Economic reforms and the deficit of democratic legitimacy in Honduras

democracy;economic reform;Honduras;legitimacy of government;political development

From economicist to culturalist development theories: how strong is the relation between cultural aspects and economic development?

development theory;Honduras;economic development;cultural factors

Economic reforms and the deficit of democratic legitimacy in Honduras

For the last decade Honduras underwent two critical developmental processes, that is, the consolidation of its democracy and a comprehensive program of economic reforms. Both processes achieved only relative progress resulting in a persistent crisis of democratic legitimacy and the need for a second wave of profound economic reforms to be implemented in the next fifteen years. Contrary to most conventional analyses, this paper explores the impact that economic reforms have had upon the democratic consolidation process in Honduras. The hypothesis is that economic reforms shape democratic consolidation to the extent that affect the socio-economic inclusion and State’s capacities to carry out nationally desired policies. These channels are analysed and compared with the role that political factors have had in the process of legitimisation. It is found that traditional political practises and subsequent unfinished political transitions have had a major and more substantial role than economic reforms in explaining political dissatisfaction and democratic delegitimisation. This in turn causes a higher pressure on structural reforms to deliver ‘economic goods’ if democracy is to further consolidate in the country

On The Micro-Foundations of Contract Versus Conflict with Implications for International Peace-Making

This paper expands the micro-foundations of the traditional greed and grievance non-cooperative model of civil conflict. First, we allow for greed and grievance to be orthogonal, so that they may affect each other rather than being exogenous. Second, we allow for the reaction curves of both parties in non-cooperative games to be substitutes and not inevitably complementary, so a peaceful strategy from a group may be followed by a belligerent upsurge from the other. Third, we also allow for Diaspora transfers to rebel groups, thus generating a trade-off between the gains associated with peace and war among rebels. Fourth, we expand external aid in the form of fungible financing of government transfers ‘buying’ peace by allowing for mechanisms that induce behavioural change towards peace. These extensions provide a better understanding of conflict persistence, the consequences of competing international aid and sub-optimal sanctions provision (“cheap talk”) by the international community

Reaching the millennium development goal for child mortality : improving equity and efficiency in Ecuador's health budget

health care; infant mortality; health policy;

On the dynamic adaptation of language models based on dialogue information

We present an approach to adapt dynamically the language models (LMs) used by a speech recognizer that is part of a spoken dialogue system. We have developed a grammar generation strategy that automatically adapts the LMs using the semantic information that the user provides (represented as dialogue concepts), together with the information regarding the intentions of the speaker (inferred by the dialogue manager, and represented as dialogue goals). We carry out the adaptation as a linear interpolation between a background LM, and one or more of the LMs associated to the dialogue elements (concepts or goals) addressed by the user. The interpolation weights between those models are automatically estimated on each dialogue turn, using measures such as the posterior probabilities of concepts and goals, estimated as part of the inference procedure to determine the actions to be carried out. We propose two approaches to handle the LMs related to concepts and goals. Whereas in the first one we estimate a LM for each one of them, in the second one we apply several clustering strategies to group together those elements that share some common properties, and estimate a LM for each cluster. Our evaluation shows how the system can estimate a dynamic model adapted to each dialogue turn, which helps to improve the performance of the speech recognition (up to a 14.82% of relative improvement), which leads to an improvement in both the language understanding and the dialogue management tasks

Incorporating a palaeo-perspective into Andean montane forest restoration

Reference ecosystems used in tropical forest restoration lack the temporal dimension required to characterise a mature or intact vegetation community. Here we provide a practical ‘palaeo-reference ecosystem’ for the eastern Andean forests of Ecuador to complement the standard ‘reference ecosystem’ approach. Pollen assemblages from sedimentary archives recovered from Ecuadorian montane forests are binned into distinct time periods and characterised as 1) Ancient (pre-human arrival), 2) Pre-European (Indigenous cultivation), 3) Successional (European arrival/Indigenous depopulation), 4) Mature (diminished human population), 5) Deforested (re-colonisation), and 6) Modern (industrial agriculture). A multivariate statistical approach is then used to identify the most recent period in which vegetation can be characterised as mature. Detrended correspondence analysis indicates that the pollen spectra from CE 1718-1819 (time bin 4 – Mature (diminished human population)) is most similar to that of a pre-human arrival mature or intact state. The pollen spectra of this period are characterised by Melastomataceae, Fabaceae, Solanaceae and Weinmannia. The vegetation of the 1700s, therefore, provides the most recent phase of substantial mature vegetation that has undergone over a century of recovery, representing a practical palaeo-reference ecosystem. We propose incorporating palynological analyses of short cores spanning the last 500 years with botanical inventory data to achieve more realistic and long-term restoration goals

El bienestar emocional de los docentes como factor determinante en los procesos de enseñanza/aprendizaje en el aula

This study concentrates on the analysis of the factors which encourage the development of students and their teachers, as well as making their happiness and wellbeing more attainable. 300 teachers from the province of Granada (Spain) took part. 113 of them were preschool teachers while 187 worked in primary education, their ages ranging from 25 to 64. A descriptive, transversal comparative was used. Results confirmed that: 1) teachers obtained higher marks in the positive aspects analyzed than the negative ones, especially if have taken part in courses or activities to improve their personal wellbeing; 2) there is a significant relationship between age and happiness, total self-esteem and its positive side.En el siguiente trabajo hemos analizado el estado emocional de los docentes de Educación Infantil y Educación Primaria. Participaron 300 docentes de la provincia de Granada (España), 113 de Educación Infantil y 187 de Educación Primaria, con edades comprendidas entre 25 y 64 años. La metodología es descriptiva y comparativa transversal. Los resultados confirman que: 1) los docentes puntúan más alto en las dimensiones positivas analizadas que en las negativas, sobre todo los que han realizado cursos o actividades para mejorar su bienestar personal; 2) existe relación significativa de la edad con la felicidad, la claridad, la autoestima total y su dimensión positiva

Large-scale magnetic fields from inflation due to a CPTCPT-even Chern-Simons-like term with Kalb-Ramond and scalar fields

We investigate the generation of large-scale magnetic fields due to the breaking of the conformal invariance in the electromagnetic field through the $CPT$-even dimension-six Chern-Simons-like effective interaction with a fermion current by taking account of the dynamical Kalb-Ramond and scalar fields in inflationary cosmology. It is explicitly demonstrated that the magnetic fields on 1Mpc scale with the field strength of $\sim 10^{-9}$G at the present time can be induced.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, version accepted for publication in Eur. Phys. J.

Model confidence sets and forecast combination: an application to age-specific mortality

Background: Model averaging combines forecasts obtained from a range of models, and it often produces more accurate forecasts than a forecast from a single model. Objective: The crucial part of forecast accuracy improvement in using the model averaging lies in the determination of optimal weights from a finite sample. If the weights are selected sub-optimally, this can affect the accuracy of the model-averaged forecasts. Instead of choosing the optimal weights, we consider trimming a set of models before equally averaging forecasts from the selected superior models. Motivated by Hansen et al. (2011), we apply and evaluate the model confidence set procedure when combining mortality forecasts. Data & Methods: The proposed model averaging procedure is motivated by Samuels and Sekkel (2017) based on the concept of model confidence sets as proposed by Hansen et al. (2011) that incorporates the statistical significance of the forecasting performance. As the model confidence level increases, the set of superior models generally decreases. The proposed model averaging procedure is demonstrated via national and sub-national Japanese mortality for retirement ages between 60 and 100+. Results: Illustrated by national and sub-national Japanese mortality for ages between 60 and 100+, the proposed model-average procedure gives the smallest interval forecast errors, especially for males. Conclusion: We find that robust out-of-sample point and interval forecasts may be obtained from the trimming method. By robust, we mean robustness against model misspecification