Country Profile on Disability: Republic of Uzbekistan

[Excerpt] The Law on Social Security of Disabled People in the Republic of Uzbekistan, Article 1 defines a person with disability as one who is in need of aid because he/she has physical or mental problems. Daily activities such as moving, orientation, speech, behavioral control, and/or work on one\u27s own are completely or partly limited. In Uzbekistan, persons with disabilities are screened in two steps. Firstly, a diagnosis is given by the hospitals where each person is registered according to his/her residential addresses. Secondly, persons with disabilities receive referrals to the Medicine Labour Expert Commissions (MLEC) of their respective district, which determines the grade of disability. Regarding reception of social security benefits, the MLEC defines persons with disabilities by legislature in accordance with national traditions, international norms, and the economic resources of Uzbekistan. According to the causes of disabilities, persons with disabilities are divided into three general groups: (1) Disability caused by genetic diseases, (2) Disability caused by acquired diseases, and (3) Disability caused by industrial injury such as traffic accidents, industrial accidents, and natural disasters

An Asia-Pacific Model of Development Cooperation

Part One of the Osaka Action Agenda has clarified the implications of the basic political commitment to free and open trade and investment in the Bogor Declaration and has set out operational guiding principles and a well-developed strategy of implementation. This paper seeks to build on the broad concepts set in Part Two of Osaka Agenda to clarify the implications of the shared commitment of APEC leaders to development cooperation. From the concepts put forward by the APEC Eminent Person Group and the proposal of Partners for Progress, precise objective, guiding principles and priorities can be set out for the implementation of a realistic and balanced strategy for development cooperation.trade sector, investment, APEC

An Asia-Pacific Model of Development Cooperation

Part One of the Osaka Action Agenda has clarified the implications of the basic political commitment to free and open trade and investment in the Bogor Declaration and has set out operational guiding principles and a well-developed strategy of implementation. This paper seeks to build on the broad concepts set in Part Two of Osaka Agenda to clarify the implications of the shared commitment of APEC leaders to development cooperation. From the concepts put forward by the APEC Eminent Person Group and the proposal of Partners for Progress, precise objective, guiding principles and priorities can be set out for the implementation of a realistic and balanced strategy for development cooperation.trade sector, investment, APEC

Energy cooperation in Southern Africa: What role for Norway?

This Working Paper contains a full report from a Seminar on Regional Energy Co-operation, Luanda, 12-14 February 2002. Norwegian involvement in the energy sector in Southern Africa is considerable. Energy is a major area in Norwegian co-operation and includes a number of countries within SADC. There has been rapid change in the sector, which has moved from being an infrastructure sector to a commodity production sector. Also, the ongoing institutional changes in SADC will have an effect on its relation to energy. The donors' role must change accordingly. Important objectives of the seminar were to discuss the changes in the sector in the region and to improve the level of information in order to make better decisions.

Conditionality, separation, and open rules in multilateral institutions

We examine the implications for the viability of multilateral cooperation of different legal principles governing how separate international agreements relate to each other. We contrast three alternative legal regimes: conditionality - making cooperation in one area a condition for cooperation in another - separation - forbidding sanctions in one area to be used to enforce cooperation in others - and open rules, i.e. absence of any restriction on the patterns of cross-issue cooperation arrangements and sanctions. As an example, we focus on a scenario where countries can enter into selective and separate binding trade and environmental agreements with different partners. Our analysis suggests that conditionality is more likely to facilitate multilateral, multi-issue cooperation in situations where the environmental policy stakes are small relative to the welfare effects of trade policies; when the costs of environmental compliance are high, a conditionality rule can hinder multilateral cooperation. Separation can undermine cooperation by limiting punishment, but can also promote broad cooperation by making partial cooperation more diffcult to sustain. Thus, how different linkage regimes affect multilateral negotiations depends on the structure of cooperation incentives for the countries involved

Predicting Human Cooperation

The Prisoner's Dilemma has been a subject of extensive research due to its importance in understanding the ever-present tension between individual self-interest and social benefit. A strictly dominant strategy in a Prisoner's Dilemma (defection), when played by both players, is mutually harmful. Repetition of the Prisoner's Dilemma can give rise to cooperation as an equilibrium, but defection is as well, and this ambiguity is difficult to resolve. The numerous behavioral experiments investigating the Prisoner's Dilemma highlight that players often cooperate, but the level of cooperation varies significantly with the specifics of the experimental predicament. We present the first computational model of human behavior in repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games that unifies the diversity of experimental observations in a systematic and quantitatively reliable manner. Our model relies on data we integrated from many experiments, comprising 168,386 individual decisions. The computational model is composed of two pieces: the first predicts the first-period action using solely the structural game parameters, while the second predicts dynamic actions using both game parameters and history of play. Our model is extremely successful not merely at fitting the data, but in predicting behavior at multiple scales in experimental designs not used for calibration, using only information about the game structure. We demonstrate the power of our approach through a simulation analysis revealing how to best promote human cooperation.Comment: Added references. New inline citation style. Added small portions of text. Re-compiled Rmarkdown file with updated ggplot2 so small aesthetic changes to plot

How mutation alters fitness of cooperation in networked evolutionary games

Cooperation is ubiquitous in every level of living organisms. It is known that spatial (network) structure is a viable mechanism for cooperation to evolve. Until recently, it has been difficult to predict whether cooperation can evolve at a network (population) level. To address this problem, Pinheiro et al. proposed a numerical metric, called Average Gradient of Selection (AGoS) in 2012. AGoS can characterize and forecast the evolutionary fate of cooperation at a population level. However, stochastic mutation of strategies was not considered in the analysis of AGoS. Here we analyzed the evolution of cooperation using AGoS where mutation may occur to strategies of individuals in networks. Our analyses revealed that mutation always has a negative effect on the evolution of cooperation regardless of the fraction of cooperators and network structures. Moreover, we found that mutation affects the fitness of cooperation differently on different social network structures.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Cooperation in Industrial Systems

ARCHON is an ongoing ESPRIT II project (P-2256) which is approximately half way through its five year duration. It is concerned with defining and applying techniques from the area of Distributed Artificial Intelligence to the development of real-size industrial applications. Such techniques enable multiple problem solvers (e.g. expert systems, databases and conventional numerical software systems) to communicate and cooperate with each other to improve both their individual problem solving behavior and the behavior of the community as a whole. This paper outlines the niche of ARCHON in the Distributed AI world and provides an overview of the philosophy and architecture of our approach the essence of which is to be both general (applicable to the domain of industrial process control) and powerful enough to handle real-world problems

Effecting Cooperation

There is a large repeated games literature illustrating how future interactions provide incentives for cooperation. Much of this literature assumes public monitoring: players always observe precisely the same thing. Even slight deviations from public monitoring to private monitoring that incorporate differences in players’ observations dramatically complicate coordination. Equilibria with private monitoring often seem unrealistically complex. We set out a model in which players accomplish cooperation in an intuitively plausible fashion. Players process information via a mental system — a set of psychological states and a transition function between states depending on observations. Players restrict attention to a relatively small set of simple strategies, and consequently, might learn which perform well.Repeated games, private monitoring, bounded rationality, cooperation