Potentialities and constraints in the relation between social innovation and public policies: some lessons from South America

Social innovation (SI) can offer alternative forms of organization and novel solutions to complex problems faced by contemporary societies. As governments face increasing pressures from mounting societal challenges, it is assumed that SI can provide bottom-up solutions in ways that can create transformative change. However, the dialectic relation between bottom-up initiatives and government can be difficult and sometimes contradictory. Even more, assumptions about the diminishing powers of government can be misleading and overstress the role of SI. Based on the study of the recent South American experience, we have departed from this assumption, seeking to understand what the role of public policies as initiators or supporters of SI could be. We analyzed two top-down initiatives promoted by public policies that ultimately fostered SI in Argentina, the subsistence agriculture “Pro-Huerta” program and the policies of the National Technology and Social Innovation Program, and one complementary case study of a bottom-up SI experience in Brazil, the One Million Cisterns Program, which was later inserted into public policies. Together, these cases have allowed us to understand the potentialities and limitations of SI and the kind of dialectic relations they established with public policies. In particular, we have considered how public policies can foster and support SI.Fil: Gordon, Ariel. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Economía y Administracion; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Becerra, Lucas Dardo. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Centro de Estudios e Investigación. Instituto de Estudios Sobre la Ciencia y Tecnología; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Fressoli, Juan Mariano. Centro de Investigaciones para la Transformación; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Las Actas de Directorio del Banco Hipotecario Nacional como fuente para reconstruir su historia durante el peronismo

Este trabajo se ocupa de avanzar en el estudio del BHN durante el primer gobierno peronista a partir del análisis de sus Actas de Directorio porque reconoce la escasez de trabajos sistemáticos sobre su historia así como la falta de referencias que trasciendan el análisis de las Memorias editadas por el BancoThis paper is concerned about further study of the Banco Hipotecario Nacional during the first Peronist government based on the analysis of its Minutes of Board, being its essential motivation the shortage of systematic work on its history and the lack of references beyond the analysis of the Reports published by the BankFil: Gómez, Juan Lucas. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero; Argentina. Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social; Argentin

Robust functional principal components: A projection-pursuit approach

In many situations, data are recorded over a period of time and may be regarded as realizations of a stochastic process. In this paper, robust estimators for the principal components are considered by adapting the projection pursuit approach to the functional data setting. Our approach combines robust projection-pursuit with different smoothing methods. Consistency of the estimators are shown under mild assumptions. The performance of the classical and robust procedures are compared in a simulation study under different contamination schemes.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOS923 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Economic Effects of Unions in Latin America: Teachers' Unions and Education in Argentina

This paper considers the effects of trade unions on the education sector in Argentina. We have provided a substantial amount of new information and we have found useful preliminary results on some of the channels of union influence on the performance of this crucial sector. We find that those provinces where teacher unionism is fragmented, where union density is higher and where political relations with the governor are more conflictual, have more strikes (fewer class days). Based on estimates of education production functions both in this paper and elsewhere, we expect this to translate into lower student performance. We then find a number of weak conclusions related to the impact that unions have on several variables that affect students’ performance (i. e. , teachers’ tenure, job satisfaction, class size, education budget and teachers’ salaries). Reviewing these results, we conclude that the impact of unions on students’ performance depends on the channel and kind of political market where unions operate, but not on the existence of unions per se.

Applying feature reduction analysis to a PPRLM-multiple Gaussian language identification system

This paper presents the application of a feature selection technique such as LDA to a language identification (LID) system. The baseline system consists of a PPRLM module followed by a multiple-Gaussian classifier. This classifier makes use of acoustic scores and duration features of each input utterance. We applied a dimension reduction of the feature space in order to achieve a faster and easier-trainable system. We imputed missing values of our vectors before projecting them on the new space. Our experiments show a very low performance reduction due to the dimension reduction approach. Using a single dimension projection the error rates we have obtained are about 8.73% taking into account the 22 most significant features

The teaching of Spanish as a second language at the South Korea universities: handicaps and didactic proposals for Hankuk University of foreign studies (Seoul)

Cada vez es mayor el número de profesores de español que se demanda en el extranjero, más concretamente en los países asiáticos. A partir de nuestra experiencia como profesores de español en Corea del Sur, concretamente en Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, destacaremos en este artículo cómo se enseña el español a nivel universitario en el país. Para ayudar a mejorar la enseñanza del idioma recomendaremos al Departamento de Español de dicha universidad que reforme o modifique ciertas costumbres y prácticas que dificultan enormemente la labor del profesorado extranjero de español.The number of Spanish instructors that are being demanded abroad is increasing every day, especially in the Asian countries. From our experience as Spanish instructors in South Korea, concretely in the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, in this article we want to highlight how to teach Spanish at the university level in the country. To help in the improvement of the language teaching, we will recommend the Spanish Department reform or change certain habits and experiences that make the work of the Spanish foreign instructors more difficult.peerReviewe

Poverty and Employability Effects of Workfare Programs in Argentina

In 1993 Argentina began implementing workfare programs, and workfare has become a central public policy starting 2002 when the government increased the number of beneficiaries from 100,000 to 2 million people in a country of 38 million. We explore targeting, poverty and employability effects of workfare before 2002 based on the permanent household survey (EPH). We find that the program was pro-poor although more than one third of participants did not satisfy the eligibility criteria. Our estimates suggest that the income of participants increased during treatment - particularly for women - indicating beneficial short run poverty effects. However, the long run effects of the program are not obvious due to selection on treatment completion. We present evidence suggesting that -for a large fraction of participants- the program generated dependency and did not increase their human capital.Workfare, evaluation, Argentina