Mapping evidence gaps in anti-corruption: assessing the state of the operationally relevant evidence on donors' actions and approaches to reducing corruption

This paper charts the current evidence on effectiveness of different anti-corruption reforms, and identifies significant evidence gaps. Despite a substantial amount of literature on corruption, this review found very few studies focusing on anti-corruption reforms, and even fewer that credibly assess issues of effectiveness and impact. The evidence was strong for only two types of interventions: public financial management (PFM) reforms and supreme audit institutions (SAIs). For PFM, the evidence in general showed positive results, whereas the effectiveness was mixed for SAIs. No strong evidence indicates that any of the interventions pursued have been ineffective, but there is fair evidence that anti-corruption authorities, civil service reforms and the use of corruption conditionality in aid allocation decisions in general have not been effective. The paper advocates more operationally-relevant research and rigorous evaluations to build up the missing evidence base, particularly in conflict-afflicted states, in regards to the private sector, and on the interactions and interdependencies between different anti-corruption interventions.

The resting-state neurovascular coupling relationship: rapid changes in spontaneous neural activity in the somatosensory cortex are associated with haemodynamic fluctuations that resemble stimulus-evoked haemodynamics

Although promise exists for patterns of resting-state blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain connectivity to be used as biomarkers of early brain pathology, a full understanding of the nature of the relationship between neural activity and spontaneous fMRI BOLD fluctuations is required before such data can be correctly interpreted. To investigate this issue, we combined electrophysiological recordings of rapid changes in multi-laminar local field potentials from the somatosensory cortex of anaesthetized rats with concurrent two-dimensional optical imaging spectroscopy measurements of resting-state haemodynamics that underlie fluctuations in the BOLD fMRI signal. After neural ‘events’ were identified, their time points served to indicate the start of an epoch in the accompanying haemodynamic fluctuations. Multiple epochs for both neural ‘events’ and the accompanying haemodynamic fluctuations were averaged. We found that the averaged epochs of resting-state haemodynamic fluctuations taken after neural ‘events’ closely resembled the temporal profile of stimulus-evoked cortical haemodynamics. Furthermore, we were able to demonstrate that averaged epochs of resting-state haemodynamic fluctuations resembling the temporal profile of stimulus-evoked haemodynamics could also be found after peaks in neural activity filtered into specific electroencephalographic frequency bands (theta, alpha, beta, and gamma). This technique allows investigation of resting-state neurovascular coupling using methodologies that are directly comparable to that developed for investigating stimulus-evoked neurovascular responses.

State capitalism and social responsibility in China's banking industry

China’s financial system has experienced a series of major reforms in recent years. Efforts have been made towards introducing the shareholding system in state-owned commercial banks, restructuring of securities firms, re-organising equity of joint venture insurance companies, further improving the corporate governance structure, managing financial risks and ultimately establishing a system to protect investors (Xinhua, 2010). Financial product innovation, with the further opening up of financial markets and the development of the insurance and bond market, has increased liquidity as well as reduced financial risks. The U.S. subprime crisis indicated the benefit of financial innovations for the economy, but without proper control, they may lead to unexpected consequences. Kirkpatrick (2009) argues that failures and weaknesses in corporate governance arrangements and insufficient accounting standards and regulatory requirements attributed to the financial crisis. Similar to the financial crises of the last decade, the global financial crisis which sparked in 2008, surfaced a variety of significant corporate governance failures: the dysfunction of market mechanisms, the lack of transparency and accountability, misaligned compensation arrangements and the late response of government, all which encouraged management short-termism, poor risk management, as well as some fraudulent schemes. The unique characteristics of the Chinese banking system are an interesting point for studying post-crisis corporate governance reform. Considering that China modelled its governance system on the Anglo-American system, this paper examines the impact of the financial crisis on corporate governance reform in developed economies, and particularly, China’s reform of its financial sector. The paper further analyses the Chinese government’s role in bank supervision and risk management. In this regard, the paper contributes to the corporate governance literature within the Chinese context by providing insights into the contributing factors to the corporate governance failure that led to the global financial crisis. It also provides policy recommendations for China’s policy makers to seriously consider. The results suggest a need for the re-examination of corporate governance adequacy and the institutionalisation of business ethics. The paper’s next section provides a review of China’s financial system with reference to the financial crisis, followed by a critical evaluation of a capitalistic system and a review of Anglo-American and Continental European models. It then analyses the need for a new corporate governance model in China by considering the bank failures in developed economies and the potential risks and inefficiencies in a current State controlled system. The paper closes by reflecting the need for Chinese policy makers to continually develop, adapt and rewrite corporate governance practices capable of meeting the new challenge, and to pay attention to business ethics, an issue which goes beyond regulation.

Species-specific identification of Leishmania in naturally infected sand flies captured in Mato Grosso do Sul State, Brazil

An increase in cutaneous and visceral leishmaniasis cases has been reported in recent years in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, and little is known to date about their etiological agents. An investigation into natural Leishmania infection of sand flies captured in this state between December 2003 and August 2004 was carried out. Mini-exon sequences were used as targets to identify Leishmania, and an RFLP technique was employed for those identified as belonging to the Viannia subgenus. Calculation of the minimal infection rate (MR) revealed that 1.6% of sand flies captured in the forest, peridomicile and intradomicile were positive. Six species were found to be infected by Leishmania (V.) braziliensis. Interestingly, two of the six species. Lutzomyia longipalpis and Nyssomyia whitmani, were captured in anthropic environments. The findings of this study constitute a useful tool for planning control measures against this disease in the State of Mato Grosso do Sul. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Determination of cadmium and lead in cetacean Dolphinidae tissue from the coast of Bahia state in Brazil by GFAAS

In the present study, cadmium and lead in the muscle, lung, liver and kidney of dolphins (Sotalia guianensis and Stenella clymene) of the Bahia coast in the northwest of Brazil were determined by graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry. Samples were digested using a diluted oxidant mixture (HNO(3) + H(2)O(2)) with a microwave heating program performed in five steps. The optimized temperatures and chemical modifier for the pyrolysis and atomization were 700 degrees C, 1400 degrees C and Pd plus Mg for Cd, and 900 degrees C, 1800 degrees C and NH(4)H(2)PO(4) for Pb, respectively. Characteristic masses and limits of detections (n = 20, 3 sigma) for Cd and Pb were 1.6 and 9.0 pg and 0.82 ng g(-1) and 0.50 ng g(-1), respectively. Repeatability ranged from 0.87 to 8.22% for Cd and 4.31 to 8.09% for Pb. The found concentrations presented no statistical differences at the 95% confidence level when compared with the ICP OES methods. Addition and recovery tests were also performed and the results ranged between 87 and 112% for both elements. Samples of cetacean Dolphinidae (S. guianensis and S. clymene) were analyzed, and the higher concentrations ranged from 0.09 to 46.2 mu g g(-1) for Cd and 0.04 to 0.47 mu g g(-1) for Pb in liver, and from 0.133 to 277 mu g g(-1) for Cd in the kidney. (C) 2010 Elsevier By. All rights reserved.

Australia's residential building faults : a view from the state of Victoria

Presented is an examination of residential building faults in the Australian Slate of Victoria. The aim is to determine the interconnections between identified main house faults., with a view to establishing their cause· effect relationships. A total of 42753 residential houses in Victoria were examined for nine key faults fully documented in Archicentre's database. These faults are: rising damp. framing fault, illegal building, stump fault, timber rot, cracking, electrical fault, roof fault and water supply issue. Second to framing fault, roof fault was found to be closely associated with other house faults examined. Hence, this paper concludes that a properly framed and roofed house could limit most of these faults. As illegal building was observed to have only a little overall association with other house faults, this study has implications for the Australia Productivity Commission's on-going efforts to deregulate various aspects of the building and construction industry professions.

Publishing in socially oriented journals - the state of play in Asia

Purpose: This paper examines this issue by examining institutional publishing in six socially oriented marketing journals generally and then explores the performance within Asian institutions and those within Australia and New Zealand, in detail.

Design/Methodology/Approach: Authorships of Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Non-Profit and Public Sector Marketing, International Journal of Non-Profit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, and Social Marketing Quarterly, from 1999-2003 were tracked, by institution and nationality of school. Results are reported for both number of authors and percent of authorship.

Findings: There is a dominance of publishing by North American Academics within the social area. Asia academics appear to be generally under-represented, based on the region’s size, although scholars in Australia and New Zealand perform relatively better than one might anticipate.

Research Limitations/Implications: A review of socially oriented publishing performance by institutions in Asia identifies that socially oriented research appears to be a focus in Australia and New Zealand across a range of institutions, but occurs less frequently in other Asian countries.

Practical Implications: Results are useful for understanding the role of socially oriented research among scholars in Asia and the Pacific. While Australia and New Zealand have made marks in socially oriented research, it appears to be a potential “growth area” for marketing scholars in Asia and the Pacific.

Originality/Value: This is the first paper to examine the role of geography in publishing among those interested in social issues in marketing.

Vulnerability, trade, financial flows and state failure in small island developing states

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are very different to other developing countries. Relative to GDP they have the highest levels of foreign trade and aid receipts of all developing countries. Remittances from abroad are a far more important source of income for SIDS, and some depend very heavily on export revenues. The quality of governance varies tremendously among SIDS, they are over-represented among countries classified as fragile states and many are prone to state failure. These and other factors combine to make SIDS highly vulnerable to external economic shocks. Achieving development in SIDS is as a consequence an especially complex task that requires an understanding of the roles played by aid, trade, remittances and governance in these countries. This paper looks at these issues, along with providing various stylised facts about SIDS. In so doing it serves as a background and broad contextual setting for the papers that follow in this Special Issue on 'Fragility and Development in Small Island Developing States'.

Policing, rule of law, state capacity and sustainable peace in Timor-Leste

This paper sets out to demonstrate the link between development, state capacity and peace, employing Timor-Leste as the case study. It employs the association between state capacity and development to illustrate where if state capacity is lacking or functions improperly there is likely to be a low level of state legitimacy. This in turn manifests as lack of respect for or failure of rule of law, developing as generalised lawlessness and anti-state activity and eventually manifesting as intra-state or civil conflict. In particular, policing is seen as a critical component in state legitimacy, being the 'front line' of the judicial system from which legitimacy ultimately derives. This issue is particularly critical in states emerging from traditional legal and judicial structures, but which have not yet articulated into 'rational-legal' structures. Ipso facto, key state institutions, such as the judicial system and police are required to function well, while these are alone not enough to guarantee peace, they are significant contributors to and guarantors of peace.

Hierarchical hidden Markov models with general state hierarchy

The hierarchical hidden Markov model (HHMM) is an extension of the hidden Markov model to include a hierarchy of the hidden states. This form of hierarchical modeling has been found useful in applications such as handwritten character recognition, behavior recognition, video indexing, and text retrieval. Nevertheless, the state hierarchy in the original HHMM is restricted to a tree structure. This prohibits two different states from having the same child, and thus does not allow for sharing of common substructures in the model. In this paper, we present a general HHMM in which the state hierarchy can be a lattice allowing arbitrary sharing of substructures. Furthermore, we provide a method for numerical scaling to avoid underflow, an important issue in dealing with long observation sequences. We demonstrate the working of our method in a simulated environment where a hierarchical behavioral model is automatically learned and later used for recognition.

An analysis of potential barriers and enablers to regulating the television marketing of unhealthy foods to children at the state government level in Australia

Background In Australia there have been many calls for government action to halt the effects of unhealthy food marketing on children's health, yet implementation has not occurred. The attitudes of those involved in the policy-making process towards regulatory intervention governing unhealthy food marketing are not well understood. The objective of this research was to understand the perceptions of senior representatives from Australian state and territory governments, statutory authorities and non-government organisations regarding the feasibility of state-level government regulation of television marketing of unhealthy food to children in Australia.

Method Data from in-depth semi-structured interviews with senior representatives from state and territory government departments, statutory authorities and non-government organisations (n=22) were analysed to determine participants' views about regulation of television marketing of unhealthy food to children at the state government level. Data were analysed using content and thematic analyses.

Results Regulation of television marketing of unhealthy food to children was supported as a strategy for obesity prevention. Barriers to implementing regulation at the state level were: the perception that regulation of television advertising is a Commonwealth, not state/territory, responsibility; the power of the food industry and; the need for clear evidence that demonstrates the effectiveness of regulation. Evidence of community support for regulation was also cited as an important factor in determining feasibility.

Conclusions The regulation of unhealthy food marketing to children is perceived to be a feasible strategy for obesity prevention however barriers to implementation at the state level exist. Those involved in state-level policy making generally indicated a preference for Commonwealth-led regulation. This research suggests that implementation of regulation of the television marketing of unhealthy food to children should ideally occur under the direction of the Commonwealth government. However, given that regulation is technically feasible at the state level, in the absence of Commonwealth action, states/territories could act independently. The relevance of our findings is likely to extend beyond Australia as unhealthy food marketing to children is a global issue.

Characterization and prediction of issue-related risks in software projects

Identifying risks relevant to a software project and planning measures to deal with them are critical to the success of the project. Current practices in risk assessment mostly rely on high-level, generic guidance or the subjective judgements of experts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to risk assessment using historical data associated with a software project. Specifically, our approach identifies patterns of past events that caused project delays, and uses this knowledge to identify risks in the current state of the project. A set of risk factors characterizing “risky” software tasks (in the form of issues) were extracted from five open source projects: Apache, Duraspace, JBoss, Moodle, and Spring. In addition, we performed feature selection using a sparse logistic regression model to select risk factors with good discriminative power. Based on these risk factors, we built predictive models to predict if an issue will cause a project delay. Our predictive models are able to predict both the risk impact (i.e. the extend of the delay) and the likelihood of a risk occurring. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our predictive models, achieving on average 48%-81% precision, 23%-90% recall, 29%-71% F-measure, and 70%-92% Area Under the ROC Curve. Our predictive models also have low error rates: 0.39-0.75 for Macro-averaged Mean Cost-Error and 0.7-1.2 for Macro-averaged Mean Absolute Error.

The political economy of markets and development: a case study of health care consumption in the State of Kerala, India

Marketing theory has largely ignored the issue of power in influencing exchanges. Most of the studies either disregard the role of power, or resource power is the only dimension taken into account. In this study, we expand the existing understanding by centrally situating the role of socio-political power in the consumption process. We examine the health care system in the Indian state of Kerala and highlight that socio-political power is a crucial determinant of consumption levels. In the process, we argue that in a resource—constrained Third World society socio-political empowerment is critical to the development process.

Play behaviour in nonhuman animals and the animal welfare issue

The mission of defining animal welfare indicators is methodologically difficult, limited, and possibly impossible. A promising alternative, however, to evaluate suitable environmental conditions is the assessment of play behaviour. In the present review, we summarise the general aspects of play behaviour in nonhuman animals and propose its use as a potential indicator of animal welfare. Play behaviour probably occurs in most vertebrates and some invertebrates, but predominately in mammals. It is also more frequent in young males and is associated with the environmental context in which animals find themselves. Animals play if they are healthy and well-fed, but not if they are under stressful conditions or if they are in a stressful state. We can therefore use the prevalence of play behaviour as an indicator of suitable environmental conditions, considering the specificity associated with the above-mentioned modifying factors.