Institutional arrangements for public debt management

This paper analyzes institutional arrangements for public debt management by reviewing the experience of OECD countries during the late 1980s and 1990s. It discusses principal-agent issues arising from the delegation of authority from the Minister of Finance to the debt management office and describes how countries have designed governance structures and control and monitoring mechanisms to deal with these issues. The paper also discusses what lessons emerging market countries and transition countries can draw from the experience of advanced OECD countries. The OECD experience clearly indicates that-regardless of whether the debt management office is located inside or outside the Ministry of Finance-four issues are of vital importance: 1) Giving priority to strategic public policy objectives rather than tactical trading objectives. 2) Strengthening the institutional capacity to deal with financial portfolio management and with the public policy aspects of debt management. 3) Modernizing debt management. 4) Creating mechanisms to ensure successful delegation and accountability to the Ministry of Finance and Parliament.Public Sector Economics&Finance,Public&Municipal Finance,Strategic Debt Management,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Urban Economics,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Strategic Debt Management,Urban Economics,Public&Municipal Finance,Banks&Banking Reform

Ethnic Andean Concepts of Health and Illness in the Post-Colombian World and Its Relevance Today

‘MEDICINE’ is a new project funded under the EC Horizon 2020 Marie-Sklodowska Curie Actions, to determine concepts of health and healing from a culturally specific indigenous context, using a framework of interdisciplinary methods which integrates archaeological-historical, ethnographic and modern health sciences approaches. The study will generate new theoretical and methodological approaches to model how peoples survive and adapt their traditional belief systems in a context of alien cultural impacts. In the immediate wake of the conquest of Peru by invading Spanish armies and ideology, native Andeans responded by forming the Taki Onkoy millenarian movement, which rejected European philosophical and ontological teachings, claiming “you make us sick”. The study explores how people’s experience of their world and their health beliefs within it, is fundamentally shaped by their inherent beliefs about the nature of being and identity in relation to the wider cosmos. Cultural and health belief systems and related rituals or behaviors sustain a people’s sense of identity, wellbeing and integrity. In the event of dislocation and persecution these may change into devolved forms, which eventually inter-relate with ‘modern’ biomedical systems of health in as yet unidentified ways. The development of new conceptual frameworks that model this process will greatly expand our understanding of how people survive and adapt in response to cultural trauma. It will also demonstrate the continuing role, relevance and use of TM in present-day indigenous communities. Studies will first be made of relevant pre-Colombian material culture, and then of early colonial period ethnohistorical texts which document the health beliefs and ritual practices still employed by indigenous Andean societies at the advent of the 17th century Jesuit campaigns of persecution - ‘Extirpación de las Idolatrías’. Core beliefs drawn from these baseline studies will then be used to construct a questionnaire about current health beliefs and practices to be taken into the study population of indigenous Quechua peoples in the northern Andean region of Ecuador. Their current systems of knowledge and medicine have evolved within complex historical contexts of both the conquest by invading Inca armies in the late 15th century, followed a generation later by Spain, into new forms. A new model will be developed of contemporary Andean concepts of health, illness and healing demonstrating the way these have changed through time. With this, a ‘policy tool’ will be constructed as a bridhging facility into contemporary global scenarios relevant to other Indigenous, First Nations, and migrant peoples to provide a means through which their traditional health beliefs and current needs may be more appropriately understood and met. This paper presents findings from the first analytical phases of the work based upon the study of the literature and the archaeological records. The study offers a novel perspective and methods in the development policies sensitive to indigenous and minority people’s health needs

Health beliefs, healing practices and medico-ritual frameworks in the Ecuadorian Andes : the continuity of an ancient tradition

This paper introduces the European Commission-funded project ‘MEDICINE: Indigenous Concepts of Health and Healing in Andean Populations’, which takes a time-depth perspective to its subject, and uses a framework of interdisciplinary methods which integrates archaeological-historical, ethnographic and modern health sciences approaches. The long-term study objective is ultimately to offer novel perspectives and methods in the global agenda to develop policies sensitive to indigenous, refugee and migrant people’s social, economic and health needs, as well as culturally sensitive approaches to the conservation of their ‘intangible cultural heritage’. This paper focuses on the project’s first phase, the critical examination of archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence and accounts from contemporary indigenous practitioners of Andean Traditional Medicine. These sources then shape the development of health beliefs and practices models which have informed the development of questionnaires for the second ‘survey’ phase of three indigenous Andean populations in the Central Sierra region of Ecuador

Reassessing the Evidence Hierarchy in Asthma: Evaluating Comparative Effectiveness

Classical randomized controlled trials are the gold standard in medical evidence because of their high internal validity. However, their necessarily strict design can limit their external validity and the ability to extrapolate these data to real world patients. Therefore, alternatively designed studies may play a complementary role in evaluating the comparative effectiveness of therapies in nonidealized patients in more naturalistic, real world settings. Observational studies have high external validity and can evaluate real world outcomes. Their strength lies in hypothesis generation and testing and in identifying areas in which further clinical trials may be required. Pragmatic trials are designed to maximize applicability of trial results to usual care settings by relying on clinically important outcomes and enrolling a wide range of participants. A combination of these approaches is preferable and necessary

A community resource for paired genomic and metabolomic data mining

Genomics and metabolomics are widely used to explore specialized metabolite diversity. The Paired Omics Data Platform is a community initiative to systematically document links between metabolome and (meta)genome data, aiding identification of natural product biosynthetic origins and metabolite structures.Peer reviewe

A Roadmap for HEP Software and Computing R&D for the 2020s

Particle physics has an ambitious and broad experimental programme for the coming decades. This programme requires large investments in detector hardware, either to build new facilities and experiments, or to upgrade existing ones. Similarly, it requires commensurate investment in the R&D of software to acquire, manage, process, and analyse the shear amounts of data to be recorded. In planning for the HL-LHC in particular, it is critical that all of the collaborating stakeholders agree on the software goals and priorities, and that the efforts complement each other. In this spirit, this white paper describes the R&D activities required to prepare for this software upgrade.Peer reviewe

International genome-wide meta-analysis identifies new primary biliary cirrhosis risk loci and targetable pathogenic pathways.

Primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) is a classical autoimmune liver disease for which effective immunomodulatory therapy is lacking. Here we perform meta-analyses of discovery data sets from genome-wide association studies of European subjects (n=2,764 cases and 10,475 controls) followed by validation genotyping in an independent cohort (n=3,716 cases and 4,261 controls). We discover and validate six previously unknown risk loci for PBC (Pcombined<5 × 10(-8)) and used pathway analysis to identify JAK-STAT/IL12/IL27 signalling and cytokine-cytokine pathways, for which relevant therapies exist

Multidifferential study of identified charged hadron distributions in ZZ-tagged jets in proton-proton collisions at s=\sqrt{s}=13 TeV

Jet fragmentation functions are measured for the first time in proton-proton collisions for charged pions, kaons, and protons within jets recoiling against a $Z$ boson. The charged-hadron distributions are studied longitudinally and transversely to the jet direction for jets with transverse momentum 20 $< p_{\textrm{T}} < 100$ GeV and in the pseudorapidity range $2.5 < \eta < 4$. The data sample was collected with the LHCb experiment at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.64 fb$^{-1}$. Triple differential distributions as a function of the hadron longitudinal momentum fraction, hadron transverse momentum, and jet transverse momentum are also measured for the first time. This helps constrain transverse-momentum-dependent fragmentation functions. Differences in the shapes and magnitudes of the measured distributions for the different hadron species provide insights into the hadronization process for jets predominantly initiated by light quarks.Comment: All figures and tables, along with machine-readable versions and any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/LHCb-PAPER-2022-013.html (LHCb public pages