Welfare to Work

[Excerpt] This paper explores welfare to work policy in the UK and sets out ways in which the delivery of that policy could become more efficient and effective by making small but significant changes to the approach. Employers and intermediaries must reposition disability from an issue to do with incapacity, doctors, damage and cost – to one concerned with capability, the workplace and investment in human potential. Employers, disabled people and intermediaries must all engage – and have high expectations of each other. We set out the case for an employer engagement strategy that supports welfare to work and maximises impact on employer behaviour by: • Repositioning the employer from ‘problem’ and ‘target’ (i.e. people whose attitudes must be changed) to valued ‘end user’, customer and potential partner. • Streamlining the ‘disability to work supply chain’ so that it more efficiently delivers suitable disabled candidates to employers equipped and supported to hire them on the basis of their capability, to retain them and to develop their potential. We believe it is necessary to reframe the welfare to work challenge as a supply chain challenge and outline 6 fundamental principles that should underpin any welfare to work policy

Investigation of Energy Service Companies in 2000

An Energy Service Company (ESCO) is a firm that offers to reduce its client's energy bill, with the cost saving being split with the client. ESCOs in the full sense of the term offer finance for their projects, will accept the risk of the project and are remunerated in proportion to the savings achieved. On their part, clients may wish to contract out management of some or all of their energy affairs to save on management time and to benefit from the expertise and specialist knowledge of ESCOs. This paper is a record of the state of ESCO activity in Ireland in 2000, based on investigations undertaken for the European Commission's BARRIERS project. This project investigated barriers to energy efficiency. The finding on ESCOs was that there are few companies in Ireland that offer ESCO-type services, and that they fell into three groups. They consisted of (1) companies that offer contract energy management, (2) companies that are engaged in the supply of Combined Heat and Power, and (3) those that manage their clients' facilities. One company of each type was interviewed with a view to identifying barriers to their fuller development into ESCOs that would engage in energy saving activity.

Isotropic singularities in shear-free perfect fluid cosmologies

We investigate barotropic perfect fluid cosmologies which admit an isotropic singularity. From the General Vorticity Result of Scott, it is known that these cosmologies must be irrotational. In this paper we prove, using two different methods, that if we make the additional assumption that the perfect fluid is shear-free, then the fluid flow must be geodesic. This then implies that the only shear-free, barotropic, perfect fluid cosmologies which admit an isotropic singularity are the FRW models.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figur

Quiescent cosmology and the final state of the universe

It has long been a primary objective of cosmology to understand the apparent isotropy in our universe and to provide a mathematical formulation for its evolution. A school of thought for its explanation is quiescent cosmology, which already possesses a mathematical framework, namely the definition of an Isotropic Singularity, but only for the initial state of the universe. A complementary framework is necessary in order to also describe possible final states of the universe. Our new definitions of an Anisotropic Future Endless Universe and an Anisotropic Future Singularity, whose structure and properties differ significantly from those of the Isotropic Singularity, offer a promising realisation for this framework. The combination of the three definitions together may then provide the first complete formalisation of the quiescent cosmology concept.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, essay receiving honorable mention in the 2007 Gravity Research Foundation Essay award

The Impact of Information Technology on Emergency Health Care Outcomes

This paper analyzes the productivity of technology and job design in emergency response systems, or 911 systems.' During the 1990s, many 911 systems adopted Enhanced 911' (E911), where information technology is used to link automatic caller identification to a database of address and location information. A potential benefit to E911 is improved timeliness of the emergency response. We evaluate the returns to E911 in the context of a panel dataset of Pennsylvania counties during 1994-1996, when almost half of the 67 counties experienced a change in technology. We measure productivity using an index of health status of cardiac patients at the time of ambulance arrival, where the index should be improved by timely response. We also consider the direct effect of E911 on several patient outcomes, including mortality within the first hours following the incident and the total hospital charges incurred by the patient. Our main finding is that E911 increases the short-term survival rates for patients with cardiac diagnoses by about 1%, from a level of 96.2%. We also provide evidence that E911 reduces hospital charges. Finally, we analyze the effect of job design, in particular the use of Emergency Medical Dispatching' (EMD), where call-takers gather medical information, provide medical instructions over the telephone, and prioritize the allocation of ambulance and paramedic services. Controlling for EMD adoption does not affect our results about E911, and we find that EMD and E911 do not have significant interactions in determining outcomes (that is, they are neither substitutes nor complements).

How widespread are non-linear crowding out effects? The response of private transfers to income in four developing countries

This paper investigates whether there is a non-linear relationship between income and the private transfers received by households in developing countries. If private transfers are unresponsive to household income, expansion of public social security and other transfer programs is unlikely to crowd out private transfers, contrary to concerns first raised by Barro and Becker. There is little existing evidence for crowding out effects in the literature, but this may be because they have been obscured by methods that ignore non-linearities. If donors switch from altruistic motivations to exchange motivations as recipient income increases, a sharp non-linear relationship between private transfers and income may result. In fact, threshold regression techniques find such non-linearity in the Philippines and after accounting for these there is evidence of serious crowding out, with 30 to 80 percent of private transfers potentially displaced for low-income households [Cox, Hansen and Jimenez 2004, 'How Responsiveare Private Transfers to Income?' Journal of Public Economics]. To see if these non-linear effects occur more widely, semiparametric and threshold regression methods are used to model private transfers in four developing countries - China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam. The results of our paper suggest that non-linear crowding-out effects are not important features of transfer behaviour in these countries. The transfer derivatives under a variety of assumptions only range between 0 and -0.08. If our results are valid, expansions of public social security to cover the poorest households need not be stymied by offsetting private responses

EOR as sequestration: Geoscience perspective

CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) has a development and operational history several decades longer than geologic sequestration of CO2 designed to benefit the atmosphere and provides much of the experience on which confidence in the newer technology is based. With modest increases in surveillance and accounting, future CO2 EOR using anthropogenic CO2 (CO2-A) captured to decrease atmospheric emissions can be used as part of a sequestration program.Bureau of Economic Geolog