Disability quotas: past or future policy?

This article considers the issues associated with the use of quota systems for the employment of workers with a disability. It examines the use and experiences of such quotas in Italy, Russia and the United Kingdom. Italy has a long established quota for the employment of such workers, whilst the modern Russian system it is a more recent innovation. In contrast the UK abandoned its quotas in the 1990s. We draw on the experiences of the three countries to consider generally whether the use of quotas is either an acceptable means of encouraging employers to take on disabled workers, or is necessary to achieve this objective

A cross-national analysis of affirmative action: an evolutionary psychological perspective

Affirmative action (AA) is a government policy permitting employers and universities to give preferential treatment to applicants from specific (e.g. racial) groups. We present a comparative analysis of AA in six countries (India, USA, Malaysia, Canada, South Africa, and Brazil) and explain similarities among these programs according to universal psychological mechanisms and variation according to cultural-historical contexts. It appears that similarities in contextual conditions (e.g. democratic government, multi-ethnic states) interact with ancient psychological mechanisms (e.g. fairness, cheater detection, alliance tracking) to provide at least part of the motivation for the development and expansion of AA, despite its problematic consequences. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.