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The marginalization of the Ottoman Empire’s state formation legacy in the Middle East: a case of Eurocentrism?
No full textDominant academic conceptualizations of state formation in the Middle East are often exclusively associated with Western colonialism and the post-World War One settlement. Drawing on the ‘Global International Relations’ framework, this paper critiques this Eurocentric framing, which marginalizes state-building processes predating the French and British mandates. It argues that the Ottoman Empire's long rule —particularly during the Tanzimat period— left an enduring legacy of statecraft essential to understanding the region's foundations. By examining nineteenth-century reforms in Iraq and Syria, this paper seeks to rectify the Eurocentric spatio-temporal ordering of events and unveil the centrality of the West in historical narratives of the region
The political economy of venture capital: winners-take-all and founder control
No full textIn many US Tech corporations such as Meta, Alphabet, and SpaceX, founders still hold shareholder voting control. How can we better understand the concentration of insider control in Tech? Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data to examine the rise of US start-up investments post-dotcom, this article demonstrates that a small group of new venture capital (VC) entrants played a key role in advancing founder control in Tech to win deals against established VC firms and make outsized capital gains. I argue that the VC market follows a winners-take-all logic, which facilitated the uptake of founder control in Tech via dual-class shares because of the success of new VC entrants and early founder-controlled tech firms exiting between 2010 and 2014, and the growing investments by nontraditional, “passive” investors post-2010. This matters because the winners-take-all logic reinforces capital concentration among leading VCs while many Tech monopolies are now controlled by a small tech elite fraction
Maternal influenza-like illness and neonatal health during the 1918 influenza pandemic in a Swiss city
No full textExposure to the 1918 influenza pandemic may have been associated with preterm birth (<37 weeks). Other outcomes, such as infant size or weight, have rarely been explored. Using 2177 historical birth records from University Maternity Hospital of Lausanne, it was estimated whether in utero exposure to maternal influenza-like illness (ILI) during the 1918 pandemic was associated with pregnancy outcomes and whether associations varied depending on the trimester of ILI during pregnancy or on fetal sex. Generalized linear models and robust linear models were used to analyze the association between ILI and gestational age, stillbirth, and anthropometric measurements, adjusting on covariates. Analyses were stratified by fetal sex. A total of 282 (13%) women developed ILI during pregnancy. Exposure to ILI was associated with lower anthropometric measurements: low birthweight (LBW; <2500 g) (marginally adjusted percentage was 13.3% compared with 6.9% in the unexposed group; difference, 6.4 percentage points [95% CI, 5.5 to 7.2 percentage points]). There was strong evidence that third trimester exposure was associated with worse adverse pregnancy outcomes, including with LBW (difference, 12.8 percentage points [CI, 11.8 to 13.7 percentage points]) and preterm birth rates (difference, 9.4 percentage points [CI, 8.2 to 10.6 percentage points]). Maternal ILI may have triggered premature birth. The magnitude of the declines in anthropometric parameters was higher among male fetuses, and they had a higher stillbirth rate. For instance, males exposed during the third trimester had their birthweight lowered by 228.4 g (CI, -391.0 to -65.8 g) compared with 126.3 g among females [CI, -256.6 to 4.0 g]. Only 41% of infants exposed to first-trimester ILI were males, suggesting a selection against male fetuses through miscarriage. Our findings may not generalize to the entire population of Lausanne, as 34% of births were home births at the time
DIALOGUE: digital care technologies for social connection, care and support of older adults. Final project report
No full textIntroduction Despite significant social and financial investment, evidence suggests that technology-enabled care services (TECS) for older adults with assisted living needs fail to meet their potential. Simultaneously, an increasingly diverse range of care and consumer technologies are entering the market with the potential to deliver innovative, effective, cost-effective, and scalable social care services. However, there is limited evidence illustrating how novel digital technologies are currently being deployed across social care. Before high-quality evidence can be generated, we need a clearer sense of delivery, what outcomes are being achieved, and the factors influencing their implementation and adoption at scale. Methods DIALOGUE identifies the novel digital care technologies being implemented for social care services for community-dwelling older adults with assisted living needs that have the greatest potential for future social care research. Working with two local authorities and an Integrated Care Board, DIALOGUE adopted a mixed methods approach, including a rapid review of academic and professional literature regarding technology implementation in social care, three co-production partnerships with older people with assisted living needs using digital technologies in social care services, a process evaluation of social care TEC delivery, and an e-Delphi survey of TECS staff. Results Older adults using social care services identified priorities in relation to signposting and information seeking, safety, security and trust, and costs and financing technologies as key priorities. Local authorities highlighted building awareness and training in person-centred approaches to TECS, building the evidence base for TECS, and ensuring that commissioning and implementation of TECS is aligned with service user priorities. Conclusion Project findings are being used to build a programme for future research regarding effective person-centred implementation of Social Care TECS. Initial work in building this agenda includes applications for NIHR research Health Technology Assessment and Research Programme for Social Care funding during 2024–2025
Pricing instruments in environmental and climate policy when polluters are boundedly rational
No full textThe use of pricing instruments in environmental policy has been argued to have certain advantages, notably related to static and dynamic efficiency as well as effectiveness due to economy-wide scope. This paper adopts a broad perspective to provide a complete set of arguments in favour of price-based instruments in environmental policy, illustrated for climate policy. Pricing instruments are still not used to their full potential. The reason is that there is still considerable unfounded scepticism, including by researchers in the social environmental sciences, about their functioning and performance. Different disciplines express distinct and partly inconsistent ideas on the desirability of pricing instruments. An important recent criticism is that traditional economic arguments for pricing instruments are based on rational agents and are inconsistent with findings of behavioural economics. We examine this argument by assessing how instruments behave under various realistic behavioural assumptions in line with bounded rationality and other-regarding behaviour. We find that the case is strengthened for cap-and-trade versus environmental taxation. We also discuss additional instruments to effectively counter environmental and climate challenges under bounded rationality and social interactions
Is there a ‘new consensus’ on inequality?
No full textThirty years after the Washington Consensus, is there a new policy consensus that addresses the problem of inequality? There is widespread acceptance that multiple, interrelated, and mutually reinforcing inequalities exist – in income, wealth, education, health, power, and recognition – and that these inequalities are generally ‘too high’. There has also been a significant shift towards a shared view that these inequalities matter, both intrinsically and because of their detrimental effects on economic efficiency and political institutions. There is much less consensus, perhaps surprisingly, on what the actual levels of income inequality are, and there are common misperceptions about their trends. In policy terms, there is something approaching a consensus regarding the desirability of various ‘pre-distribution’ policies, ranging from early childhood development to investment in better teaching. In certain quarters, there is also agreement that sharper antitrust regulation, freer labour unions, and more progressive taxation is needed in most countries. But much less is known about how to provide the poor with genuine opportunities to break the cycle of intergenerational transmission of disadvantage in a durable way
Towards resilient and sustainable universal healthcare coverage
No full textOver the past three decades, health systems have made significant strides towards achieving universal health coverage. However, household out-of-pocket payments for medical care still remain high, and disparities in financial risk protection and healthcare quality continue to give rise to pervasive health inequalities, and some Western countries exhibit a slowdown in life expectancy. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that global health systems need to be both (i) resilient to shocks and (ii) sustainable in their ability to provide for basic healthcare needs. However, the challenge that health systems in ageing societies face today include how to overcome staffing shortages, waste of resources, and poor regulation, as well as the incomplete integration of long-term care programmes into the main insurance package. Interventions include the expansion of the fiscal space, more efficient allocation of public funding, designing policies to provide high-quality care, and institutions to regulate the diffusion of new, generally costly, healthcare technologies and drugs, and limiting expenditures on waste and corruption
Overeducated yet underskilled: graduate labour market mismatch in Morocco and Serbia
No full textAbstract This paper analyses the phenomenon of qualification and skill mismatch among university graduates in two countries in Morocco and Serbia. These countries are located within the super-periphery of the EU and face similar challenges in fostering competitive economies capable of trading with and receiving investment from their northern neighbours. Effective skill development and successful labour market matching of university graduates are crucial instruments to meet these challenges. We explore the different dimensions of this requirement based on an analysis of qualification and skill mismatch on the graduate labour market. Our survey reveals simultaneous overqualification and underskilling of university graduates, a high incidence of graduate mismatch combined with low-wage penalties in the public sector, high levels of mismatch and associated relatively high-wage penalties among women graduates, and an amelioration of skill mismatch over time due to on-the-job learning and job switching
Where next with pension policy change in Latin America? Comparative insights from Chile and Uruguay
No full textSince the mid-2000s, Latin American countries have been re-reforming their pension systems to address the issue of low coverage and low future pensions. Chile and Uruguay, pioneers of social protection in the region, show diverging policy change outcomes. While Uruguay has implemented a series of reforms aiming at strengthening the private and the public pillars, Chile, notwithstanding a significant reform in 2008, has been debating significant change entailing possible more involvement of the state in pension provision and has recently adopted a reform that will challenge the dominance of the private pillar. We argue that the political institutional setting and the legacy of the pension system (both in terms of its design and performance) are key to understanding this diverging path. We contend that our analysis provides a useful framework to understand pension policy (re-)reforms in other countries in the region and thus contributes to the pension and policy continuity and change literature
Immigrants' attitudes towards immigration: convergence towards majority views or ethnoracial polarization?
No full textAfter decades of research on attitudes towards immigration among the ethnic majority, scholarly interest has recently shifted to investigate these attitudes among immigrants themselves. Drawing on survey data from France, this article investigates the role of migration-related as well as ethnoracial variables in shaping attitudes towards immigration. Our findings suggest that ethnoracial factors trump migration status and other individual-level factors in shaping support for immigration. Migrants and their descendants of African and other non-European origin are more supportive of immigration compared to the French majority and those of European origins net of other factors. Relatedly, among immigrant-origin groups, perceived ethnoracial discrimination is associated with greater support for immigration. In contrast, among the French majority, ethnoracial identity and perceived discrimination are related to lower support for immigration. The findings suggest the solidification of an emerging cleavage based on race/ethnicity that is unlikely to be resolved by immigrant integration over time