Bringing Formal Business Laws to Cameroon’s Informal Sector: Lessons and Cautions from the Tax Law Example

A substantial majority of non-agricultural workers in a developing country such as Cameroon engage in legal businesses below the governmental radar, that is, in the informal sector. Because that segment of the Sub-Saharan economy is critical to subsistence within the region, and because the financial crisis has expanded the informal sector in the Global North, developing economies’ experience with the informal sector is of world-wide relevance. Formal business laws do exist in the formal sector; however, trying to move informal-sector workers to the formal sector where these laws already offer some protection can disrupt the entrepreneurs’ ability to sustain themselves, and to contribute to the national economy. A pilot study in five Cameroonian markets is thus of general interest when it reveals that entrepreneurs there do not benefit from formal business laws, which in turn limits their ability to borrow and their willingness to lend. The same study also suggests that tax literature has interesting, non-coercive strategies to improve tax compliance in ways that may be applicable to facilitating the introduction of formal business laws to the informal sector, instead of forcing informal-sector workers into the formal sector. The tax-morale literature recommends deploying strategies of reciprocity, in addition to providing public goods and services—strategies that encourage compliance—instead of using governmental power to extract tax payments. Similarly, tax-based strategies can apply to business laws while informal-sector workers remain in the informal sector, even though the government’s posture vis-à-vis commercial actors is less direct than vis-à-vis taxpayers. The experience of Cameroon’s informal sector with formal tax law thus provides important insights on steps within the government’s control that would not only improve tax compliance, but would also bring formal business laws and their transaction-cost-reducing potential to the informal sector. The pro-business strategy is to apply tax-morale learning, which calls for government authorities to enter into a reciprocal relationship— respectful and communicative—with private parties and to focus on investing in basic infrastructure

The Representation of Probabilistic Phonological Patterns: Neurological, Behavioral, and Computational Evidence from the English Stress System

This dissertation investigates the cognitive mechanism underlying language users\u27 ability to generalize probabilistic phonological patterns in their lexicon to novel words. Specifically, do speakers represent probabilistic patterns using abstract grammatical constraints? If so, this system of constraints would, like categorical phonological generalizations (a) be limited in the space of possible generalizations it can represent, and (b) apply to known and novel words alike without reference to specific known words. I examine these two predictions, comparing them to the predictions of alternative models. Analogical models are specifically considered. In chapter 3 I examine speakers\u27 productions of novel words without near lexical neighbors. Speakers\u27 productions of these novel words are compared to actual (relatively distant) words which could serve as an analogical base. Participants successfully extended a probabilistic trend in the lexicon to novel words, and did not use the analogical bases to do so: the contents of an analogical base for a given nonword did not predict participants\u27 behavior on that nonword. In chapter 4 I discuss a case of mismatch with the lexicon - participants extend a near-categorical trend in the lexicon to novel words, but they undermatch the distribution found in the lexicon. This undermatching would not be predicted if learners could induce arbitrarily complex constraints. I argue instead that the trend is represented grammatically, and that the mismatch arises because of a bias for simpler constraints either in learning or in the structure of the grammar itself. If probabilistic phonological generalizations are represented abstractly, how do they interact with the lexicon of stored word forms? I address this issue in chapter 2 by looking at the perception of known and novel forms. ERP data demonstrates that a productive probabilistic trend influences the early stages of the lexical access process, specifically in known words. I consider two possible mechanisms for this: (1) that the lexical entries of known exceptional forms differ from known trend-observing forms, or (2) that the process of accessing an exceptional form involves a violation of expectations imposed by the grammar, and thus requires more processing power than the process of accessing a trend-observing form

Open Space, Thin Blankets, and Snores: An Examination of Sleep in Young Adults Experiencing Homelessness

Sleep has been identified as a public health concern, especially among college students and young adults, which are defined here as adults ages 18-25 years old. Individuals who are homeless also face specific challenges to getting high quality, restful sleep. The purpose of this review is to investigate the potential health burden of impaired sleep quality in young adults experiencing homelessness. The Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Ebscohost, Medline, Google Scholar, and PsychInfo databases were searched using the following terms independently and in combination: sleep, sleep quality, young adults, college students, emerging adults, sleep hygiene, homeless, subjective sleep inadequacy, impaired sleep, health, and self-rated health. Twenty-three articles from a variety of disciplines concerning sleep health in college students, young adults, and homeless adults were included. Of these 23 studies, 18 studies were conducted among college students and young adults and almost all were descriptive, aside from one experimental design to evaluate sleep and related parameters. The other 5 studies were conducted in homeless adult populations with one study being experimental and the others descriptive in design. Findings from these studies indicate that poor sleep quality and inadequate sleep quantity are problems in both college students and adults experiencing homelessness. This review also identified a gap in the literature—there has not been any sleep research conducted among young adults experiencing homelessness. But, the data that does exist among their domiciled counterparts and in older homeless adults reveals that sleep is likely a significant health issue which should be investigated and addressed in the target population. Additionally, though there is a large body of validated tools to assess sleep in college students, these assessment measures may be inappropriate in the evaluation of young adults experiencing homelessness

Brexit and the EU in Global Climate Governance

Climate change governance is one of the EU’s priorities. The EU has developed a central (and arguably, a leading) role in global climate governance. The UK has been an important supporter of strong climate action both within the EU and in international climate negotiations. We investigate how/whether the EU’s role in global climate governance will be affected by Brexit by focusing on potential changes in three conditions for EU leadership: (1) credible and ambitious internal climate policy; (2) constant and effective international engagement through climate diplomacy; and (3) the ability to attract followers. We find that the UK has sometimes played the role of a pivotal outlier, either pushing for more internal policy ambition or blocking certain policy options. Brexit is likely to have cumulative effects on the EU’s role in global climate governance over the long term, through a series of changes in internal EU policymaking and climate diplomacy. The speed and scope of these changes depend on the nature of the future UK–EU relationship. We argue that the broader international context and strains on EU unity represent more urgent challenges to the EU’s role in global climate governance than those posed by Brexit

Dementia Buddies Evaluation

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Growing intimate privatepublics: Everyday utopia in the naturecultures of a young lesbian and bisexual women’s allotment

The Young Women’s Group in Manchester is a ‘young women’s peer health project, run by and for young lesbian and bisexual women’, which runs an allotment as one of its activities. At a time when interest in allotments and gardening appears to be on the increase, the existence of yet another community allotment may seem unremarkable. Yet we suggest that this queer allotment poses challenges for conventional theorisations of allotments, as well as for understandings of public and private. In this article we explore how the allotment project might be understood to be intensely engaged in ‘growing intimate publics’, or what we term ‘privatepublics’. These are paradoxical intimacies, privatepublic spaces which are not necessarily made possible in the usual private sphere of domestic homes. Here we focus on the work involved in materialising the allotment, which we understand as a queer privatepublic ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 2008) which appears as an ‘everyday utopia’ (Cooper, 2014)