Academia as Missions: Our Adventures in Romania

Dr. Michael S. Jones, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Liberty University, shares his experiences of teaching philosophy at the flagship Romanian university in Bucharest, 2014-2015, thanks to a Fulbright grant

Giving To Ingrates?

Models for voluntary provision of public goods predict free riding is rational unless the model includes a motive for the act of giving referred to as a “warm glow” in the literature. The source for this warm glow is likely to include the gratitude of the recipient. The experimental setting employed here controls for positive or negative reciprocity from the recipient of a gift to isolate the individual satisfaction from the act of giving as the remaining motivation for giving. The experimental treatment is whether the recipient is informed that his/her payoff includes a “gift” from another participant (donor or giver). The central finding is that donations increase when the donor/giver knows that the recipient knows that a gift has been provided. Key Words:

1991 NCCD Prison Population Forecast: The Impact of Declining Drug Arrests (FOCUS)

According to the National Council and Crime and Delinquency (NCCD), prison populations will increase by 35 percent over the next five years under the current criminal justice policies. This rate of growth is significantly lower than NCCD's 1989 estimates of a 60 percent increase over five years. The principal reason for the lower growth rate is a 20 percent reduction in drug arrests, which in turn is reducing projected jail and prison admissions. The declining number of drug arrests are related to the fiscal crisis of state and local governments, drug asset and seizure laws, and lower drug use. However, prison populations will continue to grow despite reductions in admissions due to the passage of mandatory minimum sentencing statutes and lengthier prison terms for certain crimes. Assuming that the 16 states researched are representative of trends that are on-going in other states and the Federal Prison System, the nation's prison population will reach 1 million inmates by 1994

European Neighbourhood Policy in the Mashreq Countries: Enhancing Prospects for Reform. CEPS Working Documents No. 229, 1 September 2005

This report assesses ways in which the Action Plan process that has been launched under the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) could become a more effective driver of political and economic change in the Mashreq region (covering Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories), compared with the modest results from the Barcelona process to date. The development of the ENP has already provided a valuable systemic/institutional advance in Euro-Med relations and has been an important confidence-building measure in an increasingly uncertain political environment. But it has yet to provide momentum for economic, political and social advance in the partner states. Key elements in making the Action Plan process more effective would be the following: · The Commission needs to deepen the policy content of the ENP with sketches of different degrees of desirable EU acquis compliance as a function of different economic structures and capabilities of the partner states. · The task of policy-shaping in different sectors of the Action Plans with the partner states needs to be shared by the Commission with other international organisations, most importantly the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Investment Bank (EIB). · The policy-shaping recommendations in support of the economic parts of the Action Plans should be explicitly linked to financial or market-access incentives (or both) on offer from the EU and international financial institutions. The promotion of political reform in the partner states is a more delicate affair. Yet there is still some room for ‘positive conditionality’ if the Commission were to define more substantively the package of incentives that are offered to partner states