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Governments and/or regulatory authorities are responsible for, among other things, the definition of regulatory controls or conditions, if any, that should be applied to radioactive sources or radiation exposure situations in order to appropriately protect the public, workers and the environment. Countries use different policy and structural approaches to fulfil this responsibility. Generally, the recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) are used as at least part of the basis for protection. Now, with the evolution of recommendations from the ICRP, a single, conceptually simple, and self-coherent approach can be used by governments and regulatory authorities to define appropriate protection under all circumstances. This report describes this process.
In recent years longitudinal data collection has improved and there is now a relatively wide body of research tracking the effect of higher tuition fees and student debt in Canada. After outlining this data landscape, the author interrogates the question of equity and access in light of what we now know. Recent discussions about access have focused on the constrained finances of national governments and the funding shortages experienced by universities. The outcome of these discussions has, more often than not, been the downloading of costs to students and their families. That shift in the financing of an education from the state to the individual begs a series of questions about equity and access. Questions such as: Is the shift to individualized financing inevitable? If not, what are the politics of this shift? What is an acceptable level of student debt? At what point does debt become a prohibitive factor for low income families? Do “innovative” policy ideas like a graduate tax or savings schemes really cushion the blow of fee hikes? Is increased financial assistance (i.e. loans) an equitable answer? To what degree do other intersecting social and economic factors affect access? How does the prospect of increased debt and fees depress the participation rate of those already lacking social and financial capital? Though it offers few definitive answers to these questions, hopefully the article will contribute to highlight some new dilemmas that are decidedly missing from the largely econometric analysis of fiscal reforms in higher education.
Although the data are primarily Canadian, the article also makes the case that many of these dilemmas are at forefront of recent developments in European higher education policy. In particular, the recent and heated debate about “top up” fees in Britain closely mirrors the ongoing national debate in Canada about equity, access and the cost of post-secondary education.
A useful proxy for the total assets accumulated in long-term savings and retirement systems is the sum of investments of pension funds and life insurance companies. This proxy covers the vast majority of occupational and personal pension arrangements for both the public and private sectors that rely on funding. In 2004, the total assets held by pension funds and life insurance companies grew by over USD 3.3 trillion or 1.5 percentage points of total GDP in OECD countries.
In this article we attempt to analyse Portuguese HEI responses to internationalisation. After reviewing briefly the recent changes in national and EU policies aiming at promotion of higher education internationalisation, we present the results of six organisational case studies, conducted with the goal of obtaining an answer to the question: how are Portuguese higher education institutions facing the internationalisation challenge?
Based on the internationalisation profiles of the six institutions selected, we identify which factors foster and which factors impede the development of international activities at the organisational level in the Portuguese higher education system. Simultaneously we analyse the rationale explaining the different patterns of international activity between and within institutions.
The aim of the study is to measure the impact of the 1992 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on arable crop yields in the European Union (EU), and more specifically to quantify the impact that the introduction of compensatory area payments had on yields. The CAP reform in May 1992 consisted largely in reducing support prices and offsetting the ensuing loss of income with direct payments based on factors of production, i.e. acreage in the case of COP (cereal, oilseed and protein) crops.
Reflecting several recent policy developments that have brought risk management to the forefront of policy discussions, this paper looks at government intervention to reduce price and yield risk from farming and how it interacts with market instruments. The starting point is to compare existing policy measures from the point of view of their impact on production and their ability to reduce risk. In the context of “decoupling”, two related questions are posed: What is the production response to each policy? What is the relative effectiveness of different policies in reducing farming risk? When dealing with the objective of farm risk reduction, both questions are inter-related because risk reduction induces production responses from risk adverse farmers.
All types of agricultural support measures are likely to have an impact on investment. This is particularly the case of the most coupled forms of support such as market price support. However, the dimension of the investment impacts may differ significantly across policy measures since they have different impacts on the farmer’s decision environment. For instance, they have different impact on effective incentive prices and different income transfer efficiency. Under these circumstances the investment effects can be very different, requiring a specific empirical analysis.
This paper empirically explores the impact of pension funds on market volatility, equity prices, government and corporate bond yields for a panel of 24 countries. The results show a positive and statistically significant relationship between market volatility and pension assets. It complements micro evidence (Dennis and Strickland, 2002) as well as macro findings (Davis, 2004). In addition, equity prices are found to be positively correlated with pension funds, a finding observable for both OECD countries and emerging market economies (EMEs) and present in both the short and long terms. Furthermore, there is evidence indicating a negative link between pension fund assets and both corporate and government bond yields. This might be due to the sizeable buying effects of pension funds, particularly when governments have the tendency to use pension funds to finance implicit pension debts when the traditional pay-as-you-go systems shift to funded systems.
This study aims to establish whether farmers respond to insurance subsidies by either augmenting yields (changing non-land inputs use) or by changing crop patterns, or both. It also aims to provide an evaluation of farmers’ relative risk aversion coefficients.