Introduction -- comparative study of social security systems in Asia and Latin America -- a contribution to the study of emerging welfare states

East Asia, India, Latin America, Social security, Social welfare

Jeans instability of interstellar gas clouds in the background of weakly interacting massive particles

Criterion of the Jeans instability of interstellar gas clouds which are gravitationally coupled with weakly interacting massive particles is revisited. It is established that presence of the dark matter always reduces the Jeans length, and in turn, Jeans mass of the interstellar gas clouds. Astrophysical implications of this effect are discussed.Comment: version accepted in ApJ, Nov. 1, 1998 issue, vol. 50

Transformation and continuity of the Argentine welfare state -- evaluating social security reform in the 1990s

Beginning after World War II, Argentina institutionalized a limited conservative corporatist welfare state where occupation-linked social insurance held a central position and social assistance had a residual character. This was called a limited conservative corporatist welfare state, because the huge population within the informal sector was excluded from the main system. A populist government supported by trade unions and the economic model of import-substituting industrialization were the background for the formation of this type of welfare state. During the 1990s, elements of a liberal regime were added to the Argentine welfare state under the reform carried out by the Menem Peronist government. However, social insurance reform and labor reform were not as drastic as the economic reform. They still retained a certain continuity from the traditional systems. The government intended to carry out more drastic social security and labor reform, but was unable to do so due to the legacy of corporatism of the Peronist government.Social security, Social welfare, Argentina

Advancements in Road Safety Management Analysis

Road Safety Management (RSM) can be briefly defined as the tasks of preparing and implementing road safety policies. Many studies have been carried out on RSM, trying to identify success factors and reference best practice examples, but the complexity of the subject and the difficulty of quantitative data collection make it difficult a clear and comprehensive understanding. According to the EC-funded DACOTA research project, the weakest components of RSM systems in Europe are policy implementation and funding and the lack of knowledge-based road safety policy making. The main objective of the research, undertaken within the FERSI's working group on Road Safety Management (RSM), is to better investigate in several European countries those two RSM key functions: funding and research. Particularly the study aims at 1) exploring the existing structures, processes and factors affecting funding and research performances; 2) defining an assessment framework able to measure single country performances with reference to the efficiency and effectiveness of road safety funding and research, possibly shifting from a qualitative to a more quantitative approach. Based on the available knowledge on these two topics (research and funding), an assessment framework is defined and a set of qualitative and quantitative indicators for funding and research performance measurement is proposed. A desk analysis aiming at collecting available data useful to estimate the proposed indicators is conducted and a preliminary analysis with this subset of indicators is undertaken. A subset of research indicators (bibliometric) are used to estimate road safety research outputs performance of a country in terms of productivity and quality of research and international collaboration activities. Preliminary results show a positive correlation among them, even if the linear correlation turns to be not so strong. Countries are ranked on the basis of a composite index of all the three indicators

Independent Distributions on a Multi-Branching AND-OR Tree of Height 2

We investigate an AND-OR tree T and a probability distribution d on the truth assignments to the leaves. Tarsi (1983) showed that if d is an independent and identical distribution (IID) such that probability of a leaf having value 0 is neither 0 nor 1 then, under a certain assumptions, there exists an optimal algorithm that is depth-first. We investigate the case where d is an independent distribution (ID) and probability depends on each leaf. It is known that in this general case, if height is greater than or equal to 3, Tarsi-type result does not hold. It is also known that for a complete binary tree of height 2, Tarsi-type result certainly holds. In this paper, we ask whether Tarsi-type result holds for an AND-OR tree of height 2. Here, a child node of the root is either an OR-gate or a leaf: The number of child nodes of an internal node is arbitrary, and depends on an internal node. We give an affirmative answer. Our strategy of the proof is to reduce the problem to the case of directional algorithms. We perform induction on the number of leaves, and modify Tarsi's method to suite height 2 trees. We discuss why our proof does not apply to height 3 trees.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl