstract":"Welfare states are struggling with slow economic and job growth, fiscal pressures from rising benefit costs, demographic changes, and fears of structural economic transformation and job losses caused by information technology and computerization. This combination of factors has led some analysts to explore new ways to deliver welfare state benefits, or reconfigure them. But others speculate that existing welfare state policies have run their course, and cannot be easily repaired to cope with these multiple challenges, especially in the face of slower and less labor-intensive economic growth. Some advocates are calling for introducing a universal basic income (UBI), either as a floor to provide a basic level of subsistence, as a complement to existing welfare state policies, or in some cases as a replacement for the welfare state. Much of the current interest in UBI stems from a belief that technology is rapidly eliminating jobs faster than new ones can be created, and future job growth will be much lower. But the evidence on technological displacement seems too uncertain to justify major disruptions in the welfare state. Rather, the UBI debate might better focus on the over thirty-year strengthening of business’ economic power relations over labor.","PeriodicalId":316250,"journal":{"name":"SRPN: Social Economics (Topic)","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126315974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social transfer programmes in developing countries are designed to contribute to poverty reduction by increasing the income of the poor in order to ensure minimal living standards. In addition, social transfers provide a safety net for the vulnerable, who are typically not covered by contributory social security. The question of how effective such programmes are in achieving these aims has been the subject of numerous impact evaluations. However, the optimal design of such programmes is still unclear. Even less is known about whether the adoption and implementation of transfer programmes is really driven by poverty and neediness or whether other factors also have an influence. To investigate these and other research questions, we have developed a new data set entitled Non‐Contributory Social Transfer Programmes (NSTP) in Developing Countries. One advantage of this data set is that it traces 186 non‐contributory programmes from 101 countries back in time and presents them in panel form for the period up until 2015. The second advantage is that it contains all the details regarding the various programmes’ designs as well as information on costs and coverage in a coded format and thus facilitates both comparative quantitative and in-depth qualitative analyses. While describing the data we discuss a number of examples of how the data set can be used to explore different issues related to social policies in developing countries. We present suggestive evidence that the adoption of social transfer programmes is not based only on pro‐poor motives, but rather that social policy choices differ between political regimes.
{"title":"Non-Contributory Social Transfer Programmes in Developing Countries: A New Data Set and Research Agenda","authors":"M. Dodlova, A. Giolbas, J. Lay","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2841159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2841159","url":null,"abstract":"Social transfer programmes in developing countries are designed to contribute to poverty reduction by increasing the income of the poor in order to ensure minimal living standards. In addition, social transfers provide a safety net for the vulnerable, who are typically not covered by contributory social security. The question of how effective such programmes are in achieving these aims has been the subject of numerous impact evaluations. However, the optimal design of such programmes is still unclear. Even less is known about whether the adoption and implementation of transfer programmes is really driven by poverty and neediness or whether other factors also have an influence. To investigate these and other research questions, we have developed a new data set entitled Non‐Contributory Social Transfer Programmes (NSTP) in Developing Countries. One advantage of this data set is that it traces 186 non‐contributory programmes from 101 countries back in time and presents them in panel form for the period up until 2015. The second advantage is that it contains all the details regarding the various programmes’ designs as well as information on costs and coverage in a coded format and thus facilitates both comparative quantitative and in-depth qualitative analyses. While describing the data we discuss a number of examples of how the data set can be used to explore different issues related to social policies in developing countries. We present suggestive evidence that the adoption of social transfer programmes is not based only on pro‐poor motives, but rather that social policy choices differ between political regimes.","PeriodicalId":316250,"journal":{"name":"SRPN: Social Economics (Topic)","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127830431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The minimum wage has increased in multiple states over the past three decades. Research has focused on effects on labor supply, but very little is known about how the minimum wage affects health, including children's health. We address this knowledge gap and provide an investigation focused on examining the impact of the effective state minimum wage rate on infant health. Using data on the entire universe of births in the US over 25 years, we find that an increase in the minimum wage is associated with an increase in birth weight driven by increased gestational length and fetal growth rate. The effect size is meaningful and plausible. We also find evidence of an increase in prenatal care use and a decline in smoking during pregnancy, which are some channels through which minimum wage can affect infant health. Labor market policies that enhance wages can thus affect wellbeing in broader ways, and such health effects should enter into any cost-benefit calculus of such policies.
{"title":"Effects of the Minimum Wage on Infant Health","authors":"G. Wehby, Dhaval M. Dave, R. Kaestner","doi":"10.3386/W22373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W22373","url":null,"abstract":"The minimum wage has increased in multiple states over the past three decades. Research has focused on effects on labor supply, but very little is known about how the minimum wage affects health, including children's health. We address this knowledge gap and provide an investigation focused on examining the impact of the effective state minimum wage rate on infant health. Using data on the entire universe of births in the US over 25 years, we find that an increase in the minimum wage is associated with an increase in birth weight driven by increased gestational length and fetal growth rate. The effect size is meaningful and plausible. We also find evidence of an increase in prenatal care use and a decline in smoking during pregnancy, which are some channels through which minimum wage can affect infant health. Labor market policies that enhance wages can thus affect wellbeing in broader ways, and such health effects should enter into any cost-benefit calculus of such policies.","PeriodicalId":316250,"journal":{"name":"SRPN: Social Economics (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123719591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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