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Declining birth rates, increasing longevity and urbanization have created a new challenge for cities: how to respond to an ageing population. Although population ageing and urbanization are not new concerns for national governments around the world, the consequences of these trends for quality of life in cities has only recently started to receive attention from policy makers and researchers. Few comparative studies of world cities examine their health or long-term care systems; nor have comparisons of national systems for the provision of long-term care focused on cities, let alone world cities.

By extending the work of the CADENZA and World Cities Projects , this report investigates how three world cities -- Hong Kong, New York and London -- are coping with this challenge. These world cities are centers of finance, information, media, arts, education, specialized legal services and advanced business services, and contribute disproportionate shares of GDP to their national economies. But are these influential centers prepared to meet the challenge posed by the “revolution of longevity?” How will these world cities accommodate this revolutionary demographic change? Are they prepared to implement the health and social policy innovations that may be required to serve their residents, both old and young? Will they be able to identify the new opportunities that increased longevity may offer? Can they learn from one another as they seek to develop creative solutions to the myriad issues that arise? Finally, can other cities learn from the experience of these three cities as they confront this challenge?

To address these questions, we examine comparable data on the economic and health status of older persons, as well as the availability and use of health, social and long-term care across and within these cities. In the report “How Well Are Seniors in Hong Kong Doing? An International Comparison”, a first attempt was made to compare the situation in Hong Kong with five economically developed countries. This report extends this study by comparing the situation in Hong Kong with two other world cities—New York City and London, which are more comparable in terms of population size and economic characteristics.

Over the last decade, Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have become one of the most widely adopted anti-poverty initiatives in the developing world. Inspired particularly by Mexico's successful program, CCTs are viewed as an effective way to provide basic income support while building children's human capital. These programs have had a remarkable global expansion, from a handful programs in the late 1990s to programs in close to 30 countries today, including a demonstration program in the United States. In contrast to many other safety net programs in developing countries, CCTs have been closely studied and well evaluated, creating both a strong evidence base from which to inform policy decisions and an active global community of practice. This paper first reviews the emergence of CCTs in the context of a key theme in welfare reform, notably using incentives to promote human capital development, going beyond the traditional focus on income support. The paper then examines what has been learned to date from the experience with CCTs in the South and raises a series of questions concerning the relevance and replicability of these lessons in other contexts. The paper concludes with a call for further knowledge sharing in two areas: between the North and South as the experience with welfare reform and CCTs in particular expands, and between behavioral science and welfare policy.

This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, the authors argue for a revised perspective on “neighborhood effects” that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the next generation. To analyze multigenerational effects, the authors use newly developed methods designed to estimate unbiased treatment effects when treatments and confounders vary over time. The results confirm a powerful link between neighborhoods and cognitive ability that extends across generations. A family's exposure to neighborhood poverty across two consecutive generations reduces child cognitive ability by more than half a standard deviation. A formal sensitivity analysis suggests that results are robust to unobserved selection bias.

We examine the diffusion of sustainable planning and design concepts into neighbourhood development projects, based on findings of a survey of planners in all 180 cities of five Southern California counties. Sustainable neighbourhood development has particular significance in Southern California owing to the regions’s rapid growth. We compare ‘typical’ and ‘innovative’ neighbourhood developments to determine whether sustainable planning and design concepts are being incorporated in these projects. Although planners agree that ‘innovative’ projects are more likely than ‘typical’ projects to incorporate sustainable planning and design concepts, sustainability is not a high priority even in innovative neighbourhood projects. Our respondents identified significant barriers to and limited opportunities for encouraging sustainable neighbourhood development. These trends in planning and design appear likely to continue unless strong policy and other mechanisms are adopted to encourage sustainable neighbourhood development. The paper concludes with recommendations to promote more sustainable neighbourhood development.

FROM THE COFOUNDER OF SEVENTH GENERATION, the most trusted brand in environmentally friendly household products, comes this indispensable guide to maintaining absolutely everything in the home in a natural, nontoxic way. Jeffrey Hollender leads you through each room of the house with straightforward advice, comprehensive checklists, quick tips, and unparalleled resources while revealing the hidden repercussions of daily routines that most of us take for granted. From improving air quality in your bedroom to avoiding mildew in the bathroom, from sourcing local or organic food to safely laundering your clothes, Planet Home offers invaluable information for making conscious decisions for your family, your neighbors, and our shared planet home.

With additional information on power, garbage and recycling, air quality, and community activism, this book goes a step further to describe how any household is part of a much larger system. Planet Home offers a unique, comprehensive, educational, and easy approach to helping you and your family lead healthier lives as we collectively protect and maintain our shared resources for many years to come.

Two landmark policy interventions to improve the lives of youth through neighborhood mobility—the Gautreaux program in Chicago and the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiments in five cities—have produced conflicting results and have created a puzzle with broad implications: Do residential moves between neighborhoods increase or decrease violence, or both? To address this question, we analyze data from a subsample of adolescents ages 9–12 years from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal study of children and their families that began in Chicago—the site of the original Gautreaux program and one of the MTO experiments. We propose a dynamic modeling strategy to separate the effects of residential moving across three waves of the study from dimensions of neighborhood change and metropolitan location. The results reveal countervailing effects of mobility on trajectories of violence; whereas neighborhood moves within Chicago lead to an increased risk of violence, moves outside the city reduce violent offending and exposure to violence. The gap in violence between movers within and outside Chicago is explained not only by the racial and economic composition of the destination neighborhoods but also by the quality of school contexts, adolescents' perceived control over their new environment, and fear. These findings highlight the need to simultaneously consider residential mobility, mechanisms of neighborhood change, and the wider geography of structural opportunity.

This study estimates the acute effect of exposure to a local homicide on the cognitive performance of children across a community. Data are from a sample of children age 5–17 y in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. The effect of local homicides on vocabulary and reading assessments is identified by exploiting exogenous variation in the relative timing of homicides and interview assessments among children in the same neighborhood but assessed at different times. Among African-Americans, the strongest results show that exposure to a homicide in the block group that occurs less than a week before the assessment reduces performance on vocabulary and reading assessments by between ∼0.5 and ∼0.66 SD, respectively. Main results are replicated using a second independent dataset from Chicago. Findings suggest the need for broader recognition of the impact that extreme acts of violence have on children across a neighborhood, regardless of whether the violence is witnessed directly.

Physical inactivity is one of the most important public health issues in the U.S. and internationally. Increasingly, links are being identified between various elements of the physical—or built—environment and physical activity. To understand the impact of the built environment on physical activity, the development of high-quality measures is essential. Three categories of built environment data are being used: (1) perceived measures obtained by telephone interview or self-administered questionnaires; (2) observational measures obtained using systematic observational methods (audits); and (3) archival data sets that are often layered and analyzed with GIS. This review provides a critical assessment of these three types of built-environment measures relevant to the study of physical activity. Among perceived measures, 19 questionnaires were reviewed, ranging in length from 7 to 68 questions. Twenty audit tools were reviewed that cover community environments (i.e., neighborhoods, cities), parks, and trails. For GIS-derived measures, more than 50 studies were reviewed. A large degree of variability was found in the operationalization of common GIS measures, which include population density, land-use mix, access to recreational facilities, and street pattern. This first comprehensive examination of built-environment measures demonstrates considerable progress over the past decade, showing diverse environmental variables available that use multiple modes of assessment. Most can be considered first-generation measures, so further development is needed. In particular, further research is needed to improve the technical quality of measures, understand the relevance to various population groups, and understand the utility of measures for science and public health.

This article describes an innovative means of identifying a neighborhood typology that can be used for analyses of individual-level data that were not obtained through neighborhood-based sampling. A two-step approach was employed. First, exploratory factor analysis was used to reduce the number of neighborhood indicators to five clear factors of neighborhood characteristics. Second, a cluster analytic procedure was used to identify neighborhood types based on the five factors. These analyses resulted in a parsimonious solution of five distinct neighborhood clusters, or types, that constituted a manageable number of categories that could be used for future analyses of individuals grouped within neighborhood types. This method is a promising way to conduct neighborhood impact analyses that maximize the ability of researchers to characterize neighborhoods accurately (without sampling at the neighborhood level) while retaining the ability to conduct analyses of participants grouped within types of neighborhoods.

 In March 2009, The Network in collaboration with the New York Women's Foundation will release a new report on women living in poverty in New York City.  The dynamic study will include qualitative data as well as narratives from women about the impact of poverty on communities and families.  The report will help inform funding priorities for the Foundation.

In this paper, we examine the economic logic behind microfinance institutions and consider the movement from socially oriented nonprofit microfinance institutions to for-profit microfinance. Drawing on a large dataset that includes most of the world's leading microfinance institutions, we explore eight questions about the microfinance "industry": Who are the lenders? How widespread is profitability? Are loans in fact repaid at the high rates advertised? Who are the customers? Why are interest rates so high? Are profits high enough to attract profit-maximizing investors? How important are subsidies? The evidence suggests that investors seeking pure profits would have little interest in most of the institutions we see that are now serving poorer customers. We will suggest that the future of microfinance is unlikely to follow a single path. The recent clash between supporters of profit-driven Banco Compartamos and of the Grameen Bank with its "social business" model offers us a false choice. Commercial investment is necessary to fund the continued expansion of microfinance, but institutions with strong social missions, many taking advantage of subsidies, remain best placed to reach and serve the poorest customers, and some are doing so at a massive scale. The market is a powerful force, but it cannot fill all gaps.

Racial disparities are a ubiquitous feature of the US medical landscape, with health care delivery substantially segregated by race/ethnicity. Recent evidence from hospitals,1-3 nursing homes,4-5 and physicians' offices6 suggests that those caring for minority patients do not perform as well as those who care for nonminority patients, on average. This evidence is troubling but hardly surprising because the limited resources of those who care for the poor have helped to create and sustain racial disparities. As the United States enters an era of accountability in health care, it is time to consider these familiar circumstances from a new perspective.

As the national mortgage crisis has worsened, an increasing number of communities are facing declining housing prices and high rates of foreclosure. Central to the call for government intervention in this crisis is the claim that foreclosures not only hurt those who are losing their homes to foreclosure, but also harm neighbors by reducing the value of nearby properties and in turn, reducing local governments’ tax bases. The extent to which foreclosures do in fact drive down neighboring property values has become a crucial question for policy-makers. In this paper, we use a unique dataset on property sales and foreclosure filings in New York City from 2000 to 2005 to identify the effects of foreclosure starts on housing prices in the surrounding neighborhood. Regression results suggest that above some threshold, proximity to properties in foreclosure is associated with lower sales prices. The magnitude of the price discount increases with the number of properties in foreclosure, but not in a linear relationship.

Developing community capacity to improve health is a cornerstone of community-based public health. The concept of community capacity reflects numerous facets and dimensions of community life and can have different meanings in different contexts. This paper explores how members of one community identify and interpret key aspects of their community's capacity to limit the availability and use of tobacco products. Particular attention is given to examining the interrelationship between various dimensions of community capacity in order to better understand the processes by which communities are able to mobilize for social change. The study is based on qualitative analysis of 19 in-depth interviews with key informants representing a variety of community sectors in Harlem, New York City. Findings indicate that the community is viewed as rich in human and social resources. A strong sense of community identity and connectedness underlies this reserve and serves as a catalyst for action.

Written by 1506 eminent contributors, this new edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics retains many classic essays of enduring importance and contains 1,872 articles. Published in eight print volumes and for the first time in online format, this is the definitive scholarly reference work for a new generation of economists.

This article draws on the extensive literature on economic and social mobility in America to examine intergenerational contextual mobility, defined as the degree to which inequalities in neighborhood environments persist across generations. PSID data are analyzed to reveal remarkable continuity in neighborhood economic status from one generation to the next. The primary consequence of persistent neighborhood stratification is that the racial inequality in America's neighborhoods that existed a generation ago has been transmitted, for the most part unchanged, to the current generation. More than 70% of black children who grow up in the poorest quarter of American neighborhoods remain in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods as adults, compared to 40% of whites. The results suggest that racial inequality in neighborhood economic status is substantially underestimated with short-term measures of neighborhood income or poverty and, second, that the steps taken to end racial discrimination in the housing and lending markets have not enabled black Americans to advance out of America's poorest neighborhoods.

To analyze long-term consequences of homelessness, the authors compared 388 formerly homeless children 55 months after shelter entry with 382 housed peers, birth to 17, using mother- and child-reported health, mental health, community involvement, cognitive performance, and educational records. Both groups scored below cognitive and achievement norms. Small group differences favored housed 4- to 6-year-olds on cognition and 4- to 10-year-olds on mental health only. Child care and recent stressful events, which were high, were as or more important than prior homelessness. Only children living with mothers were included, potentially biasing results. Policy implications are discussed.

To analyze long-term consequences of homelessness, the authors compared 388 formerly homeless children 55 months after shelter entry with 382 housed peers, birth to 17, using mother- and child-reported health, mental health, community involvement, cognitive performance, and educational records. Both groups scored below cognitive and achievement norms. Small group differences favored housed 4- to 6-year-olds on cognition and 4- to 10-year-olds on mental health only. Child care and recent stressful events, which were high, were as or more important than prior homelessness. Only children living with mothers were included, potentially biasing results. Policy implications are discussed.

Community-Driven Development (CDD) projects have motivated both large amounts of funding from international development agencies and a number of general critiques centering on the potential susceptibility of decentralized projects to local elite capture. Drawing on case analysis and surveys fielded in 250 Indonesian sub-districts, this paper subjects the design logic of a CDD project to close empirical testing. Results suggest that while CDD projects can help create spaces for a broader range of elite and non-elite community leaders to emerge, elite control of project decision-making is pervasive. However, its effects can be influenced by project-initiated accountability arrangements, such as democratic leadership selection.

In his essay “All Community Is Local,” political scientist William Schambra urges that researchers and activists “direct our gaze away from the failed project of national community and focus once again on the churches, voluntary associations, and grass-roots groups that are rebuilding America’s civil society one family, one block, one neighborhood at a time.” Schambra’s is a rather extreme version of a view expressed by many theorists of citizenship, as well as by political figures from both right and left: that the nation is too distant from most people’s lives (or its governing officials too impersonal or corrupt) to inspire a sense of shared purposes or civic spirit. Only intense local involvement yields rightly-constituted citizens, and small communities are the likeliest realm for realizing the public good.[1]

Social entrepreneurship has come to be synonymous with the individual visionary - the risk taker who goes against the
tide to start a new organization to create dramatic social change. The problem with focusing so much attention
on the individual entrepreneur is that it neglects to recognize and support thousands of other individuals, groups, and organizations that are crafting solutions to troubles around the globe.

The article discusses the implication of business improvement districts (BIDS) to property owners in the U.S. The scheme first arrived in the country in mid-1970s when urban centers were losing both residents and businesses to suburbs. Such scheme is beneficial to companies because it delivers fair basic services such as security, maintenance, marketing and capital improvements.

Interest Group Politics presents a broad spectrum of scholarship on interest groups past and present. In a time of partisan parity, when control of Congress is always within reach of the minority party at the next election, interest groups have every incentive to keep the pressure on. And they do. But the imbalance of influence that tilts toward moneyed interests is one of the cornerstones of the political system.

What does this mean for equal representation? In nineteen chapters, noted political scientists explore the role of money, technology, grassroots lobbying, issue advocacy advertising, and much more in interest group influence. Students will learn how the National Rifle Association has become one of the most effective lobbying groups in America, what opportunities the openness of the American political process has offered ethnic groups both within and outside the United States, how the role of interest groups in elections has changed (including 527's), what effect religious organizations had in the 2004 elections, and how interest groups affect Supreme Court nominations.

New York State, because of its great diversity, has more extensive social and political conflict than most states. Governing New York State: Fifth Edition provides expert assessment of how these conflicts are organized and represented, and how the political process and political institutions work to seek to resolve them. This newly updated fifth edition contains significantly revised material and covers more topics than the prior edition.

The contributors examine conflicts between New York City and the rest of the state, and between federal, state, and local governments. The role of major political parties in organizing and representing broad coalitions of different groups is reviewed, along with the role of third parties, interest groups, and the media. Political institutions that shape the political process-the governor, the legislature, the courts, and the public authorities-are discussed, along with how these institutions affect the representation of responsiveness of various groups. Finally, Governing New York State investigates the major policy areas of the state: the economy, taxes, local education, higher education, health care, welfare, transportation, and the environment.

The Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (the Stafford Act) is the principal legislation governing the federal response to disasters within the United States. The act spells out - among other things - how disasters are declared, the types of assistance to be provided, and the cost sharing arrangements between federal, state, and local governments. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the primary federal agency responsible for responding to disasters within the United States, carrying out the provisions of the Stafford Act, and distributing assistance provided by the act. The Stafford Act establishes two incident levels - emergencies and major disasters. Emergencies tend to be smaller events where a limited federal role will suffice. Major disasters are larger events - but this can run the gamut from a blizzard in Buffalo to a major earthquake in southern California that affects millions. In other words, no distinction, and no special response, is provided in the Stafford Act following catastrophes such as major earthquakes and hurricanes. The Stafford Act should be amended to establish a response level for catastrophic events. The Stafford Act does not adequately recognize 21st century threats. For example, the definition of a major disaster does not cover chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear attacks or accidents. The act should further be amended to encompass 21st century threats.
This report does not focus on the performance of government agencies immediately following a disaster- these have been well documented by others. Rather, this report focuses on the federal role in the long-term recovery and rebuilding process following catastrophes, and what can be done to improve the effectiveness of the federal government in aiding these efforts.

Forget immigration, global warning, Donald Rumsfeld and abortion rights.

The hot issues of today will quickly fade away if the current surge in gasoline prices and home-mortgage
rates continues unabated. And all indications are that both the price of gas and the cost of borrowing are
moving in one direction only: north.

This paper contributes to the literature on information systems in crisis management by providing an overview of
emerging technologies for sensing and recording sociological data about disasters. These technologies are transforming our capacity to gather data about what happens during disasters, and our ability to reconstruct the social dynamics of affected communities. Our approach takes a broad review of disaster research literature, current research efforts and new reports from recent disasters, especially Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean Tsunami. We forecast that sensor networks will revolutionize conceptual and empirical approaches to research in the social sciences, by providing unprecedented volumes of high-quality data on movements, communication and response activities by both formal and informal actors. We conclude with a set of recommendations to designers of crisis management information systems to design systems that can support social science research, and argue for the inclusion of post-disaster social research as a design consideration in such systems.

The April, 2003 meeting of the general theory scholars included invitations to scholars utilizing action-research methodologies as well as to practitioners on the frontline of leadership development in communities. Ospina discussed the participant-centered research she and her colleagues are undertaking for the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World program and shared with the other scholars some findings emerging from this approach. Using a constructionist lens, Ospina and her colleagues are working with social change leaders to understand how leadership emerges and develops in community-based organizations engaged in social change agendas.

Since the initial modern malpractice crisis hit Pennsylvania and the nation in the mid-1970s, two successive episodes-including one in the present, which by autumn 2005 appeared to be abating-have rocked the Commonwealth's liability insurers, medical providers, and health-care consumers. The state's political establishment was swift to respond with reform legislation in both the first crisis and the present one; a malpractice bill also passed in 1996, in the wake of the 1980s troubles. But, in 1975 and 2002 alike, passage of a comprehensive reform measure did little to alleviate pressures for continued legislative relief. Political efforts to address soaring liability premiums and other systemic malpractice woes continued for years afterwards.

Dividing American history into discrete periods dates to the first European colonists in North America, several of whom variously declared their region or colony to represent a "new beginning" a "new land of Canaan," a New England, and so forth: "in the New World is born a new history," as one early sermonizer had it. (1) Soon thereafter clerics and political leaders (often the same people) lamented their fellows' fall from grace; the dichotomy of golden age and descent into depravity, of Awakening and backsliding, has been an American motif ever since. Eventually, the sweep of U.S. history was sorted on a chronological, rather than theological or eschatological, basis. For well over a century political historians have in the main hewn to a familiar temporal script.

The attack on the World Trade Center reinforced a process of change in lower Manhattan that had been under way for at least the past fifty years. The public and private responses to the destruction wrought on September 11 have provided the funds, organizational capacity, and public commitment to do what a previous generation of municipal planners tried to accomplish, with only partial success: creating a mixed residential and office community in what was once New York City's dominant financial and business district. Federal aid to rebuild lower Manhattan has been the catalyst for modernizing and expanding its mass transit systems and facilities, providing low-cost financing for converting obsolete office buildings into housing, improving pedestrian movement, investing public funds in parks and cultural institutions, and subsidizing the creation of new public schools. This chapter examines the key public and private organizations that have shaped this redevelopment and the implications for the future of lower Manhattan and for office development in the rest of New York City.

More than ever, the future of East Asian countries depends on the capacity and performance of local and provincial governments, according to the World Bank report, East Asia Decentralizes.

This decentralization has also unleashed local initiative and energy, with new ways to deliver services to people. With great potential for continued improvement and innovation, finds the report, it is essential that decentralization is done right.

The report, which focuses on six countries, notes the differences in the approach to decentralizing government in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Despite encouraging progress, fundamental problems remain. Across the region, local governments lack the resources and power to fulfill their new responsibilities, and they have few incentives to improve their performance.

Although political forces have largely driven decentralization in East Asia and most countries face similar reform challenges, their decentralization
experiences are far from uniform. Countries have adopted different intergovernmental structures,
proceeded at uneven paces, and adopted a wide range of implementation strategies. This diversity is not surprising, as East Asian countries vary greatly
in geographical size, population, history, economic structure, and political and institutional dynamics, all of which influence the form that decentralization
can and should take. This chapter provides expanded context for the analysis presented in chapter 1 and lays a foundation for later chapters. After reviewing the origins of decentralization, it compares the basic intergovernmental frameworks, structures, and processes
evolving in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.1 The chapter focuses, in turn, on enabling frameworks, the governance environment, fiscal decentralization, and the management and implementation of decentralization reforms.

Educational reform over the past two decades has focused primarily on schools as the critical units of change, often ignoring the role of districts and their effect on schools' performance. Although national reform efforts such as the recently reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (the No Child Left Behind Act), are directed primarily at schools, local school districts are responsible for a number of functions critical to schooling effectiveness (e.g., hiring, collective bargaining, curriculum development, assessment, fiscal operations, and ancillary functions). Refocusing attention on districts and their effect on schools, this study found differences between high-and low performing community school districts, or administrative subunits, within the NewYork City school system in terms of educational goals, instructional focus, leadership development, teacher recruitment and retention, and professional development.

 At any given moment, about 3 million American women, men, and children are homeless. And another 5 million Americans spend over 50% of their incomes on housing, meaning that one missed paycheck, one health crisis, or one unpaid utility bill can push them out the door into homelessness. Homelessness is one of the major social problems and personal and family tragedies of the contemporary world. No community, city, or nation is immune and the lack of affordable housing and a decline in secure, well-paying jobs means that the problem will only get worse. The Encyclopedia of Homelessness is the first systematic effort to organize and summarize what we know about this complex topic that impacts not only the homeless but all of society. The Encyclopedia focuses on the current situation in the United States with a comparative sampling of homelessness around the world.

At any given moment, about 3 million American women, men, and children are homeless. And another 5 million Americans spend over 50% of their incomes on housing, meaning that one missed paycheck, one health crisis, or one unpaid utility bill can push them out the door into homelessness. Homelessness is one of the major social problems and personal and family tragedies of the contemporary world. No community, city, or nation is immune and the lack of affordable housing and a decline in secure, well-paying jobs means that the problem will only get worse. The Encyclopedia of Homelessness is the first systematic effort to organize and summarize what we know about this complex topic that impacts not only the homeless but all of society. The Encyclopedia focuses on the current situation in the United States with a comparative sampling of homelessness around the world.

As the centerpiece of policymakers' efforts to "deconcentrate" poverty in urban America, the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) project gave roughly 4,600 volunteer families the chance to move out of public housing projects in deeply impoverished neighborhoods in five cities-Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Researchers wanted to find out to what extent moving out of a poor neighborhood into a better-off area would improve the lives of public housing families. Choosing a Better Life? is the first distillation of years of research on the MTO project, the largest rigorously designed social experiment to investigate the consequences of moving low-income public housing residents to low-poverty neighborhoods. In this book, leading social scientists and policy experts examine the legislative and political foundations of the project, analyze the effects of MTO on lives of the families involved, and explore lessons learned from this important piece of U.S. social policy.

International experience suggests that attempts to rapidly expand formal safety net coverage through cash transfers typically founder in low income countries, which must look to alternative mechanisms to boost social protection. This paper explores this challenge through the case of Vietnam. Despite over a decade of rapid economic growth and poverty reduction, approximately 40% of Vietnam’s population is below or just above the poverty line and is highly vulnerable to community-wide and household-specific shocks. Yet Vietnam’s social protection budget has largely financed formal entitlement programs that are failing to deliver substantial reductions in vulnerability for this broad spectrum of the rural population. This paper outlines the state of social protection in Vietnam and presents an agenda for improving effective coverage rates. It closes by assessing the political and bureaucratic feasibility of social protection reforms in other developing countries.

Objective
To assess the contribution of primary care systems to a variety of health outcomes in 18 wealthy Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries over three decades.

Data Sources/Study Setting
Data were primarily derived from OECD Health Data 2001 and from published literature. The unit of analysis is each of 18 wealthy OECD countries from 1970 to 1998 (total n=504).

Study Design
Pooled, cross-sectional, time-series analysis of secondary data using fixed effects regression.

Data Collection/Extraction Methods
Secondary analysis of public-use datasets. Primary care system characteristics were assessed using a common set of indicators derived from secondary datasets, published literature, technical documents, and consultation with in-country experts.

Principal Findings
The strength of a country's primary care system was negatively associated with (a) all-cause mortality, (b) all-cause premature mortality, and (c) cause-specific premature mortality from asthma and bronchitis, emphysema and pneumonia, cardiovascular disease, and heart disease (p<0.05 in fixed effects, multivariate regression analyses). This relationship was significant, albeit reduced in magnitude, even while controlling for macro-level (GDP per capita, total physicians per one thousand population, percent of elderly) and micro-level (average number of ambulatory care visits, per capita income, alcohol and tobacco consumption) determinants of population health.

Conclusions
(1) Strong primary care system and practice characteristics such as geographic regulation, longitudinality, coordination, and community orientation were associated with improved population health. (2) Despite health reform efforts, few OECD countries have improved essential features of their primary care systems as assessed by the scale used here. (3) The proposed scale can also be used to monitor health reform efforts intended to improve primary care.

The United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have galvanized the development community with an urgent challenge to improve the welfare of the world's neediest people. This paper reviews the mounting body of evidence showing that the availability of financial services for poor households is a critical contextual factor with strong impact on the achievement of MDGs. Evidence from the millions of microfinance clients around the world demonstrates that access to financial services enables poor people to increase their household incomes, build assets, and reduce their vulnerability to the crises that are so much a part of their daily lives.

Papers from a conference held May 3-4, 2001, Columbia University.

This article examines the impact of two New York City homeownership programs on surrounding property values. Both programs, Nehemiah Program and the Partnership New Homes program subsidize the construction of affordable owner-occupied homes in distressed neighborhoods. We use a geocoded data set that includes every property transaction in the City from 1980 to 1999.

Our analysis relies on a difference-in-difference approach. Specifically, we compare the prices of properties in small rings surrounding the Partnership and Nehemiah sites with prices of comparable properties that are in the same ZIP code but outside the ring. We then examine whether the magnitude of this difference changes after the completion of a homeownership development. Our results show that during the past two decades prices of properties in the rings surrounding the homeownership projects have risen relative to their ZIP codes. Results suggest that part of that rise is attributable to the affordable homeownership programs.

This article examines the impact of New York City's Ten-Year Plan on the sale prices of homes in surrounding neighborhoods. Beginning in the mid-1980s, New York City invested $5.1 billion in constructing or rehabilitating over 180,000 units of housing in many of the city's most distressed neighborhoods. One of the main purposes was to spur neighborhood revitalization.

In this article, we describe the origins of the Ten-Year Plan, as well as the various programs the city used to implement it, and estimate whether housing built or rehabilitated under the Ten-Year Plan affected the prices of nearby homes. The prices of homes within 500 feet of Ten-Year Plan units rose relative to those located beyond 500 feet, but still within the same census tract. These findings are consistent with the proposition that well-planned project based housing programs can generate positive spillover effects and contribute to efforts to revitalize inner-city neighborhoods.

Interest Group Politics presents a broad spectrum of scholarship on interest groups past and present. In a time of partisan parity, when control of Congress is always within reach of the minority party at the next election, interest groups have every incentive to keep the pressure on. And they do. But the imbalance of influence that tilts toward moneyed interests is one of the cornerstones of the political system.

What does this mean for equal representation? In nineteen chapters, noted political scientists explore the role of money, technology, grassroots lobbying, issue advocacy advertising, and much more in interest group influence. Students will learn how the National Rifle Association has become one of the most effective lobbying groups in America, what opportunities the openness of the American political process has offered ethnic groups both within and outside the United States, how the role of interest groups in elections has changed (including 527's), what effect religious organizations had in the 2004 elections, and how interest groups affect Supreme Court nominations.

Microfinance was pioneered in the developing world as the lending of small amounts of money to entrepreneurs who lacked the kinds of credentials and collateral demanded by banks. Similar practices spread from the developing to the developed world, reversing the usual direction of innovation, and today several hundred microfinance institutions are operating in the United States.

Replicating Microfinance in the United States reviews experiences in both developing and industrialized countries and extends the applications of microlending beyond enterprise to consumer finance, housing finance, and community development finance.

This book reviews experiences in both developing and industrial countries and extends the applications of microlending beyond enterprise to consumer finance, housing finance, and community development finance, concentrating especially on previously underserved households and their communities.

Community interventions are rare in the field of sexually transmitted disease (STD) control and prevention. The goals of the Gonorrhea Community Action Project are to design and implement interventions for the reduction of gonorrhea in high-prevalence areas and to increase the appropriateness and effectiveness of STD care in the participating communities. Key to conducting the formative research and developing the interventions was the creation of a community-academic-health department collaborative partnership. Using a staged model, this article presents a case study of collaboration development in the community of Harlem, New York.

The much-noted decline of state autonomy theories owes partly to external challenges to state power, such as globalization, supranational regimes, and the like. But advanced democratic states have also long been seen as threatened from within, especially by powerful private interest groups.The extent of private-interest influence on policy making depends in important part on corporate lobbyists, a group whose activities are chronicled in this essay. Lobbyists exercise considerably more autonomy from the private clients who hire them than has previously been acknowledged. This portrait ultimately suggests that the national state and civil society may be mutually supportive rather than strictly separate spheres.

Reveals the message from two surveys of senior-level appointees from the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Estimated number that said they would strongly recommended presidential service to a good friend; Percentage that said that presidential service would be both an honor and an opportunity to make a difference.

This book explores the role of community in facilitating the transition to market relationships in economic development, and in controlling and sustaining local public goods such as irrigation, forests, grazing land, and fishing grounds. Previously it was customary to classify economic systems in terms of varying combinations of state and market control of resource allocation. In contrast, this book recognizes community as the third major element of economic systems. This new approach also departs from the conventional view that markets and community norms should be treated as mutually exclusive means of organizing economic activity, instead clarifying the situations in which they may become complementary. Further discussion focuses on the conditions under which management of local commons can, and should, be delegated to local communities rather than subjected to the control of central government.

This report focuses on the cost-effectiveness of the policies of the New York State Department of Correctional Services, and makes four recommendations for achieving operational savings without diminishing public safety. These recommendations are: (1) to extend the reach and effectiveness of tested alternatives, such as boot camp and the CASAT program; (2) to develop new alternatives for additional inmate groups; (3) to reengineer the parole system; (4) to create an enhanced research and development unit.

The Government of Viet Nam is currently preparing a Socio-Economic Development Strategy for the years 2001-2010. At the Government’s request, the UNDP has recruited a small team of international and local consultants to provide input into for several sections of the strategy, of which one is “Rural Social Development”. This draft presents the initial analysis of the social development team. The analysis and strategies proposed are, by intention, synthetic: drawn extensively and freely from the best available work by Government agencies and donors. Social development is a broad concept. In this paper it is broken down into four thematic areas: i) poverty reduction and inequality; ii) social safety nets; iii) basic social services; and iv) rural institutions and participation. Each of these areas can be formulated as a broad question for the year 2010. Viet Nam confronts qualitatively different future scenarios depending on how it addresses these questions: a. Will society be polarized into the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’? What can Viet Nam do to accelerate poverty reduction in slow-growing regions and thus mitigate growing socioeconomic inequalities? b. Will social safety nets exist to help provide social stability amidst rapid economic transformation? The degree to which the living standards of disadvantaged are protected will help determine what type of society Viet Nam will have in the year 2010. c. Will social indicators which are high relative to Viet Nam’s economic development continue to propel economic growth and equitable social outcomes? In the absence of greater reform momentum in the social sectors in the coming ten years, Viet Nam’s social indicators will probably still be good “for a low-income country”, but increasing disparities will work against, rather than for, broadly based growth and poverty reduction – quite the opposite of the positive experience to date. d. Will institutions which are capable, democratic, and open to the participation of civil society underpin rural society? The recent democratization decree has generated much interest, both nationally and within the donor community. The question centers on strategic momentum for the process of reform and the degree to which it presages further openings to civil society.

How to secure an adequate measure of unity among citizens in a liberal democratic state? Versions of this question formed the brunt of communitarian critiques of liberalism over the past two decades. Most liberal respondents took aim in return at communitarians' own vision of a healthy political society, while others emphasized the shared values or purposes indigenous to the liberal tradition. Yet as the liberal/communitarian debate dissolves into a common center, it appears that this immense body of theoretical exchanges has left the problem of national union no closer to solution. Liberal theorists now affirm this issue's centrality; as Will Kymlicka writes, "[i]dentifying the bases of social unity in multinational states is... one of the most pressing tasks facing liberals today." Meanwhile, communitarians like Michael Sandel have come to acknowledge the importance of a national, not only neighborhood, sense of mutual trust and solidarity. But no coherent principled or practical unionist design has emerged from the two sides' convergence.

Almost half of the nation's children live in officially defined poverty or near-poverty. Putting a human face on this and other statistics, the authors present a disturbing and provocative composite portrait of 10 families struggling to make ends meetAfour white, two Hispanic, three black and one Hawaiian/Samoan. Bennett and Aber, both directors of Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty, and freelance journalist Shirk (a veteran St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter), identify three factorsAteen parenthood, low educational achievement and temporary or low-wage workAthat they call "the 'Bermuda Triangle' of family poverty." Add the associated risks of domestic violence, poor child care and damage to early brain development from malnutrition, preventable birth complications, environmental toxins, etc., and readers will begin to see why poverty cuts across urban, suburban and rural areas. A few of the parents profiled here battle drug addiction; one gambles; several suffer from disabling depression; one single mother bravely raises a severely disabled five-year-old son afflicted with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy and a 234-pound, 12-year-old daughter. In almost all the profiled families, one or both parents work, contradicting the widespread stereotype of the poor as lazy or irresponsible. In a succinct closing chapter, the authors call for a combination of public- and private-sector measures to help prevent or reduce child poverty. The issues they raise should fuel election-year debate.

Providing the latest research on effective prevention and intervention strategies for reducing youth violence, Youth Violence: Prevention, Intervention, and Social Policy is a comprehensive resource for dealing with both perpetrators and victims of violence and understanding the risk factors facing youth.

In representing a fragmented pluralist polity, the U.S. Congress inevitably exhibits high levels of conflict and disagreement. Increasingly, the American public finds such conflict-the ordinary procedures of legislative democracy-distasteful. As members of Congress pay closer attention to approval ratings and other poll measures, their natural inclination may be to avoid legislating, especially on controversial issues. This response to the preference of the demos has profoundly antidemocratic implications.

This study explored the effects of structural and experiential neighborhood factors and developmental stage on antisocial behavior, among a sample of poor urban adolescents in New York City. Conceptually and empirically distinct profiles of neighborhood experience were derived from the data, based on measures of perceived neighborhood cohesion, poverty-related hassles, and involvement in neighborhood organizations and activities. Both the profiles of neighborhood experience and a measure of census-tract-level neighborhood hazard (poverty and violence) showed relationships to antisocial behavior. Contrary to expectation, higher levels of antisocial behavior were reported among adolescents residing in moderate-structural-risk neighborhoods than those in high-structural-risk neighborhoods. This effect held only for teens in middle (not early) adolescence and was stronger for teens perceiving their neighborhoods as hassling than for those who did not. Implications for future research and preventive intervention are discussed.

This report is the first of a series assessing the performance of municipal agencies from 1990 to 1996, a period marked by fiscal austerity and retrenchment. The CBC concludes that the City improved the quality of living conditions in jails, but reduced the quality of some inmate services. Overall, the Department of Correction failed to improve efficiency despite some significant accomplishments.

Volume II incorporates empirical data on neighborhood poverty into discussions of policy and program development. The contributors point to promising community initiatives and suggest methods to strengthen neighborhood-based service programs for children. Several essays analyze the conceptual and methodological issues surrounding the measurement of neighborhood characteristics. These essays focus on the need to expand scientific insight into urban poverty by drawing on broader pools of ethnographic, epidemiological, and quantitative data. Volume II explores the possibilities for a richer and more well-rounded understanding of neighborhood and poverty issues.

Drawing from national and city-based sources, Volume I reports the empirical evidence concerning the relationship between children and community. As the essays demonstrate, poverty entails a host of problems that affects the quality of educational, recreational, and child care services. Poor neighborhoods usually share other negative features--particularly racial segregation and a preponderance of single mother families--that may adversely affect children. Yet children are not equally susceptible to the pitfalls of deprived communities. Neighborhood has different effects depending on a child's age, race, and gender, while parenting techniques anda family's degree of community involvement also serve as mitigating factors.

Focuses on the author's idea of applying lessons learned from the experience of stable integrated neighborhoods to strengthen cities. Theories that explain why some mixed neighborhoods remain integrated; Testing the theory; Policy implications; How the real story about America's neighborhoods is less pessimistic and more dynamic than they tended to believe.

Suggests a method of indexing local public services using community characteristics to allow the isolation of movements in prices and quantities from expenditure data. Differences in individual production functions for commodities where both private goods and community characteristics are inputs of production; Impact of government activities on community characteristics and production.