The Political Economy of Policy Vacuums: The European Commission on Demographic Change

ABSTRACT

Supranational organisations can only confront politico-economic issues that are recognised as important. Typically, issues gain recognition either when they provide an external shock to the system, shaking political actors into action, or when they are framed as important in policy networks concerned with developing the appropriate scientific approach. Ideally political and scientific actors align in creating pressures to recognise the issue as salient and to mobilise organisational responses. Issues differ in their capacity to be driven by both political and scientific pressures, creating crisis management, technocratic, and reform agenda outcomes. Here we explore a further variation, where pressures around an issue are insufficient, creating a policy vacuum. We examine one such policy vacuum in Europe: demographic change. This issue belongs to no particular Directorate-General in the European Commission, but is subject to policy frames from DG EMPL and DG ECFIN. Without sufficient political and scientific pressures, no particular policy position is occupied and advocated despite recognition of the issue’s importance. We discuss the role of policy vacuums and the need for their identification in political economy research.     

A simple model of homophily in social networks

Biases in meeting opportunities have been recently shown to play a key role for the emergence of homophily in social networks (see Currarini et al., 2009). The aim of this paper is to provide a simple microfoundation of these biases in a model where the size and type-composition of the meeting pools are shaped by agents׳ socialization decisions. In particular, agents either inbreed (direct search only to similar types) or outbreed (direct search to population at large). When outbreeding is costly, this is shown to induce stark equilibrium behavior of a threshold type: agents “inbreed” (i.e. mostly meet their own type) if, and only if, their group is above certain size. We show that this threshold equilibrium generates patterns of in-group and cross-group ties that are consistent with empirical evidence of homophily in two paradigmatic instances: high school friendships and interethnic marriages.     

利用Cisco Packet Tracer6.0模拟软件实现交换机VLAN的配置

本文简要介绍了职业院校对非计算机相关专业学生对《计算机网络及应用》实训课程的要求,以交换机VLAN的配置为例,介绍了VLAN的概念和交换机,同时阐述了操作平台Cisco Packet Tracer6.0。     

Opinion dynamics and wisdom under conformity

We study a dynamic model of opinion formation in social networks. In our model, boundedly rational agents update opinions by averaging over their neighbors’ expressed opinions, but may misrepresent their own opinion by conforming or counter-conforming with their neighbors. We show that an agent׳s social influence on the long-run group opinion is increasing in network centrality and decreasing in conformity. Concerning efficiency of information aggregation or “wisdom” of the society, it turns out that misrepresentation of opinions need not undermine wisdom, but may even enhance it. Given the network, we provide the optimal distribution of conformity levels in the society and show which agents should be more conforming in order to increase wisdom.     

Exploring the relationship between multilevel highway networks and local development patterns—a case study of Taiwan

The relationship between local development patterns and highway networks is complicated, as suggested by studies using various analytical methods. The spatial effects of each hierarchical highway network on local development patterns remains unclear. This study combines space syntax and the hierarchical linear model (HLM) within the research framework in a case study of Taiwan. The former is employed to model the topological accessibility of multilevel highway networks, and the latter is applied to handle the hierarchical relationship between multilevel highway networks and local development patterns. Results indicate a high R-squared (R² = 0.803) value, and statistically significant cross-level interactions are observed. The results show the different spatial effects of various highway networks on the scale of local development patterns, and confirm consideration of highway networks with classification in the research design. The implications of the findings may be appropriate for substantive planning and future research approaches.     

The fortunes of air transport gateways

The paper explores the idea that the fortunes of some gateway cities are changing as airlines use modern aircraft to respond to new market opportunities. It uses data on inter-city journeys between Australia and Asia to identify a hierarchy of gateway cities, and then shows how the connections between them has changed over the 2000–2013 period. Results show that secondary, and smaller, gateways in both Australia and Asia have played more important roles in passenger movements over this time. In Melbourne in particular, stronger growth in the demand for international travel in that city along with more use made of the smaller long-haul aircraft by airlines, has strengthened its role as a gateway city relative to Sydney. These results confirm that the geography of inter-continental air networks are changing which may have important implications for the air transport roles of some cities in the immediate future.     

Managing security risks for inter-organisational information systems: a multiagent collaborative model

Information sharing across organisations is critical to effectively managing the security risks of inter-organisational information systems. Nevertheless, few previous studies on information systems security have focused on inter-organisational information sharing, and none have studied the sharing of inferred beliefs versus factual observations. In this article, a multiagent collaborative model (MACM) is proposed as a practical solution to assess the risk level of each allied organisation’s information system and support proactive security treatment by sharing beliefs on event probabilities as well as factual observations. In MACM, for each allied organisation’s information system, we design four types of agents: inspection agent, analysis agent, control agent, and communication agent. By sharing soft findings (beliefs) in addition to hard findings (factual observations) among the organisations, each organisation’s analysis agent is capable of dynamically predicting its security risk level using a Bayesian network. A real-world implementation illustrates how our model can be used to manage security risks in distributed information systems and that sharing soft findings leads to lower expected loss from security risks.     

Efficiency Determinants and Capacity Issues in Angolan Insurance Companies

This paper describes a variety of approaches used to assess the efficiency of a sample of major insurance companies in Angola between 2003 and 2012. Starting out with the bootstrapping technique, several data envelopment analysis (DEA) estimates were generated, allowing the use of confidence intervals and bias correction in central estimates to test for significant differences in efficiency levels and input‐decreasing/output‐increasing potentials. Previous studies have focused on the measurement and explanation of the factors affecting the performance rather than the prediction. The use of neural networks combined with DEA results as part of an attempt to produce a model for insurance companies’ performance with effective predictive ability is investigated. The findings indicate that older insurance companies with Portuguese origin tend to be more efficient. Results also suggest that opportunities for accommodating future demand appear to be scarce.     

Job Search and the Measurement of Unemployment in South Africa

We interrogate the distinction between searching and non‐searching unemployment in South Africa using data from the first national panel survey that tracks the individual. In particular, we test whether the non‐searching unemployed display a weaker commitment to the labour market than the searching unemployed, and we investigate what counts as search activity. We find that over the panel, the search status of the unemployed does not predict their subsequent employment status, a result that is robust also for subsamples that vary by age cohort, gender and location. Moreover, social networks are the most important job‐finding strategy of the employed. These findings challenge the exclusion of the non‐searching unemployed from the measure of “genuine” work seekers.     

On the multi-dimensionality and sampling of air transport networks

Complex network theory is a framework increasingly used in the study of air transport networks, thanks to its ability to describe the structures created by networks of flights, and their influence in dynamical processes such as delay propagation. While many works consider only a fraction of the network, created by major airports or airlines, for example, it is not clear if and how such sampling process bias the observed structures and processes. In this contribution, we tackle this problem by studying how some observed topological metrics depend on the way the network is reconstructed, i.e. on the rules used to sample nodes and connections. Both structural and simple dynamical properties are considered, for eight major air networks and different source datasets. Results indicate that using a subset of airports strongly distorts our perception of the network, even when just small ones are discarded; at the same time, considering a subset of airlines yields a better and more stable representation. This allows us to provide some general guidelines on the way airports and connections should be sampled.