Showing papers on "Government published in 2019"

The advocacy coalition framework: Innovations and clarifications

Abstract: The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is a framework of the policy process developed by Paul A. Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith to deal with "wicked" problems– those involving substantial goal conflicts, important technical disputes, and multiple actors from several levels of government. This chapter presents an abbreviated version of the 1999 edition of the ACF. It analyses key concepts and causal processes, particularly with respect to policy subsystems, the devil shift, and coalition membership. It deals with a summary of some of the limitations of the ACF and important questions for future research. The ACF assumes that policymaking in modern societies is so complex, both substantively and legally, that participants must specialize if they are to have any hope of being influential. This specialization occurs within policy subsystems composed of participants who regularly seek to influence policy within a policy subsystem, such as California water policy.

The Government of India

Abstract: The Government of India (GoI) has taken major initiatives to accelerate the development and implementation of e-Governance and to create right environments for introducing G2G, G2B, G2E and G2C services within the country. The National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance provides a set of guidelines for the uniform and reliable implementation of e-Governance solutions. It has been designed to ensure seamless interoperability of various solutions developed by multiple agencies. It also aims to improve the technology choices available and avoid vendor lock-in.

Government at a Glance

Abstract: Ideally, government activities reflect a nation’s values and aspirations. As shown in Chapter 1, federal deficits are moderately high relative to historical norms, but federal debt—the sum of all past deficits—is higher than any time except during World War II, putting the nation on a precarious course. Income and payroll taxes comprise more than 80 percent of revenue. Most spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense.Providing a safety net and investing in infrastructure, research, and human capital covers much of the rest of the budget. Compared to other advanced countries, the United States has lower taxes—especially on consumption and energy-- lower public spending on children, but higher spending on defense. It has more inequality and less economic mobility.

Understanding consumers’ behavior intentions towards dealing with the plastic waste: Perspective of a developing country

Abstract: Plastic consumption has been increasing globally, creating large amount of litter and posing threat to the environment. The recycling of the plastic waste can help in reducing it and its environmental threat. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that influence the consumer’s return/recycling intention regarding plastic waste. Moreover, recycling behavior of consumer was explored in detail. The theory of planned behavior was adapted and extended to measure the determinants of recycling behavior. Survey research design was employed whereas data includes valid 243 households, collected through survey questionnaire, by employing purposive sampling. PLS-SEM was applied on the collected data for hypotheses testing. The finding of this study indicates that subjective norms, awareness consequences and convenience are major predictors of return/recycling intention. Whereas, hypothesis for the attitude, perceived behavioral control and moral norms were rejected and they all have insignificant impact on return/recycling intention. Moreover, return intention have positive significant impact on resell, reuse, dispose and donate. Reuse was the most predicted by the return intention. This study enriches the literature of reverse logistics helping to understand the consumers’ perspective. Provides the insights that will help government and organizations to understand consumers’ return/recycling intention and formulate such strategies that will increase the involvement of consumers in recycling activities.

One Explanation Does Not Fit All: A Toolkit and Taxonomy of AI Explainability Techniques

Abstract: As artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms make further inroads into society, calls are increasing from multiple stakeholders for these algorithms to explain their outputs. At the same time, these stakeholders, whether they be affected citizens, government regulators, domain experts, or system developers, present different requirements for explanations. Toward addressing these needs, we introduce AI Explainability 360 (this http URL), an open-source software toolkit featuring eight diverse and state-of-the-art explainability methods and two evaluation metrics. Equally important, we provide a taxonomy to help entities requiring explanations to navigate the space of explanation methods, not only those in the toolkit but also in the broader literature on explainability. For data scientists and other users of the toolkit, we have implemented an extensible software architecture that organizes methods according to their place in the AI modeling pipeline. We also discuss enhancements to bring research innovations closer to consumers of explanations, ranging from simplified, more accessible versions of algorithms, to tutorials and an interactive web demo to introduce AI explainability to different audiences and application domains. Together, our toolkit and taxonomy can help identify gaps where more explainability methods are needed and provide a platform to incorporate them as they are developed.

Integrated remediation processes towards heavy metal removal/recovery from various environments - a review

Abstract: Addressing heavy metal pollution isone of the hot areas of environmental research.Despite natural existence, various anthropomorphic sources have contributed to an unusually high concentration of heavy metals in the environment.They are characterized by their long persistence in natural environment leading to serious health consequences in humans, animals, and plants even at very low concentrations (1 or 2 μg in some cases). Failure of strict regulations by government authorities is also to be blamed for heavy metal pollution. Several individual treatments, namely, physical, chemical and biological are being implied to remove heavy metals from the environment.But, they all face challenges in terms of expensiveness and in-situ treatment failure.Hence, integrated processes are gaining popularity as it is reported to achieve the goal effectively in various environmental matrices and will overcome a major drawback of large scale implementation.Integrated processes are the combination of two different methods to achieve a synergistic and an effective effort to remove heavy metals. Most of the review articles published so far mainly focus on individual methods on specific heavy metal removal, that too from a particular environmental matrix only.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review of this kind that summarizes on various integrated processes for heavy metal removal from all environmental matrices. In addition, we too have discussed on the advantages and disadvantages of each integrated process, with a special mention of the few methods that needs more research attention. To conclude, integrated processes areproved as a right remedial option which has been detaily discussed in the present review. However, more research focus on the process is needed to challenge the in-situ operative conditions. We believe, this review on integrated processes will surely evoke a research thrust that could give rise to novel remediation projects for research community in the future.

Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice

Abstract: Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using predictive policing systems to forecast criminal activity and allocate police resources. Yet in numerous jurisdictions, these systems are built on data produced during documented periods of flawed, racially biased, and sometimes unlawful practices and policies (“dirty policing”). These policing practices and policies shape the environment and the methodology by which data is created, which raises the risk of creating inaccurate, skewed, or systemically biased data (“dirty data”). If predictive policing systems are informed by such data, they cannot escape the legacies of the unlawful or biased policing practices that they are built on. Nor do current claims by predictive policing vendors provide sufficient assurances that their systems adequately mitigate or segregate this data. In our research, we analyze thirteen jurisdictions that have used or developed predictive policing tools while under government commission investigations or federal court monitored settlements, consent decrees, or memoranda of agreement stemming from corrupt, racially biased, or otherwise illegal policing practices. In particular, we examine the link between unlawful and biased police practices and the data available to train or implement these systems. We highlight three case studies: (1) Chicago, an example of where dirty data was ingested directly into the city’s predictive system; (2) New Orleans, an example where the extensive evidence of dirty policing practices and recent litigation suggests an extremely high risk that dirty data was or could be used in predictive policing; and (3) Maricopa County, where despite extensive evidence of dirty policing practices, a lack of public transparency about the details of various predictive policing systems restricts a proper assessment of the risks. The implications of these findings have widespread ramifications for predictive policing writ large. Deploying predictive policing systems in jurisdictions with extensive histories of unlawful police practices presents elevated risks that dirty data will lead to flawed or unlawful predictions, which in turn risk perpetuating additional harm via feedback loops throughout the criminal justice system. The use of predictive policing must be treated with high levels of caution and mechanisms for the public to know, assess, and reject such systems are imperative.

The role of natural products in modern drug discovery

Abstract: The global medicine market is about 1.1 trillion US dollars. About 35 percent of medicines have originated from natural products. Brazil presents the largest biodiversity in the world, with more than 50,000 species of higher plants. However, few innovative products have been developed in Brazil from active constituents derived from the Brazilian biodiversity. Scientific evidences on plants and venoms have been internationally published by Brazilian scientists over the last 4 decades; but few examples of innovative products are commercially available. Few examples include the anti-hypertensive drug captopril first identified in the venom of the Brazilian viper Bothrops jararaca by Professor Sergio Ferreira; and some phytotherapeutic agents such as Acheflan®, Syntocalmy® and Melagriao® produced by standardized plant extracts with scientific proof of safety, efficacy and quality. Still, only Acheflan® and Melagriao® are obtained from native Brazilian plants. Several issues contribute to the lack of innovative products from the Brazilian biodiversity, but in my opinion, the most challenging ones are i) the lack of specific regulations to allow researchers and companies to access biodiversity for the purposes of scientific and technological innovation; and ii) the absence of a long-term government program to support research and innovation in this field.

Institutions and Entrepreneurship Quality

Abstract: Entrepreneurship contributes importantly to the economy. However, differences in the quality and quantity of entrepreneurship vary significantly across developing and developed countries. We use a sample of 70 countries over the period of 2005–2015 to examine how formal and informal institutional dimensions (availability of debt and venture capital, regulatory business environment, entrepreneurial cognition and human capital, corruption, government size, government support) affect the quality and quantity of entrepreneurship between developed and developing countries. Our results demonstrate that institutions are important for both the quality and quantity of entrepreneurship. However, not all institutions play a similar role; rather, there is a dynamic relationship between institutions and economic development.

What motivates tax compliance

Abstract: In this paper, I review and assess what we have learned about what motivates individuals to pay – or to not pay – their legally due tax liabilities. I focus on three specific questions. First, what does theory say about what motivates tax compliance? Second, what does the evidence show? Third, how can government use these insights to improve compliance? I conclude with some suggestions – and some predictions – for future research.

Multi-level governance and power in climate change policy networks

Abstract: This article proposes an innovative theoretical framework that combines institutional and policy network approaches to study multi-level governance. The framework is used to derive a number of propositions on how cross-level power imbalances shape communication and collaboration across multiple levels of governance. The framework is then applied to examine the nature of cross-level interactions in climate change mitigation and adaptation policy processes in the land use sectors of Brazil and Indonesia. The paper identifies major barriers to cross-level communication and collaboration between national and sub-national levels. These are due to power imbalances across governance levels that reflect broader institutional differences between federal and decentralized systems of government. In addition, powerful communities operating predominantly at the national level hamper cross-level interactions. The analysis also reveals that engagement of national level actors is more extensive in the mitigation and that of local actors in the adaptation policy domain, and specialisation in one of the climate change responses at the national level hampers effective climate policy integration in the land use sector.

What can we learn from China's health system reform?

Abstract: Qingyue Meng and colleagues assess what China’s health system reform has achieved and what needs to be done over the next decade

Barriers to the Development of Smart Cities in Indian Context

Abstract: Smart city development is gaining considerable recognition in the systematic literature and international policies throughout the world. The study aims to identify the key barriers of smart cities from a review of existing literature and views of experts in this area. This work further makes an attempt on the prioritisation of barriers to recognise the most important barrier category and ranking of specific barriers within the categories to the development of smart cities in India. Through the existing literature, this work explored 31 barriers of smart cities development and divided them into six categories. This research work employed fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique to prioritise the selected barriers. Findings reveal that ‘Governance’ is documented as the most significant category of barriers for smart city development followed by ‘Economic; ‘Technology’; ‘Social’; ‘Environmental’ and ‘Legal and Ethical’. In this work, authors also performed sensitivity analysis to validate the findings of study. This research is useful to the government and policymakers for eradicating the potential interferences in smart city development initiatives in developing countries like India.

Solar Energy Development in Pakistan: Barriers and Policy Recommendations

Abstract: Energy generation is heavily dependent on fossil fuels in Pakistan. Due to the huge population and current progress in industrialization, these sources are not fulfilling the existing energy needs of the country. Meanwhile, they have adverse environmental impacts and are economically unsuitable to electrify remote areas. Consequently, there is a need to look for alternate energy sources. The aim of this paper is to find out the best renewable energy option for Pakistan. For this purpose, we have collected data for solar radiation and wind speed for a period of one year in four major cities of Pakistan. Results indicate that solar energy is the best renewable energy option for Pakistan in terms of price, life span, operation and maintenance cost. Key barriers have been identified over the whole solar energy spectrum through semi-structured interviews with industry professionals. And finally, important policy recommendations have been proposed for institutions and government to overcome these barriers and utilize maximum solar energy in the country.

The Forest Certification Handbook

Abstract: This is a practical guide to all aspects of the creation, implementation and monitoring of certification programmes for wood and timber products It includes full indexes of certified forests, certification agencies and consultancies, and provides data that businesses, government agencies, environmental groups and consumer associations will need to know in order to understand and implement certification procedures and to ensure whether specific forestry products have been properly managed

The governance of entrepreneurial ecosystems

Abstract: The “entrepreneurial ecosystem” metaphor is capturing attention in academia, industry, and government. The entrepreneurial ecosystem approach is used in corporate, national, or local contexts, and has grown in prominence given the vital need to transform economies around the creation of innovative ideas, products, services, and technologies. Entrepreneurial ecosystems involve a network, a system, of interactions of individuals and organizations, like financial intermediaries, universities and research institutions, suppliers and customers, multinational companies, or the government. The entrepreneurial ecosystem literature has thus mainly focused on identifying the relevant stakeholders like entrepreneurial firms and entrepreneurs and how they interact with other stakeholders within a more or less defined system. Despite the popularity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem approach, the literature has almost overlooked and largely ignored the governance of entrepreneurial ecosystems. This special Issue of Small Business Economics critically examines issues concerning the governance of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Algorithmic Government: Automating Public Services and Supporting Civil Servants in using Data Science Technologies

Abstract: The data science technologies of artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), big data and behavioral/predictive analytics, and blockchain are poised to revolutionize government and create a new generation of GovTech start-ups. The impact from the ‘smartification’ of public services and the national infrastructure will be much more significant in comparison to any other sector given government's function and importance to every institution and individual. Potential GovTech systems include Chatbots and intelligent assistants for public engagement, Robo-advisors to support civil servants, real-time management of the national infrastructure using IoT and blockchain, automated compliance/regulation, public records securely stored in blockchain distributed ledgers, online judicial and dispute resolution systems, and laws/statutes encoded as blockchain smart contracts. Government is potentially the major ‘client’ and also ‘public champion’ for these new data technologies. This review paper uses our simple taxonomy of government services to provide an overview of data science automation being deployed by governments world-wide. The goal of this review paper is to encourage the Computer Science community to engage with government to develop these new systems to transform public services and support the work of civil servants.

Toward Algorithmic Accountability in Public Services: A Qualitative Study of Affected Community Perspectives on Algorithmic Decision-making in Child Welfare Services

Abstract: Algorithmic decision-making systems are increasingly being adopted by government public service agencies. Researchers, policy experts, and civil rights groups have all voiced concerns that such systems are being deployed without adequate consideration of potential harms, disparate impacts, and public accountability practices. Yet little is known about the concerns of those most likely to be affected by these systems. We report on workshops conducted to learn about the concerns of affected communities in the context of child welfare services. The workshops involved 83 study participants including families involved in the child welfare system, employees of child welfare agencies, and service providers. Our findings indicate that general distrust in the existing system contributes significantly to low comfort in algorithmic decision-making. We identify strategies for improving comfort through greater transparency and improved communication strategies. We discuss the implications of our study for accountable algorithm design for child welfare applications.

The phenomena of overtourism: a review

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the emergence of overtourism, outline the issues and contributing factors, as it relates to cities, and to suggest possible mitigation measures that might be taken by policy makers.,This paper draws from a review of literature looking at longitudinal issues of tourism development overtime and what has contributed to the phenomena of overtourism. A discussion of implications is provided from this review.,As tourism is an industry which has historically been poorly managed, greater political will and actual acknowledgement of the problem, as well as action by all levels of government are the necessary first steps to address overtourism.,This paper outlines key elements that contribute to overtourism and provides global examples which may help practitioners identify key critical issues in their own destinations and identify appropriate actions.,This paper identifies issues raised by local resident populations and possible responses.,This paper provides a critical overview of overtourism issues, as it relates to cities and discusses potential mitigation and reduction efforts, thereby providing an explanation of why overtourism has become so prevalent.