Which factors will influence how much active they are in participating in world politics

Decision-Making

The political, economic, and social factors that place boundaries around individual and societal choices cannot be ignored when analyzing hazardousness or engaging in mitigation. Many of these social factors affect perceptions of a hazard, which in turn determine human behavior. Indeed, it is through the perceived world that individual decision-making occurs. This perceptual context is dynamic and variable over time and space, and is perhaps most difficult to model from a scientific perspective. Questionnaire surveys of disaster victims have attempted to elicit perceptual worldviews, but these provide merely snapshots of a changing and evolving scenario. What people say they will do under certain circumstances does not always coincide with what actually happens later. For instance, people behave according to perceived rather than objective reality; if a tornado hazard is considered a low risk or a hurricane is perceived as survivable, the individual concerned may take little or no action to mitigate impending events. Consequently, further work is needed to put perception and situation in context.

Disaster experience affects individuals' perceptions and in some circumstances generates what is called gambler's fallacy. After a disaster has occurred, a common consensus is that another one is not expected for some time, that is, a run of bad luck will be followed by a run of good luck. This is a common perspective in the United States with respect to floods. It is not unusual, for instance, to hear flood victims' state that they have experienced the 100-year flood, and consequently will not experience a similar flood in their lifetime. This fallacy is rooted in the often-difficult translation of statistical probabilities into lay discourse and born out repeatedly as communities in geophysically dynamic locations experience repetitive disasters. The implementation of mitigation measures can also lead to a false sense of security. The construction of a dam or levee to control flood waters, the building of a sea wall to repel tidal surges, or elevating homes above expected storm surge levels usually generate feelings of safety such that all risk has been eliminated. However, such projects are designed to specific standards; so the risk remains that 1 day a larger event will occur. This false sense of security generates behavior that is not always conducive to minimizing losses. For instance, construction of structural measures or even the implementation of nonstructural adjustments, such as zoning ordinances, can initiate increased development on the perceived “safe” side of the project; a process termed the “levee effect.” Of course, all projects have limitations as defined by the design standards, which can fail when compromised. Consequently, losses can be disastrous when such failure occurs and over the long term, possibly greater than if the project had never been implemented because of the increased development. Individuals' and communities' perceptions of risk and hazardousness are influenced by the interplay of advancing scientific knowledge of the nature of extreme geophysical events (i.e., magnitude, frequency, duration, spatial extent, etc.) as well as the decisions we make within our communities to mitigate the deleterious effects of these phenomenon on our human systems.

Analysis of political factors

The first political factor that can be a barrier to social media penetration to promote democracy and social justice is government instability, and more importantly the uncertainty of the laws enacted by the government. There are many examples of this in the Middle East, where good laws relating to information technology were passed in a given country but for various reasons, such as a change of government or even the absence of sufficient force, reached a dead end. (This could also be included in the legal factors, but according to the experts, because of its roots in political instability, it should be in this section. One of the main reasons for this instability is that the countries studied here have been caught between two internal forces. On the one hand, one force has a tendency to rapid progression by adopting laws from advanced countries while on the other hand, the other force tends to regulate the situation through internal capabilities and support from their national culture and customs.

So every group that comes to power in a country is accompanied by policies to change previous laws. One group may understand social media penetration as a way to increase communication with the outside world while a second group may view it as endangering the stability of the country. Mediocrity is usually caused by the same factors – lack of proper use of social media by the people and the use of illegal practices such as anti-filters to access social media. Obviously, in this case, even entering a social media network is an illegal act that is not subject to proper policies to optimise their use. The next factor is the multi-curator of the IT field in Middle Eastern countries. While experts in the field of IT are to be found in advanced countries, this field has several curators in the Middle East. While on the one hand huge issues may be dealt within the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology, on the other hand important issues are also dealt with in the various cultural ministries. More interestingly, rather than each ministry itself making decisions in the field of information technology separately, such decisions come from people who do not have any expertise in this area.

Therefore, the lack of specialisation and the absence of a single person in charge of macro policy are the major obstacles to the use of social media for creating social justice. Everything falls under the banner of IT policy basically, except for social justice and democracy. If we take Iran, there are numerous institutions in charge of information technology, which is one of the major problems that impedes the development of this technology in Iran. The Supreme Council of Information, the Supreme Council of Technology Information, the Supreme Council of Informatics, the Development Center of Information Technology and Digital Media of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the Information and Communication Technology Management and Security Committee, the Deputy President for Science and Technology, the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology and several other institutions and organisations are involved in the planning and guiding of IT. The multiplicity of actors and their parallel and sometimes overlapping missions is one of the serious problems in the development of IT in Iran. Perhaps only in the areas of education and health is the use of information technology (not social media) leading to the promotion of justice. However, a large part of this was not due to policy but arose from the natural advantages to be had from IT transferred into this sector.

The next factor to be discussed is a combination of sanctions and lack of the political will among the countries of the West to bring democracy and justice to the countries of the Middle East. A large proportion of the world’s wealth of natural resources lies in the countries of the Middle East. The creation of social justice and democracy in these countries will mean that developed countries will be in need of energy and access to these resources will be more difficult. This is not so good for advanced countries, who can create chaos in these countries, keeping them in poverty with fighting between the government and the people, and thus acquire the the resources much more cheaply. Social media sources have also been created in developed countries, where the penetration strategies of the media for creating democracy and justice is well known, so that they can more easily access cheap resources.

In fact there is an indirect sanction in these countries, such that even with the correct policy the desired results may not be achieved. Approaches based on this scenario should be designed to achieve the best results. The next factor could be a named security policy. Media such as YouTube can be seen as weapons in the fight against the governments of the Middle East by the people and many videos about violations of the law by the government, corruption in governments, etc. are shared. In fact, people have tried to show how the authorities have banned such items. The result is that these media increase access by the general public to information about the government and the ruling elite which could jeopardise national security. Thus policies have been adopted in order to reduce public access to the tools, rather than to extend the goals of democracy and justice. When a government has a full vote of confidence from the media in its country having adopted the right approach, it should not worry about the exposure of illegal activities.

The problem of the lack of suitable technology in relevant government agencies is also noted. As Bayo-Moriones and Lera-Lopez (2007) note, IT adoption by other users on the network can have a positive influence on the technology adopted by companies in that sector. Since e-government programmes often have a synergistic aspect, sectors such as government departments, the private sector, NGOs and citizens acting as key stakeholders are brought together and involved in this type of IT application (Potnis, 2010). Thus the absence of such programmes in one part of the chain, in addition to the backwardness of the state, leads to failure to engage industry and the private sector.

6 Factors in Infant Mortality

There are many factors that influence infant mortality, and they are apparent at every level. The following, simplified categories can be distinguished:

(a)

political and socioeconomic factors of a country, which reflect its development, and its financial and organizational ability to supervise sanitation, to promote actions preventing infant mortality, and to create general access to health care, education, employment, and housing;

factors connected with the child's mother, in particular those with a direct effect on embryo development and on children's health: life conditions, general state of health, and potentially harmful behavior (consumption of tobacco or alcohol, and so on); and

factors connected with the individual child, notably gender, length of gestation, and weight at birth.

In these complex categories, comprised of closely linked elements, it is difficult to isolate decisive factors. Obviously infant mortality depends on the interaction of many elements, such as the wealth of a country, the quality of its health-care system, the woman's marital status, the mother's conditions of life, her state of health, her genetic history, her level of education, her knowledge of child care, the health of the newborn, and so on.

Since we do not have a model for grading these various factors, we look to risk aggravating factors. Generally, infant mortality in industrialized countries is aggravated when the mother is poorly educated, single, inactive, or belongs to a disadvantaged ethnic minority. Therefore infant mortality follows a social gradient, and a newborn's probability of survival may vary according to the social environment in which it was born (Botting and Cooper 1993, Cnattingius and Haglund 1992, Macfarlane 1996).

Infant mortality is higher for boys than for girls. As both sexes are submitted to the same hazards at this age, higher male mortality is essentially biologically determined (Tabutin 1996). Infant mortality also varies considerably according to the weight of the newborn. The mortality of low-weight children (under 2,500g) and of very low-weight children (under 1,500g) is considerably higher than the mortality of heavier children. In Sweden, for instance, six per 1,000 newborn children died before their first birthday in 1990, but of the very low-birth-weight babies, 210 per 1,000 died during the first week of life. The relationship between birth weight and death risk deserves more attention, as the proportion of very low-weight children is now increasing in industrialized countries. This is due to two factors. First, the development of fertility treatment has resulted in an increase in the number of multiple births. Second, improvements in prenatal medicine enable children to be born who previously would have died during gestation or delivery.

Offsetting these risk aggravating factors, we may point out some risk attenuating factors. In particular, the number of pregnancies with a high risk factor is becoming less important because of changes in reproductive behavior. Women are postponing having their first children, and there are now very few families with a large number of children. This results in a lower number of pregnancies among very young and relatively older women. In addition, there have been improvements of detection of various malformations or pathologies in utero, and there is the possibility of either carrying out a therapeutic abortion or of treating such problems. Generally speaking, there have been improvements in techniques that allow for the birth and survival of the frailest children, and these tend to reduce the number of infant deaths, especially during the first week of life.

In the final analysis, it seems as if even lower infant mortality is possible in industrialized countries, especially if social inequalities can be reduced. In the more advanced countries expected progress is very restricted, but there is still the possibility of important improvement in Central and Eastern Europe.

2.3 Reasons Underlying the Large Flows to the Gulf

In the sending countries, several political, demographic, and socioeconomic factors serve as push factors, while the large wage gap between the sending and receiving countries is a major pull factor that motivates labor migration in the region. Poverty in the sending countries is the single most important push factor. According to the UNDP, South Asia has the largest number of people in income poverty. Its human poverty index shows that 48 percent of Bangladeshis and 47 percent of Pakistanis faced various forms of deprivation in 1997 (UNDP 1997). The rapidly growing population and consequently the expanding labor force, in several countries, exacerbate the level of poverty. Other factors that have contributed to poverty are political conflicts and natural disasters.

Labor migrants often do not come from the poorest or most destitute groups. They are the relatively more enterprising and ‘fit’ individuals who can afford the ever-increasing financial cost of migration, and many are employed before migration. However, high unemployment rates in the sending countries are also push factor in many cases.

A major facilitator of migration is the formation of informal networks of friends and relatives, making it a self-perpetuating phenomenon. This also results in the formation of migration pockets in the sending country. Some surveys show that friends and relatives arrange work visas for 34 percent of respondents (Shah 1998).

In the receiving countries, several factors perpetuate the demand for foreign workers. The major ones are the small indigenous population and labor force, limited skills among the national workforce, the abundant and cheap supply of expatriate labor, its willingness to work in 3D (dirty, dangerous, and demanding) jobs that nationals shun, and the relatively low participation of women in the workforce in some countries. In addition, the profit that accrues to a fairly large number of intermediaries is a factor. It is well known that labor is sometimes brought in not to satisfy genuine demand but to earn transfer fees. Another important factor is the structural imbalance in the host country labor force. Nationals are employed overwhelmingly in the public sector, about 94 percent of them in Kuwait and 93 percent in Saudi Arabia. Nationals prefer to work in the public sector where work is less arduous and less competitive, and remuneration is generally as good as in the private sector.

2.18.2.2 Defining Accessibility

Accessibility denotes the ease of reaching destination opportunities such as jobs, stores, schools, and health services. Accessibility could refer to people or places (17); it could be measured at the neighborhood scale or regional scale (18), and in absolute term (e.g. minutes) (19) or in relative term (e.g. as indices) (12).

While social, economic, and political factors could become barriers to access, spatial accessibility is affected by three spatial factors:

Attributes of origins: for example, home location when accessibility refers to places; individual’s gender, income, or other characteristics when accessibility refers to people;

Attributes of destinations: for example, number of jobs or size of schools; and

Spatial separation or transportation linkage between origin and destination.

Accessibility can change when any one or more of the three factors change. Social and economic development can help elevate people’s accessibility. Land use activities, which are often regulated through zoning or other interventions, can modify place attributes, for instance, job density or concentration of services and opportunities. Personal or public mobility via transportation systems overcome spatial separations affect directly the level of accessibility.

Radical, Psychoanalytic, Postmodern, and Third-Wave Feminist Ethics

Radical feminists do not think that political, legal, and economic factors play the primary role in women’s subordination to men. Rather, they think that patriarchy – a system characterized by power, dominance, hierarchy, and competition – is the main source of women’s persistent subordination to men. So harmful is patriarchy to women’s well-being that it is incapable of being reformed, according to radical feminists. It must be destroyed.

Although all radical feminists pay close attention to issues related to sex, gender, and reproduction, radical-libertarian feminists believe that women’s liberation will be achieved only when women feel free to be as masculine or feminine as they wish and as sexy or unsexy as they please. In addition, radical-libertarian feminists think that women should use whatever means they want to use, no matter how artificial or technological, to procreate or not procreate. In contrast, radical-cultural feminists reject masculine traits and values and caution women about the dangers of sex. They also caution women not to cede their procreative powers wholesale to technology’s triumphs.

Of particular interest in the school of radical feminism are those thinkers who have developed ethical theories that apply only to women and, in some instances, only to lesbian women. Philosopher Sarah Lucia Hoagland has developed an ethics that seeks to liberate lesbians from oppressive forms of caring. She insists that lesbians – fully women-centered women – should engage only in the kind of caring that does not get tangled in a web of ‘female’ duty from which there is no escape. Hoagland, like other lesbian ethicists, claims that heterosexuality, as it is constructed under patriarchy, is not an ethically complete type of sexuality. Lesbians had best love and be sexually intimate only with other women if they wish to develop into full moral agents. Interestingly, Hoagland emphasizes that although heterosexual women, and even some men, can learn from lesbian ethics, it is not lesbian ethicists’ responsibility to share their moral insights with men or even with heterosexual women. As articulated by Hoagland, then, lesbian ethics raises profound questions about the ‘ethics’ of separatist ethics. Is it really possible to have an ethics that is not meant to be universally embraced?

Like radical feminists, psychoanalytic feminists think that women’s full liberation depends on more than the reform of political, legal, and economic systems. They maintain that the causes of women’s oppression are buried in their psychosocial identity. As Freudian psychoanalytic feminists see it, boys want to separate themselves from their weak mothers so they can become like their strong fathers. In contrast, girls have a more difficult time letting go of their mothers. They copy their mothers’ behavior, trying to please others, but especially men. Like boys, girls view men as somehow better than women – that is, themselves. Moreover, because of the ways in which patriarchal society reinforces men’s superiority, boys and girls come to see masculine values as better than feminine values.

Wanting to liberate women from the pernicious idea that women are less worthy than men, some psychoanalytic feminists theorize that traditional gender roles are the problem. Were men to spend as much time with their children as women do, and were women to be as actively engaged in the occupational/professional world as men are, then children would stop linking authority, independence, and justice to men and love, dependence, and care to women. Rather, children would think that all human beings need to be both autonomous and connected to others in order to be fully human persons.

Interestingly, not all psychoanalytic feminists think that dual-parenting and dual-working arrangements are likely to liberate women from leading life on men’s terms. Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva advise women to stay in the so-called Imaginary, the domain infants must leave in order to enter the so-called Symbolic order – the realm of language, rules, and laws: in short, the world of men. They see women as losing out by entering an ‘order’ that will oppress, suppress, or repress them whenever it gets a chance. Unlike the Symbolic order, the Imaginary provides a space for women to take joy in their difference from men – to live life freely on their own terms.

Postmodern and third-wave feminists push even harder than psychoanalytic feminists do to help women think, write, and speak in ways that overcome the dichotomous oppositions present in patriarchal thought. Postmodern feminists seek to rethink the category Woman. As they see it, Woman, as a discrete category upon which a label may be fixed, does not exist. There are only individual women, different from each other in their plurality and multiplicity. In contrast to philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, who stress the importance of holding fast to some sort of universal foundation for feminism, postmodern feminists insist that no single or even best explanation for women’s oppression exists. In fact, they claim that offering any such explanation is simply another instantiation of so-called phallogocentric thought – that is, the kind of male thinking that limits women’s and other marginalized people’s ability to conceive of themselves in new and diverse ways.

Like postmodern feminists, third-wave feminists have no patience with sameness. For them, difference is the nature of reality. Conflict, even self-contradiction, is to be embraced by any woman who wants to be her own self. Among other third-wave feminists, Judith Butler urges women to seek new sexual identities for themselves and to stir up as much ‘gender trouble’ as they wish. It is not that third-wave feminists want to think, speak, and write Woman out of existence, as if it were meaningless to identify as a woman. Rather, they want to permit each and every woman to define herself as she pleases. If a woman wants to be free, she must be courageous enough to live life on her own terms even when it is lonely and difficult to do so.

Exercise 1

As has been seen throughout this chapter, political factors, such as government objectives and the weight of sectors affected by exchange rate policy, are important elements that affect the decision in regards to the exchange rate regime adopted by a country. In this context, answer what the following items request.

Discuss the costs and benefits of a fixed exchange rate system, identifying which groups benefit and which are harmed with the adoption of this type of regime.

Discuss the costs and benefits of a floating exchange rate system, identifying which groups benefit and which are harmed with the adoption of this type of regime.

Considering your answers to the previous items, in a country whose elected ruler holds a high degree of influence on economic policy and is committed to growth, what would be the most adequate exchange rate regime? Give examples of countries that possess this type of political structure, associating it with the exchange rate regime adopted.

Continuing within the context of the previous item, in a country whose elected ruler is committed to democratic institutions and is subject to political pressure that is fairly scattered among the economic sectors, what would be the most adequate exchange rate regime? Give examples of countries that possess this type of political structure, associating it with the adopted exchange rate regime.

Considering the strict relation between monetary policy and exchange rate policy, what type of institutional rule would you use to reduce political influence on the exchange rate? Explain your answer, presenting, if possible, examples of countries that have implemented institutional reforms of this nature.

Developed and developing country settings

Constraints in the developed world are primarily determined by political and economic factors, with the former usually influencing/affecting the latter. By virtue of being a developed country, many requirements for a good healthcare system such as a well-trained workforce, reliable information and good logistics are, by definition (IMF—cited by Nielsen, 2016), well developed and would only present a mildly severe or temporary constraint.

The developing world, under the same definition, is often constrained in all or most of the areas required to provide a good healthcare system. As an example, South Africa has the challenge of inadequate financing in the face of a disproportionate disease burden, as well as shortcomings with respect to trained staff, reliable asset information, adequate facilities, and technology logistics.

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