Unfair Distribution Of Resources Research Articles

How Fair is Education Policy in Albania?

Democracy, although a highly debated concept, preserves its identity in the values upon which it is founded. These values give universality to democracy, are normative and define democracy. Fairness is considered as one of the standard values of democracy. It is seen as justice, social justice and as equality. Fairness is highly discussed from the prospect of distributive justice. As injustice comes from unfair distribution of resources, the criteria over which this distribution is done is important. Three are the main principles based on which fair distribution is conducted: equality; everyone receives the same resource; equity, resource is distributed based on merit, work, talent; need, resource is distributed based on what individuals need. The development of political culture is the bridge that links fairness with citizens. Education stands as an important tool that influences political culture. At the same time, it is one of the spheres where to notice issues of fairness. In education, a top-down analysis of fairness necessitates the examination of education policy. The driving research question has been to examine how education policy in Albania reflects issues of fairness. It brings results from the analysis of formal documents representing education policy. Content analysis has been used as a method aiming to filter these documents for issues related to fairness.

Is Environmental Pressure Distributed Equally in China? Empirical Evidence from Provincial and Industrial Panel Data Analysis

China's rapid economic development has resulted in increasingly serious environmental pollution that is negatively affecting the health of Chinese citizens. Notably, the unfair distribution of resources may cause the uneven distribution of the environmental burden. In this study, panel data of 30 Chinese provinces and 32 industries for the period 2004 to 2017 is used to investigate how the environmental burden is distributed across different regions and industries. To manage potential endogeneity and allow for dynamics, the generalized method of moments and panel vector autoregression models are employed. The estimation results indicate that, on the whole, urban residents endure the most serious environmental pollution. Notably, a big gap is observed between urban and rural residents' share of environmental pressure, and a similar gap is also observed between developed and underdeveloped areas in China. Moreover, the government is responsible for less environmental pressure than companies for urban residents and rural residents. The subindustry regression results indicate that the “polluting department” bears the most environmental pressure, and the “green department” also bore some negative environmental pressure.

Use of a fuzzy logic scheduler to improve quality of service on cellular networks

An efficient and fair packet scheduler is very important to guaranty the cellular network quality of service (QoS). In general, classic packet schedulers follow static rules based on priorities. Unfortunately, static rules may cause unfair resource distribution. We present and analyze FuzSy, a cellular network packet scheduler based on the quality of service and fuzzy logic. Instead of following static prioritization rules, it prioritizes traffic classes that have a higher risk of not reaching QoS requirements. Its dynamic priority changes any traffic class in case of performance decrease risk. Based on network metadata, FuzSy uses fuzzy logic to decide about prioritization. We conducted simulations in a 4G network. FuzSy achieved QoS requirements and network fairness for all classes. One of FuzSy’s significant advantages is the fairness guaranty that solutions contained in other works do not garantee. We show that FuzSy can be used in any kind of cellular network because it is straightforward to have its parameters adjusted. In the future 5G networks, for example, FuzSy may be helpful due to a large number of heterogeneous connected devices and different kinds of applications. The FuzSy scheduler use may achieve the QoS, and the fairness guarantees since its concept is independent of technology, and it is usable in any kind of network.

Is environmental pressure distributed equally in China? Empirical evidence from provincial and industrial panel data analysis

China's rapid economic development has resulted in increasingly serious environmental pollution that is negatively affecting the health of Chinese citizens. Notably, the unfair distribution of resources may cause the uneven distribution of the environmental burden. In this study, panel data of 30 Chinese provinces and 32 industries for the period 2004 to 2017 is used to investigate how the environmental burden is distributed across different regions and industries. To manage potential endogeneity and allow for dynamics, the generalized method of moments and panel vector autoregression models are employed. The estimation results indicate that, on the whole, urban residents endure the most serious environmental pollution. Notably, a big gap is observed between urban and rural residents' share of environmental pressure, and a similar gap is also observed between developed and underdeveloped areas in China. Moreover, the government is responsible for less environmental pressure than companies for urban residents and rural residents. The subindustry regression results indicate that the “polluting department” bears the most environmental pressure, and the “green department” also bore some negative environmental pressure.

Heterogeneity in children's developing moral judgments about different types of harm.

The patterning of 160 U.S. 4- to 9-year-olds' (M = 6.23 years, SD = 1.46) moral judgments regarding physical harm, psychological harm, and unfair resource distribution transgressions were examined in separate latent profile analyses. Judgments regarding physical harm yielded a single Prototypical profile, where transgressions were judged as very unacceptable, punishable, wrong even if not regulated, intentional, harmful, and as causing very negative emotions for victims. A similar Prototypical profile, as well as an Emergent profile, was extracted for both unfair resource distribution and psychological harm; children in the Emergent profile evaluated transgressions as more acceptable, particularly when rules and authority were removed, less punishable, less intentional, and less harmful than did Prototypical children. In addition, psychological harm was characterized by a small Inconsistent profile, where children judged moral transgressions as very acceptable but also as intentional and harmful. Profiles were differentiated by child age and authority independence justifications, but not by individual differences in social competence, gender, or act acceptability justifications. Children in the Inconsistent profile for psychological harm or in the Emergent profile for unfair resource distribution were younger than children in the other profile(s) for the respective harm type. Children who were classified in the Prototypical (or the Emergent) profile when judging unequal distribution were more likely than would be expected by chance to be classified in the equivalent profile when evaluating psychological harm transgressions. The results show that moral judgments are organized and reflect age differences in children's moral understanding of different types of harms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Association between organizational justice and depressive symptoms among securities company workers.

BackgroundThe organizational justice model can evaluate job stressor from decision-making process, attitude of managerial or senior staff toward their junior workers, and unfair resource distribution. Stress from organizational injustice could be harmful to workers' mental health. The purpose of this study is to explore the association between organizational justice and depressive symptoms in a securities company.MethodsTo estimate organizational justice, a translated Moorman's organizational justice evaluation questionnaire (Korean) was employed. Cronbach's α coefficient was estimated to assess the internal consistency of the translated questionnaire. To assess depressive symptoms, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale was used. The link between the sub-concepts of the organizational justice model and depressive symptoms was assessed utilizing multiple logistic regression models.ResultsThe risk of depressive symptoms was significantly higher among workers with higher levels of all subcategory of organizational injustice. In the full adjusted model odds ratio (OR) of higher level of procedural injustice 2.79 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.58–4.90), OR of the higher level of relational injustice 4.25 (95% CI, 2.66–6.78), OR of higher level of distributional injustice 4.53 (95% CI, 2.63–7.83) respectively. Cronbach's α coefficient of the Korean version was 0.93 for procedural justice, 0.93 for relational justice, and 0.95 for distributive justice.ConclusionsA higher level of organizational injustice was linked to higher prevalence of depressive symptoms among workers in a company of financial industry.

Socioeconomic differential in self-assessment of health and happiness in 5 African countries: Finding from World Value Survey.

ObjectiveFactors that contribute to wealth related inequalities in self-rated health (SRH) and happiness remains unclear most especially in sub-Saharan countries (SSA). This study aims to explore and compare socioeconomic differentials in SRH and happiness in five SSA countries.MethodsUsing the 2010/2014 World Values Survey (WVS), we obtained a sample of 9,869 participants of age 16 and above from five SSA countries (Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Rwanda and Zimbabwe). Socioeconomic inequalities were quantified using the concentration index. The contribution of each predictor to concentration index’s magnitude was obtained by means of regression based decomposition analysis.ResultsPoor SRH ranges from approximately 9% in Nigeria to 20% in Zimbabwe, whereas unhappiness was lower in Rwanda (9.5%) and higher in South Africa (23.3%). Concentration index was negative for both outcomes in all countries, which implies that poor SRH and unhappiness are excessively concentrated among the poorest socioeconomic strata. Although magnitudes differ across countries, however, the major contributor to wealth-related inequality in poor SRH is satisfaction with financial situation whereas for unhappiness the major contributors are level of income and satisfaction with financial situation.ConclusionsThis study underscores an association between wealth related inequalities and poor SRH and unhappiness in the context of SSA. Improving equity in health, as suggested by the commission of social determinants of health may be useful in fighting against the unfair distribution of resources. Thus, knowledge about the self-rating of health and happiness can serve as proxy estimates for understanding the distribution of health care access and economic resources needed for well-being in resident countries.

Dinamika hubungan kekuasaan pusat dan daerah

In 2001 President Wahid made a significant change in the administrative systemfrom a highly centralised to a decentralised system. After the downfall of Soeharto,governors, regents and mayors, who had felt the unfair distribution of resources, started to claim a greater share of their resources. In the implementation of local autonomy the relationship between the central and the localgouemments and the respective functions of each administrative level became cru­cial. Regional autonomy aimed at changing the balance between the central bureaucracy and the Iocal btaeaucracy, and between upper leuel bureaucracy and lozaer level bureaucracy. The need to change the concentration of power and resouces in the hands of power holders and, informally, also in hands of its cronies, was a logical consequence of the struggle to eliminate cronyism and collusion: According to Law Na 22 of 1999 on Local Government, districts had full autonomy. This meant that the provincial governor continued to act as the representative of the central government in the province, but that the head of a district could no longer be regarded as a representative ofcentral government The governor had a dual role as head of the autonomous region, the governor did not have power over the regent. As the central government representative, however, the governor clearly had the power of the centre to supervise and to facilitate the district and city governments.

Life and Liberty in the Pursuit of Housing: Rethinking Renting and Owning in Post-Crisis America

The recent housing crisis's devastating effects on U.S. households’ economic situations provides reason to examine the risks, pitfalls and assumptions underlying contemporary housing policy. This paper examines issues associated with renting and owning housing in America. It argues that housing operates as (1) a dimension of the U.S. system of stratification, (2) a method for the unfair distribution of resources in metropolitan space, and (3) a mechanism for the construction of the “other” and as a vehicle for social exclusion. Homeownership restricts people to homogeneous neighborhoods, renders low-income families and renters of all types unacceptable, makes neighborhoods fertile ground for learning who is socially undesirable, breeds class-based distinctions, and puts people in financially risky situations. Rethinking questions about renting and owning may allow consideration of how housing can play a more constructive role in pursing economic opportunities, redistribution and social and economic justice in America.

CT coronary angiography vs. invasive coronary angiography in CHD.

Scientific background Various diagnostic tests including conventional invasive coronary angiography and non-invasive computed tomography (CT) coronary angiography are used in the diagnosis of coronary heart disease (CHD).

ASSET (Age/Sex Standardised Estimates of Treatment): A Research Model to Improve the Governance of Prescribing Funds in Italy

BackgroundThe primary objective of this study was to make the first step in the modelling of pharmaceutical demand in Italy, by deriving a weighted capitation model to account for demographic differences among general practices. The experimental model was called ASSET (Age/Sex Standardised Estimates of Treatment).Methods and Major FindingsIndividual prescription costs and demographic data referred to 3,175,691 Italian subjects and were collected directly from three Regional Health Authorities over the 12-month period between October 2004 and September 2005. The mean annual prescription cost per individual was similar for males (196.13 euro) and females (195.12 euro). After 65 years of age, the mean prescribing costs for males were significantly higher than females. On average, costs for a 75-year-old subject would be 12 times the costs for a 25–34 year-old subject if male, 8 times if female. Subjects over 65 years of age (22% of total population) accounted for 56% of total prescribing costs. The weightings explained approximately 90% of the evolution of total prescribing costs, in spite of the pricing and reimbursement turbulences affecting Italy in the 2000–2005 period. The ASSET weightings were able to explain only about 25% of the variation in prescribing costs among individuals.ConclusionsIf mainly idiosyncratic prescribing by general practitioners causes the unexplained variations, the introduction of capitation-based budgets would gradually move practices with high prescribing costs towards the national average. It is also possible, though, that the unexplained individual variation in prescribing costs is the result of differences in the clinical characteristics or socio-economic conditions of practice populations. If this is the case, capitation-based budgets may lead to unfair distribution of resources. The ASSET age/sex weightings should be used as a guide, not as the ultimate determinant, for an equitable allocation of prescribing resources to regional authorities and general practices.

A politics of resentment: Shopkeepers in a London neighbourhood

In this article we analyse the “talk” of shopkeepers in a multicultural London neighbourhood. These shopkeepers resent the loss of economic prosperity and sense of community that, in their nostalgic recollection, characterized their neighbourhood in an earlier era. They answer the classic question of politics, “who gets what and why” with “they get everything because we get nothing.” We identify this stance as a politics of resentment, one that engages with government and media narratives against asylum-seekers to construct a highly exclusionary notion of British identity. In these shopkeepers’ discourse being British means being Anglophone, Christian and white, with these signifiers being configured in different ways, depending on the social location of the speaker. They resent local and national government for what they perceive as the unfair distribution of resources, both to “asylum-seekers” below them and to corporate capital above them.

Family Business-Owning Couples: An EFT View into Their Unique Conflict Culture

This study expands the understanding of business-related tensions within business-owning couples through an interdisciplinary literature review, through a longitudinal data analysis, and through application of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) to a case study. Business-owning husbands and wives in this study reported that conflicts related to work/family life balance and unfair distribution of resources (money, time, energy) between family and business systems create the greatest tensions. Low family functionality, wives' role dissatisfaction, transfer of resources from family to business, and husbands' identification of wives as major decision makers were all predictors of wives' higher tension levels. Husbands reported increased tension when wives worked more hours in the business. Three elements of EFT are applied to a family business couple.

Unfair Distribution of Resources in Africa: What Should be done about the Ethnicity Factor?

This paper1 depicts a common way African governments misuse resources: By letting ethnicities sway distribution decisions. Some analysts endorse ac? cepting the situation as simply how Africans choose to govern themselves (Chabal and Daloz, 1999). However, interviews conducted in Kenya brought to light two popular ? and conflicting ? alternatives: either taking people's ethnic allegiances as is, and devising a federal state based on ethnic regions; or continuing to discourage ethnic identification with a view to promoting statewide unity. After posing the two views as a central dilemma, I will next ask whether more academic debate about pluralistic/multicultural societies debates fueled by Hannah Arendt, Iris Young, Justin Ekennia, and recent stud? ies in social psychology can shed light on that dilemma. Finally, I will pro? pose a solution that rejects ethnic federalism, encourages nonethnic political organizations, and tentatively endorses nonethnic federalism.

A social justice agenda.

A social justice agenda.

Land use planning practice under the public land ownership policy in Tanzania

Land-use planning can be defined as a programme of state intervention in land use and environmental change to mediate conflicts of interests over how land should be used, developed, and coordinate individual activities which if left to proceed otherwise would lead to an environment for living that is characterised by negative externalities, inefficient use of land and services, inequity and unfair distribution of resources. The land-use programme is realised through a planning system, constituted by institutional arrangements, instruments and tools. Being one of the land policy tool by which the government intervenes in land-use change and development, land-use planning practice is, obviously, influenced by the content of the land policy as well as interests extant in a locality to include those of the planners and other land administrators. How does planning practice looks like under a public landownership policy? Through an empirical case of planning in practice, this paper provides an answer to this question.

Is Justice Enough? Ends and Means in Bioethics

There call be little doubt that the dominant social issue of the 1960s and 1970s was that of justice and equality. It inspired the development of many fresh welfare policies and was a potent motivating force in the advent of Medicare and Medicaid, both thought (mistakenly as it turned out) to be the forerunners of universal health care. John Rawls' 1972 study A Theory of justice was not only a powerful work in its own right but perfectly in step with the times. Given that context, it was hardly surprising that the field of bioethics saw a great surge of writing and debate on issues of justice and health care. That was, and still is, a central topic. Far less important for many years was any serious discussion of the ends of medicine. To be sure, there was and is a field known as the philosophy of medicine that has given considerable attention to the nature of medicine. But the discussion in that field - which was often technical and historical in any case, self-consciously academic and scholarly - proceeded independently of the interest in health care equality. And vice-versa. In retrospect, that seems an odd bifurcation. How is it possible to have a full examination of a field as dynamic and fast-changing as health care without - simultaneous - asking some basic questions about what health care is supposed to give us and do for us? Norman Daniels, in his fine work on justice and health care, has come as close as anyone to attempting to find the specific link between the ends of health care and fair access to it. By his use of the concept of functioning as the goal of medicine he has sought to bring ends and means together. That is surely a traditional and conventionally valid concept, and in his hands has proved exceedingly useful. But it is in the end too thin and formal a concept to give us the kind of help we need. Its main shortcoming is that it does not well take account of two dominant realities of modern medicine. One of them is the constant introduction into the health care system of new technologies, most of them expensive and of greater benefit to individual than to population health. Advances in organ transplantation would be a good example of this kind of development. The pursuit of functioning for some classes of patients can be enormously costly - and probably achieved only at the cost of limiting resources for other classes of patients. Daniels has, I would note, been working on this problem in recent years - but doing so with the language and concepts of equality rather than those of the ends of medicine and health care. The other reality seems to me even more important. The impact of modern medical progress is often to force us to go beyond, and thus to redefine, what constitutes species-typical functioning. This is happening most notably in the field of aging, where one of the aims of the medical branch of the anti-ageism movement is to distinguish sharply between getting sick and getting old. In the ambitions of medical research, and now and then in its actual results, the ancient pattern of increasing illness, dementia, and frailty in old age can someday be vanquished@ the curve of morbidity can be squared. Medical progress has served to redefine the statistical notion of normality, and it is no less markedly beginning to dangle before our eyes the optimization or even enhancement of species functioning. Some now argue, moreover, that there is no real difference between normalizing and optimizing anyway. The relationship between medical research and fairness in health care is particularly important in this context, and also little explored. What are fair and reasonable research priorities? When can it be said that no further progress is socially necessary? What kinds of research exacerbate an unfair distribution of resources, or enhance a fair one? For both of the reasons I have cited - the cost of medical progress, on the one hand, and its power to redefine normality, on the other - there can be no full discussion of equality in health care without an equally full discussion of the substantive goods and goals that medicine and health care should pursue. …

Fairness in broadband ISDNs

In order to achieve satisfactory performance in broadband Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDNs), some techniques to control flow of information traffic, are necessary. Bandwidth allocation, bandwidth enforcement, and load balancing, are some of the examples of these techniques. Unfortunately, some of these techniques result in unfair distribution of resources among users. Recently, fairness in resource sharing systems has received significant attention among researchers.In this paper, we discuss, in comparative terms, several resource allocation techniques along with their fairness aspects in broadband ISDNs. We will also propose a threshold-based scheme to minimize the blocking probability and improve fairness.

Abused, Neglected, and Nonmaltreated Children's Conceptions of Moral and Social-Conventional Transgressions

The effect of child maltreatment on children's social-cognitive development was examined by investigating abused, neglected, and nonmaltreated children's judgments regarding the permissibility of social-conventional and moral transgressions pertaining to physical harm, psychological distress, and the unfair distribution of resources. Abused and neglected children and a control group of nonmaltreated children matched on IQ, age, and social class judged the seriousness, deserved punishment, generalizability, and rule contingency of familiar transgressions for themselves and others. Abused subjects were more likely than neglected subjects to consider psychological distress to be universally wrong for others; neglected subjects were more likely than abused subjects to judge the unfair distribution of resources to be universally wrong for themselves. Abused and control children, but not neglected children, judged all transgressions to deserve more punishment when committed by others than when committed by the self. All children distinguished between morality and social convention and between different types of moral transgressions on all 4 criteria. Furthermore, all children were more egocentric in their judgments for the self than for others. These findings are discussed in relation to research on the effects of child maltreatment and on moral judgment.