Policy Space Research Articles

Explaining interest group position-taking across partisan policy dimensions

ABSTRACT Some interest groups have policy positions on one or more policy dimensions in partisan policy space while others do not. In this paper we examine explanations for differences in interest group position-taking across policy dimensions. While group characteristics are likely to explain parts of such variation in interest group position-taking, we hypothesise that the salience and polarisation among parties and citizens of the respective policy dimension also matter. By utilising novel survey data on interest group positions (within a predefined policy space) in six different countries as well as survey data on citizen and party positions, we investigate interest group position-taking across policy dimensions. The analysis shows that interest groups with more resources, core interests linked to the examined policy dimensions and a connection to the traditional party system are more likely to have policy positions than other groups. Furthermore, we find evidence of groups supplementing citizens and parties in policy space by articulating positions on policy dimensions that the average citizen and party pays less attention to. Moreover, when party polarisation increases on a dimension, greater party salience is negatively associated with group position taking.

Untying the Knot: How Child Support and Alimony Affect Couples’ Dynamic Decisions and Welfare

Abstract In many countries, divorce law mandates post-marital maintenance payments (child support and alimony) to insure the lower earner in married couples against financial losses upon divorce. This paper studies how maintenance payments affect couples’ intertemporal decisions and welfare. I develop a dynamic model of family labor supply, home production, savings, and divorce and estimate it using Danish register and survey data. The model captures the policy tradeoff between providing insurance to the lower earner and enabling couples to specialize efficiently, on the one hand, and maintaining labor supply incentives for divorcees, on the other hand. I use the estimated model to study various counterfactual policy scenarios. I find that alimony comes with more substantial labor supply disincentives compared to child support payments and is less efficient in providing consumption insurance. The welfare maximizing policy, within the status quo policy space, involves increasing child support and reducing alimony payments. My results show that Pareto improvements beyond this welfare maximizing policy are feasible, highlighting limitations of how child support and alimony policies are commonly implemented.

Article: Green Subsidies: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This article examines the legal framework governing subsidies. It scrutinizes the manner in which green subsidies are treated under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measure (ASCM). The main issue of the current system is that subsidies cannot be justified by a policy rationale. This paper then discusses some of the proposals made for the amendment of ASCM in order to provide states with sufficient policy space. This article examines the question of whether international climate change obligations are jus cogens norms, before ending with concluding remarks.

Assessment of dyna clue model for prediction of spatio-temporal dynamics of urbanisation and green space in Jaipur district, Rajasthan (India)

Urbanisation in Jaipur, Rajasthan’s capital, has significantly impacted land use and land cover (LULC) over the past four decades. This study addresses the pressing issue of how rapid urban expansion affects green spaces and environmental balance. Utilizing satellite imagery and a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm, LULC maps for 1993, 2003, 2013, and 2023 were generated to analyze changes in land cover, including agriculture, barren land, built-up areas, vegetation, wasteland, fallow land, and water bodies. The Dyna-CLUE model, incorporating variables such as elevation, slope, aspect, and proximity to streams and roads, was employed to forecast LULC changes for 2033 and 2043. The findings reveal a marked increase in built-up areas at the expense of vegetative cover, driven by urbanization, infrastructural development, agricultural expansion, climate change, and policy decisions. With Kappa coefficients indicating high agreement between classified land cover and ground truth data (84–90% accuracy), the study projects continued urban growth and further decline in vegetation. This underscores the urgent need for sustainable land use planning and environmental conservation in Jaipur. Proposed strategies to address these issues include establishing ecological zones, enforcing green building regulations, promoting mixed-use development, and implementing a 15-min green space policy. These measures aim to enhance green space distribution and support Jaipur’s transition towards a greener urban environment.

Evaluation of university food environment and healthy space policy implementation at university

Abstract Issue/problem Unhealthy diets, along with factors like tobacco, alcohol, and inactivity, contribute significantly to non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Prevention strategies should prioritize reducing exposure to these risk factors. It’s also crucial to consider environmental well-being alongside promoting health. Description of the problem During 2023/2024, university cafeterias (UC) were evaluated for healthy eating standards compliance, resulting in a noticeable presence of unhealthy foods together with plastic use, alcohol and tobacco consumption. This led to the development of an accreditation program to boost UC as healthy spaces. Results The developed program includes 5 mandatory standards and 42 recommendations. Priority objectives are offering healthy food options like fruit, avoiding alcohol and sugary drink ads, banning tobacco, promoting physical activity, and reducing waste for example by encouraging unpackaged water consumption. Our policy emphasizes evaluation and monitoring, so accreditation is valid only for two years. Our goal is to establish UC as sustainable, healthy spaces. To encourage compliance, we offer institutional financial support and accreditation seals to UC, showcasing their commitment to community health. Implementation begins in the 2024/2025 academic year, with an initial evaluation scheduled at that time. Lessons Monitoring UC food offerings is crucial for ensuring healthier options. Cafeterias play a key role in promoting healthy habits. Creating environments with healthier options can mitigate non-communicable disease risk factors presence. Key messages • University cafeterias are pivotal in fostering a healthy lifestyle. • Prioritizing policies to address non-communicable diseases is crucial. Clear programs are essential for sustained effectiveness.

Nonsingular Terminal Sliding Mode Control for Vehicular Platoon Systems with Measurement Delays and Noise

Platooning of vehicular systems has been considered an effective solution for alleviating traffic congestion and reducing energy consumption. Because of limitations in onboard sensors, the measurement system inevitably suffers from measurement delays and noise, yet it receives insufficient attention. In this article, to deal with the measurement delays and noise while improving convergence performance, the platoon control problem of vehicular systems is studied under the nonsingular terminal sliding mode control (NTSMC) framework. A sliding mode observer (SMO) is proposed to estimate the states affected by measurement delays and noise. A distributed NTSMC scheme is developed for the platooning of the vehicular systems and ensures the convergence of the sliding mode surface affected by measurement delays and noise. One salient feature of the proposed SMO is that it can handle time-varying measurement delays rather than constant ones. Moreover, the control law is free of initial spacing error conditions under the employed coupled spacing policy. Numerical simulations are finally provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

Trade Policy Space, Aid for Trade and, Intra-African and External African Manufactured Exports

Boosting intra-African manufactured exports is a critical objective of African leaders. The present analysis examines whether trade policy space and Aid for Trade (AfT) flows can contribute to achieving this objective. The analysis covers an unbalanced sample of 36 African countries over the period from 2004 to 2020, and uses estimators that allow obtaining the short-term (i.e., within-country effect) and long-term (i.e., between-country effect) effects of each regressor. The estimators are the combination of the feasible generalized least squares estimator on the one hand, and the Seemingly Unrelated Regression on the other hand, in the context of a hybrid model. The findings indicate that both trade policy space and AfT flows can help promote - including in a complementary way - African manufactured exports, especially intra-African manufactured exports. In this regard, trade policy space and AfT flows are instrumental in meeting African leaders’ objectives of promoting intra-African trade. The implications of the findings are discussed.

On the limits of economic activity: bridging degrowth and modern monetary theory for socio-ecological sustainability and justice

This paper advances recent work exploring synergies and tensions between two schools of political-economic thought—degrowth and modern monetary theory (MMT)—and posits that this synergy warrants closer attention from International Political Economy and Environment (IPEE) scholars. Thus far, degrowth policies have largely been proposed upon the assumption that governments are limited in budgetary terms. MMT theorists have offered an alternative perspective on fiscal policy space but generally provide insufficient ecological considerations. This paper asks how each school’s underlying assumptions about the limits of economic activity might inform the other’s framework of action. We find that while there are tensions between the two schools’ economic philosophies, there are possibilities for cross-fertilization, which ought to interest IPEE scholars. MMT could engage degrowth’s perspective of ecological limits and global socio-ecological justice in its discussions about what economies can ‘afford’, whereas degrowth could use MMT insights to shift from a ‘pay for’ to a ‘resource’ frame, while centering abundance before limits. Meanwhile, IPEE can provide insights to an MMT-informed degrowth transition by grounding this debate in material analyses of class and power. Our findings suggest that degrowth and MMT could provide a normative direction for IPEE research centered around meeting material needs within planetary boundaries.

South Korea's Space Policy and Leap to Space Power

South Korea's Space Policy and Leap to Space Power

Deep Learning-Based Energy-Efficient Spacing Policy and Platooning Control Co-Design for Connected and Automated Vehicles on Inclined Roads

Deep Learning-Based Energy-Efficient Spacing Policy and Platooning Control Co-Design for Connected and Automated Vehicles on Inclined Roads

Period Poverty: How School Nurses Can Support Menstrual Health and Hygiene

Lack of access to menstrual products, menstrual hygiene, and education, also known as period poverty, is a widespread issue and disproportionately impacts low-income, rural, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and People of Color. Period poverty along with period symptoms, such as heavy and painful periods, contribute to school absenteeism impacting school connectedness and student success. The purpose of this article is to bring awareness to period poverty and encourage school nurses to intervene in individual schools, communities, and far-reaching policy spaces utilizing their expertise to secure resources. School nurses can assist in implementing interventions throughout the school year to increase student engagement, success, and overall menstrual health wellness. Through added engagement of stakeholders such as student groups, school staff and administrators, and community organizations, school nurses can help shift the narrative from a position of oppression around menstrual health to a position of empowerment.

How to place non-majoritarian institutions and political actors in a common policy space: Spatial modeling of court–executive interactions

How to place non-majoritarian institutions and political actors in a common policy space: Spatial modeling of court–executive interactions

China in global digital trade governance: towards a development-oriented agenda?

Abstract Existing literature on the behaviour of rising powers in global trade governance has yielded inconclusive evidence about their role and impact. This article contributes to this literature by examining China's role in global digital trade governance, an issue area which so far has not received sufficient scholarly attention. Specifically, it addresses the following question: as a self-proclaimed leader of the developing world in digital development, to what extent do its preferences and negotiation approach align with the interests of other developing countries? Analysing China's participation in three sets of negotiations using process tracing, the article argues that China's dual identity both as a self-identified developing country and as a rising power has contributed to its strategic ambivalence. In principle China supports a development-oriented approach to digital trade governance, calling attention to issues such as the digital divide and preserving developing countries' policy space on data localization consistent with its domestic regulatory approaches. Yet China's interest in promoting Chinese technology firms' global expansion leads to increasing divergence with other developing countries on issues such as the e-commerce customs duty moratorium and the global taxation of digital firms, paradoxically increasing its interest alignment with developed countries and limiting its support for fundamental reforms.

Proposal of self and semi-supervised learning for imbalanced classification of coronary heart disease tabular data

Triple Mixup is an augmentation policy in the hidden latent space we introduced in the Contrastive Mixup Self-Semi Supervised learning framework, to address the imbalanced data problem, for Cardiovascular Heart Diseases tabular dataset. Medical tabular datasets are known to present challenges as high imbalanced class, limited annotated quality samples due to the domain nature. Recent literature in Self and Semi supervised learning, has shown tremendous progress in learning useful representations, and leveraging unlabeled dataset and labeled dataset to train a learning model. Most existing methods are not feasible for tabular data due to the data augmentation scheme. In addition, the high imbalanced problem can show lower performance on machine learning algorithms. For this work, we propose the triple data augmentation method in hidden space to attack the unbalanced challenge in self-supervised and semi-supervised learning, from the possible applications of Contrastive Mixup, thus we will study the influence of it.

A world agenda? How was universal primary education selected as a UN Millennium Development Goal?

ABSTRACT Between 2000 and 2015, the eight UN Millennium Development Goals were central to the UN agenda, forming a blueprint for development. However, the manner in which multilateral agencies establish such global priorities is not well understood. The article analyses how and why universal primary education was selected as a Millennium Development Goal. It shows the historical momentum of MDG2 among competing priorities in a contested policy space and how policy entrepreneurs skilfully managed and navigated the process. Developing country voices, on the other hand, were virtually absent from influential decision-making forums. A unique contribution of the research is interviews with MDG policy entrepreneurs, to improve understanding of what would otherwise remain hidden aspects of the process and to aid theory testing and development.

Towards more sustainable and inclusive development corridors in Africa

Abstract Development corridors are linear programmes of infrastructure and agriculture aiming to facilitate rapid socio-economic development. In Africa, they are a major development activity, with 88 underway or planned corridors. Drawing from extensive literature and insights gleaned from a 4 year research programme, this review scrutinizes the impacts of development corridors on people, wildlife and ecosystems in Kenya and Tanzania, proposing solutions to achieve better outcomes. The overarching goal was to discern the principle challenges emerging from the practical execution of the prevailing corridor model. The holistic approach taken, assessing the development corridors paradigm through an integrated ecological, social, and economic lens, provides novel insights that have not been possible using more traditional—siloed—research approaches. Eight key challenge areas are identified: impact assessments processes; coherence across international, national and local planning; governance; inclusivity; equality; impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services; incorporation of future climate risks; and integrated water resource management. Poorly planned and implemented corridors detrimentally impact livelihoods and ecosystems. They lack a sustainable development vision, detailed social, environmental or climate risk assessments, and develop incrementally in policy and corporate spaces. There is also often a disconnect between investors and recipient governments, with some investors funding what governments request without applying internationally-recognised safeguards, and governments lacking capacity and resources to enforce regulations. We make recommendations for addressing these challenge areas. These aim to enhance impact assessment efficacy; integrate local perspectives into effective and inclusive corridor planning; overcome siloed project development and implementation; anticipate future development projections; and prioritise landscape preservation for enhanced ecosystem services and climate resilience.

Comparative analysis of different spacing policies for longitudinal control in vehicle platooning

Most existing automated driving vehicles in the platoon equipped with an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems and a Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) systems have mainly focused on enhancing safety, improving traffic efficiency problems, and reducing workload. The spacing strategy is the core of all platoon designs, and the performance of an ACC/CACC systems hinges on the select of the spacing strategy. Although, in the literature, there are many papers dealing with platoon control, detailed explanations of the operating mechanisms of two types of spacing policies including the Headway Spacing Strategy (CTHS), and Constant Spacing Strategy (CSS), and comparative studies on them are still lacking. This work presents the studies of the longitudinal control strategy of a platoon of vehicles equipped with the existing ACC systems and CACC systems under two different spacing policies to evaluate the performances. The contributions in this work are carefully reviewed and the operating mechanisms and characteristics of two different spacing policies: the CTHS and CSS, the general evaluation criteria for spacing strategies are provided and their advantages and disadvantages are based on the numerical results. Both numerical simulations and experiments with a platoon of smart cars in real-time have demonstrated the effectiveness and practicability of the presented methodology.

Industrial and innovation policies in times of crisis: a widening technological divide?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ongoing revival of industrial and innovation policies across developed and developing economies. Design/methodology/approach The paper compare the scale and scope of recent industrial and innovation policy initiatives across developed and developing economies. Also, it analyzes recent data regarding R&D investments and other innovation indicators. Findings There are enormous disparities across economies in their capacity to implement industrial policies, particularly those to support science, technology and innovation. Most developed economies, and a few developing economies, are implementing bold, ambitious and medium-term innovation policies towards bolstering R&D investments, supporting advanced manufacturing and green energies and strengthening technological capabilities. Amid lack of fiscal policy space and vulnerable debt sustainability positions, institutional deficiencies and weak innovation ecosystems, developing economies – particularly in Africa and Latin America – face enormous challenges to implement strategic industrial and innovation policies. Research limitations/implications Under the current economic, financing and institutional conditions, together with subdued global trade and ongoing geopolitical fragmentation, the technological divide and innovation asymmetries across economies will likely widen even further, paving the ground for a “development divergence” in the coming decade. Originality/value The paper analyzes the implications of the current industrial and innovation policy trends across developed and developing countries. Under the current economic, financing and institutional conditions, together with subdued global trade and ongoing geopolitical fragmentation, the technological divide and innovation asymmetries across economies will likely widen even further, paving the ground for a “development divergence” in the coming decade.

Regulatory challenges and policy gaps for in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing technologies

In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM) technologies provide incredible opportunities to improve space exploration by giving space assets longer lives, enabling the creation of space objects that are too large to launch from Earth, and allowing space technology to be built using materials sourced from other celestial bodies. However, ISAM technologies also pose legal and regulatory challenges. There are some ongoing challenges with satellite regulations that also apply to ISAM technologies, like spectrum allocation and enforcement, and some difficulties that are unique to ISAM, like mission authorization and continuing supervision. This paper explores how ISAM technologies fit within current space policy framework and the current efforts to regulate ISAM. Additionally, it identifies policy gaps and future work to be done to ensure the safe and sustainable use of ISAM technology.

Implementation of the Green Open Space Policy Regarding the Provision and Arrangement of Kaombona City Forest Areas, Manikulore Koľa Palu City

This research was conducted to look at implementing the Green Open Space Policy regarding the Provision and Arrangement of City Forest Areas. Based on the research results, the Provision and Arrangement of RĽH in the Kaombona City Forest Area is based on planning, analysis, design, implementation, and maintenance. In the Implementation of the Policy for Providing and Arranging Green Open Space in the City Forest Area of ​​Mantikuloie District, Palu City, the development of the City Forest has been very beneficial for urban areas as well as maintaining environmental sustainability and making it clean. However, the provision and arrangement activities are still 20% complete from the Masterplan concept which is considered to have still deficiencies including the design, implementation, and maintenance processes, namely the facilities and services of the Kaombona City Forest which are currently still under construction, apart from the play area buildings, not all road access has been built, and there are still many buildings that have not been completely built, some roads have not been asphalted, street lighting is inadequate and there are many more sports and recreation facilities that have not been completed.