Universal service obligations in utility concession contracts and the needs of the poor in Argentina's privatization

The authors summarize the main lessons emerging from Argentina's experience, including universal service obligations in concession contracts. They discuss free-riding risks, moral hazard problems, and other issues that arise when social concerns are delegated to private operators. After reporting on Argentina's experience, the authors suggest some guidelines: 1) Anticipate interjurisdictional externalities. Users'mobility makes targeting service obligations difficult. 2) Minimize the risks imposed by elusive demand. In providing new services, a gradual policy may work better than a"shock". 3) Realize that unemployment leads to delinquency and lower expected tariffs. Elasticity of fixed and usage charges is important. 4) Deal with the fact that the poor have limited access to credit. Ultimately, plans that included credit for the payment of infrastructure charges were not that successful. 5) Coordinate regulatory, employment, and social policy. One successful plan to provide universal service involved employing workers from poor families in infrastructure extension works. 6) Beware of the latent opportunism of users who benefit from special programs. Special treatment of a sector may encourage free-riding (for example, pensioners overused the telephone until a limit was placed on the number of subsidized phone calls they could make). 7) Fixed allocations for payment of services do not ensure that universal service obligations will be met. How do you deal with the problem that many pensioners do not pay their bills? 8) anticipate that operators will have more information than regulators do. If companies exaggerate supply costs in remote areas, direct interaction with poor users there may lead to the selection of more cost-effective technologies. 9)"Tailored"programs are often much more effective than standardized programs. They are clearly more expensive but, when demand-driven, are also more effective.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Enterprise Development&Reform,Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Governance Indicators,Health Economics&Finance,Consumption,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research

Promises, Impositions, and other Directionals

Promises, impositions, proposals, predictions, and suggestions are categorized as voluntary co-operational methods. The class of voluntary co-operational methods is included in the class of so-called directionals. Directionals are mechanisms supporting the mutual coordination of autonomous agents. Notations are provided capable of expressing residual fragments of directionals. An extensive example, involving promises about the suitability of programs for tasks imposed on the promisee is presented. The example illustrates the dynamics of promises and more specifically the corresponding mechanism of trust updating and credibility updating. Trust levels and credibility levels then determine the way certain promises and impositions are handled. The ubiquity of promises and impositions is further demonstrated with two extensive examples involving human behaviour: an artificial example about an agent planning a purchase, and a realistic example describing technology mediated interaction concerning the solution of pay station failure related problems arising for an agent intending to leave the parking area.Comment: 55 page

Assessing National Service Outcomes: A Multilevel Approach

The present study uses hierarchical linear modeling and a large sample of AmeriCorps members (N = 1,376) and AmeriCorps programs (N = 108) to examine the determinants of national service outcomes at the individual and program levels. We found several demographic variations in civic engagement and trust, tolerance and life skills, including race variations in gains in constructive group interactions and personal behavior in groups post-service. Programmatic characteristics have important influences on AmeriCorps members’ civic engagement, tolerance, and trust post-service. Furthermore, the level of support of members that programs offer is a key component to success of AmeriCorps programs. We conclude that the impact of national service could be improved through a better and deeper understanding of the interaction of individual and program level influences on AmeriCorps members’ outcomes. Successfully managing the recruitment of members and the delivery of quality programs in the future will depend on how well the interactions of individual and program-level determinants are understood.LBJ School of Public Affair

Meta-F*: Proof Automation with SMT, Tactics, and Metaprograms

We introduce Meta-F*, a tactics and metaprogramming framework for the F* program verifier. The main novelty of Meta-F* is allowing the use of tactics and metaprogramming to discharge assertions not solvable by SMT, or to just simplify them into well-behaved SMT fragments. Plus, Meta-F* can be used to generate verified code automatically. Meta-F* is implemented as an F* effect, which, given the powerful effect system of F*, heavily increases code reuse and even enables the lightweight verification of metaprograms. Metaprograms can be either interpreted, or compiled to efficient native code that can be dynamically loaded into the F* type-checker and can interoperate with interpreted code. Evaluation on realistic case studies shows that Meta-F* provides substantial gains in proof development, efficiency, and robustness.Comment: Full version of ESOP'19 pape

International Research Project on Job Retention and Return to Work Strategies for Disabled Workers: Canada

[Excerpt] The International Research Project on Job Retention and Return to Work Strategies for Disabled Workers is an initiative of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Global Applied Research and Information Network on Employment and Training (GLADNET). It reflects ILO and GLADNET joint aims of establishmg a base for cross-national research and strengthening links between research analysis and policy reform in the field of employment of disabled people. The Project is a response to a combination of developments which highlight the need for more effective policies and practices in support of workers whose prospects of remaining in employment are jeopardised by work injury, illness or disability. Persons with disabilities are increasingly claiming rights to stay in work as well as to access employment. Pressures on state budgets, the rising costs of compensation claims and disability benefits, and changes in the structure of the labour market are strengthening policies in favour of job retention and return to work. Enterprises are developing their own strategies to minimise the costs of disability and to retain valued employees. Overall, the balance of responsibility is shifting from the state to the enterprise. Policies and practices to prevent disabled workers from leaving work unnecessarily, and to facilitate rapid return to employment if job loss cannot be prevented, are recent developments in many countries. The cross-national exchange of information on initiatives and their effects is limited. The first aim of this Project has been to gather information about what has been attempted, by whom, for what purposes, in which contexts and to what effects. The second, more ambitious, aim, is to examine the interaction between the various policies and practices, identify dysfunctions, and work towards more coherent and cost-effective strategies for job retention and return to work which might be applied in different national systems. The ultimate objective is to identify strategies which can be put into effect in the workplace

Franchising as a form of use of corporate image (Франчайзинг як форма використання корпоративного іміджу організації)

The concept of the corporate image is considered; fundamental, external and internal constituents of the corporate image are distinguished; franchising as the system of business organization, based on the use of corporate image of organization and product image, is analysed; the features of franchising, benefits and disadvantages for the franchisor and the franchisee are distinguished analyzed in the article (У статті розглянуто поняття корпоративного іміджу та виділено такі його складові, як фундаментальний, внутрішній та зовнішній; проаналізовано франчайзинг як систему організації та ведення бізнесу, що ґрунтується на використанні корпоративного іміджу організації та товарного іміджу її продуктів; виокремлено особливості франчайзингу, його переваги та недоліки для франчайзера та франчайзі

Formal certification and compliance for run-time service environments

With the increased awareness of security and safety of services in on-demand distributed service provisioning (such as the recent adoption of Cloud infrastructures), certification and compliance checking of services is becoming a key element for service engineering. Existing certification techniques tend to support mainly design-time checking of service properties and tend not to support the run-time monitoring and progressive certification in the service execution environment. In this paper we discuss an approach which provides both design-time and runtime behavioural compliance checking for a services architecture, through enabling a progressive event-driven model-checking technique. Providing an integrated approach to certification and compliance is a challenge however using analysis and monitoring techniques we present such an approach for on-going compliance checking

Considerations about effective dissemination of improved fish strains

Aquaculture production systems in developing countries are largely based on the use of unimproved species and strains. As knowledge and experience are accumulated in relation to the management, feeding and animal health issues of such production systems, the availability of genetically more productive stock becomes imperative in order to more effectively use resources. For instance, there is little point in providing ideal water conditions and optimum feed quality to fish that do not have the potential to grow faster and to be harvested on time, providing a product of the desired quality. Refinements in the production system and improvement of the stock used must progress hand in hand. In this paper we deal separately with genetic and non-genetic issues pertaining to the multiplication and dissemination of improved strains. The separation is somewhat arbitrary, and as will be evident from our discussion, there is frequent interaction between the two

An open extensible tool environment for Event-B

Abstract. We consider modelling indispensable for the development of complex systems. Modelling must be carried out in a formal notation to reason and make meaningful conjectures about a model. But formal modelling of complex systems is a difficult task. Even when theorem provers improve further and get more powerful, modelling will remain difficult. The reason for this that modelling is an exploratory activity that requires ingenuity in order to arrive at a meaningful model. We are aware that automated theorem provers can discharge most of the onerous trivial proof obligations that appear when modelling systems. In this article we present a modelling tool that seamlessly integrates modelling and proving similar to what is offered today in modern integrated development environments for programming. The tool is extensible and configurable so that it can be adapted more easily to different application domains and development methods.