Suchergebnisse

International development assistance for health generates an emergent social network in which policy makers in recipient countries are connected to numerous bilateral and multilateral aid agencies and to other aid recipients. Ties in this global network are channels for the transmission of knowledge, norms and influence in addition to material resources, and policy makers in centrally situated governments receive information faster and are exposed to a more diverse range of sources and perspectives. Since diversity of perspectives improves problem-solving capacity, the structural position of aid-receiving governments in the health aid network can affect the health outcomes that those governments are able to attain. We apply a recently developed Social Network Analysis measure to health aid data for 1990-2010 to investigate the relationship between country centrality in the health aid network and improvements in child health. A generalized method of moments (GMM) analysis indicates that, controlling for the volume of health aid and other factors, higher centrality in the health aid network is associated with better child survival rates in a sample of 110 low and middle income countries.

Following September 11, 2001, there was a challenge to the role of law as a regulator of military action and executive power. Government lawyers produced legal interpretations designed to authorize, legitimize, and facilitate interrogation tactics widely considered to be illegal. This raises a fundamental question: how should law respond to such flawed interpretation and its consequences, even if the ends might have seemed necessary or just? This Symposium examines deep tensions between competing visions of the rule of law and the role of lawyers. Spurred by a controversy over the selection of then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey as commencement speaker, the goal was to examine such basic and challenging questions. What is the optimal relationship among policy, legal interpretation, and ethics? What ethical norms should guide government lawyers? Attorney General Mukasey agreed to publish his commencement address as part of the Symposium. Participants were asked to read it and, if they wished, to use it as a touchstone for their analyses of the questions it raised.

Inclusive growth (IG) analysis involves analyzing the available data in a country to determine the best course of action for accelerating growth and or improving the distribution of the opportunities and benefits from the growth process. In economies in which international migration is a significant trend, that determination may be especially challenging. The international migration phenomenon can contribute to (or detract from) growth and its distribution through myriad number of complex and sometimes divergent channels, and these effects can change substantially over time. The ability to analyze these impacts, however, is often significantly handicapped by a lack of appropriate data. Moreover, because the migration decision is inherently a private decision made by households in the best interest of their welfare, determining the policy conclusions based on the results of inclusive growth analysis is often unclear. Governments are rightfully wary of interfering with the migration process. This paper examines the issue of international migration in inclusive growth. The aim is to provide the practitioners of inclusive growth diagnostics a useful framework for assessing the nature of the international migration phenomenon, and to highlight the key tools utilized in evaluating its current and potential impact on shared growth.

The ESA INTEGRAL satellite, launched in October 2002, is the first astrophysical satellite of the European Space Agency ESA with Czech participation. The results of the first 7 years of investigations of various scientific targets e.g. cataclysmic variables, blazars, X-ray sources, and GRBs with the ESA INTEGRAL satellite with Czech participation are briefly presented and discussed.

This report is on the Anti-Corruption Standards of the International Financial Institutions.

The regional economics and geography literature on urban population size has in recent years shown interesting conceptual and methodological contributions on the validity of Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law. Despite distinct modeling features, they express similar fundamental characteristics in an equilibrium situation. Zipf's law is formalized in a static form, while its associated dynamic process is articulated by Gibrat's Law. Thus, it is likely that both Zipf's Law and Gibrat's Law share a common root. Unfortunately, empirical investigations on the direct relationship between Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law are rather rare and not conclusive. The present paper aims to answer the question whether (a generalisation of) Gibrat's Law allows us to infer Zipf's Law, and vice versa? In our conceptual and applied framework, particular attention will be paid to the role of the mean and the variance of city population as key indicators for assessing the (non-) validity of the generalised Gibrat's Law. Our empirical experiments are based on a comparative analysis between the dynamics of the urban population of four countries with entirely mutually contrasting spatial-economic and geographic characteristics: Botswana, Germany, Hungary and Luxembourg. We arrive at the following results: if (i) the mean is independent of city size (first necessary condition of Gibrat's law) and (ii) the coefficient of the rank-size rule/Zipf's Law is different from one, then the variance is dependent on city size.

After the economic shock in 2009, the European Union (EU) changed its economic governance system considerably. The question is how social policies fare within this new system. Does stricter economic governance limit the sovereignty of states to deal with social risks? To answer this question, the article determines the nature of the EU's stricter economic governance package and explains how the interconnection between coordination mechanisms brings employment and social policy areas within the range of strengthened economic coordination. The article combines an analysis of new regulations with a study of the actual interaction between the EU and seven member states in 2011. It concludes that stricter economic governance gives the EU options to also strengthen employment and social policy coordination. Yet, the policy response of seven member states shows that there is leeway still in reacting to new EU demands.

Description based on: 78th (4-6 Feb. 1937) ; Minutes of the 1st-4th Sessions are confidential. ; Mode of access: Internet.