An International Index of Child Welfare

This paper develops an international index of child welfare that can be used for comparisons across countries and over time. Values of this index for the year 1998 are presented for 118 countries. The paper is organized as follows. Sections 2 briefly discusses the importance of child welfare both as a means to advance economic development objectives and as an end in itself. Section 3 calculates National Performance Gaps (NPGs), a concept first introduced by UNICEF (1995) to measure child welfare variables relative to international norms based on per capita income. After a review of some methodological issues, estimates are presented of NPGs for five variables: (1) the infant mortality rate; (2) the under-five mortality rate; (3) the percentage of underfive children who are underweight; (4) the primary school enrollment rate; and (5) the percentage of children reaching grade five. Section 4 draws on these NPGs to devise a composite index of child welfare, WINOCENT. Finally, Section 5 offers some concluding remarks.

The Intersection problem for 2-(v; 5; 1) directed block designs

The intersection problem for a pair of 2-(v, 3, 1) directed designs and 2-(v, 4, 1) directed designs is solved by Fu in 1983 and by Mahmoodian and Soltankhah in 1996, respectively. In this paper we determine the intersection problem for 2-(v, 5, 1) directed designs.Comment: 17 pages. To appear in Discrete Mat

Biostratigraphy of the Danian/Selandian transition: A case study from Kamestan anticline section, northwest of Izeh city in Khuzestan province, Southern Iran

The planktonic foraminifera turnover across the Danian-Selandian boundary (early to late Paleocene, ~60 Ma) has been studied in the Kamestan anticline section. The studied interval span planktonic foraminifera zones P2-P3. In this section Danian-Selandian boundary is located in Pabedeh – Gurpi Formations transition. Here, the boundary of Pabeh and Gurpi Formations is a transitional one and identified by with color change of from grey shale to purple shale of Gurpi Formation to Pabdeh Formation .

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