How much food, air, space, water, and various consumer goods are necessary to sustain productive life? "Vital Minimum: Life and Need in Modern France "is an ambitious history of attempts to define and quantify what we need, at bare minimum, to live and work. It uncovers the profound influence of science on modern France s reproduction of labor and the social order. Agronomists, chemists, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and amateur data gatherers all believed that social organization, and particularly the circulation of goods, should be actively directed according to scientific principles, which they attempted to articulate by grounding a study of human needs on quantifiable foundations. Science, they all held, would mitigate market exchange. Ultimately the science of need formed the core of social policy, coming to fruition after World War II with the welfare state. Dana Simmons shows howeven though it could not establish a satisfactory and stable measure of needs to shore up enduring legislationa science of welfare preceded and undergirded the modern welfare state."

This book provides a historical inquiry into the quantification of needs in humanitarian assistance. Needs are increasingly seen as the lowest common denominator of humanity. Standard definitions of basic needs, however, set a minimalist version of humanity – both in the sense that they are narrow in what they compare, and that they set a low bar for satisfaction. The book argues that we cannot understand humanitarian governance if we do not understand how humanitarian agencies made human suffering commensurable across borders in the first place. The book identifies four basic elements of needs: As a concept, as a system of classification and triage, as a material apparatus, and as a set of standards. Drawing on a range of archival sources, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), and the Sphere Project, the book traces the concept of needs from its emergence in the 1960s right through to the present day, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call for “evidence-based humanitarianism.” Finally, the book assesses how the international governmentality of needs has played out in a recent humanitarian crisis, drawing on field research on Central African refugees in the Cameroonian borderland in 2014–2016. This important historical inquiry into the universal nature of human suffering will be an important read for humanitarian researchers and practitioners, as well as readers with an interest in international history and development.

Publishes in-depth articles on labor subjects, current labor statistics, information about current labor contracts, and book reviews.

The publication is an international standard on the design and operation of an efficient and accurate vital statistics system at national level. It provides guidelines on collection, compiling and disseminating vital statistics. More specifically it contains (a) basic principles for a vital statistics system; (b) uses of vital statistics and civil registration records; (c) topics to be covered in a vital statistics system; (d) sources of vital statistics and how they function; (e) quality assurance in the vital statistics system and (f) strategies in improving civil registration and vital statistics systems in countries. It also informs policy makers and the general public on the importance of vital statistics and hence further improving the vital statistics system.

RiverFlow 2004 is the Second International Conference on Fluvial Hydraulics, organized as speciality conferences under the auspices of the International Association of Hydraulic Engineering and Research (IAHR) within its Fluvial Hydraulics and Eco Hydraulics Sections. RiverFlow conferences are a significant forum of discussion for many researchers