Analyzing the Triad Diagnosis Requirement for Autism in Arkansas

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that has steadily increased in incidence and prevalence over the last ten years. While the disorder can be diagnosed as early as two years of age, most children do not receive a diagnosis until they are about five years old. The state of Arkansas requires a triad autism diagnosis, mandating that a physician, psychologist, and speech pathologist individually evaluate and agree on a diagnosis of autism for a child. The purpose of this evaluation was to examine diagnostic practices in the 11 states that participate in the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDM) to compare efficiency of the Arkansas triad diagnosis. The ADDM findings show that Arkansas ranks last in autism detection and evaluation of at-risk children before age 3 years. These practices have not improved in the last 10 years. The participating states with the lowest ages of diagnosis and strongest practices utilized an interdisciplinary team approach and had programs located in multiple cities that were focused solely on early identification, evaluation, and diagnosis. By implementing similar interdisciplinary practices in Arkansas, the triad diagnosis requirement could be re-evaluated, and more resources for evaluation and diagnosis can be created for the state. Arkansas’ identification, evaluation, and diagnostic rates could improve by discontinuing the triad autism diagnosis requirement in favor of implementing similar interdisciplinary team approaches and increasing program locations throughout the state

On the Distributional Implications of Social Protection Reforms in Latin America

The paper tracks recent changes in the components of social protection in Latin America, the reforms to social insurance in the 1990s and the growth of social assistance in the 2000s, and assesses their effects on poverty and inequality and implications for welfare institutions in the region. The analysis focuses on public subsidies to social protection and their rebalancing. The paper concludes that the expansion of social assistance in the region will result in social protection institutions which are more comprehensive and distributionally progressive.Latin America, social insurance, social assistance, social protection, poverty, inequality

Analysis of International Migration and its Impacts on Developing Countries

This paper provides a review of the literature on the reasons and consequences of international migration. The principal determinants of migration are analyzed and it is seen that educated people from developing countries are more likely to migrate for several reasons (i.e. network determinants, costs of moving, pull factors and push factors). Looking into the empirical data, the global trend is that emigration of educated people (usually called “brain drain”) has increased a lot. This trend implies that industrialized countries are importing highly skilled people from developing countries and this will certainly have important consequences for developing countries in the long run. Some researchers argue that developing countries will loose, since the most qualified people leave and stop contributing to their country. Others say that the global trend can be beneficial because positive spillovers will be created; in the sense that developing countries will experience higher investments in human capital (“brain gain”). Empirical findings show that these spillovers depend on the probability to migrate and the stock of human capital that a country has. Finally another group of researchers argues that this process is inevitable, and barriers to migration should be abolished in order to reap the benefits for both sending and receiving countries as well as the migrants themselves.Migration, Brain Drain, Brain Gain

Supplementary pension coverage in Britain

The 1986 Social Security Act introduced far-reaching changes to the supplementary pension environment in Britain, encouraging the growth of defined contribution pension plans and especially personal pensions. This paper examines the pattern of supplementary pension coverage of employees in Britain five years after the implementation of the Act, using cross-sectional data from the Family Resources Survey 1993-94. Two-thirds of employees in Britain are covered by private contracted-out pension schemes. Employer-provided defined benefit pension schemes remain the dominant type of supplementary pension scheme. The growth of personal pension plans is more marked among manual, less-skilled, workers in smaller establishments. The paper concludes that, in the absence of further pension reform, adverse labour market conditions will exert downward pressure on private pension coverage.

ESTIMATION AND TESTING AN ADDITIVE PARTIALLY LINEAR MODEL IN A SYSTEM OF ENGEL CURVES

The form of the Engel curve has long been a subject of discussion in appliedeconometrics and until now there has no been definitive conclusion about its form. In this paperan additive partially linear model is used to estimate semiparametrically the effect of totalexpenditure in the context of the Engel curves. Additionally, we consider the non-parametricinclusion of some regressors which traditionally have a non linear effect such as age andschooling. To that end we compare an additive partially linear model with the fullynonparametric one using recent popular test statistics. We also provide the p-values computedby bootstrap and subsampling schemes for the proposed test statistics. Empirical analysis basedon data drawn from the Spanish Expenditure Survey 1990-91 shows that modelling the effectsof expenditure, age and schooling on budget share deserves a treatment better than that adoptedin simple semiparametric analysis.Engel curve, expenditure, nonparametric estimation, marginal integration