Suchergebnisse

In fields such as Sociology and Political Science, there have been, over the course of three decades, attempts to engage elected officials in "Evidence-Based Decision-Making". Evidence is generally conceived as "expert" advice provided to politicians. A question that has gained more centrality in recent years is "why do elected officials not trust expert opinion or technical evidence?" and the answer to this question has been sought in historical or general terms (e.g. Irwin 2006; Weiss et al. 2008; Kraft et al. 2015). Here I will propose an alternative question: "when politicians exhibit a lack of trust in expert advice, how is such skepticism publicly accounted for?" I will examine this question by utilizing a case study ethnographic approach to the City of Toronto's controversial decision to endorse the Hybrid alternative for the Gardiner expressway. By doing so, I intend to show that knowledge controversies are not inherently a form of deficiency on the part of the elected official – that they are ignorant to the implications of evidence – but rather the standard by which elected officials and appointed experts review and understand evidence can lead to very different (although both reasonably 'correct') conclusions.

How do politicians see constituencies? Various academics have furnished elected officials with effective evidence of activities on the assumption that "better" information inevitably leads to better decisions. I propose we consider official information as seeings. I discuss how constituencies are seen or made sense of in a municipal scrutiny committee meeting in England. Using the notion of "affordance," I will discuss not only how official evidence affords a perspective but also how that perspective is not reflective of the full spectrum of evidence that decision-makers may rely on to perform effectively.

The monetary approach to the balance of payments accords a very important role to monetary variables in the determination of reserve flows; (see Johnson, 1977). It postulates that the reserve flows will increase (decrease) if the residents of a country desire to accumulate (deplete) money balances faster than the rate at which the money stock is growing (diminishing) as a consequence of purely domestic influences. In other words, reserve flows are the mechanism through which money demand and supply are brought into equilibrium, and the model predicts in particular that these flows are negatively related to the rate of domestic credit expansion. A most important policy implication of this approach is that the monetary authorities can influence the level of foreign reserves by acting upon the composition of the monetary base through deliberate and meaningful credit policies. Devaluation of the currency, on the other hand, will have little or no effect on the flow of these reserves; (see Frenkel and Johnson, 1976, Chapter 1).

PurposeExtreme natural hazard events in the Caribbean continue to result in major adverse consequences. Studies of disaster experiences have identified operational deficiencies that limited the effectiveness of disaster management policies in live emergencies. This paper reports on a study of the implementation characteristics of specific public disaster risk reduction and response measures in two Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS), Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada, which may impact the success of these measures. The purpose of this paper is to examine these characteristics and their potential impacts.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected data on specific aspects of disaster risk management (DRM) policy implementation from policy documents and interviews with public DRM agencies. A sample of business entities also provided data on their interactions with public risk management measures. The data focussed on operational aspects of implementation to identify likely impacts on hazard event outcomes.FindingsThe study identifies implementation deficiencies that may hamper achievement of risk reduction objectives and limit the effectiveness of emergency response.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings may be instructive for other Caribbean SIDS which share similar economic and social characteristics, natural hazard exposures and potential catastrophic outcomes.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest tactical areas of focus to enhance the operationalisation of policy.Social implicationsImproved operational effectiveness will support the efforts of Caribbean SIDS to reduce the scale of adverse outcomes on people and property.Originality/valueThe findings of this study broaden the scope of Caribbean disaster studies to provide an insight into operational weaknesses that may be recognised and addressed prior to hazard events.

Nascent entrepreneurship is important for economic growth and development because it often involves new firm creation and innovation. Besides the perceived ability to become an entrepreneur, determined by one's human, social and financial capital, individuals must have a willingness to become self-employed as exhibited by their entrepreneurial motivation. A distinction is made between opportunity or "pull" entrepreneurs who set up a business to take advantage of an identified opportunity and necessity or "push" entrepreneurs who are forced to start a business to escape unemployment or poverty. This paper investigates nascent entrepreneurship in a selection of Small Island Developing States of the Caribbean (SIDS), along with differences between nascent opportunity and necessity entrepreneurs. We use the 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Adult Population Survey (APS) for Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Probit regressions are used and comparisons between opportunity and necessity driven entrepreneurs are made. The findings indicate that both socio-economic and perceptual factors affect nascent entrepreneurship and do so differently among opportunity and necessity entrepreneurs with important policy implications for encouraging new firm creation.

AbstractSmall Island Developing States (SIDS) are characterized by high levels of biodiversity that are under threat. Simultaneously, the tourism sector plays a key role in many of these economies. In this paper, the Hausman-Taylor estimator is used to investigate a tourism demand function in SIDS in which marine and terrestrial biodiversity play a key role, in addition to the traditional economic and price variables. This estimator allows for both the presence of time-invariant variables, a standard feature of environmental data, and the existence of endogenous covariates. Levels of biodiversity are found to have a significant influence on tourism in SIDS and, in particular, a test for redundant variables shows that the biodiversity variables are jointly significant. This justifies their inclusion in a tourism demand function, over and above the conventional economic factors, and points to the importance of national and international policy in protecting the biodiversity of SIDS.

Introduction -- Individual memory and forgetting -- Defining collective memory -- Three-in-one model of memory consolidation -- Buffering and attention -- Selection and relationality -- Generalization and specialization -- Influence of the consolidating entity -- Collective retrograde amnesia -- Persistence of consolidated collective memory -- Loss of unconsolidated collective memory -- Conclusions