Explicit Policy Research Articles

Semi peripheral scholars negotiating internationalizing institutional strategies with translingual tactics in academic discourse

Abstract This article takes a closer look at the complexity of scholarly communication in the specific context of a German University by discussing the relevance of individual discourse tactics of European scholars with a heterogeneous background in communicating in English. The case study featured three scholars from the fields of Neurobiology and Microbiology. The data comes from interviews with the scholars, perusal of their drafts, and policy documents on the publishing expectations in their scientific community. Borrowing de Certeau’s terms strategies and tactics, I treat strategies as belonging to institutions, as manifested in tacit and explicit normative policies on publishing expectations and academic requirements in the name of internationalizing scholarship. Tactics are demonstrated by the dynamic and creative practices of scholars in the discourse practices they adopt to negotiate restrictive policies. While the policies are largely monolingual and monolithic, the practices of scholars draw from their translingual resources and social communicative ecologies. The article demonstrates through a case study that translingual practice can be a resource in negotiating dominant academic conventions for semi peripheral scholars.

Current Practices and Prospects of Climate-Smart Agriculture in Democratic Republic of Congo: A Review

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is one of the innovative approaches for sustainably increasing the agricultural productivity, improving livelihoods and incomes of farmers, while at the same time improving resilience and contributing to climate change mitigation. In spite of the fact that there is neither explicit policy nor practices branded as CSA in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), farmers are utilizing an array of farming practices whose attributes meet the CSA criteria. However, the intensity, distribution, efficiency, and dynamics of use as well as the sources of these technologies are not sufficiently documented. Therefore, this review paper provides a comprehensive evidence of CSA-associated farming practices in DRC, public and private efforts to promote CSA practices, and the associated benefits accruing from the practices as deployed by farmers in the DRC. We find evidence of progress among farming communities in the use of practices that can be classified as CSA. Communities using these practices are building on the traditional knowledge systems and adaptation of introduced technologies to suit the local conditions. Reported returns on use of these practices are promising, pointing to their potential continued use into the future. While progressive returns on investment are reported, they are relatively lower than those reported from other areas in sub-Saharan Africa deploying similar approaches. We recommend for strategic support for capacity building at various levels, including public institutions for policy development and guidance, extension and community level to support uptake of technologies and higher education institutions for mainstreaming CSA into curricula and training a generation of CSA sensitive human resources.

Financial Inclusion: Cost and Implications in Developing Countries: A Review of the Existing Literature

This article discusses about research reviews of financial inclusion comprehensively in terms of its nature, basic reasons behind financial exclusion, costs and implication of financial exclusion in developing country like Tanzania. The main objective of this study was to review and analyze various published articles related to financial inclusion in developing countries. The study specifically analyzed the extent to which the existing published academic articles have addressed the challenges associated with financial exclusion. Although substantial progress has been made, there is still much to achieve since FinScope survey Tanzania 2017 reports only 16.7% of adult population in Tanzania access to formal banking services. The same report maintains about 28% of adult Tanzanian are completely excluded from accessing financial services. Based on a content analysis, this study analyzed academic articles from demand side, supply side, regulatory and infrastructure and societal barriers. It is found that most developing countries and Tanzania in particular, are still faced by the mentioned challenges to effective financial inclusion. Lack of a clear and explicit policy on strategies toward inclusive finance and absence of explicit consumer protection regulation in Tanzania and other developing countries is yet another challenge. This study therefore suggests that, firstly, government and other stakeholders to establish guiding policy to enhancing financial inclusion efforts. Secondly, Policy makers and financial services providers need to initiate innovative infrastructure systems to enhance extension of financial services to rural areas at affordable operating costs. Thirdly, there is need for establishing and operationalizing consumer protection regulation among financial services providers. Finally, to encourage variety of financial providers, products and technologies to widen individuals and firms access to finance.

Assessing The Dangers Of A Hospital Stay For Patients With Developmental Disability In England, 2017-19.

People with developmental disability have higher health care needs and lower life expectancy compared with the general population. Poor quality of care resulting from interpersonal and systemic discrimination may further entrench existing inequalities. We examined the prevalence of five avoidable in-hospital patient safety incidents (adverse drug reactions, hospital-acquired infections, pressure ulcers, postoperative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, and postoperative sepsis) for four developmental disability groups (people with intellectual disability, chromosomal abnormalities, pervasive developmental disorders, and congenital malformation syndrome) in the English National Health Service during the period April 2017-March 2019. We found that the likelihood of experiencing harm in disability groups was up to 2.7-fold higher than in patients without developmental disability. Patient safety incidents led to an excess length-of-stay in hospital of 3.6-15.4 days and an increased mortality risk of 1.4-15.0percent. We show persisting quality differences in patients with developmental disability, requiring an explicit national policy focus on the needs of such patients to reduce inequalities, reach parity of care, and lower the burden on health system resources.

Guidelines for improving transport policy effectiveness in developing countries: a case study of Sri Lanka

Efficient and effective policies pertaining to transportation is an important prerequisite for satisfactory provision of mobility of people and goods; an essential attribute of an economy to ensure productivity, societal welfare and environmental sustainability. Explicit transport policies formulated in Sri Lanka for that purpose have been mainly ignored by the relevant authorities, even though approved by the government. Implicit policies represented by approvals for investments and recurrent expenditures have continued without critical analysis, in most cases becoming ineffective and obsolete. The blunting of these policy instruments has resulted in the transport sector operating for decades without an effective policy-based direction. The failure of the bureaucracy that is responsible for policy implementation has also been identified as a primary reason for this situation. This paper provides guidelines based on established global best practices in policy formulation, implementation, monitoring, and review to improve the content of a transport policy and its potential for application towards meeting the country's mobility needs, as opposed to continuing the status quo in transport supply. The paper also uses examples from the current practice of transport policy in Sri Lanka, typical of many developing countries, and identifying pre-requisites and laying down guidelines for efficient policy making as well as for improving processes and practices to be improved.

Government sponsorship and innovation: the Gazelle Plan in China's Zhongguancun Science Park

Promoting high‐growth enterprises' innovation performance has become an explicit policy focus in recent years. This study extends the extant literature on the effects of public funding schemes by focusing on an under‐researched sponsorship scheme designed to develop the financial market and mobilize external finance for innovation. We posit that external finance has positive and moderating effects on innovation. The positive effect improves firms' innovation performance; the moderating effect diminishes when the amount of external finance received by firms exceeds a threshold level. We further hypothesize that sponsorship improves firms' innovation performance by enhancing the positive and diminishing moderating effects. To test our hypotheses, we selected Zhongguancun Science Park's Gazelle Plan as the study context. We constructed a balanced panel of 37,270 firm‐year observations and adopted difference‐in‐differences and panel threshold models to provide an evidenced‐based approach for refining public support policies for firm innovation. The results suggest that the Gazelle Plan has limited effects on enhancing the positive and moderating effects of venture capital and promoting new product sales. Implications and suggestions for academia and policymakers are provided.

Costs or signals: The role of “Social insurance and housing fund” in the labor market — Evidence from recruitment platforms

In China's labor market, enterprises are allowed for some flexibility in deciding whether to provide “social insurance and housing fund” to laborers. This paper uses micro-data from two leading Internet recruitment platforms and finds that in a labor market with double-side information asymmetry, “social insurance and housing fund” serves as not only a cost but also a signal. Providing workers with “social insurance and housing fund”, enterprises send a signal of stable operation to the labor market while identifying high-quality workers for enterprises. We further construct an instrument variable (IV) of local average social security payment rate, and show that the signaling effect remains significant after accounting for the endogeneity issue using IV regressions. In addition, “housing fund” has a stronger signaling effect than “social insurance”. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the strength of the two signaling effects is affected by the scale of the enterprises and the level of local payment rates. A theoretical framework capturing two micro-mechanisms — signaling and screening — is developed to fit our empirical findings. This paper provides explicit policy implications. It is suggested to strengthen the information disclosure and the propagation of social security payment, and further reduce the financial burden of enterprises.

Stabilizing Queuing Networks With Model Data-Independent Control

Classical queuing network control strategies typically rely on accurate knowledge of model data, i.e., arrival and service rates. However, such data are not always available and may be time-variant. To address this challenge, we consider a class of model data-independent (MDI) control policies that only rely on traffic state observation and network topology. In this article, we focus on the MDI control policies that can stabilize multiclass Markovian queuing networks under centralized and decentralized policies. Control actions include routing, sequencing, and holding. By expanding the routes and constructing piecewise-linear test functions, we derive an easy-to-use criterion to check the stability of a multiclass network under a given MDI policy. For stabilizable multiclass networks, we show that a centralized, stabilizing MDI policy exists. For stabilizable single-class networks, we further show that a decentralized, stabilizing MDI policy exists. In addition, for both settings, we construct explicit policies that attain maximal throughput and present numerical examples to illustrate the results.

Key drivers of promoting patient safety culture from the perspective of medical staff at a tertiary hospital in China

PurposeUnderstanding the antecedents of patient safety culture among medical staff is essential if hospital managers are to promote explicit patient safety policies and strategies. The factors that influence patient safety culture have received little attention. The authors aim to investigate the antecedents of patient safety culture (safety climate) in relation to medical staff to develop a comprehensive approach to improve patient safety and the quality of medical care in China.Design/methodology/approachThe Chinese version of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (CSAQ) was used to examine the attitudes toward patient safety among physicians and nurses. This medical staff was asked to submit the intra-organizational online survey via email. A total of 1780 questionnaires were issued. The final useable questionnaires were 256, yielding a response rate of 14.38%. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to test if different sex, supervisor/manager, age, working experience, and education result in different perceptions. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to verify the structure of the data. Then linear regression with forward selection was performed to obtain the essential dimension(s) that affect the safety culture (safety climate).FindingsThe CFA results showed that 26 CSAQ items measured 6 safety-related dimensions. The linear regression results indicated that working conditions, teamwork climate, and job satisfaction had significant positive effects on safety culture (safety climate).Practical implicationsHospital managers should put increased effort into essential elements of patient-oriented safety culture, such as working conditions, teamwork climate, and job satisfaction to develop appropriate avenues to improve the quality of delivered medical services as well as the safety of patients.Originality/valueThis study focused on the contribution that the antecedents of patient safety culture (safety climate) make with reference to the perspective of medical staff in a tertiary hospital in China.

The Mechanism for Matching the Supply Content and Policy Instruments of Resistive Public Policy

In the continuous development of behaviorist public policy theory, nudge tools have gradually become a policy tool of great interest to the academic community, which believes these tools can improve the effectiveness of public policy. However, scholars frequently disregard the impact of policy attributes on the policy effect when the policy content is matched with explicit policy tools and potential policy tools. Most studies have confirmed the application effect of nudges in policies that are receptive, but there is little research on their application in policies that are resistive. Through research on the supply content and promotion mechanism of policy resistance, we determined that the nudge policy tool does not demonstrate significant benefits for the effect of policy behavior, while, among the explicit policy tools, the preaching tool has a significant impact on the effect of policy behavior.

Evidence to Inform Resilience Policy in the SADC: Current Limitations and Future Research Areas

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) and its member countries are potentially vulnerable to external disturbances, including environmental, economic, and social shocks. Regional policy emphasizes interventions to ensure long-term growth and development in the face of potential disturbance. Current emphasis is placed on mitigating the impact of climate change, including the creation of the SADC Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan. However, the need for long-term adaptation and associated policy is evident to reduce regional vulnerabilities. Research is an important source of evidence to support policymaking, with specific importance to institutions in developing regions such as the SADC and during times of global change and disruption. SADC development policy related to resilience outcomes ought to be informed by research. This paper investigates the extent to which existing research supports regional resilience policymaking. Objectives include investigating available research on resilience in the SADC, identifying potential limitations, and delineating areas of future research to be considered by researchers that contribute to knowledge and evidence creation. A bibliometric review and selective content review of existing research were utilized. Relevant publications for the aforesaid analysis were delineated using the source concepts “resilience”, “adaptation”, “adaptability”, and “Southern African Development Community” (or “SADC”). Using the SCOPUS database, bibliometric data of 65 publications were imported into the VOSviewer application (v.1.6.17). Keyword occurrences and network and overlay visualizations were applied to identify the research themes underlying current research. The findings, which were supported by the selective content review, indicate that existing research focuses primarily on environmental and social disturbances, while the applicable regional planning scale and development policy are considered to a limited extent. Areas of future research ought to create evidence that is thematically relevant to policy areas and applicable to policy interventions, which necessitates increased research on economic disturbances, a broadening of existing themes to the appropriate regional planning scale, and consideration of explicit regional development objectives and policy. Transdisciplinarity ought to be central to future research on the diverse disturbances facing the region, while researchers ought to leverage knowledge-creation opportunities catalyzed by SDG implementation.

Necessitating the determination of the legal status of Afghans in Pakistan: an analysis

Afghan soil due to its strategic and geopolitical significance has witnessed numerous political turmoils creating an effective governance vacuum and transnational interferences costing the fate of the Afghan population. Massive Afghan movements were directed to Pakistan and Iran with the hope of evading the bitterness of traumatized living conditions in the native state. Only the situation of Afghans that Pakistan is housing is within the scope of the present study. This study aims to highlight the significance attached to the status determination of said community that has attracted little attention. Without an explicit and clear policy toward Afghans in Pakistan, uncertainty looms over their potential fate. Until and unless a certain status is accorded to them and they are brought into a certain legal net, they will continue to be employed as tools by the political actors. With underpinning the need to adopt a clear policy vis-à-vis the status of said Afghans the study finds that it will equally benefit Pakistan. The study opens room for future doctrinal legal research as to what are the potential legal classes these Afghans may belong to.

Violent Victimization of Gender and Sexual Minority Individuals: The Challenges to Effective Prevention and Response among Criminal Justice Professionals in South Korea

The high rate of violent victimization of LGBTQ+ individuals is a serious problem in South Korea. To provide suggestions on how to address the problem, the current study reviews the existing literature on violent victimization of gender and sexual minority individuals and the relevant U.S. laws, prohibitions, and policies. This study suggests that the South Korean criminal justice system should establish explicit anti-discrimination prohibitions and policies regarding criminal justice professional interactions with LGBTQ+ populations. Furthermore, it is essential to implement specialized education and training devoted to eliminating criminal justice professionals’ prejudicial beliefs and oppressive attitudes against LGBTQ+ populations to effectively respond to violence against LGBTQ+ individuals and provide appropriate legal and medical services to LGBTQ+ victims.

Quantum researcher mobility: the wonderful wizard of Oz who paid for Dorothy’s visa fees

Historically, science has benefited greatly through the mobility of researchers, whether it has been due to large-scale conflict, the search for new opportunities or a lack thereof. Today’s world of strict global immigration policies, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, places inordinate hurdles on the mobility of all researchers, let alone quantum ones. Exorbitant visa fees, the difficulty of navigating a foreign immigration system, lack of support for researchers’ families, and explicit government policy targeting selected groups of immigrants are all examples of things that have severely impacted the ability of quantum researchers to cross both physical and scientific borders. Here we clearly identify some key problems affecting quantum researcher mobility and discuss examples of good practice on the governmental, institutional, and societal level that have helped, or might help, overcome these hurdles. The adoption of such practices worldwide can ensure that quantum scientists can reach their fullest potential, irrespective of where they were born.

What about Inputting Policy in Value Function: Policy Representation and Policy-Extended Value Function Approximator

We study Policy-extended Value Function Approximator (PeVFA) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), which extends conventional value function approximator (VFA) to take as input not only the state (and action) but also an explicit policy representation. Such an extension enables PeVFA to preserve values of multiple policies at the same time and brings an appealing characteristic, i.e., value generalization among policies. We formally analyze the value generalization under Generalized Policy Iteration (GPI). From theoretical and empirical lens, we show that generalized value estimates offered by PeVFA may have lower initial approximation error to true values of successive policies, which is expected to improve consecutive value approximation during GPI. Based on above clues, we introduce a new form of GPI with PeVFA which leverages the value generalization along policy improvement path. Moreover, we propose a representation learning framework for RL policy, providing several approaches to learn effective policy embeddings from policy network parameters or state-action pairs. In our experiments, we evaluate the efficacy of value generalization offered by PeVFA and policy representation learning in several OpenAI Gym continuous control tasks. For a representative instance of algorithm implementation, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) re-implemented under the paradigm of GPI with PeVFA achieves about 40% performance improvement on its vanilla counterpart in most environments.

GALAXY: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Task-Oriented Dialog with Semi-supervised Learning and Explicit Policy Injection

Pre-trained models have proved to be powerful in enhancing task-oriented dialog systems. However, current pre-training methods mainly focus on enhancing dialog understanding and generation tasks while neglecting the exploitation of dialog policy. In this paper, we propose GALAXY, a novel pre-trained dialog model that explicitly learns dialog policy from limited labeled dialogs and large-scale unlabeled dialog corpora via semi-supervised learning. Specifically, we introduce a dialog act prediction task for policy optimization during pre-training and employ a consistency regularization term to refine the learned representation with the help of unlabeled dialogs. We also implement a gating mechanism to weigh suitable unlabeled dialog samples. Empirical results show that GALAXY substantially improves the performance of task-oriented dialog systems, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets: In-Car, MultiWOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1, improving their end-to-end combined scores by 2.5, 5.3 and 5.5 points, respectively. We also show that GALAXY has a stronger few-shot ability than existing models under various low-resource settings. For reproducibility, we release the code and data at https://github.com/siat-nlp/GALAXY.

Did tradable quota rights really affect fleet size? The case of the Gulf of Mexico reef‐fish fishery*

An explicit policy objective of the tradable individual fishing quota programs introduced for various reef‐fish species in the Gulf of Mexico in 2007 and 2010 was to restore cost‐effectiveness by reducing the fishery's significant excess capacity. To gauge the success of this policy shift from a common‐pool to a catch shares system, we construct a simple model of vessel participation that takes into account the regulatory systems as well as environmental and economic variables. Calibrating our model with historical data from 1990 to 2020, we show how changes in the total allowable catch, biomass, dockside prices, and the regulatory system can explain the observed contraction of the fleet size. We find that only about half of the initial contraction was due to the switch from a common‐pool to a tradable quota system, the remainder being driven by the simultaneously occurring biomass recovery on the one hand and a participation‐inflating contest for catch shares prior to the regime change on the other.

National Trends in Gender-Affirming Surgical Procedures: A Google Trends Analysis.

Background: There has been a significant increase in the volume of gender-affirming surgical (GAS) procedures over the past decade. The objective of this paper is to use online search data from Google Trends (GT) to describe national search trends for GAS procedures.Methods: GT was queried for search terms relating to GAS from January 2004 to February 2021. The 19 selected keywords covered a broad range of GAS topics. United States (US) search interest was collected as relative search volumes (RSVs) and then analyzed by geographic region. The number of plastic surgery providers offering GAS and academic surgery centers was collected from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and Trans-health.com. RSVs were analyzed by metro area to determine the relationship between search demand and personal income. State Medicaid policies for transgender health services were also collected.Results: All search terms demonstrated a positive increase in RSVs over time except “sex reassignment surgery” and “penectomy”. The Mountain/Pacific and East South Central/West South Central had the greatest search volume for GAS and most providers offering care. The East South Central/West South Central region​​ ranked last for providers offering care, despite the relatively high search interest. This region also had no states with explicit Medicaid policies covering gender-affirming care. Metro areas in the top five for RSV but bottom quartile for per capita personal income were identified.Conclusions: Online search interest for GAS-related terms has increased. Search interest for GAS has regional variation and did not show a specific pattern with provider availability.

The Persistence of Rural Underdevelopment: Evidence from Land Reform in Italy

Patchiness in rural development remains a salient feature of many developed and developing countries that have struggled historically to overcome enormous national disparities in economic structure and well-being. This paper examines how one major, explicit rural policy ostensibly aimed at rural advancement—land reform—can impact uneven development in the countryside. It does so in Italy, where a major land reform redistributed large landholdings to individual peasant families after World War II. Based on original fine-grained data on land redistribution and a geographical regression discontinuity analysis that takes advantage of Italy’s zonal land reform approach, I find that greater land reform fueled comparative underdevelopment and precarity locally over the long term. Several related mechanisms delayed development in land reform zones: a slower transition out of agriculture, lower labor mobility, and an aging demographic. These are generalizable mechanisms that could operate in other cases of land reform beyond Italy.

Public Employee Use of Social Media at Work: Competency, Collaboration, and Communication of Workplace Policy

Although the growth of social media has changed the way employees communicate at work, our understanding of the related workplace dynamics, particularly in public organizations, is still embryonic. This study fills these research gaps by testing hypotheses, drawn from social cognitive theory and social capital theory, using two sets of data on social media usage patterns and workplace practices among public employees. Our survey data ( n = 1,360) analysis revealed that most respondents (more than 72%) spent at least an hour per day on social media while at work, for both work- and non-work-related purposes. Furthermore, public employees with higher levels of social media competence (technical understanding and impact assessment) were more likely to report effective collaboration and seek assistance when needed. The results of scenario-based randomized survey experiment ( n = 600) show that the perceived fairness of social media-related termination decisions (or “get dooced”) was influenced by the presence of an explicit workplace social media policy.