THE OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES OF MICROINSURANCE

Microinsurance is a term increasingly used to refer to insurance characterized by low premium and low caps or low coverage limits, sold as part of a typical risk-pooling and marketing arrangements, and designed to service low-income people and businesses not served by typical social or commercial insurance schemes. As a relatively new field, few studies evaluating the impact of microinsurance projects exist. Of these, even fewer have a rigorous methodology leading to reliable results. Our research aimed to: - examine the viability of microinsurance as a mechanism of risk transfer and tool for risk management in developing countries; - provide a state of the art analysis of microinsurance for a better understanding of currently operational microinsurance schemes; - reflect on the opportunities and challenges of microinsurance in developing countries, highlighting both the potential benefits and limitations of microinsurance as an instrument for transferring risk; - consider the interests and perspectives of different stakeholders and the incentives and disincentives for participating and investing in a micro-insurance scheme; - enhance dialogue and collaboration on this topic between and within the commercial insurance sector and the disaster risk reduction communities; - assess the opportunity of introducing microinsurance in Romania. Reflecting on the opportunities and challenges of introducing microinsurance in Romania, there is absolutely necessary to understand both the supply side (current insurance market) and the demand side (risks faced by low-income persons and the coping strategies used to manage these risks). The majority of the primary research was conducted on-site in Romania, in Oradea and its environs, during the month of December 2010. Qualitative research techniques were utilized, including focus group discussions (FGD) and guided individual interviews with members of both the public and private sector, as well as with international non-governmental organizations, such as the World Bank, and IMF. The research revealed the main risks faced by low-income households, and the fact that microinsurance is a mostly unknown concept in Romania. There is a clear need and demand for microinsurance in Romania. The potential market is estimated to include approximately 4.3 million persons in 2008.microinsurance, microfinance, low-income, direct sales, performance

The Commons of the Tragedy

Presents findings from surveys conducted in September and October 2001. Looks at how the Internet was used by millions after the September 11 terror attacks to grieve, console, share news, and debate the nation's response

On information-optimal scripting of actions

Best paper award.Animals and humans encounter many tasks which permit ritualized behaviours, essentially fixed action sequences or “scripts”, similar to options known from Reinforcement Learning, but proceeding without intermediate decisions. While running a script, they proceed in an open-loop fashion. However even when these are already known, an agent needs to decide whether to perform a basic action or to trigger a script regarding the particular task. Here we study if including such scripts (i.e. behaviour rituals) is advantageous from the point of view of the relevant information required to take the decision to start such a script depending on the tasks. To achieve this, we modify the relevant information framework including sequences of basic actions to the possible actions

RELATIONS WITH THE PUBLIC VERSUS PUBLIC RELATIONS IN LOCAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Concomitant with the evolution of society, public relations are socially expressed only together with the explicit articulation of public categories and public organizations, once the individual becomes a citizen whose satisfaction is at the core of the public system's preoccupations, ignoring times long gone when the ordinary citizen and the majority of the public administration representatives couldn't tell apart the concept of public relations from that of relations with the public.citizens, organizational culture, routine

CURRENT COORDINATES OF THE INSURANCE MARKET IN ROMANIA

Although the insurance activity is well known to the Romanian market ever since the 14th century, when insurance was all about mutual help, this activity evolved rapidly in the period before the First World War and in the period between the World Wars, and it manifested itself as the entrance on the market of insurance companies representatives from countries as Austria, Italy, Great Britain. facultative insurance.premium, life insurance, non-life insurance

IMPLICATIONS OF CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN LOCAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION UPON CITIZENS' SATISFACTION

The satisfaction of citizens considering public services depends on the way the authorities identify and offer solutions to fulfil citizen's expectations, which are at least identical or even superior to the services offered in private domain. In addition, the worldwide governments are forced to adapt to the pressure exercised by the changes that appear in the demographic, technologic and economic environment, by the growing expectations of citizens and the necessity of lowering the taxes. As a consequence, the public system is starting to adopt the solutions that the citizens identified for the developing of the public policies, implying and making the community responsible in the act of governing.Social inclusion, exclusion, inequity

Spatial Hamiltonian identities for nonlocally coupled systems

We consider a broad class of systems of nonlinear integro-differential equations posed on the real line that arise as Euler-Lagrange equations to energies involving nonlinear nonlocal interactions. Although these equations are not readily cast as dynamical systems, we develop a calculus that yields a natural Hamiltonian formalism. In particular, we formulate Noether's theorem in this context, identify a degenerate symplectic structure, and derive Hamiltonian differential equations on finite-dimensional center manifolds when those exist. Our formalism yields new natural conserved quantities. For Euler-Lagrange equations arising as traveling-wave equations in gradient flows, we identify Lyapunov functions. We provide several applications to pattern-forming systems including neural field and phase separation problems.Comment: 39 pages, 1 figur

MODELS OF BANKING RISKS MANAGEMENT

Banking risks management as a fundamental element of banking management aims at diminishing as much as possible the negative impact of risk factors, at minimizing losses by expenditures cut-off and maximizing direct and transferred influxes, changing themodel, insurance, risk

GUIDELINES REGARDING EFFICIENT COMMUNICATION WITHIN MODERN ORGANIZATIONS

Efficient communication is one modern organization’s key to success, strengthening from within the employees’ confidence in the vision and mission of the organization, pinning them down to the reality of their workplace, feeding the development process oforganization, feed-back, memo

Investigation into diode pumped modelocked ND based laser oscillators for the CLIC photoinjector system

The photo-injector system envisaged for the proposed CLIC linear e+-e- accelerator at CERN has a demanding set of specifications on output pulse structure, power and timing stability. This paper reports on results obtained with quasi-CW diode pumped laser oscillators with output stabilisation. A 300W 804nm diode array stack is used to side pump Nd:YLF (1047nm) crystals with 200μs pulses at 100Hz repetition rate. Using feedback from the laser output to control an acousto-optic loss modulator in the cavity, start-up spiking and Q-switched behaviour is suppressed. Preliminary results obtained on incorporation of a saturable absorbing mirror for passive modelocking are presented