Policy Ought Research Articles

THE PRICE DEVELOPMENT OF SELECTED ENERGETIC COMMODITIES

The aim of the paper was to evaluate the price development of electrical energy and inflation as a commodity in the course of the past 10 years. The production of electrical energy decreased from 83.7 TWh in 2010 to 70.6 TWh in 2020 in the Czech Republic in accordance with the results achieved by using the methods of descriptive statistics, time series, correlation analysis and regression analysis. The consumption of energy slightly increased. The proportion of production to consumption declined and consumption was higher than production in 2020. The prices of electricity reveal oscillations influenced by the conflict in the Ukraine. The use of the sources of energy changed, however, without specific trends. The dependence of prices on inflation is considerable and direct. Energy policy ought to deal with the dependence on import and support the domestic production of energy.

Is the metabolic efficiency of smart cities higher? Evidence from China

Comprehending how smart city construction (SCM) affects urban metabolic efficiency (UME) is crucial to comprehensively assessing the policy performance of SCM. This study evaluates how SCM affects UME through a double-difference-in-differences (DID) model according to panel data collected between 2004 and 2021 from 284 Chinese cities. It is found that SCM can promote UME, and this effect increases yearly. Meanwhile, the impact of SCM on UME has spillover effects, spatial decay boundaries and heterogeneity characteristics. Moreover, SCM promotes UME through technological innovation effect (TIE), industrial upgrading effect (IUE), energy saving effect (ESE) and spatial structure effect (SSE). Results from the above contribute to better understanding of the impacts of SCM policies and offer recommendations for emerging nations that wish to improve their UME. The SCM policy ought to be further promoted by the Chinese government.

Cultural management: analysis of strategies, policies, and practices in Ukraine and the EU countries

The focus of this article is on the evolution of cultural policy and strategy within Ukraine in the context of its integration with the European Union. A historical investigation into the shared origins of the Ukrainian population and European peoples is conducted, emphasizing Slavic heritage and communal settlements. The regulatory framework governing the progress of Ukrainian culture in its independent state is delineated. The primary hypotheses and trajectories for the advancement of Ukrainian cultural policy, as articulated in the "Long-term Strategy for the Development of Culture until 2025," are expounded upon. In aggregate, it is ascertained that the outlined objectives within the Strategy currently fall short of addressing the imperatives incumbent upon the nation to affirm its national identity and align with the attainments of European civilization. It is discerned that the absence of a cultural diplomacy framework in Ukraine stands in stark contrast to the substantial outcomes achieved through this paradigm across the majority of European Union member states. Additionally, an exploration of both shared features and distinctions in cultural policy and strategy between the European Union as an entity and select member countries is undertaken. The European Union's strategy, characterized by its dynamic and targeted approach, is notable for its commitment to preserving the integrity of nations and ethnicities. This strategy places considerable emphasis on respecting the distinct national identities and traditions of each country and its constituent nations. Of particular significance is the instance of the Republic of Poland, the Republic of Italy, and Finland, wherein the cultivation of cultural diplomacy has been a focal point. These examples underscore the diverse routes undertaken to achieve cultural recognition and formulate distinct cultural strategies for each nation. This serves as an indication that cultural policy ought to evolve into a responsibility shared among the state, diplomatic representatives, and cultural stakeholders within Ukraine. The ongoing conflict instigated by Russia underscores once again the multi-dimensional trajectory characterizing Ukraine's cultural evolution. It underscores Ukraine's heightened dedication to unity and the rejuvenation of the European principles that were proclaimed during the twentieth century.

Self-medication with antibiotics among out-patient attendants at Madina Polyclinic prior to medical consultation.

The study aimed to determine the prevalence of self-medication with antibiotics among attendants of the Out-patient Department (OPD) at Madina Polyclinic before seeking medical consultation and associated factors. Cross-sectional study. The study was conducted at Madina Polyclinic. The study involved 319 general OPD attendants aged 18 years and above accessing healthcare services at the Madina Polyclinic between May and June 2019. The prevalence of antibiotic self-medication and the factors associated with this practice. From the study, 46.4% (95% CI 40.8%- 52.0%) had self-medicated with antibiotics before presenting for medical consultation at the hospital. Less than half of the respondents (44.5%) had adequate knowledge about the use of antibiotics. Having a tertiary level of education was significantly associated with self-medication (aOR= 8.09, 95% CI 2.31-28.4, p = 0.001), whilst adequate knowledge on the use of antibiotics reduced the odds of self-medication by 53% (aOR= 0.47, 95% CI 0.23- 0.66, p<0.001). The level of education modified the relationship between knowledge and self-medication with antibiotics. The practice of antibiotic self-medication is rife among OPD attendants. Therefore, adequate public education on the use of antibiotics and the effects of using them inappropriately must be done. The Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) policy ought to be reinforced and made known to all, especially among the pharmacies that dispense antibiotics indiscriminately. None declared.

Attribute-Based Data Sharing Scheme With Flexible Search Functionality for Cloud-Assisted Autonomous Transportation System

The existing group public key encryption with equality test schemes could only support one-to-one data sharing and are not suitable for cloud-assisted autonomous transportation systems (ATS) which demand one-to-many data sharing. To tackle this problem efficiently, in this article, we put forward the group attribute-based encryption with equality test (G-ABEET) scheme. The presented G-ABEET allows sensors equipped in vehicles to encrypt traffic data with an expressive access policy before sharing it. Only users with attributes required by the access policy ought to access the shared ciphertexts, thus achieving selective one-to-many data sharing. Meanwhile, the authorized cloud server could provide group users with equality tests over the ciphertexts, realizing ciphertext search ability. Furthermore, with the group mechanism, the G-ABEET scheme could resist offline message recovery attacks. Besides, in the standard model, we give rigorous security proof of the G-ABEET construction. The feasibility and efficiency of G-ABEET are demonstrated by experimental simulations.

Visitor restrictions in hospitals during infectious disease outbreaks: An ethical approach to policy development and requests for exemptions.

In this paper, we explore the ethics of restricting visitation to hospitals during an infectious disease outbreak. We aim to answer three questions: What are the features of an ethically justified hospital visitor restriction policy? Should policies include scope for case-by-case exemptions? How should decisions about exemptions be made? Based on a critical interpretive review of the existing ethical literature on visitor restrictions, we argue that an ethically justified hospital visitor restriction policy has the following features: proportionality, comprehensiveness, harm mitigation, exemptions for specific patient populations, visitation decisions made separately from a patient's treating clinicians, transparency, and consistency in application. We also argue that an ethical policy ought to include scope for case-by-case exemptions for individual patients. We propose a process for ethical decision-making that provides a shared language and structure to decrease the risks and burdens of decision-making when clinicians or managers are considering requests for exemptions.

Politics of reproduction: a view from Israel on the Dobbs decision

BackgroundThis opinion piece looks at the recent decision of the United States Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and then compares the law on abortion in the USA to the law in Israel on reproductive medicine in general.The Dobbs decision validated a Mississippi state law that restricted access to abortion, while overruling the landmark precedent of Roe v. Wade on women's constitutional right to safe abortion. It declared that the US constitution does not confer upon women any right to abortion, whether pre- or post-viability, sending shockwaves throughout the world. It also had an immediate effect on women's reproductive health in the US.Main bodyWomen's right to reproductive freedom and to make decisions about their lives and their bodies is key to their hard-won equality. Still, abortion remains in ongoing controversy worldwide with legal barriers that impact upon the most vulnerable. In Israel, abortion is relatively available, accessible, affordable, and acceptable, in both law and practice. This is because of the lenient and nuanced stance of rabbinical authorities in the Jewish law tradition. This stance, together with Israel's post-Holocaust biblical culture of "be fruitful and multiply", also underlies its high rates of medically assisted reproduction for the treatment of infertility, including preimplantation genetic diagnosis of fertilized eggs. Women's bodies mediate all these repro-genetic technologies, in most cases for the benefit of others, not because of their own health needs. There is also concern about global practices and market forces that objectify women's bodies, exploit women and are harmful to their health, wellbeing, and dignity, carrying on outdated patriarchal patterns.ConclusionReproductive health policy ought to be based on an ethic of care and responsibility first and foremost for the women, as well as the children they choose to bring to life, in the spirit of the Jewish tradition that her life is of greater value than the fetus'. Women deserve control of their bodies and their lives and respect for the choices they make to the best of their judgment, which when it comes to abortion are mostly hard ones. They have a right to reproductive choice, freedom, autonomy, and dignity.The views expressed in this perspective are those of the author.

Precarious employment and workplace health outcomes in Britain

RationaleThe world of work is changing rapidly, and precarious employment is becoming more prevalent in Britain and elsewhere, particularly since the 2008 financial crisis. This is despite the evidence linking employment precarity to adverse health outcomes, and the policy discourses advocating for high-quality jobs. ObjectiveI seek to establish empirically the extent and nature of the potential link between employment precarity and health outcomes, which is done chiefly at the workplace level. The research can be vital from the perspective of informing policy, given that the workplace represents the level where key policy levers operate. MethodsI use nationally representative data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey. Four workplace health outcomes (WHOs; viz., injuries, illnesses, job satisfaction, and job anxiety) have been used to examine if organizations with precarious employment arrangements are likely to experience adverse health outcomes. I use alternative econometric approaches to compare organizations that reported to have three types of precarious employment arrangements, viz., shift working, annualised hours, and zero-hours contracts (ZHCs), vis-à-vis their counterparts without such arrangements. ResultsThe results obtained reveal that workplaces with precarious employment arrangements are significantly unhealthier, and those with the most insecure form of precarious employment perform particularly worst in this respect. ConclusionsPrecarious employment may become ever more prevalent as organizations contend with economic fallouts from shocks such as Brexit or Covid-19. This may lead to sub-standard health outcomes. The positive influence of trade unions on working conditions has largely been decimated and the workforce in Britain is ageing. These combinations may pose significant challenges to public health including mental health crises. Public policy ought to help minimise adverse health outcomes linked to employment precarity.

Depressive Symptoms and Sleep Duration as Risk Factors for Breast Cancer - China, 2020.

Psychological and lifestyle factors are known to potentially play a significant role in the development of breast cancer. However, current evidence-based studies present controversial findings on the associations between depression, sleep duration, and breast cancer risk. This study investigated the potential risk factors of depressive symptoms and short sleep duration for breast cancer within the Breast Cancer Cohort Study in Chinese Women. The findings revealed that women experiencing depressive symptoms and short sleep duration exhibited a heightened risk of developing breast cancer, particularly among the older population. Public policy ought to prioritize early health education interventions targeting psychological factors in order to facilitate the prevention of breast cancer.

Effects of Water Policy Implementation and Management of Common Pool Resources in Turkana County, Kenya

Kenya and the sub-Saharan Africa nations could not accomplish the millennial advancement objectives plan on water and consequently the administration of water is in the core of manageable improvement objectives. This paper explored several reasons explaining why water policies are ineffective in Kenya, including; weak institutional frameworks, poor and unsustainable management schemes, fragmented approach to development of water resources and inadequate development of water infrastructure caused by conflict of interest by the implementing agencies. This study used descriptive research design, and targeted household heads and the county water staff in Loima Sub County. The study sample comprised 392 respondents. Data was collected using semi-structured questionnaire and KII. The study findings revealed that, community participation in water resource project management cycle was important for managing water as a shared resource. Moreover, the study established that non-governmental groups and the private sector were better at managing water as a shared resource. Furthermore, community participation in the management of water as a resource for common use was found not to be a determining factor in such management. The study concludes that water is a development challenge in Loima Sub County; it is thus essential to involve the community in the management of water as a common pool resource. The study therefore recommends that Turkana water government should improve performance of utilities through operationalize Turkana County Water Act 2019 and develop robust performance improvement plans based on diagnostic of the utility’s key challenges. Additionally, development of water and governance policy ought to guide management through co-creation in development of coherent and robust policy framework, operationalization roadmap and redesign the structure of water management committees through adoption of appropriate service delivery options based on context. Keywords: Water assets, Policy implementation, Decision making, Pool resources, Challenges

Ethics of a Mandatory Waiting Period for Female Sterilization.

Due to a history of coerced sterilization, a federal Medicaid sterilization policy mandates that a specific consent form be signed by a patient at least thirty days prior to when the patient undergoes sterilization. However, in contemporary obstetrical practice, the Medicaid sterilization policy serves as a policy-level barrier to autonomously desired care. We review the clinical and ethical implications of the current Medicaid sterilization policy. After discussing the utility and impact of waiting periods for other surgical procedures, we explore the psychology of time required for decision-making and consider scientific understanding of regret. We argue that the current Medicaid sterilization waiting period is clinically and ethically unjustifiable and that the policy ought to be revised in light of the goals, preferences, and concerns of the people most affected by it. While the need for continued protection against coercion remains, the current mandated waiting period does little to enforce the high-quality shared decision-making that is desired for sterilization counseling.

Financial repression, SOE reform and fiscal-monetary policy coordination

We build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with financial repression and conduct estimation and simulation with it using aggregate data. We discuss the interaction and optimal combination of fiscal and monetary policies when the model features SOE monopoly and financial repression. We find that under current situation, fiscal policy should play a bigger role in stabilizing output, while monetary policy ought to pay more attention to combatting inflation. Although private firms' limited access to credit can be attributed to financial repression and SOE monopoly, financial repression is a second-best policy, in that it promotes SOE's output via cheap credit when SOEs behave like monopolists. This offsets the efficiency loss associated with monopoly. Moreover, our policy experiments show that the optimal fiscal policy can respond less to output fluctuations, when SOE reforms dampen the significance of financial repression.

The impact of conflicts on climate and migration policy

AbstractWe develop a theoretical model to study the relationship between climate change, migration, and conflicts from the perspective of the recipient countries, which we call collectively the North. The North chooses the number of immigrants it wants to accept together with the amount of climate change mitigation. The potential number of migrants is determined by the extent of climate change in the South. Accepting more migrants allows the North to increase local production but it also exacerbates climate change and gives rise to internal conflicts. Those potential migrants that want to migrate North due to climate change but are not allowed to immigrate may induce external conflicts. We find that a policymaker, subject to the threat of both internal and external conflicts, may either choose a policy that relies more on mitigation with less immigration, or less mitigation and more immigration. Which policy ought to be pursued depends on the relative cost of internal and external conflicts, and the mitigation cost. If either the threat of external or internal conflicts are negligible, then we find that the optimal mitigation and immigration policies are not interdependent any longer. We also discuss when mitigation and immigration policies are substitutes or complements.

The Health Equity Impact Assessment: A Case Study in COVID-19 Visitor Policy.

The Health Equity Impact Assessment: A Case Study in COVID-19 Visitor Policy.

A Public Health Reset Through Contractualism

A Public Health Reset Through Contractualism

Article processing charge expenditure in Chile: The current situation

AbstractThe National Agency of Research and Development from Chile is proposing, for the first time, a national OA policy aiming to ensure access to the scientific knowledge contained in publications resulting from research projects and graduate thesis. Since no information regarding APC expenditure in Chile is available, this study examined the cost of APC for the 2019 publications that included at least one Chilean affiliation. The total expenditure for the year 2019 was estimated at USD 9,129,939. The results confirm that almost one third of the total APC was spent on publications from Health &amp; Medical Sciences, research area with the highest APC (USD 6000). Furthermore, five commercial publishers collected 52% of the total APC expenditure. Unfortunately, the cost of publishing in some journals is so high that it causes detrimental effects on the research capacity of under resourced individuals. In the Chilean scenario, APC is not well suited to scale as most universities do not have an OA budget to support researchers that are eager to publish their work in OA journals. Perhaps the implementation of an OA policy ought to be accompanied by sustainable APC funding grants aimed at supporting under resourced researchers that want to make their research freely available.

Anticipating global and diffuse risks to prevent conflict and governance breakdown: lessons from the EU’s southern neighbourhood

ABSTRACT Where societies display sufficient resilience to global and diffuse risks they are able to avoid tipping-over into governance breakdown and violent conflict. Similarly, if external actors such as the EU wish to build resilience in Europe’s volatile neighbourhood, they require a systematic understanding of global and diffuse risks and tipping-points in order to develop long-term resilience-building strategies. But how should global and diffuse risks and tipping-points be conceptualized and understood? How can policy-makers anticipate global and diffuse risks to avoid governance breakdown and violent conflict in areas of limited statehood? This article addresses these questions. First, it argues, it is only by systematically integrating global and diffuse risks into explanatory logics of governance breakdown and violent conflict that we can develop better predictive models and resilience-building strategies. Second, it articulates a six-cluster typology of global and diffuse risks. Lastly, it demonstrates that in areas of limited statehood societies confront three distinct types of tipping-points that can overwhelm societal resilience. EU early-warning and resilience-fostering policy ought to distinguish between them and prepare to address each type.

A note on optimal taxation, status consumption, and unemployment

Existing research on optimal taxation in economies with status-driven relative consumption (implicitly) assumes that there is no involuntary unemployment, despite ample evidence that real world labor markets are typically characterized by such unemployment. We show how the marginal tax policy ought to be modified to simultaneously account for positional consumption externalities and equilibrium unemployment, and find that interaction effects between these two market failures are crucial determinants of the marginal tax structure. In certain cases, the policy incentive to tax away positional externalities vanishes completely, and negative positional externalities may even lead to lower marginal taxation, under involuntary unemployment.

ANALISIS PEMBIAYAAN MURABAHAH PADA LEMBAGA KEUANGAN MIKRO SYARIAH ( LKMS) ( STUDI KASUS PADA LKMS MM SEJAHTERA KOTA BENGKULU)

ABSTRAK gone into effect of Code/Law No. 1 year 2013 about Micro Financial Institution ( LKM) hence since then standing many Micro Financial Institution both for operating by kovensional and or operate Moslem lawly , one of the Micro Financial Institution ( LKM) operating Moslem lawly that is Secure and prosperous LKMS MM which is have location in this Town Bengkulu Research aim to to know akad execution defrayal of murabahah in Secure and prosperous LKMS MM of Bengkulu and as according to Religious Advices Council Moslem law National MUI , this research is]research qualitative, that is in the form of an research procedure yielding descriptive data in the form of article or utterance and behavior which can be perceived from people itself subjek. Source of data become consideration in determination of data collecting method. Source of data consist of primary data and sekunder data. There is three data processing step qualitative, namely reduce data ( reduction data), presentation of data ( data displayed), and withdrawal of conclusion ( verification and drawing conclusion). Conclusion result of this research : Execution Defrayal of Murabahah at Secure and prosperous LKMS MM of Town Bengkulu not yet fully as according to Religious Advices Council Moslem law National MUI that is in the case of . In each application of defrayal [submitted/sent] murabahah by member / nasabah is not provided with member statement or promise / utk client buy produk from this LKMS matter of risk the happening of cancellation of murabahah by member/ client which later will harm LKMS party/ side in the case of policy of gift of margin cutting ( Muqashah) LKMS party/ side advise early this matter interfere in Religious advices DSN MUI which is policy ought to Keyword: LKMS, Akad Murabahah, Religious advices DSN MUI

European Union and the fight against terrorism: a differentiated integration theory perspective

Although many EU member states experienced large scale terrorist attacks and both national and EU policymakers have repeatedly acknowledged the need to tackle the apparent contradiction between borderless terrorism and national counterterrorism measures, a genuine supranational EU counterterrorism response has not emerged thus far. In this article, we explore why this has been the case. Via a set of proxy indicators, we operationalize and test three key variables derived from differentiated integration theory, which suggests that the lack of horizontal and vertical integration in the EU’s counterterrorism policy ought to be the result of high and asymmetric politicization, asymmetrical interdependence, and little preference convergence across EU member states. Our findings indicate that although all of these variables did influence integration in the first fifteen years of EU counterterrorism policy (2001–2016), only one variable (interdependence) acted exactly as expected by differentiated integration theory.