Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty by making welfare programs conditional upon the receivers' actions. That is, the government only transfers the money to persons who meet certain criteria. These criteria may include enrolling children into public schools, getting regular check-ups at the doctor's office, receiving vaccinations, or the like. They have been hailed as a way of reducing inequality and helping households break out of a vicious cycle whereby poverty is transmitted from one generation to another. Do these and other claims make sense? Are they supported by the available empirical evidence? This volume seeks to answer these and other related questions. Specifically, it lays out a conceptual framework for thinking about the economic rationale for CCTs; it reviews the very rich evidence that has accumulated on CCTs; it discusses how the conceptual framework and the evidence on impacts should inform the design of CCT programs in practice; and it discusses how CCTs fit in the context of broader social policies. The authors show that there is considerable evidence that CCTs have improved the lives of poor people and argue that conditional cash transfers have been an effective way of redistributing income to the poor. They also recognize that even the best-designed and managed CCT cannot fulfill all of the needs of a comprehensive social protection system. They therefore need to be complemented with other interventions, such as workfare or employment programs, and social pensions.

Ideal for those with a minimum of mathematical and statistical knowledge, Business Research Methods and Statistics Using SPSS provides an easy to follow approach to understanding and using quantitative methods and statistics. It is solidly grounded in the context of business and management research, enabling students to appreciate the practical applications of the techniques and procedures explained. The book is comprehensive in its coverage, including discussion of the business context, statistical analysis of data, survey methods, and reporting and presenting research. A companion website also contains four extra chapters for the more advanced student, along with PowerPoint slides for lecturers, and additional questions and exercises, all of which aim to help students to: - Understand the importance and application of statistics and quantitative methods in the field of business - Design effective research studies - Interpret statistical results - Use statistical information meaningfully - Use SPSS confidently

While the world's attention has been focused on the spectacular economic success of Japan and Korea, the less developed countries of Asia have often been neglected. Asian Development closes the gap. In nontechnical style and with minimal mathematics, it presents an in-depth perspective on the economic development of fourteen countries in East, Southeast, and South Asia. Asian Development is mainly a story of success. Though some problems remain, Asian countries have shown remarkable resilience in responding to sharp changes in the international economy--oil shocks, world recession and inflation, exchange-rate and interest-rate fluctuations, and rapid technological change. The authors conclude that their ability to adjust to changing external conditions is closely related to intelligent governmental policies. Looking back they comment: "In the past, growth of the United States and Japan pulled up the growth rates of the smaller economies in the region." Looking forward, they predict: "In the future, increasingly it will be the growth of the Asian developing countries that acts as a catalyst to growth in the more advanced economies."

In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.

The Housing Challenge in Emerging Asia: Options and Solutions provides new insights and ideas to best design and implement housing policies aimed at improving access to affordable and adequate housing. The book offers an innovative theoretical framework to conceptualize and analyze various housing policies. It also critically reviews housing policies of various countries and draws lessons for others. The countries studied include advanced economies within and outside Asia, such as Japan, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as emerging countries within Asia, such as the People's Republic of China and India.