albertmartinez/OSDG huggingface dataset:
Globally, health and social inequities are growing and are created, actively maintained, and aggravated by existing policies and practices. The call for evidence-based policy making to address this injustice seems a promising strategy to facilitate a reversal of existing strategies and the design of new effective programming. Acting on evidence to address inequities requires congruence between identifying the major drivers of disparities and the study of their causes and solutions. Yet, current research on inequities tends to focus on documenting disparities among individuals or subpopulations with little focus on identifying the macro-social causes of adverse population health. Moreover, the research base falls far short of a focus on the solutions to the complex multilevel drivers of disparities. This paper focuses upon recommendations to refocus and improve the public health research evidence generated to inform and create strong evidence-based recommendations for improving population health.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg16)
Indeed, it might even give the US Congress the evidence it claims is lacking to justify American provision of budget support. Evidently, not all LDCs are currently at a level of government capacity at which certification would be assured. Hence, it would be important to combine a certification process with transitional arrangements, including support for capacity building followed by re-assessment for those countries currently below the standard necessary for certification. While from the perspective of government this may be inferior to budget support, it is evidently better than the government not receiving the aid at all.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg9)
Environmental economics is currently still far from properly evaluating the impacts on land use and ecological systems of electricity generation. The important work on the health impacts of air pollution, for instance, still needs to be replicated in the area of land use. Direct land-use regulation, most often through zoning laws at the local and regional levels, are the most common and most widely used form of land-use policy. However, market-based schemes such as mitigation banking have been used in some countries to try to ensure that there is no net loss of sensitive ecosystems like old-growth forests and wetlands.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg7)
The CAD 20 million Biofuels Opportunities for Producers Initiative, which ran from 2006 to 2008, helped farmers and rural communities hire experts to assist in developing business proposals, feasibility studies and other work necessary to create and expand agricultural producers’ biofuels production capacity. The NexGen Biofuels Fund will disburse funds up to 31 March 2017. A Strategy for Agriculture and the Rural Development Plan for period 2014-20 are being prepared by the Ministry of Agriculture.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg13)
The unequal sharing of family and household responsibilities means that when public services such as health, childcare, water and sanitation are cut back or become less affordable, it is usually women and girls who fill the ensuing gap, spending more time on unpaid care and domestic work (see Chapter 6). Finally, because women are more likely to be employed in the public sector, they are particularly affected by staff and wage cuts in this sector. In the United Kingdom, the Women's Budget Group has repeatedly denounced the regressive nature of fiscal consolidation, which is based on spending cuts rather than tax increases, and quantified the toll that budget cuts take on the most disadvantaged women and girls in the country.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg5)
The increase in low cost and abundant Internet bandwidth supported the launch of 100 Mbps fiber optic packages. Parallel to this, secondary education enrolment jumped and all high schools are equipped with Internet access through corporate social responsibility initiatives. This includes those on track to achieve SDG 9.C by 2020 (high), those that might achieve at least one or more of the indicator thresholds particularly with the right policies to induce rapid growth (medium), and those unlikely to reach the target by 2020 due to vulnerability challenges and structural barriers, or and where change is likely to be incremental (low).
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg9)
Thus funding for the “active” services of the El system was in principle, before taking subsidies from government into account, a quarter of funding for passive unemployment benefits. Table 5A. 1 (see Annex 5A) lists these programmes, together with a tentative allocation of each programme to Categories 1 to 7 of the OECD/Eurostat classification, which is a classification by “type of action” rather than by target group. The sub-sections below follow this approach, and include some comments based on Table 5A.1.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg8)
One possible weak point is that there is a ceiling only on charges for the chronically ill. Widening this ceiling to the population at large would potentially reduce the risk of low-income households (particularly large ones) from being dissuaded from accessing the health-care system. Finally, co-payments for NHI services should not be the sole focus as direct payments linked to either Shaban or commercial insurance may well also be significant for those households who spend a substantial share of their incomes on health-care services. One approach is to base eligibility on whether individuals (or households) receive the National Insurance Institute’s (Nil’s) Income Support benefit (or the Income Supplement in the case of pensioners). However, the eligibility criteria for this support are so stringent that a significant share of low-income households does not receive these benefits. Clearly access to health care would be strengthened if access to them was itself widened, as has been suggested in other OECD analysis (OECD, 2010a, 2010b and 2011b).
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg3)
Finally, access to well designed and reliable transport systems can lower congestion and reduce operating costs for firms and commuting times. Most carbon emissions in urban areas in China come from industrial use including power generation and in selected cities such emissions are high compared to cities in other countries (Sugar et al., However, the density of Chinese cities has helped limit carbon emissions from non-industrial sources, including transport. As noted in Chapter 1, as urbanisation continues density in Chinese cities has remained high by international standards.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg6)
In today’s Latin America, governments implementing public policies for development and against poverty and inequality meet with social movements that engage in practices for social change, poverty reduction, and empowering. In this context, we analyze the interplay between both processes, describing its conflicts in three specific dimensions: the material, the democratic, and the environmental. Social movements are permanently contesting and challenging public policy when they autonomously appropriate public policy resources, yet, governments respond with criminalization and cooptation strategies. In a setting where social conflict takes place in response to existing poverty and inequality levels, movements challenge development and poverty reduction projects of an ‘assistentialist’ and extractivist nature, and propose an integral understanding of development and the emergence of new relationships among individuals, society, and the environment.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg16)
At the same time, the less dispersed wages among union members indicate that such extensions may be associated with lower earnings inequality. While empirical evidence also suggests that centralised as opposed to intermediate wage bargaining might be beneficial for both employment and income equality, the level of bargaining is not under the immediate influence of policy makers. These labour market effects have implications for income inequality: the lower employment rate is likely to be associated with higher income inequality, whereas the more compressed wage distribution - to the extent that unemployment benefits are progressive or lower-income workers are more likely to receive them - has the opposite effect.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg10)
This paper starts by summarising recent challenges to neo-liberal assumptions about human motivation, rooted in economically rational individualism. This leads into the discussion of the increasing recognition of the role of emotions and alternative approaches to social policy and community development, including increasing interest in faiths and spirituality within civil society as well as amongst public policy makers. Finally, the paper focuses upon the emotional impact of neo-liberal policies upon public service professionals, their motivations and professional identities, together with the ways in which they identify and cope with the ethical dilemmas that they face, in the current policy context. This final section draws upon the findings from research carried out together with Paul Hoggett and Chris Miller, along with some more personal reflections on the possible implications for training and continuing professional development.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg16)
Of the EUR 47 million to be transferred to federal ministries, only EUR 34 million were effectively applied to the water resources management system. States and municipalities received EUR 422 million, but the application of those financial resources (representing over 85% of the total financial compensation) is not committed to the water sector. Overall, only a small part of the revenues is invested in the implementation of the WRM system, as most of the revenues are invested according to the respective governments’ general priorities. The revenue generated by the water use charges must be invested in the river basin where it was collected, according to the respective water resources plan.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg6)
Furthermore, there are additional reasons why donors may prefer not to use country systems, such as the ability to account for taxpayer funds and the need to track climate-related results (OECD, 201 la). As transaction costs reduce the total amount of climate finance devoted to climate activities, reducing them can increase the effectiveness of climate finance. The performance/existence of specific national institutions can also affect whether a country meets the safeguards introduced by selected climate funds to limit potential negative impacts (e.g. social) of climate interventions, or to ensure that specific standards (e.g. fiduciary standards) have been met. However, there are several related challenges at both the national and international level.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg13)
This chapter explores how Mexico can meet those challenges and the steps it can take to close remaining gender gaps in top public decision-making positions. Whereas women accounted for only 22.6% of members of parliament in the Camara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies) in 2005, they currently hold 42.37% of the 500 seats. In the Camara de Senadores (Senate) they occupy 33.6% of the 128 seats, compared to 17.19% in 2006. Such representation is well above the OECD average of 28.47% of seats in lower houses and unicameral legislatures.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg5)
Rather, what is needed is a set of marketing policies and institutions that connect farmers to markets by reducing their marketing costs and risks (IFPRI, 2007). Similarly, this analysis strongly confirms the importance of better market integration and investment in rural infrastructure to help reduce transport and energy costs thereby better transmitting the opportunities created by market opening to those regions. Today, food and other agricultural products are sourced globally as much as manufactured products and the expanding markets for agro-food products are opening up new opportunities for developing countries (see Box 4). Participation in regional or global agro-food value chains allows developing country producers to overcome the limits imposed by their small domestic markets. It provides them access to more vibrant markets, allowing them to upgrade their production processes and improve the quality and value-added of their products. Although the strong growth performance of recent years has been mainly attributed to Zambia’s booming mining sector (copper is the country’s single largest foreign exchange earner), agriculture is the most dynamic component of Zambia’s export economy and is the main driver of export diversification.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg1)
They score it higher than the transport infrastructure, resulting in a higher international country ranking (4.57 points on a scale between 1 and 7 points), although there remains a significant quality gap with the best OECD performers (Figure 5.4). World Bank, htto://data.worldbank.orQ/data-cataloa/world-development-indicators. Labour income play ed a key role in reducing poverty and income inequality in Brazil, helped by a steady decline in unemployment. Under Brazilian labour regulations, the minimum wage is subject to the automatic indexation rule based on past inflation and increases in overall GDP (as opposed to per capita GDP).
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg2)
The term “good governance” is unsettled in its meaning. Through the 1980s and 1990s, donor countries and institutions trended to make aid conditional upon reforms in the recipient country, which was found largely ineffective in encouraging real policy changes. More recently, donors, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United States, are increasingly insisting upon performance and good governance as a prerequisite for aid, a practice called “selectivity.” This is a means of requiring a recipient state to demonstrate the seriousness of its commitment to economic and social reforms. There are no objective standards for determining good governance: some aspects include political stability, the rule of law, control of corruption, and accountability. High levels of poverty and weak governance are linked, making selectivity difficult to implement. For reforms to succeed, domestic support, ownership, and commitment are crucial, as are the recipient's cultural context and history.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg16)
They may also renounce asking for their rights for fear of reprisals and to avoid stigma from their family and society. Heirs must register their inheritance, and all transactions involving a transfer of property rights is forbidden during three months following the death of the testator (Box. This regulation obliges all heirs to register their immovable inheritance in their name and prohibits any transactions involving a transfer of inheritance rights until three months after the death of the testator.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg5)
It also confers on Governments the primary responsibility for mapping out the roles of different actors, establishing rules of engagement and ensuring their enforcement, setting technical and safety standards, and planning for human development. Consumer protection, and protections against the abuse of market power, may also be a consideration where micro- or mini-grid owners attain effective monopoly status locally. A transition to more environmentally sustainable systems can lead to shortages of generation capacity — as has been the case even in some European countries (Deloitte, 2015). Most regional generation projects are started by electricity utilities, although there are exceptions, such as the Manantali dam completed in 1987, a joint initiative of Mali, Senegal and Mauritania to develop the agricultural and hydropower potential of the Bating River, which was initiated by their joint water organization (Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du fleuve Senegal).
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg7)
Governments introduced several measures in order to help families, for instance measures of debt relief. As a result, firms started to cut jobs or reduce wages. Moreover, they increasingly used temporary employment contracts without benefits, and more generally entailing a reduction in job security and deterioration in job quality.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg1)
By Grade 9, approximately six in ten boys and seven in ten girls report that they go to school tired, and around a third of boys and a quarter of the girls are overweight or obese (self-reported height and weight). But there are also more encouraging findings. Diets appear to have improved over time, and rates of daily smoking continue to be low for Canadian students.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg4)
There are wide disparities in quality between public and private education services in many developing countries. A recent review of 21 studies in Ghana, India, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria and Pakistan found that students in private schools tend to achieve better learning outcomes than do students in state schools. Epidemics, violence, climate change and natural disasters can quickly undermine the progress of individuals who have exiced poverty and push poor people into more extreme poverty.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg1)
The range of qualifications across public universities is quite remarkable where more established universities may have 40 to 55% of academic staff with doctorates while newer universities have less than 10% staff with doctoral degrees. Universiti Sains Malaysia reports 53.6% staff with doctoral degrees and University of Malaya 40.5% while Universiti Malaya Pahang reports 11% and the National Defence University only 0.7%. Training schemes to upgrade staff qualifications have started but will take considerable time to change the situation. However salary packages offered by universities, which operate within a civil service framework, are unable to be internationally competitive.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg4)
However, no data are published about such industrial water uses. About 450 million m3/y is directly abstracted from rivers and streams (i.e. not via reservoirs). Use of underground waters for irrigation is limited (about 3 per cent of the total). These figures are not, however, based on actual monitoring of volumes abstracted for irrigation purposes. Due to erosion and alluvium, their real water retention capacity' has been reduced to approximately 290 million m3.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg6)
In quantile regressions, we continue in the same way. We replace the scalar § in equation (3) by the parametric function %<Xj, /?) The Blinder-Oaxaca (bo) decomposition divides the wage differential between two groups into a portion that is “explained” by groups’ dissimilarities in productivity characteristics and an “unexplained” residual portion, which is typically used as a measure of discrimination (Jann, 2008).
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg5)
Although it has been demonstrated that in the long term, factors such as demographic transition and economic growth have generally had a greater impact on poverty reduction than social policy, some countries have in recent years developed broader, more comprehensive and more coordinated policies, which have been particularly successful in reducing poverty and indigence. These include innovative link-ups between programmes to create employment —public works, job creation subsidies and subsidized lines of credit— and provide training for young people and the unemployed and the conditional transfer programmes. The latter will be considered later in this chapter.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg10)
This is a consistent picture that emerges for a range of mental health indicators and a large number of countries. Yet, in the empirical analysis presented in this paper, there is no evidence that these higher expected needs are being met through higher hospital admissions or pharmaceutical consumption for mental health. This is perhaps a sign of further stress on mental health systems that are unable to respond and provide adequate treatment during times of high need. The clear lesson is that providers need additional capacity to respond to the additional mental health needs during times of economic downturns.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg3)
This is particularly true in the case of the Agency for Quality Education, which is building up an assessment and feedback mechanism on school effectiveness that should allow schools to make a more effective use of resources. It forbids private-subsidised schools to select their students on the basis of economic, social and academic criteria. This is likely to put an end to a longstanding practice which has been considered one of the reasons for the high level of socio-economic segregation in the Chilean school system.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg4)
There have been across-the-board rationalisations of expenditure in all sectors of the health system and permanent cuts to public sector workers salaries, including those of health professionals, since 2010, in efforts to reduce costs. These pressures, combined with the fact that private spending is already high (Figure 12) and unlikely to be able to stretch further, create tangible concerns over the adequacy of health system funding, especially in the longer term. In response, the sector has seen a number of evidence-based measures aimed at securing savings and enhancing efficiency (Box 4), However, despite the huge reductions, current spending on prescribed and over-the-counter medicines makes up over a quarter (26%) of all health expenditure, and is among the highest in the EU. Before the crisis, high private capacity combined with weak sickness fund bargaining power, poor payment procedures, the lack of clinical protocols/guidelines and a failure to monitor doctors’ use of diagnostic tests created an incentive structure conducive to overconsumption and waste.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg3)
This last issue is particularly important when curriculum material or education tasks have little relevance or meaning to groups within the student population, including Indigenous students (Young, 2010). Compared to other students in their own countries, all three groups of low performers undertake less homework each week, and this indicator is particularly pronounced among low performers in Australia (Figure 6.3).
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg4)
Table 3.4 presents the number of students who graduated with specialization in specific environment-related subjects from universities in Uzbekistan from 2001 to 2008. The Biological Department of the National University of Uzbekistan (NUU) teaches a course on sustainable development. In 2008, the Moscow State Academy of Fine Chemical Technology (named after M.V. Lomonosov) became a co-founder of the centre.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg6)
It provides facilities for savings and fixed deposit accounts, thus inculcating thrift. The impetus to form the Bank came from a recognition that mainstream commercial banks failed to address the specific needs of poor, self-employed women. In March 2012 the Bank had 165,175 loan accounts and more than 371,000 savings and deposit accounts, amounting to a total outstanding deposit base of some INR 1.11 billion (US$20,813,800) at the end of financial year 2011-2012. For example, it offers a unique loan product that provides up to INR 100,000 for repaying high-cost debts taken earlier from largely exploitative moneylenders.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg5)
In the last two decades, researchers have scrutinised the conditions under which aid is effective. William Easterly argued that the US$568 billion spent on aid to Africa over the last 40 years has not lifted average African incomes.23 Other recent cross-country analyses also conclude that the relationship between aid and development is weak and often ambiguous (Rajan and Subramanian 2008, Easterly et al. In a recent meta-analysis of the literature, Doucouliagos and Paldam (2011) conclude that the overall finding on ‘aid ineffectiveness’ has not been overturned, though there are some results suggesting certain components of aid may be effective.
(Sustainable Development Goal: sdg10)