Suchergebnisse

Future growth in employee benefits has a significant linkage with the long‐range actuarial position of Social Security (OASDI). Earlier research by this author explained the sensitivity of the projected long‐range OASDI deficit to the assumption about the rate of growth of fringe benefits. 1 This paper summarizes, updates, and extends the discussion of the implications of fringe‐benefit growth to include distributional effects

Although a long tradition of research shows that the correlation between economic growth and well-being is imperfect, the sociology of development continues to focus on economic growth. In this paper we take a first step toward a sociology of social development by defining which indicators other than economic growth best capture different facets of citizen well-being, theorizing what social phenomena explain the variance in these indicators, and specifying causal mechanisms that connect the two. We show quantitatively that one main predictor of social development is basic sanitation, and that a key correlate of poor sanitation is corruption in law enforcement. We use direct measures of experiences with corruption, rather than subjective measures of perceptions of corruption. We then draw on qualitative data to suggest why and how corruption in the judiciary enables poor sanitation. Where the state does not efficiently deliver municipal services, intermediaries facilitate illegal access to services, and can only perform their work if law enforcement can be bribed. But by providing access to some citizens and not all, these intermediaries fragment citizens' interests. Politics develops around lines of patronage rather than programmatic policies, and those who do not have the material resources to bypass the poor municipal systems, or the political resources to participate in patronage, are left without access to basic sanitation.

The study deals with the relationship between social protection for workers and economic growth in twenty-five sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries for 2005 and 2006. The regression estimation (using instrumental variables and random effects techniques) includes the logarithm of real GDP, the logarithm of the gross capital formation GCF to GDP (GCF/GDP) ratio, the logarithm of population, the logarithm of the export/GDP ratio, tertiary school enrollment (SET), and social protection rating (SPR). The results show the coefficient of the proxy for capital (GCF/GDP) is insignificant, but the labor variable was shown to have a positive effect on economic growth. Human capital entered the model as tertiary school enrollment (SET). However, the coefficient of SET was not statistically significant, implying that human capital played no part in economic growth in SSA in 2005 and 2006. The SPR variable implies that labor seeks protection and employers resist granting it. Both labor and employers lobby the government and the level of protection achieved is a Nash equilibrium outcome. The income gains to workers if they win cause efficiency losses for society. The SPR variable is positive and statistically significant, indicating that the efficiency losses are less than the income gains by workers. Government promotion of labor, exports, and social protection policies can increase productivity and economic growth.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 28th international conference on the Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2008), organized under the auspices of the Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS). This year's conference attracted 117 submissions. Each submission was reviewed by at least three independent referees. The final selection of the papers making up the programme was done through an electronic discussion on EasyChair, spanning two weeks, without a physical meeting of the Programme Committee (PC). All PC members participated actively in the discussion. We have five invited speakers this year: Hubert Comon-Lundh, Uriel Feige, Erich Graedel, Simon Peyton Jones and Leslie Valiant. We thank them for having readily accepted our invitation to talk at the conference and for providing abstracts (and even full papers) for the proceedings. We thank all the reviewers and PC members, without whose dedicated effort the conference would not be possible. We thank the Organizing Committee for making the arrangements for the conference. This year, the conference is being held at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, as part of its centenary year celebrations. It is a great honour and privilege for the conference to be recognized and associated with the institute on this occasion. Finally, this year we have taken a decisive step in democratizing the conference by moving away from commercial publishers. Instead, we will be hosting the proceedings online, electronically, via the Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server (DROPS). A complete copy of the proceedings will also be hosted on the FSTTCS website (www.fsttcs.org). The copyrights to the papers will reside not with the publishers but with the respective authors. The copyright is now governed by the Creative Commons attribution NC-ND. We do hope this direction will be sustained in the future.

The author presents the results of studies of the factors of the participation of the Ukrainian citizens in voluntary associations as the cooperative practice. The hypothesis on the effect of interpersonal faith as an indicator of the social capital has not been confirmed. A partial influence of the ideological and regional distinctions, education, the interest in policy, and the political identification is fixed. However, the greatest and most stable effect on cooperative practices is produced by the active habits of leisure, in particular, the sporting ones.