Protecting the Unemployed in Chile: From State Assistance to Individual Insurance?

The weaknesses of traditional policies for dealing with unemployment shocks have placed the reform of social insurance programs at the center of the public policy debate. Unemployment insurance saving accounts (UISAs) have been proposed as an instrument to protect workers from the loss in earnings associated with unemployment. The idea is to have all workers (and possibly their employers as well) deposit a share of their monthly incomes into their UISA, with the balance in the account accruing market interest rates. During an unemployment spell, the workers who would be eligible to do so could withdraw funds from their individual account. It is only when there would be no or few funds left in the account that complementary unemployment assistance allowances would be provided. The fact that the accounts are individualized helps to solve the moral hazard problem. Moreover, the fact that the contribution system is mandatory also helps to solve another problem, namely the adverse selection mechanisms through which only some workers might choose to self-insure, or through which the private insurance firms insuring workers would try to hand-pick those workers with the lowest risk of being unemployed. Overall, the objective of UISAs is to set incentives right. Recent proposals for replacing standard forms of unemployment assistance by UISAs are being implemented in several Latin American countries. This paper explores some of the implications of replacing in Chile the current job security system with UISAs.Chile; unemployment insurance savings account

Government Programs for the Insertion of Youth and Women in Chile's Labor Market: A Discussion

In Chile, labor-based inclusion policies and training programs have been targeted at social groups seen as especially vulnerable. Using results from the 1990 CASEN household survey, the democratic governments identified youths and women heads of households as target groups in need of training. This led to the creation of two training programs: one for women (Capacitacion para Mujeres Jefes de Hogar), and one for youths (Chile J6ven). Do young workers and women need these special training programs? If yes, do programs such as PMJH and Chile Joven, as they stand, succeed in promoting the labor market insertion of their beneficiaries and in addressing the obstacles faced by low-income youth and female heads of households in finding and keeping good jobs? Are there other segments of the population which also require special attention from policy makers? Although this paper cannot address all these questions in a comprehensive manner, it does provide an introductory discussion of the issues.Chile; Employment programs

High-Level Control Of Modular Robots

Reconfigurable modular robots can exhibit different specializations by rearranging the same set of parts comprising them. Actuating modular robots can be complicated because of the many degrees of freedom that scale exponentially with the size of the robot. Effectively controlling these robots directly relates to how well they can be used to complete meaningful tasks. This paper discusses an approach for creating provably correct controllers for modular robots from high-level tasks defined with structured English sentences. While this has been demonstrated with simple mobile robots, the problem was enriched by considering the uniqueness of reconfigurable modular robots. These requirements are expressed through traits in the high-level task specification that store information about the geometry and motion types of a robot. Given a high-level problem definition for a modular robot, the approach in this paper deals with generating all lower levels of control needed to solve it. Information about different robot characteristics is stored in a library, and two tools for populating this library have been developed. The first approach is a physics-based simulator and gait creator for manual generation of motion gaits. The second is a genetic algorithm framework that uses traits to evaluate performance under various metrics. Demonstration is done through simulation and with the CKBot hardware platform