Current Developments in Services for People with Intellectual Disabilities

[Taken from Executive Summary] This literature review is the culmination of the Saskatchewan Community Living Division jurisdictional study which began in the autumn of 2003. Following a brief survey of developments in providing services to people with intellectual disabilities (hitherto the People) for creating the questionnaire for this study, information was gleaned from the provinces and territories on their services. The CLD Jurisdictional Project was completed in the spring of 2005. Subsequently, a thorough search and examination of pertinent resources for serving this People and for policy development was conducted. From over 800 documents about 350 were selected for this literature review. The material is recorded in the following chapters: Public Consultation and Policy Development; Social Philosophy: the philosophical influence on contemporary social issues; Definition of disabilities; Needs assessment systems; Human Rights; Advocacy; Community services & Deinstitutionalization; Issues and Influences; Citizenship; Inclusion; Self-determination; Person-centered planning; Supports; Respite; Individualized funding; Canadian governmental initiatives; Provincial Services

The Cost of Developing Site-Specific Environmental Regulations: Evidence from EPA's Project XL

The flagship of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory reinvention initiative, Project XL has been touted as a ‘regulatory blueprint’ for a site-specific, performance-based pollution control system. But widespread complaints about the costs of the program beg the question of whether the costs of tailoring regulations to individual facilities are manageable. To address this question, this paper presents original survey data on a sample of 11 XL projects. We find that the fixed costs of putting in place XL agreements are substantial, averaging over $450,000 per firm. While stakeholder negotiations are widely cited as the principal source for these costs, we find that they actually arise mainly from interaction between participating facilities and the EPA. Moreover, EPA management problems are perceived by our survey respondents as having inflated project development costs. Finally, we find that the key factor that explains differences in costs across XL projects is the scope and complexity of the project proposal. These findings suggest that Project XL favors large firms that can afford to pay significant project development costs, that EPA management problems must be resolved to reduce costs, and that there may be a significant economic bias against complex and innovative proposals—precisely the type of proposals that Project XL was designed to foster in order to improve the efficiency of the regulatory system.

Muddling Through while Environmental Regulatory Capacity Evolves: What Role for Voluntary Agreements?

The city of León, Guanajuato, is Mexico’s leather goods capital and a notorious environmental hotspot. Over the past two decades, four high-profile voluntary agreements aimed at controlling pollution from León’s tanneries have yielded few concrete results. To understand why, this paper reconstructs the history of these initiatives, along with that of local environmental regulatory capacity. Juxtaposing these two timelines suggests that the voluntary pollution control agreements were both motivated by—and undermined by—gaps in the legal, institutional, physical, and civic infrastructures needed to make regulation effective. Our analysis offers a concrete definition of environmental regulatory capacity, provides insights into how it evolves, and demonstrates its importance. Moreover, it sheds light on the question of whether voluntary environmental agreements—an increasingly popular regulatory tool—are likely to be effective in developing countries.environment, voluntary agreement, regulatory capacity, Latin America, Mexico

Conceptualizing and illustrating the digital lifestyle of youth

This research looks at the psychosocial content and nature of the concept of the digital lifestyle when applied to pre-teens and teenagers. The concept of lifestyle is analyzed to assess whether the digital technological context is an acceptable framework to characterize the daily life of pre-teens and teenagers. Five dimensions of the digital lifestyle concept were useful to structure more than 200 technologically aware young consumers who discussed the meaning and usage of several digital devices.Consumer psychology, Internet, teenagers

Tailored Regulation: Will Voluntary Site-Specific Performance Standards Necessarily Improve Welfare?

Increasingly popular tailored regulation (TR) initiatives like EPA’s Project XL allow plants to voluntarily substitute site-specific environmental performance standards for command-and-control regulations that dictate pollution abatement strategies. TR can significantly reduce participants’ costs of complying with environmental regulations. But in doing so, it can also provide participants with a competitive advantage. We show that this can have undesirable welfare consequences when it enables relatively inefficient firms in oligopolistic markets to "steal" market share from more efficient firms. One critical determinant of whether or not TR has such adverse welfare impacts is the regulator’s policy regarding the diffusion of TR agreements among non-participating firms.

Towards a Comparative Approach to Manuscript Study on the Web: the Case of the Lancelot-Grail Romance

This paper presents an outline of the on-going Lancelot-Grail Project, an interdisciplinary collaborative research project drawing together, analysing, and making available in text and picture the surviving manuscripts of the popular Arthurian romance known as the Lancelot-Grail. The project uses web technology as part of the analytical process and as a means to navigate within the material, presenting models based on the concepts of geographic information systems (GIS) in a non-traditional context

The Greening of Development Economics: A Survey

Although ignored for decades, environmental issues now attract considerable attention in the literature on economic development. This paper describes research on environmental issues in seven topic areas that historically have been at the heart of development economics: the role of the state, economic growth, trade and industrialization, relations between rich and poor countries, structural adjustment and stabilization, population change, and the objectives and strategies of development.

The Use of Economic Incentives in Developing Countries: Lessons from International Experience with Industrial Air Pollution

To what extent should developing countries eschew conventional command and control environmental regulation that is increasingly seen as inefficient and rely instead on economic incentives? This paper addresses this question as it pertains to industrial air pollution. The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of various economic incentive instruments, presents in-depth case studies of their application in Sweden, the United States, China, and Poland, and proposes a number of policy guidelines. The authors argue that both design deficiencies and pervasive constraints on monitoring and enforcement impede the effectiveness of economic instruments in developing countries. The latter are difficult to rectify, at least in the medium term. As a result, tradable permits are generally not practical. Suitably modified however, emissions fee policies probably are appropriate. They can provide a foundation for a transition to an effective economic incentive system, and can raise much needed revenue for environmental projects and programs. In addition, if political opposition can be overcome, environmental taxes constitute a second-best but potentially effective pollution control instrument.