Digital Commons Network^™

Rural Women's Role In The Socio-Economic Growth And Well-Being Of Ghana: A Case Study Of Women Operating Within The Informal Sector, Raphael Avornyo

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

This paper examines women’s contributions to Ghana’s economic growth and well-being. Data for the study were collected using interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs) with women operating in the informal sector of the Twifo-Hemang-Lower Denkyira District. The main findings of the study showed that even though women con-tribute to socio-economic growth and well-being, most of them do not have adequate ac-cess to the resources needed to expand their impact. The paper recommends policies aimed at addressing women’s issues regarding the socio-economic system, so that they can create wealth and improve well-being for themselves, their children, and society at large.

Modeling Incentives To Disclose : Smart Disclosure Policy, Private Sector Transparency And Demanded Disclosure, Djoko Sigit Sayogo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Increasing information asymmetry in the markets has spawned public policy problems that require smart disclosure policy approaches involving collaboration between governments, private entities and the general public. Such novel disclosure policies have the potential to induce more perfect information in markets by changing the decision processes by which organizations disclose information.

The Family And Its Effects On Intergenerational Educational Attainment In The Bahamas, Marcellus C. Taylor

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This exploratory study examines the individual and family effects on intergenerational educational attainment mobility giving focus to the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, a small, newly-independent nation in the Caribbean region.

Demographic Analysis Of Recovery Act Supported Jobs In Massachusetts, Quarters 1 And 2, 2011: Final Report, Carol Hardy-Fanta, Monica Lamboy, David Merwin, Paige Ransford, Meryl Thomson, Christian Weller

Publications from the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy

Since 2009, researchers have analyzed the economic and employment impact of ARRA spending and tax policies. The current report is possible due to the efforts of Massachusetts policymakers who went beyond federal reporting requirements to require additional reporting on the number of workers who received ARRA-funded pay. ARRA workers’ demographic characteristics were also collected as part of the Massachusetts’ ARRA reporting requirements to allow for transparency and determine the fiscal policy’s impact on the state and local economy. The Massachusetts Recovery and Reinvestment Office (MassRRO) makes available much of these data on their website (www.mass. gov/recovery), including highlights for each …

2013 Children’S Legislative Briefing Book, Nevada Institute For Children’S Research And Policy, Children’S Advocacy Alliance, Denise Tanata Ashby, Tara Phebus

Nevada Institute for Children's Research and Policy Reports

The purpose of this Legislative Briefing Book is to provide a quick snapshot of some of the most pressing issues facing Nevada’s children in order to provide advocates and policymakers with a stepping stone in creating positive changes to improve the lives of Nevada’s children. While this book will not cover every issue facing our children, it is intended to highlight some of those where state policy may have an impact, covering issues in education, health, safety and security, and the juvenile justice system. Diligent efforts need to be made during the 2013 Legislative Session to improve policies, procedures and …

India: Subsidy State Or Developmental State?, Annie Jalota

CMC Senior Theses

India does not fit easily into existing models of thought on the nature of a state and defies ease of understanding. Though India is most often considered to be a subsidy state, I show in this thesis the notion of the subsidy state does not capture the true nature of the Indian state. Chapter two of the paper looks at various models of understanding the nature of the Indian state and draw out three essential features: competing interest groups, how economic liberalization facilitates corruption and works against India’s aim of equalizing the capabilities and freedoms of all its citizens, and …

Una Propuesta De Planificación Para Afrontar Los Efectos Del Cambio Climático En El Sector Agrícola De Jalisco, México, Isabelle A. Heilman

CMC Senior Theses

Jalisco es un estado altamente vulnerable a los efectos del cambio climático. El estado es vulnerable a sequías en el norte e inundaciones en las costas. Jalisco también es un estado con un sector agrícola de alta producción. Los efectos del cambio climático ponen en riesgo esta producción agrícola, que en turno tendría efectos negativos en las familias agrícolas y la economía del estado. A través de varias estrategias de adaptación al nivel del agricultor y del gobierno, se puede crear un sector agrícola con posibilidades para afrontar los efectos del cambio climático con éxito. Para crear estas estrategias de …

The Declining Natural Fish Stock: A Proposed Solution To Public Fear And Perceptions Of Genetically Modified Fish, Morgan Beltz

CMC Senior Theses

The global fish population is declining. Aquaculture production is saturated and the global fish stock is operating at an unsustainable level. Genetically modified (GM) fish is a potential solution to relieve the natural fish stock, if the FDA grants the approval. The global fish population is harmed by environmental conditions and the inability for fish to adapt to changing conditions and human interactions. Genetic modification is a growing technology that has the ability to alleviate the fishing industry by modifying fish to grow faster, be disease tolerant, eat plant-based food, and be more nutritious. However, the approval process has been …

National Security Pedagogy: The Role Of Simulations, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article challenges the dominant pedagogical assumptions in the legal academy. It begins by briefly considering the state of the field of national security, noting the rapid expansion in employment and the breadth of related positions that have been created post-9/11. It considers, in the process, how the legal academy has, as an institutional matter, responded to the demand.

Part III examines traditional legal pedagogy, grounding the discussion in studies initiated by the American Bar Association, the Carnegie Foundation, and others. It suggests that using the law-writ-large as a starting point for those interested in national security law is a …

Scaling Up Advocacy For Gender-Based Violence And Child Sexual Abuse In The East, Central And Southern Africa Region: Technical Exchange And Meeting, East Central And Southern African Health Community

Reproductive Health

The East, Central and Southern Africa (ECSA) Health Community, which prioritizes gender-based violence and child sexual abuse as regional health concerns, partnered with the Population Council to convene a pre-conference Expert Committee meeting of the Research, Information and Advocacy Programme. The conference marked a major milestone in the ECSA Health Community’s commitment to promote and support region-wide sharing and utilization of health research and policy information among its member states. This report summarizes the deliberations of the two-day workshop and the recommendations for implementing an advocacy plan to address this important facet of the region’s development agenda.

Better Health, But Less Justice: Widening Health Disparities After National Federation Of Independent Business V. Sebelius, Emily W. Parento, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

At the time it was enacted in 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was widely applauded by health activists, as it meant that the United States would at last join the overwhelming majority of industrialized countries in providing its population with guaranteed access to affordable health care. Roughly half of the increase in access to health insurance was to come from the expansion of Medicaid eligibility to all U.S. citizens and legal residents with income below 138% of the Federal Poverty Level. However, the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius ( …

Towards A Framework Convention On Global Health: A Transformative Agenda For Global Health Justice, Lawrence O. Gostin, Eric A. Friedman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

International law has responded weakly to the inequities in health care, public health, and the broader determinates of health that collectively cause the greatest loss of lives and human potential every year. Approximately one-third of global deaths can be attributed to enduring and unconscionable inequities. Despite significant progress in improving global health over the past several decades, these inequities persist. Current global governance for health is inadequate to the task of resolving these inequities, from lack of accountability and enforcement to inadequate funding and the absence of leadership required to respond to the threats to health that arise from other …

Scaling Food Security: A Political Ecology Of Agricultural Policies And Practices In Bukidnon, Philippines, Ryan Ehrhart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Debates over food security strategies in the Philippines have pitted the neoliberal paradigm of trade liberalization, export cropping, and chemical and biotech agricultural methods against the food sovereignty paradigm of protectionism, staple cropping, and sustainable agriculture methods.

The Philippine government has long pushed for yield increases of staples. However, there has been dissonance between governmental desires for rice self-sufficiency and pursuit of a more export-oriented agricultural economy. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Trade Organization have pressured the government of the Philippines to adopt various tenets of neoliberalism (trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, …

Unrelated Business Income's Impact On Direct Public Support In The Nonprofit Sector, Kelsey Lewis

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

Nonprofits today are losing their traditional funding sources for a variety of reasons and are turning to nontraditional ways of finding resources to make sure their organization is able to sustain itself while still meeting its mission. One common non-traditional approach is engaging in unrelated business income activities. Since these activities are not related to a nonprofit’s mission they are subject to taxation. Some question whether these activities help a nonprofit organization meet its mission.

A nonprofit seen not fulfilling its mission can be detrimental to that organization especially where its donors are concerned. If a donor does not support …

Could The Money Saved Through Uncompensated Hospital Care Be Enough To Justify Medicaid Expansion In The State Of Kentucky?, Matthew Rudacille

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

This paper examines the proposed Medicaid Expansion detailed under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and whether it would be fiscally responsible for the state of Kentucky to move forward with the expansion. While the federal government plans on covering a majority of the expense for the expansion, each state will be responsible for a portion of the costs incrementally increasing from 5% in 2017 to 10% in 2020 and beyond. Analysts and think tanks have examined the healthcare act’s expansion and determined the individual states have a lot to gain financially for accepting the federal government’s proposition. …

Policies To Eliminate Racial Disparities In Education: A Literature Review, Ann Curry-Stevens, Analucia Lopezrevoredo, Dana Peters

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

In response to an increasing need to understand the reach of the literature and the research undertaken on initiatives to eliminate racial disparities, a literature review was initiated in 2012 for the Eliminating Racial Disparities Collaborative within the All Hands Raised initiative to improve academic outcomes for students in Multnomah County. This was an expansive undertaking – and at the end, we have drawn upon about 160 different articles, some of which were meta-analyses of an array of publications in a particular field.

The first section in this report is a summary document that details each policy-based recommendation in this …

Institutional Lending Models, Mission Drift, And Microfinance Institutions, Bethany L. Paris

Theses and Dissertations--Public Policy and Administration

Microfinance is a development tool used to reduce poverty among extremely poor households. Impoverished households can access lines of credit through microfinance institutions (MFIs), in order to create a new business, smooth household consumption, fund medical emergencies, etc. Many authors postulate that MFIs are drifting from a welfarist to an institutionalist approach to lending.

Using MIXMarket data on specific MFIs in 118 countries between 1995 and 2011, the average loan balance of these organizations will be regressed against measure of outreach and sustainability of these institutions by charter type through a series of four, fixed effects models. The main research …

The Case To Accredit Homeland Security Programs: Why Outcomes-Based Accreditation Makes Sense, James D. Ramsay

Security Studies & International Affairs - Daytona Beach

The following essay lays out an argument for program level accreditation in academic homeland security (HS) programs. Admittedly, neither the practice nor the educational components of the HS discipline are standardized. Indeed, a recent analysis by the Congressional Research Service indicates that there remain several operational definitions of HS in practice. Regardless, this paper provides rationale which argues that after roughly eight years, academic HS has developed enough to be able to identify and support a distinct set of student learning outcomes— knowledge, skills and attitudes—that can both characterize and define the discipline.

Generally, program level academic accreditation requires a …

Nevada Children’S Policy Update Bill And Bill Draft Requests - 2013 Nv Legislative Session, The Nevada Institute For Children’S Research And Policy, Children’S Advocacy Alliance

Nevada Institute for Children's Research and Policy Reports

Bill and Bill Draft Requests for 2013 NV Legislative Session for Nevada Children’s Policy Update.

Bloomberg’S Health Legacy: Urban Innovator Or Meddling Nanny?, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Michael Bloomberg leaves the mayoralty of New York City, with his health legacy is bitterly contested. The public health community views him as an urban innovator—a rare political and business leader willing to fight for a built environment conducive to healthier, safer lifestyles. To his distractors, however, Bloomberg epitomizes a meddling nanny—an elitist dictating to largely poor and working class people about how they ought to lead their lives. His policies have sparked intense public, corporate, and political ire—critical of sweeping mayoral power to socially engineer the city and its inhabitants.

Here, I seek to show how Bloomberg has fundamentally …

Getting To Collective Impact: How Funders Can Contribute Over The Life Course Of The Work, Douglas Easterling

The Foundation Review

· Foundations have a long tradition of convening and funding collaborative groups with the hope that this will lead to large-scale impact.

· Although funder-driven collaboration sometimes leads to breakthrough solutions, foundations have also pushed the participating organizations into artificial, awkward, and unsustainable efforts.

· This article argues that funders should support naturally emerging networks and should tailor their support to match the network’s stage of development.

· A five-stage developmental model is introduced and illustrated through a case study of the Central Appalachian Network (CAN).

· Over CAN’s 20-year history, a succession of regional and national foundations have played …

Lessons From Patchwork Nation: A New Framework For Building Community Indicators, Stephen Borders, James Edwards, Ashley Miller

The Foundation Review

· As interest in outcomes continues to rise, community indicators have become a widely used tool to measure progress. While indicators provide a vehicle for understanding and addressing community issues from a holistic perspective, current efforts seem to suffer from both a notable absence of local-level data and end-user information overload, whereby the presentation of numerous and often disconnected indicators makes it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from the analysis.

· We highlight the results and our experiences with a community health needs assessment conducted through an indicator project in Michigan’s Kent County. The analysis and visualization of the indicator …

Standing With Our Sisters: The Life And Work Of Rehana Hashmi Of Pakistan, Sue Diaz

Kroc IPJ Research and Resources

In the following pages, you will find narrative stories about a Woman PeaceMaker, along with additional information to provide a deep understanding of a contemporary conflict and one person’s journey within it. These complementary components include a brief biography of the peacemaker, a historical summary of the conflict, a timeline integrating political developments in the country with personal history of the peacemaker, and a question-and-answer transcript of select interviews during her time at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.

Rehana Hashmi, a development professional and human rights defender, knows well the stark differences between the remote expanses …

Armed Seafarers On Board Ships : An Analysis From An International Perspective, Itrisha Nunes

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Lessons Learned: Can A Principled Mechanism For Improving Health Equity Be Integrated Into A Budgetary Process?, Maria X. Martinez Ms., Maria X. Martinez Ms.

Master's Projects and Capstones

Health equity is the social justice lens that public health institutions across the United States have increasingly embraced as a mandate, however there are few jurisdictions addressing how to prioritize funding toward that end. The practical translation of a social justice concept necessitates the creation of a budgetary tool and an implementation process that identifies those with the highest levels of health disparity and social disadvantage.

Using the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) as its central case, this paper argues that for health delivery systems to be socially just and to achieve health equity, these systems must not …

The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna: A Public Policy Approach To Saving An Iconic Species, Timothy Patrick O'Brien

Theses and Dissertations

The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus thynnus) is perhaps the most magnificent and most marvelous nomadic wild animal living in the world. It lives in the deep blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean and is one of the largest of the world’s fin fish and the largest of the 48 other species of tuna (Kuhn, 1996). It is a species that seems to have been designed and sculpted by an artist—sleek, smooth, and beautiful—instead of having been a product of an evolutionary process. Today, the existence and future of the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna is in question because of the constant overexploitation …

The National Elder Economic Security Standard Index, Gerontology Institute, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Gerontology Institute Publications

The Elder Economic Security Standard Index (Elder Index) is a new tool for use by policy makers, older adults, family caregivers, service providers, aging advocates, and the public at large. Developed by the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), the Elder Index is a measure of income that older adults require to maintain their independence in the community and meet their daily costs of living, including affordable and appropriate housing and health care. The development and use of the Elder Index promotes a measure of income that respects the autonomy goals of …

School Reform: Where Does Policy Come From? Where Should It Go?, Kim Karman Friel

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Policy analysis helps to develop a greater understanding of societal problems and provide possible solutions for elected and non-elected government decision makers. Ultimately, the product of analysis is advice relating to public decisions and informed by social values. In light of the pressures placed on education by policy-makers concerning implementation of educational reform there are surprisingly few studies concerning the changing role of the federal government from a historical perspective. Looking at the past, with the present in mind, reminds us that the current shape of education was not inevitable.

This qualitative dissertation study analyzes the evolution of the intentions …

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program For Women, Infants, And Children (Wic) And The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap): Comparing Policies And Suggesting Changes, Regina T. Cucurullo

Journal of Food Law & Policy

National concerns, such as obesity, should be addressed through national efforts. Considering the national reach of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and their ability to influence the diets of a significant amount of the nation's population, changes to these programs should be made to encourage healthy nutrition.

Policy Evaluation Using Cost-Benefit Analysis: Empirical Ramifications For Two Policy Issues, Elizabeth Crouch

All Dissertations

Using two distinct health policy issues my research examines the relevance and ramifications of using cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to demonstrate real-world impacts of the policies. My dissertation discusses how these two situations represent particular challenges to cost-benefit analysis. The challenges have specific implications for how scholars, agencies, and government entities should use CBA to evaluate policies. Specifically, my research finds that by separating CBA into four different approaches, a much more complete, and less assumption-laden, CBA can be accomplished.