The reaction of CEPAL during the Chilean authoritarian regime: repression, institutional constraints, and evaluations of the economic model

Rad je kulturnoantropološka analiza suodnosa velikih infrastrukturnih projekata u Gorskom kotaru s populacijom i krajolikom. Primjenom kvalitativnog etnografskog metodološkog okvira, analiziraju se prakse, naracije, sjećanja, mašta i osjećaji u kontekstu tri infrastrukturna projekta: Lujzinska cesta, građena od 1803. do 1811., koja spaja gradove Rijeku i Karlovac; brana u Lokvama s akumulacijskim jezerom, građena od 1952. do 1955; i autocesta Rijeka – Zagreb, građena od 1970. do 2008. godine. U skladu sa suvremenim kulturnoantropološkim pristupima društveno-kulturnog oblikovanja prostora te kroz povijesni i političko-ekonomski kontekst, cilj je pokazati transformaciju prostora pod utjecajem infrastrukture. Istraživanje doprinosi razumijevanju značenja infrastrukture za društvo te povezuje tehnološki, kulturni i društveni segment infrastrukturnih projekata u ruralnom kraju.

Modern Dictatorships and Their Art Worlds

During the period 1997-2000 a technical assistance project to build capacity for community-based health promotion was implemented in seven cities and one province in China. The technical assistance project formed part of a much larger World Bank supported program to improve disease prevention capabilities in China, commonly known as Health VII. The technical assistance project was funded by the Australian Agency for International Development. It was designed to develop capacity within the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the cities and province in the management of community-based health promotion projects, as well as supporting institutional development and public health policy reform. There are some relatively unique features of this technical assistance which helped shape its implementation and impact. It sought to provide the Chinese MOH and the cities and province with an introduction to comprehensive health promotion strategies, in contrast to the more limited information, education and communication strategies. The project was provided on a continuing basis over 3 years through a single institution, rather than as a series of ad hoc consultancies by individuals. Teaching and learning processes were developmental, leading progressively to a greater degree of local Chinese input and management to ensure sustainability and maintenance of technical support for the project. Based on this experience, this paper presents a model for capacity building projects of this type. It describes the education, training and planning activities that were the key inputs to the project, as well as the limited available evidence on the impact of the project. It describes how the project evolved over time to meet the changing needs of the participants, specifically how the content of the project shifted from a risk-factor orientation to a settings-based focus, and the delivery of the project moved from an expert-led approach to a more participatory, problem based learning approach. In terms of impact, marked differences before and after the implementation of the training activities were identified in key areas for reform, in addition to the self reported positive change in knowledge, and a high level of participant satisfaction. Key lessons are summarized. Technical assistance projects of this kind benefit from continuity and a high level of coordination, the provision of culturally and linguistically appropriate teaching, and a clear understanding of the need to match workforce development with organizational/institutional development.

(1985). Authoritarianism, democracy and the transition to socialism. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 5-27.

9 - The Foreign Advisor: Roles and Experiences

Проаналізовано шляхи проведення реформ адміністративно-територіального устрою в країнах ЄС (Німеччині, Румунії, Данії, Австрії, Естонії, Грузії, Латвії) у площині застосування в Україні успішного досвіду. Досліджено аспекти співпраці з проектами міжнародної технічної допомоги і міжнародними організаціями. Проаналізовано кар’єрну службу в органах місцевого самоврядування у ФРН.

In contrast to typical National Science Foundation program evaluations, the Utah State Math Science Partnership‐Research, Evaluation and Technical Assistance Project (MSP‐RETA) provided technical assistance (TA) in two forms: direct TA for up to 10 projects a year, and professional development sessions for a larger number of project staff. Not surprisingly, the two forms led to different results in terms of involvement and use. Most of those who participated in the direct technical assistance activities were positively affected and sought additional support and development. Project staff who were not included in the direct assistance efforts were more likely to report limited involvement and use. © Wiley Periodicals Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

Richard P. Francisco Center for Educational Policy and Management University of Oregon Eugene, Oregon U rban schools are plagued by difficulties and problems of all kinds. That point has been well documented in education and educational research. The article by Bell that appeared earlier in this journal focused on some of the unique properties of the urban school organization that create some of the problems and hinder those schools from accomplishing their main mission: the education of urban youth. If urban schools are to overcome the problems and progress to their mission, they are going to need considerable assistance. In 1975, the National Institute of Education (NIE) awarded a joint contract to the Center for Educational Policy and Management (University of Oregon) and the Center for New Schools (Chicago, Illinois) for a project to study the problems facing urban schools and to provide the schools assistance to solve some of their more pressing problems. The nation-wide project became known as the Documentation and Technical Assistance project in Urban Schools (DTA). DTA's charge was twofold. The first part studied and documented the problem-solving activities of nine model urban school communities throughout the country. The second part of the charge, technical assistance (TA), conveyed some of the documented information of the nine model school communities to other urban school communities and helped the other communities to use and tailor the conveyed information for problem solving in their setting. Simply, the DTA was a project that used knowledge about successful problem solving in one school to help another school develop its own successful capacity for problem solving. The purpose of this article is to discuss the ways that we in the DTA used process consultation to provide TA to a west coast urban school community. In doing that, we provide background information about our west coast urban setting, speak specifically about the helpful and unhelpful effects of our TA, and share our findings about the modes of process consultation that best suit urban settings.

Social, political, and economic contexts: Keys in educating true public relations professionals

Novel AGREOR Integration for Enhancing Gas Loading Saving Energy Maximizing Oil Production and CO2 Emissions Mitigation

Modeling Residential Adoption of Solar Energy in the Arabian Gulf Region

Modeling the diffusion of residential solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in their social, political and economic context is crucial to help policymakers assess which policies may best support adoption. Current models of renewable energy adoption [1, 2, 3, 4] assume regulatory and incentive frameworks that do not apply to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, where energy tariffs are strongly subsidized, tax credits are not viable due to the lack of personal income tax, and support for distributed generation through grid access policies such as the Feed-in Tariff and Net Metering is not available. The goal of this study is to address this gap by analyzing the impact of home ownership, the falling cost of PV, the reduction of electricity subsidies, the introduction of a carbon tax, and the diffusion of innovation on the residential adoption of solar PV technologies in Qatar. Our objective is to develop a social simulation platform that helps policymakers and other stakeholders assess the optimal regulatory framework to promote the adoption of building-integrated PV systems in Qatar and other countries which share a similar geographical, political, economic and social context. We present an agent-based model for residential adoption of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the state of Qatar as a case study for the Arabian Gulf Region. Agents in the model are defined as households. Each household corresponds to a dwelling in the Al Rayyan municipality of Qatar that is either owned (by citizens) or rented (by expatriates). The objective of the model is to evaluate PV adoption in terms of these two household cohorts under diverse regulatory and incentive scenarios. In the present state of affairs, only Qatari citizens can own property in Al Rayyan and Qatari households are exempt from electricity charges. Therefore, home owners are Qataris who have free electricity, while renters tend to be expatriates who pay for electricity. The more competitive the cost of electricity from residential PV systems is as compared to the electricity tariff, the more likely are household agents to adopt solar PV. Several factors can contribute to make the cost of electricity from residential PV more competitive, including: the falling cost of PV due to increasing technology maturity the reduction of subsidies for electricity and the gas used for electricity production the introduction of a carbon tax the extension of the electricity tariff to Qatari households the neighborhood effect, which implements peer effects on the diffusion of PV innovation as a percent discount on residential PV cost. We compute solar PV adoption as resource limited exponential growth. Households adopt solar PV with a probability established by the logistic function in (1), where L is a scaling constant, e is the natural logarithm, x is the cost of electricity from residential PV systems and k is a parameter which determines the slope of the adoption curve. We set L = 1 to normalize the output of the logistic function as a probability. For the k parameter, we select a value (k = 0.59) that in the null-hypothesis scenario yields a PV market share that is equivalent to the innovator cohort of adopters in Rogers' adoption/innovation curve (2.5%) [5]. According to Rogers, “innovators are active information seekers about new ideas”, who are close to the scientific community and other innovators, have financial liquidity, and are willing to take high risks to pursue their vision. The rationale for restricting adopters to innovators in the null hypothesis scenario is that only eco-warriors with financial means and high technology awareness would adopt in the absence of incentives, with high PV costs.(1) f (x) = L / 1 + e^(-k*x) At each simulation tick, each household agent that has not adopted yet, is presented with the opportunity of doing so. Adoption is determined randomly according to the output of the logistic function in (2): a random probability p is generated, and if the probability of adoption as calculated by (1) is greater or equal to p, adoption occurs. We analyze three alternative simulation scenarios: Scenario 1 – Business as usual: no measures are introduced to incentivize PV, the neighborhood effect is active, and the price of PV falls due to increasing technology maturity Scenario 2 – 40% of gas and electricity subsidies are curtailed, the neighborhood effect is active, a carbon tax of $8/tCO2e is introduced, the price of PV falls due to increasing technology maturity, and citizens continue to have free electricity Scenario 3 – same as scenario 2, with the variant that citizens to pay for electricity. As baseline, we establish a null hypothesis scenario, which is the same as scenario 1, except that the price of PV does not fall due to increasing technology maturity. Details of the simulation results are provided in the attached file to this submission. Our study suggests that Qatar's residential PV adoption is strongly promoted by the falling cost of PV and can be further facilitated through the reduction of electricity subsidies and the extension of the electricity tariff to Qatari households, which are currently exempt. The introduction of a carbon tax can also play a role in accelerating residential PV adoption, if above $8 per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. The ensuing PV adoption rates would help facilitate the national targets of 2% electricity production from solar energy by 2020 and 20% by 2030.

This is the second of two papers which examine the contribution that health psychology can make to the problem of hypertension in South Africa. Essentially hypertension is a chronic medical condition that leads to increased susceptibility to life-threatening diseases. In this paper the author summarizes data on its high prevalence in the various South African race groups, and on the low rates of diagnosis and treatment. Research on the possibility of genetic susceptibility of blacks to hypertension is reviewed. An analysis of the political, economic and social context, and the state of the health care infrastructure in South Africa is presented in order to evaluate the potential for establishing on a large scale educational and cognitive and behavioural programmes of the type described in the first paper. Although the outlook is pessimistic, a number of initiatives that can be taken by psychologists in the teaching, research and political spheres are suggested.

This article presents the Liwa Oasis as a hydrosocial territory. It is defined by its natural resource, social, economic, and political context and we show how these manifest in policy and practice. The article identifies these components through analysis of the political economy of water management and agricultural production systems. Two distinct hydrosocial periods are defined: from independence in 1971 to the formation of agencies with water sustainability remits in 2006, and then from 2010 to the present, when subsidy regimes incentivized changes to cropping in existing agricultural production systems. The changes between these periods reflect alterations in the hydrosocial cycle stemming from natural resource degradation and from how agricultural policy responded to it, while still meeting social stability and food security objectives. In Liwa, water management and agricultural production regimes reflect the distributive nature of the state, in that agricultural subsidies and payments are a significant source of supplementary income for UAE citizens. The current hydrosocial cycle leads to major groundwater resource degradation, which is beginning to pose a major challenge. This disruption is at the heart of the hydrosocial dialectic playing out now in Liwa: resource degradation and depletion will ultimately require new patterns of resource utilization. Arriving at new practices will require new laws, policies and modes of governance, which will alter the political, social, and economic context.

ABSTRACT: This article studies how differences in the quality of market-supporting institutions across countries affect the foreign direct investment (FDI) level. This is particularly relevant for developing countries where such institutions are generally weak, while for the same countries, attracting foreign investment from multinationals are so much more critical for their economic development. The article fills the gaps in the literature by considering home country institutions in addition to those of host country, and different dimensions of institutions. These include rule of law, property rights and corruption; size and effectiveness of government; efficiency and quality of regulatory bodies; and international openness of markets. Additionally, not only distances but also directional differences in institutional quality are examined. In the analyses, the standard gravity model is expanded with controls for other distance measures from the literature such as cultural, historical, political and socio-economic distances, in addition to measures of institutional quality, resulting in 5,400 bilateral data points. Analyses show the importance of high-quality institutions that support the markets in both host and home countries, but more importantly at home. While distance in institutional quality reduces the investments, multinationals surprisingly tend to invest more in host countries with underdeveloped market-supporting institutions. This implies that multinationals are not necessarily seeking host countries with stronger rule of law, protection of property rights, etc. Other motivations for FDI such as resource and efficiency seeking seem to supersede the need for market-supporting institutions at hosts. The results also highlight challenges related to the emerging-country multinationals' ability to operate under a more developed formal institutional environment at hosts without the support of informal institutions they are accustomed to at home. Based on these results, policy makers in developing countries should support their domestic firms' internationalization efforts in countries with similar or lower institutional development, when they are considering foreign investment locations. This said, considering rising trade barriers in developed economies, to access their larger markets, policy makers in developing countries should continue with their efforts to improve the quality of their institutions to reduce the institutional distance with developed countries, so that their multinationals can be competitive without governments' active involvement.