Important Questions For Policymakers Research Articles

Exploring different visions of scientific literacy in Irish primary science education: core issues and future directions

ABSTRACT This discussion paper focuses on the purpose of, and vision for, Irish primary science education prior to the redevelopment and publication of the primary science curriculum in 2024. Scientific literacy is broadly accepted as the goal of science education. Despite this, curricular analysis focusing on scientific literacy in Europe is scarce. There is no universally accepted definition of scientific literacy and the divergent perspectives of scientific literacy and its conceptualisation in terms of purpose and competencies warrant discussion. This paper details and critiques both the historical and current position of Irish primary science education against prominent policy documents and research in the field. It presents research informed recommendations required to transform a holistic vision of scientific literacy from curriculum documents into classroom practice. It is hoped that this discussion paper raises important questions for policy makers and educators highlighting the central role of science literacy education to meet the needs of all students in the twenty-first century.

International tourism and income inequality: The role of economic and financial development

The effect of tourism growth on tourism destinations’ income inequality is an important question for policymakers. In this study, we explore if this relationship is affected by economic and financial development and their interactions. We find that tourism growth affects a country’s income inequality differently. Post-redistribution, tourism growth eases income inequality in the lower economic development regime but may worsen income inequality in the upper economic development regime. However, tourism growth helps to alleviate income inequality in the lower financial development regime but may also lessen income inequality in the upper financial development regime. We also find some evidence that improving opportunities to access finance does a better job of helping to utilise the effect of tourism growth on easing income inequality in more developed nations rather than their counterparts. In line with these, our results also indicate that inflation tends to have different effects on income inequality, subject to the selection of thresholds. Our results are drawn from a dynamic panel threshold approach across 71 developed and developing countries during 1996–2016.

Carbon Tax and Tourism Employment: Is There An Interplay?

The impact of the climate change response on the labour market is an important question for policymakers, while the net positive effect of green policies on the labour market is seen as one of the arguments in favour of a green transition. This is particularly important for the tourism labour market, which was severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examined the effect of carbon taxes on tourism employment for European countries that have levied a carbon tax over the past thirty years. A macroeconomic panel data regression model ex-post study was applied by contrasting the obtained results via a robustness check. The estimation results indicate a slightly positive and significant association between the carbon tax and tourism employment, which was additionally tested by considering revenue recycling, early adopters of the carbon tax, and a higher carbon tax compared to countries with a lower carbon tax. We cannot conclude that these factors matter for tourism employment, proving the robustness of the results. Revenue-neutral carbon taxation, policies to address the skills gap, push and pull incentives, and active labour market policies to facilitate the quick re-integration of jobseekers into employment are viewed as pivotal to ensure a smoother transition toward a sustainable tourism labour market.

Don’t stop me now: Incremental capacity growth under subsidy termination risk

Once a subsidy scheme is close to reaching its goal or loses political support, it may be terminated. An important question for policy makers is how to minimize the negative impact of the risk of subsidy termination on industrial investment. We assume the social planner aims to increase capacity and welfare and uses a subsidy, which has an uncertain lifetime, for the purpose. We examine a monopolist supplying an uncertain demand, faced with the option to expand capacity by irreversibly investing in small increments. We find that the firm installs capacity expansions sooner and, consequently, installs a larger capacity than a firm without a subsidy. A firm’s total investment during the subsidy’s lifetime increases with both the subsidy size and the likelihood of subsidy withdrawal. However, this happens at the cost of less investment directly after the subsidy has been retracted. The optimal subsidy size strongly depends on the point in time at which the social planner aims to maximize the welfare — the further into the future, the larger the welfare optimal subsidy. Furthermore, the welfare optimal subsidy size strongly depends on the social planner’s discretion over adjustments to the subsidy size.

A Robust Test of Prejudice for Discrimination Experiments

A large experimental literature is devoted to studying discrimination. An important question for policymakers and firms is what drives the discrimination uncovered by those experiments. However, motivations are hard to determine when decision makers pay selective attention to information because their learning is private. We overcome this challenge by deriving conditions on average outcomes that reveal decision makers are prejudiced no matter what they learn about individuals in each demographic group before making their decisions. This provides a test of prejudice that is general, simple, and robust and that can potentially be used to identify prejudice in a wide range of important settings, such as hiring, consumer lending, and housing access. We demonstrate our test of prejudice using two influential labor market experiments. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Distributional effects of carbon pricing in Brazil under the Paris Agreement

This paper assesses the distributional effects of carbon pricing on Brazilian households. We apply a multi-regional Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model with representation of multiple households according to a family expenditure survey. Important questions for policy makers in Brazil are addressed. What are the economic effects of introducing carbon pricing in Brazil? Is there a double dividend, with economic and environmental benefits, when carbon revenue is recycled through tax rebates? Could carbon revenue contribute to the financing of social spending and to income distribution improvements in Brazil? Results show that carbon pricing avoids further carbon intensive infrastructure lock-in by further promoting biomass in electricity generation and biofuels in the transportation sector. Lump-sum transfers from carbon revenue help boosting income of lower deciles up to +4.5%, while targeting transfers to most vulnerable groups leads to an income growth of +42.2% by 2030. Brazil has a large gap in terms of effective carbon pricing when compared to other countries that could be addressed in the context of the ongoing tax reform debate, with carbon revenue contributing to the financing of social spending. Our analysis examines different policy design options and contribute to the debate about fiscal reform and socioeconomic effects of carbon pricing in Brazil.

Employment Effects of Environmental Policies – Evidence From Firm-Level Data

The employment impact of environmental policies is an important question for policy makers. We examine the effect of increasing the stringency of environmental policy across a broad set of policies on firms’ labor demand, in a novel identification approach using Worldscope data from 31 countries on firm-level CO2 emissions. Drawing on evidence from as many as 5300 firms over 15 years and the OECD environmental policy stringency (EPS) index, it finds that high emission-intensity firms reduce labor demand upon impact as EPS is tightened, whereas low emission-intensity firms increase labor demand, indicating a reallocation of employment. Moreover, tightening EPS during economic contractions appears to have a positive effect on employment, other things equal. Quantifications exercises show modest positive net changes in employment for market-based policies, and modest negative net changes for non-market policies (mainly emission quantity regulations) and for the combined aggregate EPS. Within market-based policies, the percent decline in employment in high-emission firms (correspondingly the increase in low-emission firms) for a unit change in a policy index is smallest (largest) for trading schemes (“green” certificates, and “white” certificates)—although stringency is not comparable across indices. Finally, the employment effects of EPS are not persistent.

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Cars and ground-level ozone: how do fuels compare?

IntroductionAn important question for policy-makers is how the main automotive fuels – diesel, gasoline, LPG (and increasingly, electricity) – compare in terms of ground-level ozone formation.MethodsBased on recent, equivalent emissions data, the study compares ozone formation on a per-kilometre basis of the main fuels: gasoline, diesel, liquefied petroleum gas and electricity (the latter in the United Kingdom).ResultsConsidering tailpipe emissions only, gasoline’s and LPG’s per-kilometre ozone impact is 44–88% of diesel’s, while LPG’s is slightly lower than gasoline’s. If fuel production and tailpipe emissions are added together, the liquid fuels generate 48–80% of electricity’s impact, i.e. the electric car’s ozone impact is highest. The liquids’ ozone-impact rankings are the same as for tailpipe only, from most to least: diesel, gasoline, LPG.ConclusionsChanging the fuel/energy type of a passenger car changes its emission inventory, so this could be a useful policy in combating ozone, i.e. governments could encourage some fuels/energies and discourage others. Based on the results shown above, a priority ranking of the main types, from best to worst in the United Kingdom, is: LPG, gasoline, diesel and battery electric. For electric, this ranking will vary in other regions, depending on the emissions of the power-generation grid. For the liquid fuels, the rankings are valid for Europe and North America in general. Impact assessment of ozone is complex, because the chemistry of its formation is complex. This complexity is only partially incorporated in existing impact assessment methods.

Identifying socio-demographically favourable area types for early hybrid electric vehicle adoption through mining of public sector data

In the coming years, the share of hybrid electric vehicles is expected to grow significantly in personal transportation. Vehicles that can be charged from the electrical grid, such as plug-in hybrids, could introduce problems for the distribution network, especially if the vehicle adoption is spatially concentrated and the charging happens unmanaged. Thus, where and when the hybrid vehicle adoption occurs is an important question for policy makers and planners. Currently, promoted by the European Union directives such as INSPIRE and PSI, there is a trend of public sector data being harmonised and opened for free usage across the Europe. The vast amount of information in the various registers of the society has a huge and largely untapped potential for modelling societal and environmental phenomena. To discover correlations and relationships from such large databases, data mining methods can be useful. In this paper, we utilise a data mining approach to identify relationships from public sector data between hybrid vehicle adoption and small area level socio-demography. Based on the discovered model, we assess how favourable each area type is for the adoption. The approach combines Self-Organizing Map based data compression, a feature selection using Genetic Algorithm and a linear regression model.

What does global mean temperature tell us about local climate?

The subject of climate feedbacks focuses attention on global mean surface air temperature (GMST) as the key metric of climate change. But what does knowledge of past and future GMST tell us about the climate of specific regions? In the context of the ongoing UNFCCC process, this is an important question for policy-makers as well as for scientists. The answer depends on many factors, including the mechanisms causing changes, the timescale of the changes, and the variables and regions of interest. This paper provides a review and analysis of the relationship between changes in GMST and changes in local climate, first in observational records and then in a range of climate model simulations, which are used to interpret the observations. The focus is on decadal timescales, which are of particular interest in relation to recent and near-future anthropogenic climate change. It is shown that GMST primarily provides information about forced responses, but that understanding and quantifying internal variability is essential to projecting climate and climate impacts on regional-to-local scales. The relationship between local forced responses and GMST is often linear but may be nonlinear, and can be greatly complicated by competition between different forcing factors. Climate projections are limited not only by uncertainties in the signal of climate change but also by uncertainties in the characteristics of real-world internal variability. Finally, it is shown that the relationship between GMST and local climate provides a simple approach to climate change detection, and a useful guide to attribution studies.

Limited evidence to assess the impact of primary health care system or service level attributes on health outcomes of Indigenous people with type 2 diabetes: a systematic review.

BackgroundTo describe reported studies of the impact on HbA1C levels, diabetes-related hospitalisations, and other primary care health endpoints of initiatives aimed at improving the management of diabetes in Indigenous adult populations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.MethodSystematic literature review using data sources of MEDLINE, Embase, the Cochrane Library, CINHAL and PsycInfo from January 1985 to March 2012. Inclusion criteria were a clearly described primary care intervention, model of care or service, delivered to Indigenous adults with type 2 diabetes reporting a program impact on at least one quantitative diabetes-related health outcome, and where results were reported separately for Indigenous persons. Joanna Briggs Institute critical appraisal tools were used to assess the study quality. PRISMA guidelines were used for reporting.ResultsThe search strategy retrieved 2714 articles. Of these, 13 studies met the review inclusion criteria. Three levels of primary care initiatives were identified: 1) addition of a single service component to the existing service, 2) system-level improvement processes to enhance the quality of diabetes care, 3) change in primary health funding to support better access to care. Initiatives included in the review were diverse and included comprehensive multi-disciplinary diabetes care, specific workforce development, systematic foot care and intensive individual hypertension management. Twelve studies reported HbA1C, of those one also reported hospitalisations and one reported the incidence of lower limb amputation. The methodological quality of the four comparable cohort and seven observational studies was good, and moderate for the two randomised control trials.ConclusionsThe current literature provides an inadequate evidence base for making important policy and practice decisions in relation to primary care initiatives for Indigenous persons with type 2 diabetes. This reflects a very small number of published studies, the general reliance on intermediate health outcomes and the predominance of observational studies. Additional studies of the impacts of primary care need to consider carefully research design and the reporting of hospital outcomes or other primary end points. This is an important question for policy makers and further high quality research is needed to contribute to an evidence-base to inform decision making.

Why choose teaching? An international review of empirical studies exploring student teachers’ career motivations and levels of commitment to teaching

Why do individuals all over the world choose to become school teachers? What motivates them to become educators of young people, and how committed are they to this cause when they enter their teacher education courses? Considering that teacher motivation and commitment have been identified as crucial factors for the future success of education and schools (Huberman, 1993; Manning & Patterson, 2005; Rikard, 1999), these are important questions for policy makers and societies to address. This paper provides a systematic and conceptual review of empirical research studies exploring student teachers’ career motivations and commitment in 23 countries from 5 continents. A variety of motivating factors are explored, their relative importance in student teachers’ career decisions is discussed, and differences between various subgroups and cultural contexts are highlighted. Attention is drawn to methodological limitations as well as recent developments in this important area of research.

The Search for a Post-2015 International (Sustainable) Development Agenda: Some Reflections from a European Perspective

With the experience of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it has become evident that the academic world will have a key role to play in researching the efforts and commitments of the EU, its Member States, and all other countries and stakeholders involved in shaping the global development agenda. This contribution focuses on the international (sustainable) development agenda after the expiration of the current MDGs. By pointing to important questions for policy-makers and providing an overview of important research findings on development cooperation and the impact of MDGs, it aims to serve as a reflection on the 'way ahead'. In addition to presenting several institutional and methodological challenges, it highlights how universal concepts are currently discussed in the context of the post-2015 debate, such as sustainable development, governance and rule of law, human rights, security and development, and food security. At the same time, the paper argues that these concepts are prominent features of the EU’s vision on and approach towards development. Looking at the post-2015 development agenda and the EU’s particular objectives, the paper shows that the EU and its Member States will play a vital role in galvanizing a renewed collective global commitment to tackle the increasingly complex realm of development cooperation.

RETRACTED: Systematic Review of Economic Evaluation Literature in Ghana: Is Health Technology Assessment the Future?

In many countries, such as Ghana, there is an increasing impetus to use economic evaluation to allow more explicit and transparent health care priority setting. An important question for policymakers in low-income countries, however, is whether it is possible to introduce economic evaluation data into health care priority-setting decisions. This article systematically reviewed the literature on economic evaluation on medical devices and pharmaceuticals in Ghana published between 1997 and 2012. Its aim was to analyze the quantity, quality, and targeting of economic evaluation studies that relate to medical devices and pharmaceuticals and provide a framework for those conducting similar health technology assessment reviews in similar contexts. The review revealed that the number of publications reporting economic evaluations was minimal with regard to medical devices and pharmaceuticals. With the introduction of the National Health Insurance Scheme since 2004 policymakers are confronted with the challenge of allocating scarce resources rationally. Priority setting therefore has to be guided by a sound knowledge of the costs of providing health services. The need for economic evaluation is thus important. More costing studies were found; there were very few cost-effectiveness analysis studies. If economic evaluation is useful for policymakers only when performed correctly and reported accurately, these findings depict barriers to using economic evaluation to assist decision-making processes in Ghana; hence, there is a need for an independent health technology assessment unit.

Measuring the consequences of pension reform applying liquidation and longevity considerations

Around the world, the longer life expectancy of the population raises important questions for policy-makers about how citizens can maintain their basic standard of living after retirement. Pension schemes tend to be the major source of retirement incomes, at least, in the developed world. Facing this aging problem, the Taiwanese government offered persons insured under the Labor Insurance Pension Scheme the choice of whether or not to annuitize their retirement benefits from January 1, 2009. Following the implementation of this pension program, the insured may now select the old-age one-time benefit or a monthly pension benefit when they retire. The puzzle is that very few people would choose to annuitize their wealth in practice. This is contrary to the suggestions made by the financial literature. In this study, we apply the liquidity premium and the implied longevity yield (ILY) to compare the old-age one-time benefit with the monthly pension benefit. The results demonstrate that the ILY minus the risk-free rate is greater than the liquidity premium in most scenarios and these findings encourage the insured to choose the old-age pension benefit. This result is consistent with the financial literature. Moreover, we find that those insured with the lowest insurance salary and fewer years of coverage earn the highest ILY. This shows that the program has been designed with the purpose of wealth re-distribution.

Blogging and Journalism: Extending Shield Law Protection to New Media Forms

News-oriented bloggers have contributed much to the public sphere in recent years. Whether or not bloggers are considered journalists and thereby are protected by shield laws will be an important question for policy makers and the courts. This paper provides an overview of the law concerning the constitutional and statutory privileges accorded journalists. It then critiques proposals to create a federal journalist's privilege as applied to bloggers. Finally, the paper argues that the test articulated in Von Bulow v. Von Bulow should be adopted in federal legislation. Under Von Bulow, bloggers would be shielded from disclosing confidential sources and information when they function as journalists.

Join the Club

An important question for policy-makers is how to communicate information (for example, about public health interventions) and promote behavior change most effectively across a population. The structure of a social network can dramatically affect the diffusion of behavior through a population. Centola (p. [1194][1]) examined whether the number of individuals choosing to register for a health forum could be influenced by an artificially constructed network of neighbors that were signed up for the forum. The behavior spread more readily on clustered networks than on random, poorly clustered ones. Certain types of behavior within human systems are thus more likely to spread if people are exposed to many other people who have already adopted the behavior (for example, in the circumstances where your friends know each other, as well as yourself). [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1185231

Evaluating Conditions in Major Chinese Housing Markets

A year after the adoption of the 4 trillion yuan (US $586 billion) economic stimulus package, Chinas GDP grew 10.7% year on year in the last quarter of 2009, accelerating from 6.2%, 7.9% and 9.1% in the first, second and third quarters, respectively. Riding the strong economic growth, the rolling bull market prospects continue in China\'s housing sectors. China\'s land auctions continue to set new price records, with new price peaks reached multiple times in recent months. Housing prices in China\'s major cities grew at the fastest pace in recent months, with prices rising at a double digit rate in the latest data available for February of 2010. Prompted by fears of a bubble in the housing market, at the end of last year, the government announced a series of measures to dampen the overheated housing market. Among the new rules was a harsher property sales tax to curb speculation in the housing market. Thus, the Chinese government and many international investors appear worried that house prices might have reached unsustainable levels. Whether the fallout from any such mispricing would be similar to what happened in the U.S. is another important question for policy makers in particular. This study examines a wide array of data to document what has happened to prices across the many markets in China and to gauge whether they are sustainable. Data limitations are the key problem for any such study of the Chinese housing market. Times series lengths are no more than a decade for virtually any market because of recent changes that allowed for competitive bidding and pricing of property in China. To help deal with this limitation, we study the issue from a variety of perspectives. Two are traditional affordability metrics used in housing studies around the world: share of income devoted to housing and price-to-rent ratios. Income shares spent on housing are very high in China, but that alone does not necessarily indicate the presence of a bubble or general overpaying for property. As we discuss in the paper, there are various cultural and social reasons why it is not considered abnormal for Chinese households to dedicate much more than 30% of their income to housing. More interesting are the recent sharp rises in price-to-rent ratios in Chinas major markets. In the top seven markets nationally, the price-to-rent ratio increased from about 30 to 50 just within the past two years. As we argue in the paper, the key features in the sharp rise in the ratio, not the level of the ratio itself. Beyond these traditional affordability metrics, we also examine how Chinese house prices compare to fundamental production costs (which includes physical construction costs, land costs, and a normal profit for the developer). In the U.S. context, Glaeser, Gyourko and Saiz (2008) have shown that this supply side approach is a good predictor of mispricing in the bubble markets of the U.S. sunbelt region. Many Chinese markets are not in elastic supply, so this approach is not so readily transferable to them, but the analysis does suggest that prices are well above fundamental production costs in a number of markets. If the Chinese government does not restrict the supply of land in these markets, the implication is that prices should fall. We also conduct a detailed micro-level analysis of over 300 recent land auctions in Beijing. We are able to identify the location of each land sale, and then compare it to prices of fully finished housing units. While that analysis remains to be done, some market observers claim that recent land prices in particular have been above the trading value of completed units. If so, that would be a signal of mispricing. While that part of our analysis remains to be done, we will be able to document whether these claims are true, using hard data and spatial mapping technology.

Technology Transfer Through Vertical Linkages: The Case of the Spanish Manufacturing Industry

Whether or not foreign direct investment helps to upgrade the technological capacities of firms in host countries is an important question for policy makers. Even more important is the question of what are the most effective channels of technology transfer. The econometric analysis presented here is based on a firm level database from Spain for the period 1990–2000. We associate spillovers with the effect of horizontal and vertical FDI on total factor productivity of local firms. We find that technology spillovers are limited to the case of vertical linkages. However these spillovers are affected by the technology gap between domestic firms and foreign affiliates as well as by the characteristics of foreign affiliates. Linkages with exportoriented affiliates and fully owned ones seem to have a better influence on the productivity of domestic firms.