Can ‘New Welfare’ Address Poverty through More and Better Jobs?

New welfare has been prominent in recent European social policy debates. It involves mobilising more people into paid work, improving human capital and ensuring fairer access to opportunities. This programme is attractive to business (more workers, better human capital and reduced social conflict to enhance productivity and profitability) and to citizens (more widely accessible job-opportunities with better rewards): a relatively low-cost approach to the difficulties governments face in maintaining support and meeting social goals as inequalities widen. The general move towards ‘new welfare’ gathered momentum during the past two decades, given extra impetus by the 2007-9 recession and subsequent stagnation. While employment rates rose during the prosperous years before the crisis, there was no commensurate reduction in poverty. Over the same period the share of economic growth returned to labour fell, labour markets were increasingly de-regulated and inequality increased. This raises the question of whether new welfare’s economic (higher employment, improved human capital) and social (better job quality and incomes) goals may come into conflict. This paper examines data for 17 European countries over the period 2001 to 2007. It shows that new welfare is much more successful at achieving higher employment than at reducing poverty, even during prosperity, and that the approach pays insufficient attention to structural factors, such as the falling wage share, and to institutional issues, such as labour market deregulation

Rapid Assessment of Deep Retrofit System Solutions to Improve Energy Efficiency in DoD Installations and Buildings

The paper describes the application of a methodology and tools for early assessment of integrated system solutions for deep retrofit with a potential of 30-50% energy reductions across large building portfolio as well as at an individual building scale using information only about building characteristics, usage type and climate. The building energy consumption is estimated using a simple building description, and then the impact of energy conservation measures (ECMs) are estimated individually and in combination as integrated system packages. We demonstrate the tool application with two types of cases from the Department of Defense (DoD) real property database. The results illustrate both statistical analysis of the potential for deep retrofits at DoD portfolio level, which comprises nearly 250,000 facilities in the U.S., and also for a few representative existing DoD buildings

Senior Jazz Recital

List of performers and performances

Trade and health: how World Trade Organization(WTO) law affects alcohol and public health

The alcohol field is becoming more aware of the consequences of world trade law for alcohol policies. However, there is a need for greater clarity about the different effects of trade on alcohol-related harm. Methods A comprehensive review of all literature on alcohol and world trade [including World Trade Organization (WTO) disputes on alcohol], supported by amore selective review of other relevant cases, academic reports and the grey literature on trade and health. Results The burden of WTO law on alcohol policies depends upon the type of policy in question. Purely protectionist policies are likely to be struck down, which may lead to increases in alcohol-related harm. Partly protectionist and partly health-motivated policies are also at risk of being struck down. However, purely health-motivated policies are likely to be defended by the WTO—and to the extent that policy makers misunderstand this, they are needlessly avoiding effective ways of reducing alcohol-related harm. Conclusions WTO agreements contain genuine and substantial risks to alcohol policies, and various ways of minimizing future risks are suggested. However, the‘chilling effect’ of mistakenly overestimating these constraints should be avoided. Health policy makers should decide on which policies to pursue based primarily on considerations of effectiveness, ethics and politics rather than legality. As long as any effect of these policies on trade is minimized, they are overwhelmingly likely towin any challenges at the WTO

Joint evolution of multiple social traits: a kin selection analysis

General models of the evolution of cooperation, altruism and other social behaviours have focused almost entirely on single traits, whereas it is clear that social traits commonly interact. We develop a general kin-selection framework for the evolution of social behaviours in multiple dimensions. We show that whenever there are interactions among social traits new behaviours can emerge that are not predicted by one-dimensional analyses. For example, a prohibitively costly cooperative trait can ultimately be favoured owing to initial evolution in other (cheaper) social traits that in turn change the cost-benefit ratio of the original trait. To understand these behaviours, we use a two-dimensional stability criterion that can be viewed as an extension of Hamilton's rule. Our principal example is the social dilemma posed by, first, the construction and, second, the exploitation of a shared public good. We find that, contrary to the separate one-dimensional analyses, evolutionary feedback between the two traits can cause an increase in the equilibrium level of selfish exploitation with increasing relatedness, while both social (production plus exploitation) and asocial (neither) strategies can be locally stable. Our results demonstrate the importance of emergent stability properties of multidimensional social dilemmas, as one-dimensional stability in all component dimensions can conceal multidimensional instability

Climate smart agriculture? Governing the sustainable development goals in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the political economic and governance challenges faced by African governments in operationalizing Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) as part of their pursuit of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is a need to enrich our understanding of the diverse contexts and ways in which governments will have to navigate and address the inevitable choices and conflicts, synergies and trade-offs that will characterize efforts to simultaneously implement these global goals. Here we seek to develop an account of why and how countries are managing the interrelationship between SDGs, particularly those associated with food security and climate action. We develop explanations for the diversity in approaches and provide an initial assessment of what the consequences are for policy and practice. The analysis is informed by the contrasting experiences of four Eastern African countries, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, as they seek to build more “climate resilient” food and agricultural systems that are compatible with achieving the SDGs

Significance of Elecsys (R) S100 immunoassay for real-time assessment of traumatic brain damage in multiple trauma patients

Background: The neuroprotein S100 released into the circulation has been suggested as a reliable marker for primary brain damage. However, safe identification of relevant traumatic brain injury (TBI) may possibly be hampered by S100 release from peripheral tissue. The objective of this study was to measure early S100 levels using the Elecsys((R)) S100 immunoassay for real-time assessment of severe TBI in multiple trauma. Methods: Consecutively admitted multiple trauma patients (injury severity score >= 16 points) were stratified according to the results of the initial cerebral computed tomography (CCT) examination. S100 serum levels were determined at admission and at 6, 12, 24, 48 and 72 h after trauma. Data were correlated to creatine phosphokinase (CK) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) serum levels. Using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, the discriminating power of S100 measurement was calculated for the detection of CCT+ findings. Results: Median S100 levels of CCT+ patients (n=9; 37 years) decreased from 3.30 mu g/L at admission to 0.41 mu g/L 72 h after trauma. They revealed no significant differences to CCT- patients (n=18; 44 years), but remained elevated compared to controls. Median CK and LDH levels correlated with the corresponding S100 levels during the first 24 h after trauma. ROC analysis displayed a maximum area under the curve of only 0.653 at 12 h after trauma. No significant difference was calculated for the differentiation between CCT+ and CCT- patients. Conclusions: Measurements of S100 serum levels using the Elecsys((R)) S100 immunoassay are not reliable for the real-time detection of severe TBI in multiple trauma patients. Due to soft tissue trauma or bone fractures, S100 is mainly released from peripheral sources such as adipocytes or skeletal muscle cells