Emerging Alternatives to Mutual Funds: Unit Investment Trusts and Other Fixed Portfolio Investment Vehicles

Thomas Harman offers a comprehensive analysis of the Unit Investment Trust. First, he defines the trust, examining the mechanics and participants associated with it. He then traces the development of the trust since its inception as a fixed trust. Next he discusses the regulation of the trust by the Securites Acts of 1933 and 1940. Finally, he compares the unit investment trust with other investment vehicles

Analysing Leadership in Global Health Governance

Rhetoric around the need for more and better leadership is everywhere in contemporary global health governance, yet there has been little articulation of what type of leadership is required, who might play leadership roles, and in what fora leadership might be exercised. Global health governance has widely been seen as a policy space characterised by a multiplicity of (often competing) actors with no overall authority. Yet despite this things do ‘get done’, and in some cases there are impressive levels of collective action to address particular health problems. We argue that leadership provides an important lens for understanding how things do (or do not) get done in global health governance. Drawing on the existing literatures on global health governance and leadership and agency in international relations, we set out in this paper a framework for analysing leadership in global health governance. Crucially, we argue, such a framework must be specific enough to be operationalisable in terms of a program of research and at the same time broad enough to capture a wide variety of different sources, sites and forms of leadership – including the roles played by ‘hidden leaders’ who are seldom acknowledged in mainstream analyses of global health politics

Beyond TRIPS: Why the WTO's Doha Round is Unhealthy

OA Monitor ExerciseOA Monitor ExerciseOA Monitor ExerciseThe current round of World Trade Organization (wto) negotiations—the Doha Round—has significant implications for global health which have received insufficient attention from the global health community. All too often the health implications of global trade agreements are examined only after their conclusion, and are concerned only with intellectual property rights. This paper seeks to move beyond this narrow focus and elucidate the wider health implications of the Doha Round. It explores the negative effect of the Round on state capacity to provide and regulate health services in low-income countries, and the impact it will have on livelihoods among the poor and their ability to access health services. Overall the paper makes the case for greater engagement from the health community with the wto and the Doha Round negotiations beyond the customary focus on intellectual property rights

International development in transition

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: HARMAN, S. and WILLIAMS, D. (2014), International development in transition. International Affairs, 90: 925–941. doi: 10.1111/1468-2346.12148, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12148International development is in a period of transition. While the outcome of this is still unclear, this article argues that there are at least four areas in which the project of international development is changing. First, there is a debate, especially within the World Bank, about development strategy and how we think about development, particularly in terms of the balance between states and markets. This is evident in the debate over state failure and the new structural economics. Second, there is increasing evidence of a shift in lending, away from projects of 'small' human development, perhaps best encapsulated by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, towards more transformative 'big' development projects such as infrastructure. Third, 'non-traditional' aid donors and new forms of private philanthropy are playing a more significant role in development financing and this, in turn, offers developing countries a new range of choices about what kinds of development assistance they receive. Fourth, aid relations are changing as a result of the renewed agency of developing states, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and shifts towards increased South-South cooperation are growing as evidenced by increased funding from regional development banks and increased trade flows. The article reviews these changes and suggests a series of questions and challenges that arise from them for analysts of international development, developing countries and traditional aid donors. © 2014 The Royal Institute of International Affairs

The Dual Feminisation of HIV/AIDS

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Globalizations on 2011, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14747731.2010.49302

ConSIT: A conditioned program slicer

Conditioned slicing is a powerful generalisation of static and dynamic slicing which has applications to many problems in software maintenance and evolution, including reuse, reengineering and program comprehension. However there has been relatively little work on the implementation of conditioned slicing. Algorithms for implementing conditioned slicing necessarily involve reasoning about the values of program predicates in certain sets of states derived from the conditioned slicing criterion, making implementation particularly demanding. The paper introduces ConSIT, a conditioned slicing system which is based upon conventional static slicing, symbolic execution and theorem proving. ConSIT is the first fully automated implementation of conditioned slicing. An implementation of ConSIT is available for experimentation at &http://www.mcs.gold.ac.uk/tilde/~mas01sd/consit.htm