A Decade of Helping Civil Society Fight Corruption in the Philippines: Results and Lessons

This Report details the results and lessons of a decade long (2003-2013) Partnership for Transparency Fund (www.ptfund.org) support to Filipino civil society organizations to fight corruption. It celebrates the successes and reflects on challenges faced as PTF enters a new phase in its partnership. In 2014 PTF established a regional affiliate called PTF Asia as a foundation headquartered in Manila. As efforts worldwide and in the Philippines have evolved during these ten years, the discussion in this Report offers lessons in going forward towards this new phase as well as initiatives beyond the Philippine

State of Civil Society 2013: Creating an Enabling Environment

Welcome to the second edition of the State of Civil Society report produced by CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. This report is not ours alone. The 2013 State of Civil Society report draws from nearly 50 contributions made by people active in civil society all over the world -- from our members, friends, partners, supporters and others in the CIVICUS alliance. They contributed 31 new pieces of analysis and thinking on the state of civil society. Our analysis also benefits from 16 responses to a questionnaire from national civil society platforms that are members of either our Affinity Group of National Associations (AGNA), or the International Forum of National NGO Platforms (IFP). Together, their contributions, published at http://socs.civicus.org, form the full report. Our summary report is a synthesis of this impressive array of perspectives. We believe that together their contributions offer a body of critical, cutting edge thinking about the changing state of contemporary civil society. We thank them for their efforts and continuing support. It is also important to acknowledge in this report the work of coalitions such as the Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness and BetterAid, and the subsequent CSO Partnership for Development Effectiveness, in bringing together many CSOs working in the development sphere in recent years to advance the debate on civil society's contributions to development effectiveness, including on the issue of the enabling conditions for civil society that are a necessary part of increasing CSO effectiveness. This report is also intended as a contribution to those wider efforts, in which we at CIVICUS are happy to be active partners

National Accounts for a Global Economy: the Case of Ireland. Quarterly Economic Commentary Special Article, Summer 2018

Globalisation is affecting the way economic activity is reflected in the National Accounts. Intellectual property, which is now part of the capital stock, interacts with the choice of global firms as to their legal structure, producing different national accounting outcomes for individual countries. This is but one manifestation of the challenges that a global economy presents for national accounting. Using the example of Ireland, consideration is given to the data needed to meet the needs of users of National Accounts. In particular, more information is required to separately identify all the activity of multinational enterprises and domestically owned firms. This paper suggests a set of satellite accounts for Ireland that would show how changes in the economy affect the economic welfare of Irish residents

Philanthropic Freedom: A Pilot Study

The staff at Hudson's Center for Global Prosperity (CGP) is delighted to present the first analysis of philanthropic freedom across the world. In this 13 country pilot study, we examine barriers and incentives for individuals and organizations to donate resources to social causes. CGP scored and compared countries on their ease of giving by collecting detailed information on three main indicators: the ease of registering and operating civil society organizations (CSOs); domestic tax policies for deductions, credits, and exemptions; and, the ease of sending and receiving cash and in-kind goods across borders. This research is a major step in helping countries identify policy changes that will encourage philanthropy, the goal of this study

Second Meeting of the Committee on Governance and Popular Participation

African civil society organizations (CSOs) form a sector that has become increasingly important over the past few decades in terms of its participation in the development and governance processes as well in global policy processes. This report highlights the impact and effectiveness of the participation of CSOs and NGOs in promoting development and governance in Africa

Civil Society Legitimacy and Accountability: Issues and Challenges

University education rarely focuses its attention and imagination on teaching students how to turn a vision into reality; how to design, develop, and lead social change organizations. The author co-created the Social Entrepreneurship Collaboratory (SE Lab) at Stanford University and then Harvard University as a model educational program designed to achieve this goal. The SE Lab is a Silicon Valley influenced incubator where student teams create and develop innovative pilot projects for US and international social sector initiatives. The lab combines academic theory, frameworks, and traditional research with intensive field work, action research, peer support and learning, and participation of domain experts and social entrepreneurship practitioners. It also provides students an opportunity to collaborate on teams to develop business plans for their initiatives and to compete for awards and recognition in the marketplace of ideas. Students in the SE Lab have created innovative organizations serving many different social causes, including fighting AIDS in Africa, promoting literacy in Mexico, combating the conditions for terrorism using micro-finance in the Palestinian territories, and confronting gender inequality using social venture capital to empower women in Afghanistan

VLBA images of High Frequency Peakers

We propose a morphological classification based on the parsec scale structure of fifty-one High Frequency Peakers (HFPs) from the ``bright'' HFP sample. VLBA images at two adjacent frequencies (chosen among 8.4, 15.3, 22.2 and 43.2 GHz) have been used to investigate the morphological properties of the HFPs in the optically thin part of their spectrum. We confirm that there is quite a clear distinction between the pc-scale radio structure of galaxies and quasars: the 78% of the galaxies show a ``Double/Triple'' morphology, typical of Compact Symmetric Objects (CSOs), while the 87% of the quasars are characterised by Core-Jet or unresolved structure. This suggests that most HFP candidates identified with quasars are likely blazar objects in which a flaring self-absorbed component at the jet base was outshining the remainder of the source at the time of the selection based on the spectral shape. Among the sources classified as CSOs or candidates it is possible to find extremely young radio sources with ages of about 100 years or even less.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures; accepted for pubblication in A&A. Paper version with full resolution images is available at http://www.ira.inaf.it/~ddallaca/orienti.p

What Communities Can Do to Rein In Payday Lending: Strategies for Successful Local Ordinance Campaigns through a Texas Lens

Because New Mexico has one of the highest consumer usage rates and highest concentrations of payday and title loan shops in the nation,2 we thought it would be an ideal place to measure the public’s knowledge of and interest in these ubiquitous loans. We also measured knowledge of interest rate caps in the context of credit cards, as a point of comparison. Our data are consistent with that of previous studies showing that the general public overwhelmingly supports interest rate caps both in general and for certain types of loans. More uniquely, we also found that many consumers are unaware that there are no interest rate caps on many forms of consumer loans. These data are useful in explaining why consumers do not do more to change the law on interest rate caps

A review of the methodologies used in compiling owner-occupiers’ housing indices. ESRI Working Paper 651 January 2020

This paper examines the manner in which owner-occupiers housing costs are incorporated in the official inflation index. In particular, the focus is on the net acquisitions and the payments approach, which are currently used by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). The paper provides a detailed overview of the two approaches, along with some suggestion for further refinement