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Copyright of Interventions Économiques is the property of Association d'Economie Politique and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper seeks to move beyond what Martin and Ruhs described as the numbers versus rights equation in temporary labour migration programs. We do this by examining the ideology of temporary labour migration. This ideology has three key elements: temporariness, labour markets and rights. The paper describes how these concepts obscure key features of temporary labour migration programs. The argument is developed by examining points of contrast between current programs in place in the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK. The paper concludes by demonstrating how unmasking the power imbalances of this ideology will lead to new policy directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International focus on reducing onward HIV transmission emphasizes the need for routine HIV testing and early uptake of antiretroviral treatment (ART). Strategic targets have been set for 2020 to achieve the goal of 90% of people infected with HIV diagnosed, 90% of identified cases on treatment, and 90% of persons on treatment virally suppressed (90–90–90). It is vital to understand the complexity of factors influencing a person's treatment decisions over time and the context which may enable better adherence. In this paper we present findings from the review of published and gray literature (2003–2013) on the documented factors associated with treatment initiation and adherence in the general adult population of Australia, Canada, and the UK. A framework developed by Begley, McLaws, Ross, and Gold [2008. Cognitive and behavioural correlates of non-adherence to HIV anti-retroviral therapy: Theoretical and practical insight for clinical psychology and health psychology.Clinical Psychologist, 12(1), 9–17] in Australia was adapted to summarize the findings. A systematic database search using keywords and a set of inclusion criteria yielded 17 studies (Australia = 6; Canada = 8; UK = 3). In addition 11 reports were included in the review. We found that a person's abilities and motivations (intrapersonal factors, reported in 7 studies) to start and continue ART are influenced by a host of interconnected factors spanning relationship (interpersonal, 3 studies) and broader structural (extrapersonal, 15 studies) factors that are situated within social determinants of health. People therefore evaluate various costs and benefits of starting and staying on treatment, in which biomedical concerns play an important yet often subsidiary role. In this review the economic barriers to care were found to be significant and under-reported, highlighting the persistent health inequities in terms of access to services. Our understanding of the context around people's use of ART remains poor. Qualitative social research within HIV-positive communities is urgently needed to capture people's lived experiences and may address some of this deficit in understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Census-based deprivation indices have been widely used in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada and UK to measure area-based socio-economic inequalities. This paper examines the indicators used in census-based area deprivation indices using a political ecology approach. We question whether the current indicators of deprivation derived from census data are meaningful for the all age groups and minority groups in the population, with a particular focus on deprivation indicators used in New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. We comparatively reviewed methodological papers and reports that describe the indicators of deprivation in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada and the UK from 1975 to 2014. We consider the relationship between the notion of standards of living and measurements of deprivation and explore how hegemonic cultural constructs are implicit in measures of deprivation that privilege a Eurocentric, ageist and gender normative construction of statistics. We argue for more political ecological analyses to studying the relationship between social inequalities, geographies, health inequities and political economy to transform structures of oppression and inequality. This requires turning the analytical gaze on the wealthy and privileged instead of defaulting into deficit models to account for inequality. Studies of deprivation and inequality would benefit from understanding the processes and operations of power in the (re)production of socio-economic and health inequities to inform holistic strategies for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper reports on a qualitative study examining everyday practices of healthy living (HL). Forty-four semi-structured interviews were undertaken with Canadian and UK citizens, aged 45 – 70, in April–May 2010. The research sits within the now substantial literature concerned with how health information is mediated, both by people and technologies, and employed in the context of ‘good’ health citizenship. Throughout this work, notions of ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’ have been interrogated, theoretically and empirically, to reveal both the knowledge/power relationships integral to ‘informing’ processes and the shifting relationship between information and care in contemporary health encounters. In this paper, we analyse how people make sense of what it means to live healthily and how they know if they are doing so by focussing on three ways in which study participants become informed about healthy living: through their engagement with universal HL messages, through their own information searches, and through their attempts to measure their ‘healthiness’. Following critique of the “logic of choice” in contemporary healthcare, we understand healthy living as a “situation of choice” where complex problems are framed as simple matters of choice and where information and technologies are understood as neutral aids to decision-making in support of ‘correct’ choices. Our analysis builds on and extends Mol’s work by exploring how participants negotiate between this “logic of choice” and her alternative “logic of care” in their accounts of everyday HL informing practices and how the two logics “interfere” with one another. These accounts show resistance to the logic of choice through ‘calls for care’ but they also show clearly how the disciplining logic of choice works to (re)present such calls for care as failed attempts at healthy living, undermining the very practices the logic of choice seeks to encourage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Canada and the United Kingdom have pedigrees in offering asylum; however, research in both countries has demonstrated widespread poverty amongst asylum seekers and a high risk of homelessness. Focusing on case examples drawn from 60 in-depth interviews with refugees in Toronto and London, this paper shows how national and local structures shape pathways to homelessness, and how refugees interpret their homlessness in the context of their flight from persecution, reception, and settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bowen and colleagues ask us to re-imagine how to conduct research in academic-practice partnerships, and to develop capacity in the applied research and health workforce to do this. This commentary reinforces their messages, and describes a framework of research capacity development for impact (RCDi) which emphasizes active and continuous experiential learning within research partnerships. The RCDi framework includes the need to focus on multiple levels in the collaboration architecture, and describes principles of working that aims to increase impact on services, and learning opportunities for all partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Fundamentally, the goal of health professional regulatory regimes is to ensure the highest quality of care to the public. Part of that task is to control what health professionals do, or their scope of practice. Ideally, this involves the application of evidence-based professional standards of practice to the tasks for which health professional have received training. There are different jurisdictional approaches to achieving these goals.Methods: Using a comparative case study approach and similar systems policy analysis design, we present and discuss four different regulatory approaches from the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. For each case, we highlight the jurisdictional differences in how these countries regulate health professional scopes of practice in the interest of the public. Our comparative Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis is based on archival research carried out by the authors wherein we describe the evolution of the institutional arrangements for form of regulatory approach, with specific reference to scope of practice.Results/conclusions: Our comparative examination finds that the different regulatory approaches in these countries have emerged in response to similar challenges. In some cases, 'tasks' or 'activities' are the basis of regulation, whereas in other contexts protected 'titles' are regulated, and in some cases both. From our results and the jurisdiction-specific SWOT analyses, we have conceptualized a synthesized table of leading practices related to regulating scopes of practice mapped to specific regulatory principles. We discuss the implications for how these different approaches achieve positive outcomes for the public, but also for health professionals and the system more broadly in terms of workforce optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There is no widespread agreement over what form healthcare professional regulation should take, and the evidence base concerning the effectiveness and fairness of regulatory systems and practices is limited. Those urging policy change argue there is a need to modernize; however, there is much we can learn from reviewing the history of healthcare professional regulation.Main Body: An overview of the history of regulation in Canada, with consideration of the United States of America and the United Kingdom, is provided. Self-regulating professions emerged in the nineteenth century, influenced by a variety of stakeholders responding to local concerns for healthcare quality, access and professional training. Regulatory practices changed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in response to changing stakeholders and shifting interests.Conclusions: Reviewing the history of healthcare professional regulation reveals lessons to inform policy in a range of settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are over 5000 Specialised Biotechnology Firms (SBFs) in the world, out of which at least 1500 are in the USA, 400 in Canada, and a similar number in the UK. Within this group of SBFs rapid growth is concentrated in some 10% of the firms. This paper compares the growth patterns of SBFs in the USA and the UK, and with the previous results for Canada. These three countries represent nearly 50% of SBFs in the world. By combining several different databases, the paper reveals the determining factors of SBF growth in the two leading countries. Using correlation and logistic regressions for each country, we found that five factors (patents, the targeting of human health products and processes, the support of venture capital, R&D and marketing corporate alliances, and the search for world markets) explain most of the growth of these firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives We sought to compare all-cause mortality of people living with HIV and accessing care in Canada and the UK. Methods Individuals from the Canadian Observational Cohort ( CANOC) collaboration and UK Collaborative HIV Cohort ( UK CHIC) study who were aged ≥ 18 years, had initiated antiretroviral therapy ( ART) for the first time between 2000 and 2012 and who had acquired HIV through sexual transmission were included in the analysis. Cox regression was used to investigate the difference in mortality risk between the two cohort collaborations, accounting for loss to follow-up as a competing risk. Results A total of 19 960 participants were included in the analysis ( CANOC, 4137; UK CHIC, 15 823). CANOC participants were more likely to be older [median age 39 years (interquartile range ( IQR): 33, 46 years) vs. 36 years ( IQR: 31, 43 years) for UK CHIC participants], to be male (86 vs. 73%, respectively), and to report men who have sex with men ( MSM) sexual transmission risk (72 vs. 56%, respectively) (all P < 0.001). Overall, 762 deaths occurred during 98 798 person-years ( PY) of follow-up, giving a crude mortality rate of 7.7 per 1000 PY [95% confidence interval ( CI): 7.1, 8.3 per 1000 PY]. The crude mortality rates were 8.6 (95% CI: 7.4, 10.0) and 7.5 (95% CI: 6.9, 8.1) per 1000 PY among CANOC and UK CHIC study participants, respectively. No statistically significant difference in mortality risk was observed between the cohort collaborations in Cox regression accounting for loss to follow-up as a competing risk (adjusted hazard ratio 0.86; 95% CI: 0.72-1.03). Conclusions Despite differences in national HIV care provision and treatment guidelines, mortality risk did not differ between CANOC and UK CHIC study participants who acquired HIV through sexual transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the current global focus on strengthening HIV prevention through greater testing and treatment uptake, it is increasingly salient to identify and address barriers to testing. A review of the published, peer-reviewed literature and national reports from Australia, Canada, and the UK (2003–2013) on barriers to HIV testing was conducted to provide new information relevant to Australia and to complement earlier reviews from Canada and the UK. A systematic database search using keywords and a set of inclusion criteria yielded 36 studies (Australia = 13; Canada = 6; and the UK = 17). In addition 17 unpublished reports were included in the review. Our study uses a novel, comprehensive framework to describe barriers to HIV testing, and thus contributes to moving beyond the traditional patient–provider–system categorization. Within that framework, barriers are categorized as either intrapersonal (reported in 15 studies), interpersonal (21), or extrapersonal (16) and conceptualized within wider sociocultural and structural contexts. People's abilities and motivations to test (intrapersonal factors) are influenced by a host of interconnected factors spanning relationship (interpersonal) and broader socioeconomic, political and cultural (extrapersonal) factors. We suggest that the relative effects of interventions targeting barriers to HIV testing at the intrapersonal and interpersonal levels are limited by the extent to which the social determinants of health are addressed. The framework may also lend itself to thinking about the enabling factors for HIV testing, and future research may investigate the application of that framework for strategizing the most effective response. Future studies should also capture the lived experiences of barriers to HIV testing experienced by patients, especially in populations which are hard to reach based on social and geographic distance. Context-specific studies to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of various interventions proposed in the literature to address barriers to HIV testing are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate about the future of universal social programmes has been raging for years, both in social-democratic and in liberal welfare states. The objective of this article is to contribute to the literature on universality by analyzing the evolution of universal social programmes in two social-democratic and two liberal countries: Denmark, Sweden, Canada and the UK. This choice of countries provides the opportunity to investigate whether the principle and practice of universality has fared differently both within and between countries. The analysis focuses primarily on the national level while exploring three policy areas: pensions, healthcare and family policy, specifically child benefits and day care. The main conclusion of our comparative analysis is clear: among our two liberal and two social-democratic countries, the institutional strength of universality varies greatly from one policy area and one country to another. Considering this, there is no such a thing as a universal decline of universality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donors have lagged behind aid recipients in adhering to the principles of aid effectiveness. Explaining the reasons for this demands greater awareness of organisational attributes within donor entities. To date, there have been only limited attempts to relate donor organisational factors to aid-effectiveness goals. This article elaborates on a number of such relationships based on an empirical examination of donor dynamics in Norway, the UK and Canada. Donor effectiveness provides an important lens through which to build a robust post-Busan global partnership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors examine the details of the board of director (BOD) education programs currently offered in Canada, the UK and Australia. The authors analyse the program patterns relative to an integrated model of BOD education and present recommendations for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary & Nonprofit Organizations is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Citizenship tests are increasingly used by national governments as part of their naturalization procedures. Several analysts suggest that citizenship tests are indicative of a converging trend toward civic integration, especially in Europe. The reform of the Canadian citizenship test in 2009-2010 represents an opportunity to examine the mobilization of tests in different national context. Are citizenship tests necessary the central tools of civic integration policies? In order to answer this question, this article first argues that it is crucial to understand citizenship tests as public policy instruments. Using the approach developed by Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick LeGalès, the article compares the emergence and characteristics of the citizenship tests implemented by Canada and the United Kingdom. Stemming from this analysis, this article demonstrates that the two citizenship tests are different instruments despite their similar appearances. The Canadian test remains, despite the reform, an instrument to promote naturalization and integration. In contrast, in addition to promoting civic integration, the British test is also an instrument of immigration control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates Canada's tax-free savings account (TFSA), using evidence from the UK experience with a similar type of plan (the individual savings account, or ISA) to test the veracity of the government's assertions regarding which Canadians will be the primary beneficiaries of this new savings incentive. Specifically, the analysis considers whether the TFSA will prove to be as advertised-a savings mechanism that will benefit "Canadian from all income levels and all walks of life." The authors first set out the technical details of the TFSA and describe how it fits into the existing Canadian landscape of tax-assisted savings. They then present results from the UK government''s review of the ISA seven years after its introduction in 1999. Like Canada's TFSA, the UK's ISA was promoted wit the stated objective of providing a tax system for savings that "will benefit the many and not just the few." Although the UK government considers the ISA to have successfully met this objective, the authors' analysis suggests otherwise and should cause Canadian taxpayers to doubt the ability of the TFSA to help moderate earners build their savings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a framing analysis of mainstream press coverage of poverty (offline and online) in Canada and the UK, and compares mainstream news coverage to coverage on alternative news sites. The research questions the extent to which, and how, coverage of children and immigrants presents contemporary constructions of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’. It is argued that rationalizing and individualizing frames dominate coverage of poverty and immigration. The author suggests that the significance of the dominance of these frames is their ability to privilege and embed market-based approaches to poverty and immigration. An analysis of alternative news content reveals the extent to which social justice frames, the very frames that counter market-based approaches, are absent from mainstream news coverage. Overall, these results indicate that challenging problematic representations and approaches to poverty will require changing representations, an expansion of coverage that runs counter to news norms, and structural investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a result of a transnational comparison of two broadcast book programs' influence on readers' book choices. Online surveys and focus group interviews in Canada and the UK illustrate active audience participation in the converged era of print books, the internet, television and radio. The analysis examines readers' negotiation of book choices through uses and gratifications theory as informed by a cultural critique of the programs themselves. Readers simultaneously respond to and create a hierarchy of cultural tastes that are bound up in the cultural assumptions that they have about the different media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines and compares the growth and prevalence of MPs' blogging in the UK and Canada. We explore the scope and objectives of such blogs, assess their democratic significance and analyse the institutional and systemic features that help shape the blogosphere. Diverging patterns of adoption were found: the number of blogs have increased in the UK but withered in Canada, where party discipline has been heavily imposed. This illustrates the impact the wider systemic environment can have on the adoption of new technologies. Ultimately, it is concluded that while there is evidence of a potential for MPs' blogs to serve as spaces for debate and conversation, the current majority resemble the traditional style soapbox where few listen let alone take the time to engage. However, there is some early evidence to show that blogs might in fact have a great deal of potential in personality driven, and internal party, election campaigns which have a niche, but highly attentive audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The responsibility of the social work profession to be inclusive and equitable in its service provision is reviewed via policies relating to professional training regarding sexual orientation issues. A comparative review of Canada, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA) and international standards regarding sexual orientation issues in social work codes of ethics and curricula standards was undertaken. A consistency exists in the USA between its ethics code and curriculum standards further backed by a mandated approach, but it is weak in the area of ethically principled practice skills. Both Canada and the UK are less consistent and comprehensive and lack a mandated approach. The results speak to where consistencies exist and where they need to be established in order to develop an infrastructure that properly trains social workers in cultural competency for these populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]