8,985 research outputs found

    Does Government Ideology Matter in Monetary Policy? – A Panel Data Analysis for OECD Countries

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    This paper examines the effect of government ideology on monetary policy in a quarterly data set of 15 OECD countries in the period 1980.1–2005.4. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant indicator for central bank independence and government ideology. The results suggest that leftist governments did not decrease short term nominal interest rates at all. In contrast, short term nominal interest rates were higher under leftist governments. A potential reason for this finding might be that leftist governments have sought to make a market-oriented policy shift by delegating monetary policy to conservative central bankers.Monetary policy, Taylor rule, government ideology, partisan politics, central bank independence, panel data

    Public Reason and Moral Bioenhancement

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    The Rawlsian model of public justification is proposed for the assessment of politics of moral enhancement, in alternative to the neo-republican model proposed in these debates by Robert Sparrow. The central idea of the Rawlsian model of public justification is represented by the liberal principle of legitimacy, although it is extended in relation to the domain that Rawls sees as proper for its application (constitutional essentials). The liberal principle of legitimacy in its extended application requires that a law or public policy be justified on the base of reasons for which we can reasonably expect that other citizens can accept as free and equal citizens. The application is extended to children as prospective agents, as well. From the standpoint of the liberal principle of legitimacy, valid public reasons put forward in the moral enhancement debate are represented by the assessment of whether emotional modulation is progressive or regressive in relation to the capacity of moral judgment. The conclusion is that, at the actual stage of the debate, there are no victorious reasons to endorse any of the two proposals. Consequently, this is a domain of reasonable pluralism. Compulsory moral enhancement is ruled out, but mandatory moral enhancement is allowed. Usages of public funds for researches that concern moral bioenhancement are proper matter of democratic decision making

    Crime, Unemployment, and Xenophobia? An Ecological Analysis of Right-Wing Election Results in Hamburg, 1986−2005

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    This paper investigates the consequences of immigration, crime and socio-economic depriviation for the performance of right-wing extremist and populist parties in the German city state of Hamburg between 1986 and 2005. The ecological determinants of voting for right-wing parties on the district level are compared to those for mainstream and other protest parties. Parallels and differences in spatial characteristics between right-wing extremist and populist parties' performance are identified. Our empirical results tend to confirm the general contextual sociological theory of right-wing radicalization by general social deprivation and immigration. Nevertheless they indicate that one has to be very cautious when interpreting the unemployment/crime - right-winger nexus. Moreover, crime does not seem to have a strong significant effect on right-wing populist parties' election successes despite its importance for their programmes and campaigns.elections, political extremism, labor market policy, welfare policy, immigration

    (WP 2016-01) Transformation without Paternalism

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    Human development is meant to be transformational in that it aims to improve people’s lives by enhancing their capabilities. But who does it target: people as they are or the people they will become? This paper argues that the human development approach relies on an understanding of personal identity as dynamic rather than as static collections of preferences, and that this distinguishes human development from conventional approaches to development. Nevertheless this dynamic understanding of personal identity is presently poorly conceptualized and this has implications for development practice. We identify a danger of paternalism and propose institutionalizing two procedural principles as side constraints on development policies and projects: the principle of free prior informed consent, and the principle of democratic development

    Transformation without Paternalism

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    Human development is meant to be transformational in that it aims to improve people's lives by enhancing their capabilities. But who does it target: people as they are or the people they will become? This paper argues that the human development approach relies on an understanding of personal identity as dynamic rather than as static collections of preferences, and that this distinguishes human development from conventional approaches to development. Nevertheless, this dynamic understanding of personal identity is presently poorly conceptualized and this has implications for development practice. We identify a danger of paternalism and propose institutionalizing two procedural principles as side constraints on development policies and projects: the principle of free prior informed consent and the principle of democratic development

    DEPAS: A Decentralized Probabilistic Algorithm for Auto-Scaling

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    The dynamic provisioning of virtualized resources offered by cloud computing infrastructures allows applications deployed in a cloud environment to automatically increase and decrease the amount of used resources. This capability is called auto-scaling and its main purpose is to automatically adjust the scale of the system that is running the application to satisfy the varying workload with minimum resource utilization. The need for auto-scaling is particularly important during workload peaks, in which applications may need to scale up to extremely large-scale systems. Both the research community and the main cloud providers have already developed auto-scaling solutions. However, most research solutions are centralized and not suitable for managing large-scale systems, moreover cloud providers' solutions are bound to the limitations of a specific provider in terms of resource prices, availability, reliability, and connectivity. In this paper we propose DEPAS, a decentralized probabilistic auto-scaling algorithm integrated into a P2P architecture that is cloud provider independent, thus allowing the auto-scaling of services over multiple cloud infrastructures at the same time. Our simulations, which are based on real service traces, show that our approach is capable of: (i) keeping the overall utilization of all the instantiated cloud resources in a target range, (ii) maintaining service response times close to the ones obtained using optimal centralized auto-scaling approaches.Comment: Submitted to Springer Computin

    Enhancing the Role of Regional Development Banks

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    There are a number of important reasons why lending by regional or sub-regional development banks can and should play an important and valuable complementary role in the international development architecture. We look at the specific strengths of multilateral, regional and sub-regional development banks and drawing on the successful experience of the European Investment Bank and the Andean Development Corporation conclude that the time is now for creating new regional development banks and expanding existing ones. Creating new institutions or expanding existing ones will have very clear benefits, as for instance providing regional public goods which are currently undersupplied, such as regional infrastructure. Very large pools of savings and foreign exchange reserves originate in developing countries these days and therefore the potential for a significant expansion of regional or sub-regional development banks, with only or mainly developing country members has grown significantly. At the same time, it may be desirable to create new regional development banks where gaps exist, however too much duplication of services is not desirable.
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