infonet-economy

ELECTRA Project

The author introduces a new methodological framework for dealing with complex issues, named Integrative Systems Methodology (ISM). ISM is a general heuristic to help actors in organizations and society achieve requisite variety. For this purpose, numerous "problem solving" approaches have been developed. ISM is aimed at overcoming the drawbacks of many established…

What does it mean to be moral ? What does it mean to be a moral political man ? This contribution takes Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development as the analytical frame to answer these questions. Based on the writings of Vaclav Havel, political dissident and then first president of the postcommunist Tchecoslovakian Republic, our study displays how emblematic a moral man…

Development of the Decision Support System (DSS) used by the National Emergency Operations Centre in Switzerland began immediately after the accident at Chernobyl. The system will evaluate acceptable countermeasures following the accidental release of radioactivity in order to reduce ingestion dose. The DSS - not designed for the very early phase following the accidental release of…

The growing demand for long-term care (LTC) causes the relationship between children and their parents to gain increased importance for society. Parents may create incentives for children to provide LTC through bequests, or they may purchase LTC insurance. While these instruments have been analyzed separately in the literature, this article shows that optimal LTC insurance must be…

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1984-90, the author analyzes the entrance of young individuals into the German labor market, comparing the experience of apprenticeship graduates to that of graduates from universities, full-time vocational schools, and secondary schools. Apprentices experienced fewer unemployment spells in the transition to their first full-time…