Ethnicity, Democracy and Development in Papua New Guinea

This article examines the relationship between ethnicity, democracy and development in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on an earlier co-authored study, it shows that a key cause of disparities in provincial development in Papua New Guinea is variation in the levels of ethnic diversity between provinces. Even when alternative explanations such as size, government performance and resource endowments are factored in, more diverse provinces have significantly lower development levels than more homogeneous ones. Increasing levels of ethnic diversity are associated with lower overall levels of development, in part because ethnic divisions encourage rent-seeking behaviour, leading to sub-optimal outcomes for the country as a whole

Free Riders on the Firestorm: How Shifting the Costs of Wildfire Management to Residents of the Wildland-Urban Interface Will Benefit Our Public Forests

Since the early 1900s, the federal land management agencies—the Forest Service in particular—have focused their wildfire management efforts on suppression. A century of wildfire suppression policy has created a buildup of natural fuels in the Nation’s forests that contribute to larger, more damaging fires today. This, coupled with the rapid development of the Wildland-Urban Interface, makes today’s wildfires a greater threat to human life and property. As a result, the federal government’s annual expenditures for wildfire management have ballooned in recent years. Relying on the billions of tax dollars spent each year to fight wildfire, individuals have continued to develop property on fire-prone lands and insurers continue to issue them policies with premiums that do not reflect the true risk of wildfire. This situation creates an implicit subsidy for residents of fire-prone lands, which presents many of the same pitfalls as the National Flood Insurance Program’s explicit subsidy for residents of flood-prone lands. This Note advocates for a reform of the way we pay for wildfire management. Specifically, it encourages the federal government to implement a National Wildfire Insurance Program that employs a “homeowner mandate” to shift the costs of wildfire management to those who directly benefit from it: the residents of the Wildland-Urban Interface

Political Reform in Papua New Guinea: Testing the Evidence

In this paper, I argue that if judged specifically against measurable performance indicators, rather than the elevated expectations of cultural change advanced by some of these critics, Papua New Guinea’s electoral, party and parliamentary reforms have in fact already had a discernable positive impact upon political outcomes. Assertions to the contrary rely on outlandish interpretations of reform aims and at times ignore available evidence. And, as I will show, testable data to assess the impact of each of these reforms is readily available

Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula

In Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula, Benjamin Reilly illuminates a previously unstudied phenomenon: the large-scale employment of people of African ancestry as slaves in agricultural oases within the Arabian Peninsula. The key to understanding this unusual system, Reilly argues, is the prevalence of malaria within Arabian Peninsula oases and drainage basins, which rendered agricultural lands in Arabia extremely unhealthy for people without genetic or acquired resistance to malarial fevers. In this way, Arabian slave agriculture had unexpected similarities to slavery as practiced in the Caribbean and Brazil. This book synthesizes for the first time a body of historical and ethnographic data about slave-based agriculture in the Arabian Peninsula. Reilly uses an innovative methodology to analyze the limited historical record and a multidisciplinary approach to complicate our understandings of the nature of work in an area that is popularly thought of solely as desert. This work makes significant contributions both to the global literature on slavery and to the environmental history of the Middle East—an area that has thus far received little attention from scholars.https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/1016/thumbnail.jp

Evaluating the effect of the electoral system in post-coup Fiji

In 1997, Fiji’s Constitution Review Commission (CRC) produced a voluminous proposal for constitutional reform, The Fiji Islands: Towards a United Future, which recommended that Fiji move ‘gradually but decisively’ away from communalism towards a free, open and multi-ethnic political system

Democratization and political reform in the Asia-Pacific: Is there an ‘Asian Model’ of institutional design?

One of the little-noticed consequences of the democratization of the Asia-Pacific has been reforms to key political institutions such as electoral systems, political parties, and parliaments. I argue that, across the region, these reforms have been motivated by common aims of increasing government stability, reducing political fragmentation, and limiting the potential for ethnic politics. As a result, similar strategies of institutional design are evident in areas such as the increasing prevalence of ‘mixed-member majoritarian’ electoral systems, attempts to develop aggregative political party systems, and constraints upon the formation of small, ethnic or regional parties. I argue that these political reforms have increasingly converged on an identifiable "Asian model" of institutional design

Telemedicine coverage for post-operative ICU patients.

Introduction There is an increased demand for intensive care unit (ICU) beds. We sought to determine if we could create a safe surge capacity model to increase ICU capacity by treating ICU patients in the post-anaesthesia care unit (PACU) utilizing a collaborative model between an ICU service and a telemedicine service during peak ICU bed demand. Methods We evaluated patients managed by the surgical critical care service in the surgical intensive care unit (SICU) compared to patients managed in the virtual intensive care unit (VICU) located within the PACU. A retrospective review of all patients seen by the surgical critical care service from January 1st 2008 to July 31st 2011 was conducted at an urban, academic, tertiary centre and level 1 trauma centre. Results Compared to the SICU group ( n = 6652), patients in the VICU group ( n = 1037) were slightly older (median age 60 (IQR 47-69) versus 58 (IQR 44-70) years, p = 0.002) and had lower acute physiology and chronic health evaluation (APACHE) II scores (median 10 (IQR 7-14) versus 15 (IQR 11-21), p \u3c 0.001). The average amount of time patients spent in the VICU was 13.7 + /-9.6 hours. In the VICU group, 750 (72%) of patients were able to be transferred directly to the floor; 287 (28%) required subsequent admission to the surgical intensive care unit. All patients in the VICU group were alive upon transfer out of the PACU while mortality in the surgical intensive unit cohort was 5.5%. Discussion A collaborative care model between a surgical critical care service and a telemedicine ICU service may safely provide surge capacity during peak periods of ICU bed demand. The specific patient populations for which this approach is most appropriate merits further investigation