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During the last decade measures of overt and covert surveillance, information sharing and deterrence of the illegal movement of people has increased within and between states. Border security has come to dominate international relations, and increasingly to deflect the needs of asylum-seekers who search for a state that will offer them substantive protection under the Refugee Convention. Measures of internal and external deterrence diminish the reality of protection to genuine refugees as some of the most vulnerable individuals in the world today. Australia, as a country of relative geographic isolation, has not experienced the large-scale influxes of asylum-seekers seen in many parts of the world. Notwithstanding this, the Australian Government has in recent years implemented harsh policy and administrative measures directed at asylum-seekers with a substantial measure of public support. In August 2001, an incident involving 433 asylum-seekers was branded in popular discourse an 'asylum crisis'. This incident involved a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, which picked up survivors from a sinking boat who were making their way to Australian waters in order seek protection under the Refugee Convention. The Tampa was repelled by Australian security forces from disembarking the people they had picked up in distress on Australian soil. In this article, I explore the Tampa incident against the backdrop of refugee policy development from 1999. I argue that rather than responding to a crisis, the Australian government has generated the perception of a crisis in the Australian community. Implications of the Australian response to asylum-seekers are significant not only in the Asia/Pacific region, but further afield, as policy responses toward asylum-seekers by receiving states have converged in the recent past. – asylum ; Australia ; media

Children living in the occupied Palestinian territories are exposed to poverty as well as continued physical and psychological violence and human rights violations, leading to low levels of mental health compared to children in Western countries. We use test score and survey data on approximately 4,000 students in grades 5 to 9 in the West Bank to study the effect of poor mental health on cognitive development. We show that low cognitive test scores are significantly linked with measures of mental health such as the Birleson depression self-rating scale or the parent-rated Strengths and Difficulties (SDQ) scores also after controlling for a wide range of potential confounders. Using self-reported exposure to potentially traumatizing events related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as instruments for the prevalence of mental health problems, we find evidence for a causal link between mental health and cognitive development. Since our estimators identify the effect only for those whose exposure to potentially traumatizing events has impaired their mental health (non-resilient types), we find IV estimates that are substantially larger than OLS estimates. We conclude that physical and psychological violence related to political conflict harms children's mental health and thus impairs their cognitive development. Although in the long run, addressing the underlying causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is preferable, the results of this study call for short-term measures to improve the mental health and thus the cognitive ability of Palestinian children, such as increased availability of psychiatric counseling in schools and communities.

Focusing on the advanced political economies, this article critically reviews the recent scholarship on the evolution of top incomes over the past few decades. The existing literature shows that the determination of top incomes is complex, multifaceted and bound up with factors associated with both politics and economics. Technological change and globalization are vital sources of change in contemporary capitalism, but the continued diversity in top income shares across the advanced capitalist world suggests that these forces alone cannot account for the empirical patterns. Instead, there is compelling evidence that power and politics, including government policy, trade union and left party strength, institutions and financialization, all play a pivotal role in regulating distributive outcomes. It is argued that future research will require a plurality of methodological approaches in order to clarify the complex causal process that drives top-end income concentration.

The purpose of this study is to prove to what extent the influence that fiscal decentralization, local financial performance, local government expenditure, Locally Generated Recurring Revenues or Pendapatan Asli Daerah (PAD), Profit-Sharing Fund or Dana Bagi Hasil (DBH), General Allocation Fund or Dana Alokasi Umum (DAU), and Special Allocation Fund or Dana Alokasi Khusus (DAK) have on the level of society welfare. The objects of this research are Regencies and Municipalities in Java Island. The data used in this study are the secondary. The data on balance sheet and realization report of the regional revenues and expenditure budget (APBD) are from the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Indonesia. The data on the level of society welfare that is proxyed by the value of HDI is obtained from Bappenas and BPS of Central Java. This research uses time series data from 2012-2014 periods. The research method used is the research of causality with linear regression model. The result of the significance test shows that only one DAK variable can partially affect the HDI variable. Meanwhile those variables other than DAK partially or individually do not influence the HDI variable. The result of regression analysis shows that simultaneously such variables as Fiscal Decentralization, Regional Finance Performance, Local Government Expenditure, PAD, DAU, DAK and DBH have an influence on HDI in Regencies / Municipalities in Java Island.

China's high income and wealth inequality has long attracted the interest of policymakers and re-searchers, yet surprisingly little has been done since 2010 on inequality trends. Given China's evolving economic structure and the government's adoption of new policy tools in recent years, we revisit the latest data on Chinese inequality and assess the impacts of economic and policy changes on income distribution. After a quarter century of rapid, sustained increase, we see Chinese inequality plateauing and even diminishing. To verify this finding, we draw upon a range of data sources and measures of inequality. We examine inequality trends through decomposition by income source and population subgroups, and consider possible explanations such as policy shifts and structural trans-formation of the Chinese economy. The findings suggest that the narrative on Chinese inequality today should focus on clarifying the factors driving this apparent inequality turnaround.

This paper presents an empirical investigation about the effect of an increase in economic inequality on some aspects of the quality of a democracy. The main novelty of the paper lies in its methodology: it applies to a single country (instead of a pool of countries) - the UK - in a long run perspective. Using survey data, we select three questions and check whether an increase in inequality alters the answers to these questions, subject to other control variables. Another novelty is the use of several measures of inequality (rather than the usual GINI only) both for disentangling what happens in the different parts of the income distribution and for avoiding the dependence of the results on the choice of the indicator. The main finding is that a higher level of income inequality impacts negatively on citizens' satisfaction with democracy and positively on their political participation.

Political unrest, civil war, and - in extreme instances - genocide have contributed to the disappointing economic growth observed in many developing countries in recent decades, particularly in Africa. Sustained periods of violence also influence the distribution of income within a society; a cross-country analysis shows that income inequality increases as a result of violent conflicts, especially in the early post-war period. Immediate post-war efforts to address the social and economic disruption caused by conflict may help to counteract this trend.

Abstract. The paper explains that complexity to explain natural ecosystem is deterministic in relativism though its simplification towards human quantum takes its motivation from human rights and freedom of individual choice that gives stimuli for understanding the importance of provision of rights at individual level with some discussion on Gay Rights and political and economic empowerment of the individual without discrimination based on gender, ethnicity or religion.Keywords. Choice theory, Human quantum, Gay rights.JEL. E24, J24, O15.

Abstract. This paper examines the effect of poverty on corruption using annual unbalanced panel data analysis on 154 countries from 2000 to 2013. In the models, we use corruption measures from three alternative sources as a dependent variable while independent variables are five different poverty measures. In addition, this study has some control variables, such as foreign direct investment (FDI), trade openness, inflation rate and democracy level. According to empirical results, all poverty variables and inflation rates have statistically significant and positive effects on corruption, while FDI, trade openness and democracy levels have statistically significant and negative effects.Keywords. Poverty, Corruption, Inflation, FDI, Democracy.JEL. O15, K42, E31, D72.

The main aim of the paper is to show and examine how culture shapes human progress; in particular—how values determine economic development. The author describes culture as an axiological sphere including values, rules, customs, beliefs attitudes and worldviews that are prevalent in a given society. According to the humanistic perspective (called cultural turn), adequate values and other axiological determinants have a very positive impact on economic development of each society. The author analyses Mariano Grondona's twenty cultural factors: religion, trust in the individual, the moral imperative, two concepts of wealth, different views of competition, two notions of Justice, the value of work, the role of Heresy, education, the importance of utility, the lesser virtues, time focus, rationality, authority, worldview, life view, salvation from or in the world, two Utopians, nature of optimism, two visions of democracy. The main thesis of the Grondona's work is that economic development and well-being of civilization depends on choosing a progressive value system by a society. The author emphasizes that a further study must be conducted to understand and apply scientifically this model.

When does business support the expansion of social policy in the developing world? Existing work on managers' preferences has tended to concentrate on the developed world, where governments can credibly commit to policy, tax evasion is constrained, and mechanisms exist to hold the bureaucracy accountable for policy implementation. In this paper, I relax these assumptions, arguing that weak institutions create opportunities for some firms to shift costs onto others: making social policy more attractive. I argue that firms with political connections are uniquely positioned to benefit from subsidies and property rights protection, which decreases the cost of social policy, while firms with low visibility can evade taxes and free-ride off universalistic social policy. Such firms will support social policy even where institutions are poor. I test this argument using a survey of 666 firms in 10 Russian regions.