Servant Learners: Short-Term Missions as an Effective Strategy

Short-term missions (STM) is a phenomenon that is quickly growing; each year more and more teams are sent out from North America to locations across the globe to share the gospel and do work projects in another culture. However, there are some significant issues with the current execution of STM, ranging from its ineffectiveness in accomplishing helpful projects to its heavy financial cost to the potential negative impact on host communities. In order to push the impact of STM in a positive direction, there are two major shifts in the way it is carried out that must take place. First, the focus of STM must shift so that it is focused on serving host communities and learning from national believers and long-term workers. Secondly, short-term teams must receive careful preparation from sending entities in three significant areas: practical preparation, cultural preparation, and spiritual preparation. If these adjustments are made to the way STM is implemented, it will begin to lead to long-term impact in powerful ways

The windfall tax

This paper analyses the windfall tax on the privatised utilities, introduced in the 1997 Budget. It describes the main arguments put forward for the tax and sets out the details of its scope, scale and method of implementation. The tax is examined against the guidelines of economic efficiency, fairness and administrative feasibility. A one-off tax based on past profits should be efficient, provided that the statement that it is one-off is credible. However, as a tax levied on companies, it does not directly tax the windfall gains that were made in the past by shareholders in the companies concerned.

Taxing Profits in a Changing World

This report looks at how corporate income taxes have changed over the past two decades, what incentives they provide for domestic and international investment, and whether changes in the international economy have helped shape these reforms

Has technology hurt less skilled workers? A survey of the micro-econometric evidence

There is a growing concern in advanced countries that the position of less skilled workers has deteriorated, either through their ability to secure jobs and/or their ability to earn a decent wage. Some have linked this decline to modern computing technologies. This paper surveys the evidence on the effects of technical change on skills, wages and employment by examining the micro-econometric evidence (we take this to include studies at the industry, firm, plant and individual levels). We focus on over 70 empirical studies that have used direct measures of technology (rather than associating technology with a residual time trend). We first point to three basic methodological problems relating to endogeneity, fixed effects and measurement. Our survey comes to the following tentative conclusions: (i) there is a strong effect of technology on skills in the cross section which appears reasonably robust to various econometric problems; (ii) there is a strong effect of diffusion of technologies on wages in the cross section which is not robust to endogeneity and fixed effects; (iii) at the firm level product innovations appear to raise employment growth, but there is no clear evidence of a robust effect (either positive or negative) of process innovations or R&D on jobs.Employment; Wages; Skills; Technology

Company dividends and taxes in the UK

The tax treatment of company dividend payments is an area where corporate taxation interacts with the personal income tax. This interaction raises some awkward issues, such as whether shareholders who are exempt from personal income tax should also be exempt from corporation tax, and if so, then how this can be achieved. The solutions adopted are often complex and certainly diverse, as witnessed by the range of different approaches used in the OECD countries, described in OECD (1991).

Anglicans and Roman Catholics before and after Independence

A Zambezia essay review on the history of Anglicans and Catholics in Zimbabwe.Writing Church history has its own peculiar problems. No church exists simply in terms of its institutions because a church is not its institutions but the body of believers which pay allegiance to it. Belief in itself is difficult to quantify, for of its very nature it is internalized in the believer and, although sacramental churches can obtain some sense of how widespread belief is through people’s participation in liturgical practices, statistics of baptisms, confirmations and partakings of the Eucharist make for dull history. The historiography of missionary churches is even more difficult to handle. The central question that must be asked of any successful missionary enterprise is why it succeeded at all. Missionary success, after all, means that a people who had religion appropriate to their whole cultural experience chose to repudiate it and put in its place a set of alien beliefs which, more often than not, designated their former practices as works of the devil. One way of considering the success of missions is to invoke the power of the Spirit which draws people to Its light through Its own mysterious processes. Such an account of conversions may be satisfying in pious magazines, but history does not deal in mysteries. If missionary history is to satisfy, it must offer an account which pays some attention to crises in the culture of a people, the problems the old religion had in accommodating those crises, and the way in which the teaching and practices of the new church have a peculiar and engaging relevance

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An original poem on the theme of where I come from.https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/is/1004/thumbnail.jp

EQUITABLE ACCESS TO HUMAN BIOLOGICAL RESOURCES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: Benefit Sharing Without Undue Inducement.

The main research question of this thesis is: How can cross-border access to human genetic resources, such as blood or DNA samples, be governed to achieve equity for developing countries? Access to and benefit sharing for human biological resources is not regulated through an international legal framework such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, which applies only to plants, animals and micro-organisms as well as associated traditional knowledge. This legal vacuum for the governance of human genetic resources can be attributed (in part) to the concern that benefit sharing might provide undue inducements to research participants and their communities. This thesis shows that: (a) Benefit sharing is crucial to avoiding the exploitation of developing countries in genomic research. (b) With functioning research ethics committees, undue inducement is less of a concern in genetic research than in other medical research (e.g. clinical trials). (c) Concerns remain over research involving indigenous populations and some recommendations are provided. In drawing its conclusions, the thesis resolves a highly pressing topic in global bioethics and international law. Originally, it combines bioethical argument with jurisprudence, in particular reference to the law of equity and the legal concepts of duress (coercion), unconscionable dealing, and undue influence

The sweetest dream : Lessing, Zimbabwe and Catholicism

In her later work, Lessing refers frequently, if in passing, to Roman Catholicism, often as part of her growing interest in spirituality, which began while she was writing The Golden Notebook. Some of these references are in the accounts of her travels in Zimbabwe, but they are also to be found in her autobiographies, reviews and occasional journalism. Because of their frequency, she cannot be regarded as entirely indifferent to the church. A valid line of enquiry into Lessing’s work asks whether her dislike for the church, formed during her traumatic four years as a young child in the Salisbury convent, remained her dominant impression, or whether in later life she found in Catholicism, particularly in Zimbabwe, an institution that invited more complex responses. An answer is provided in The Sweetest Dream, her last long novel that deals directly with Africa. The novel is partly set in Zimlia, a country that clearly suggests Zimbabwe. It avoids representing Catholicism and traditional spirituality as antagonistic; the complex plotting at its end rejects a confident division between the sacred and the secular, and suggests that, although Catholicism is on the whole a force for good, its powers in Zimlia are limited, confronted as the church is by the literal epidemic of AIDS and the power of traditional spirituality. One possible reading suggests that this latter power prevails.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss202018-01-31hb2016Englis