Dual Mandate Research Articles

Antinomies of the gig economy: The annihilation of space by time or the annihilation of time by space?

AbstractThis paper concerns migrants in Sweden working in various types of on and offline gig work. It explores how the temporal and spatial flexibility afforded to gig customers is predicated on temporal and spatial inflexibility for workers. The argument moves discussions beyond relational space by promoting a more fully dialectical view of space that understands it as simultaneously relational, relative, and absolute. Without such a view of space—which understands that space is not always open and fluid but just as often closed and fixed—it is impossible to understand the specific relations of labour that structure gig work, particularly offline gig work in such ways as to provide maximal flexibility for customers. This paper shows that the Marxian adage concerning how, in capitalism, space is annihilated by time, does not always hold. For workers doing cleaning and delivery gig work, the converse is oftentimes truer: time is annihilated by space. Gig workers—and even more so migrant gig workers crowded in the above‐mentioned industries—experience the annihilation of time by space through the dual mandate that they must be available “just‐in‐time” and “just‐in‐place” to produce the spatiotemporal flexibility upon which the gig companies base their model and their success.

An ecological reorientation of the Codex Alimentarius Commission could help transform food systems.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex) has a substantial influence over the structure and operation of food systems by setting international standards that affect the composition, structure and labelling of food. Despite the dual mandates of Codex to protect public health and ensure fair practices in food trade, food systems are increasingly unhealthy and unsustainable. An ecological reorientation of the decision-making elements that influence how Codex sets food standards-particularly mandates, governance and risk assessment-could help transform food systems towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The US Food and Drug Administration Dual Mandate for Rapid Drug Review and Equity.

The US Food and Drug Administration Dual Mandate for Rapid Drug Review and Equity.

When Social Workers Are Given Dual Mandates: Child Maintenance and the Complexities of Family Situations in the Ghanaian Child Protection System

Abstract Custodial parents, often single mothers, face challenges regarding child maintenance, including a lack of financial commitments from non-custodial parents for their children’s welfare. The evidence suggests that there is a strong link between child maintenance and poverty as well as other family violence issues. In addition to their primary child and family protection duties, child protection practitioners in Ghana have a mandate to assess child maintenance concerns. This dual responsibility may have the advantage of promoting holistic child and family practices, but it could also negatively impact families when practitioners overly focus on one responsibility at the expense of the other. We sought to understand and show whether families who reported child maintenance concerns to the Department of Social Welfare and Community Development in Ghana experienced challenges beyond child maintenance and whether practitioners identified these primary protection concerns in their assessments. Findings from qualitative in-depth interviews with seventeen parents show that these families experienced domestic violence, marital conflict and child abuse and neglect beyond the scope of a standard child maintenance case. The findings highlight the importance of child protection workers conducting comprehensive family assessments to resolve ‘hidden’ family difficulties when establishing child maintenance arrangements.

Fed’s Dual Mandate: Maximum Employment and Price Stability

Abstract In this paper, we look at the dual mandate (price stability and maximum employment) as policy objectives of the central bank (the Fed) and we test mostly the effectiveness of policy instruments on these two ultimate objectives. We start from 1978 to 2008 and then, from 2009 (the year of major changes in monetary policy) to present to measure statistically the capability of the Fed to improve the economy’s cycle and citizens’ wellbeing. OLS and VAR models and at the end some measurements of correlations and causality are used to determine the effectiveness of the policy tools on the two objective variables, price and unemployment. The empirical results show that prices have been drastically affected (inflation and bubbles) by this expansionary monetary policy for so many years, but employment has not been improved. In general, our public policies have generated a social cost that exceeds the social benefits. JEL classification numbers: E52, E58, E4, E44, C52, D6. Keywords: Monetary Policy, Central Banks and Their Policies, Money and Interest Rates, Financial Markets and the Macro-economy, Model Evaluation and Testing, Social Welfare.

Research alignment in the U.S. national park system: Impact of transformative science policy on the supply and demand for scientific knowledge for protected area management

The US National Park System encompasses diverse environmental and tourism management regimes, together governed by the 1916 Organic Act and its dual mandate of conservation and provision of public enjoyment. However, with the introduction of transformative science policy in the 2000's, the mission scope has since expanded to promote overarching science-based objectives. Yet despite this paradigm shift instituting “science for parks, parks for science”, there is scant research exploring the impact of the National Park Science Policy on the provision of knowledge. We address this gap by developing a spatiotemporal framework for evaluating research alignment, here operationalized via quantifiable measures of supply and demand for scientific knowledge. Specifically, we apply a machine learning algorithm (Latent Dirichlet analysis) to a comprehensive park-specific text corpus (combining official needs statements -i.e. demand- and scientific research metadata -i.e. supply-) to define a joint topic space, which thereby facilitates quantifying the direction and degree of alignment at multiple levels. Results indicate an overall robust degree of research alignment, with misaligned topics tending to be over-researched (as opposed to over-demanded), which may be favorable to many parks, but is inefficient from the park system perspective. Results further indicate that the transformative science policy exacerbated the misalignment in mandated research domains. In light of these results, we argue for improved decision support mechanisms to achieve more timely alignment of research efforts towards distinctive park needs, thereby fostering convergent knowledge co-production and leveraging the full value of National Parks as living laboratories.

The Deflationary Bias of the ZLB and the FED's Strategic Response

AbstractThe paper shows, in a simple analytical framework, the existence of a deflationary bias in an economy with a low natural rate of interest, a zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint on nominal interest rates and a discretionary Central Bank (CB) with an inflation mandate. The presence of the ZLB prevents the CB from offsetting negative shocks to inflation whereas it can offset positive shocks. This asymmetry pushes average inflation below the target which in turn drags down inflation expectations and reinforces the likelihood of hitting the ZLB. We show that this deflationary bias is particularly relevant for a CB with a symmetric dual mandate (i.e., minimizing deviations from inflation and employment), especially when facing demand shocks. But a strict inflation targeter cannot escape the suboptimal deflationary equilibrium either. The deflationary bias can be mitigated by targeting “shortfalls” instead of “deviations” from maximum employment and/or using flexible average inflation targeting. However, changing monetary policy strategy risks inflation expectations becoming entrenched above the target if the natural interest rate increases.

Coping with crisis: The Peruvian state-owned fishing enterprise Pesca Perú, 1973–1998

This article examines why and how states use the legal and organisational construction of the state-owned enterprise (SOE) to deal with environmental and social crises. In 1973, in response to a drastic collapse in the world’s largest fishery, the Peruvian state nationalised its anchoveta fishing fleet and factories while hastily creating Pesca Perú, an SOE given a monopoly on industrial catch and exploitation of the resource. Pesca Perú struggled with a dual mandate and governments with widely varying ideas of how the Peruvian economy should be organised. In the early 1980s the enterprise lost its production monopoly due as much to environmental factors as to political decisions. It was eventually privatised in the 1990s. While generally regarded as a failed business, Pesca Perú was a useful tool for a state with limited resources to pursue governance and developmental objectives.

Special designations and the US Food and Drug Administration's "dual mandate".

Special designations and the US Food and Drug Administration's "dual mandate".

Multiplicity of tools for antitrust and consumer protection in digital markets: the Italian experience and the road ahead

ABSTRACT This article discusses the role of national competition authorities in the digital sector in the lights of new legislative initiatives in Europe. It argues that the availability of multiple tools offers new opportunities to balance objectives such as flexibility, harmonization, timeliness and legal certainty, helping to enhance effectiveness. Further, it discusses the recent enforcement experience of the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), which has the dual mandate to enforce competition and consumer protection rules in Italy. The AGCM has used antitrust tools to empower consumers with choice, through a number of landmark digital cases on issues related to access and visibility in online marketplaces, refusal to deal and interoperability, data value and portability, privacy and advertising, and unfair negotiations. The AGCM has used consumer protection tools to guide consumers in the selection process, concluding numerous digital investigations on online architecture, misleading information, dark patterns and choice pressure.

Tight labor markets are essential to reducing racial disparities in the labor market and within the purview of the Fed's dual mandate

Tight labor markets are essential to reducing racial disparities in the labor market and within the purview of the Fed's dual mandate

Assessing the impacts of recreation on the spatial and temporal activity of mammals in an isolated alpine protected area.

The management objectives of many protected areas must meet the dual mandates of protecting biodiversity while providing recreational opportunities. It is difficult to balance these mandates because it takes considerable effort to monitor both the status of biodiversity and impacts of recreation. Using detections from 45 camera traps deployed between July 2019 and September 2021, we assessed the potential impacts of recreation on spatial and temporal activity for 8 medium- and large-bodied terrestrial mammals in an isolated alpine protected area: Cathedral Provincial Park, British Columbia, Canada. We hypothesised that some wildlife perceive a level of threat from people, such that they avoid 'risky times' or 'risky places' associated with human activity. Other species may benefit from associating with people, be it through access to anthropogenic resource subsidies or filtering of competitors/predators that are more human-averse (i.e., human shield hypothesis). Specifically, we predicted that large carnivores would show the greatest segregation from people while mesocarnivores and ungulates would associate spatially with people. We found spatial co-occurrence between ungulates and recreation, consistent with the human shield hypothesis, but did not see the predicted negative relationship between larger carnivores and humans, except for coyotes (Canis latrans). Temporally, all species other than cougars (Puma concolor) had diel activity patterns significantly different from that of recreationists, suggesting potential displacement in the temporal niche. Wolves (Canis lupus) and mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) showed shifts in temporal activity away from people on recreation trails relative to off-trail areas, providing further evidence of potential displacement. Our results highlight the importance of monitoring spatial and temporal interactions between recreation activities and wildlife communities, in order to ensure the effectiveness of protected areas in an era of increasing human impacts.

Can a dual mandate be a model for the global governance of AI?

Can a dual mandate be a model for the global governance of AI?

The Origins of Monetary Policy Disagreement: The Role of Supply and Demand Shocks

Abstract We investigate how dissent in the FOMC is affected by structural macroeconomic shocks obtained using a medium-scale DSGE model. We find that dissent is less (more) frequent when demand (supply) shocks are the predominant source of inflation fluctuations. In addition, supply shocks are found to raise private sector forecasting uncertainty about the path of interest rates. Since supply shocks impose a trade-off between inflation and output stabilization while demand shocks do not, our findings are consistent with heterogeneous preferences over the dual mandate among FOMC members as a driver of policy disagreement.

Dialectics as a tool for navigating the mandates of scholarship and community impact: learning from reflexive practices

ABSTRACT Universities are increasingly demanding that faculty fulfill multiple mandates including producing scholarly published work and demonstrating community impact. As such, faculty experience the challenges of community involvement and impact, while also ensuring that community involvement leads to published research. This manuscript discusses a participatory action research (PAR) project that failed to achieve its initial outcome goal of community impact. Heeding the advice of previous scholars, we attempt to ‘work the ruins’ of failure, to stimulate discussion that may assist other researchers in efforts to fulfill this dual mandate of publication and community impact. Rooted in dialectics, and based on our own reflexive practice, and interviews with program staff and participants, we suggest three dialectics for consideration for future scholarship: 1) Community led AND researcher led; 2) Failure AND success; and 3) Messy AND publishable.

Developments in big data for park management: a review of mobile phone location data for visitor use management

Land managers and public agencies strive to manage parks and protected areas (PPAs) for a balance between the preservation of ecological health and the visitor experience. To fulfill this dual mandate, an understanding of recreationist visitation patterns in PPAs is vital. Mobile phones, passively capturing location data while in use throughout our daily lives, represent a significant opportunity for PPA managers and researchers. This study conducts a scoping literature review to understand how mobile phone location data has been used in PPA research to measure visitation, spatial patterns of use, and visitor experiences in PPAs. The body of research included in this review provides methodological guidance and highlights room for growth in our understanding of the use, limitations, and analysis of mobile phone location data. This scoping literature review presents existing applications of mobile phone location data in PPA research, limitations identified, and opportunities for future research.

Revisiting Okun's law in South Korea: Asymmetries, crises, and structural changes

How well does Okun's law fit the data for Korea? This is not only a significant question but also has attracted interest lately, as economists have debated whether the Bank of Korea's policy goals should include an employment objective as in the case of the US Fed's dual mandate. Unlike major industrial countries for which Okun's law has been mostly studied, there are few (if any) recent studies on this subject for Korea. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by providing a careful empirical evaluation of Okun's law for Korea in the period of 1980–2021. We go beyond the basic question about the short-term relationship between unemployment and output and investigate other related issues, such as impact of financial crises on Okun's law, structural change(s), asymmetry across business cycles, and the underlying employment-output and unemployment-employment relations, from which we derive rich and interesting results. Simultaneously, this paper also contributes to the burgeoning literature on asymmetries by carefully examining how key macroeconomic relations can change in a fundamental way after a financial crisis, that is, asymmetry before and after a crisis as well as asymmetry between expansions and recessions.

The more we change the more we stay the same: Canadian child welfare systems' response to child well-being

BackgroundChild welfare services in Canada are guided by a dual mandate: to protect children from imminent harm and to promote their optimal development and well-being. To understand how child welfare systems respond to this dual mandate, Trocmé et al. (2014) developed a taxonomy to classify child welfare investigations as either being related to urgent protection or chronic needs. ObjectiveTo extend Trocmé et al.'s (2014) analysis using data from the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect 2019 (CIS-2019). Participants and settingThe CIS-2019 employs a file review methodology to collect information on child maltreatment-related investigations conducted in Canada in 2019. The study's unweighted sample included 41,948 investigations involving children aged 0–15 years. MethodsSecondary analyses of the CIS-2019 were conducted including frequency counts and bivariate analyses. ResultsNinety percent of investigations conducted in Canada in 2019 were focused on concerns related to chronic needs. Most investigations (90.9 % of urgent protection investigations and 98.3 % of chronic needs investigations) did not involve physical harm to the child. Urgent protection investigations were less likely to have been previously investigated and more likely to be substantiated, involve a child welfare court application, or involve a placement in out-of-home care. ConclusionsMost child welfare investigations in Canada continue to be focused on chronic needs. Yet, the investigation response seems designed to respond to urgent protection concerns. A truly differential model is needed to appropriately respond to the dual mandate of Canadian child welfare services and better serve children and families.

Partial COVID-19 closure of a national park reveals negative influence of low-impact recreation on wildlife spatiotemporal ecology

Human presence exerts complex effects on the ecology of species, which has implications for biodiversity persistence in protected areas experiencing increasing human recreation levels. However, the difficulty of separating the effect on species of human presence from other environmental or disturbance gradients remains a challenge. The cessation of human activity that occurred with COVID-19 restrictions provides a ‘natural experiment’ to better understand the influence of human presence on wildlife. Here, we use a COVID-19 closure within a heavily visited and highly protected national park (Glacier National Park, MT, USA) to examine how ‘low-impact’ recreational hiking affects the spatiotemporal ecology of a diverse mammal community. Based on data collected from camera traps when the park was closed and then subsequently open to recreation, we found consistent negative responses to human recreation across most of our assemblage of 24 species, with fewer detections, reduced site use, and decreased daytime activity. Our results suggest that the dual mandates of national parks and protected areas to conserve biodiversity and promote recreation have potential to be in conflict, even for presumably innocuous recreational activities. There is an urgent need to understand the fitness consequences of these spatiotemporal changes to inform management decisions in protected areas.

Ideological Trends in European Colonisation in the 1920s – 1930s

The author focuses on the analysis of ideological trends of European colonisation in the 1920s – 1930s in the context of the emerging transformation of colonial policy in general. After the Great War, the European colonial empires were experiencing greater challenges in governing their colonies and were threatened by various revolutionary and anti-colonial movements. Colonial officials and propagandists along with the European political class hoped to meet the challenges that arose by reforming colonial policies. By and large, the key tenet of colonial ideology remained the following formula: achievements to demonstrate the practices of the colonisers and backwardness to characterise the local population. The colonial discourse of the 1920s and 1930s became more complex and was an apologia of European institutions and values. It explicitly posited the validity of the ideals of progress supposedly inevitably brought about by colonisation. Discussions and propaganda were dominated by the idea of 'humanist colonisation'. The ideologues and inspirers of colonial policy downplayed the real benefits that justified continued domination and emphasised, if not the complete unselfishness, then at least the great generosity of the colonisers' mission, which went beyond the interests of the imperial nation. They tried to soften the memory of the bloody events of the conquests by presenting them as a necessary price to pay for development and progress. The most significant contribution to the development of colonial ideology between the two world wars was the notion of the dual mandate formulated by Lord Lugard. According to this doctrine, the colonial power exercises the powers of the trustee and Europeans are entrusted with a dual mission: to improve the lives of subjugated peoples and to develop the capabilities of these countries for the benefit of humanity. This concept was a fictitious and artificial one, yet it made it possible to present colonisation as compatible with democratic imperatives, highlighting the possibility of evolution from colonial dependency to freedoms and representative institutions. The author concludes that in the 1920s – 1930s, colonial powers gradually shifted to a humanitarian rhetoric of colonial rule that was more in keeping with the spirit of the times. However, ideas and practices of differentiation and exclusion towards the indigenous population of the colonies continued to be normative. Thus, the opposition between Europeans and local populations remained a fundamental feature of colonial societies.