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What My Assignments Have Entailed
Highlights of My Experience
I have edited literally hundreds of documents covering
hundreds of topics and issues (cited broadly in my professional resume.
You may obtain a publications list as a file from my email address.). The
following are merely representative of the type of researchglobal
and domesticon which I have provided
different writing and editorial support.
Longitudinal Evaluation
Country Assistance Review: Bolivia.
(Operations
and Evaluation Division, the World Bank; not for public release.) (Submitted
under the title, Institutional Limits to Poverty Alleviation in Bolivia:
The Threat to Meaningful Policy Reform and Lending Assistance.
Research indicated that more than $400 million
in credits from the International Development Association (part of the
World Bank Group), plus more than $350 million in support from other
international donors (including USAID), enabled Bolivia to have positive
though tepid GDP growth in the past 12 years. Yet lending did not filter
down to those who were supposed to benefit from the GDP growth that the
credits inducedBolivia's poor, whose
socioeconomic indicators, already the second lowest in Latin America and
the Caribbean, did not change during the period. The main constraint against
alleviating povertythe World Bank's
philosophical mission in developing countrieshas
been the dearth of institutional integrity by Bolivia's judicial, civil
service, and customs systems, which prevent legitimate entrepreneurial
activity by all except large, foreign-owned corporations.
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Read and tied together more than 3,000 pages of independent,
personal, and Bank mission research on 12 years of IDA assistance to Bolivia
into a 7-page summary and a 35-page report.
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Wrote text boxes that summarized 7 research papers written
by independent analysts in the "fields" of Bolivia. Each paper corroborated
strands of the main message of the Country Assistance Review.
Bank executives did not share the vision of the
report for Bolivia's poor, and requested twice that it be revised. Its
main message now takes the form of a rhetorical question: "What would have
happened to Bolivia without IDA assistance?" The evidence indicates that
Bolivia might not have had positive GDP growth without the infusion of
creditsbut it also suggests that, had
more meaningful and substantive reform accompanied the infusion of money,
Bolivia would now be doing much better for its people.
Conference Proceedings
Second Annual World Bank Conference on Environmentally
Sustainable Development: The Human Face of the Urban Environment. (Published
by the World Bank.)
The
World Bank and the National Academy of Sciences sponsored
an adjunct conference to the UNCED-Earth Summit 1992 in Rio de Janeiro
and the UN Population Summit 1993 in Cairo to address the convergence of
the "brown" and "green" agendas and the threat of unchecked population
and urban growth on the environment in developing and industrialized
countries. The conference was one of the Bank's contributions to what is
referred to as the "Rio cluster"a series
of summits and proceedings that define the United Nations' Agenda 21 for
"environmentally sustainable development."
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Edited 1,235 pages of transcripts from panel discussions
and conference presentations into a 375-page report.
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Speakers included environmental program operators from São
Paulo, Santiago, Mexico City, Jakarta, Calcutta, and Seoul; the mayors
of Barcelona, Rome, Marseilles, and Nairobi; environmental ministers from
Canada, Brazil, and Germany; and Henry Cisneros (former Secretary of Housing)
and Robert Watson (former Associate Director for the Environment, Office
of Science and Technology, the White House).
Concerns about the global environment are not
the exclusive domain of Agenda 21. In fact, at the Rio Conference, a coalition
of nongovernmental organizationsthose "in the field"demanded a series of Alternative
Treaties (including the People's Earth Declaration) that questioned
the intentions of framers of Agenda 21. And in the United States, many
question Agenda 21's altruistic language, which masks the aim of some
proponents to undermine U.S. sovereignty and override the tenets
of the U.S. Constitution.
Synthesis of Research
Infrastructure Strategies in East Asia: The
Untold Story (Published by the World Bank, ISBN 0-8213-4027-1.)
The
East Asian "miracle" (while it lasted) was not just
an economic phenomenon. It also reflected the opening of what was once
the exclusive domain of Governmenta country's
infrastructure,
including roads, railways, seaports, water and
sanitation, electric power, and telecommunications.
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Edited twelve 90-page papers into a 200-page report on the
strategies used by Hong Kong, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore,
and Taiwan to modernize their infrastructure sectors in the post-War era.
The report focused specifically on policymaking, institutional, regulatory,
and financing arrangements, and ownership and service delivery schemes.
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Wrote the introduction to the report, synthesizing all findings
into lessons about what other industrial and developing countries could
learn from the East Asian experience.
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Edited case studies from India, Japan, and Korea that highlighted
the financial, regulatory, and organizational mechanisms of infrastructure
development.
Synthesis of Position Papers
Food Stamp Research Conference Monograph.
(Published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service.)
As
part of our nation's ongoing, as yet unfruitful, reevaluation
of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," the Food Stamp Program has been modernized,
streamlined, and automatedall in response
to questions about the income efficiency of the program. Yet in the absence
of more effective, less governmental interventions to reduce hunger in
our country, the FSP has often made the difference in a family's nutritional
intake, and it has remained open to all low-income families regardless
of age, disability, or family status.
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Edited eight papers solicited by the Food and Nutrition Service
from four research firms (Mathematica Policy Research,
The Urban Institute,
Research Triangle Institute, and
Abt Associates)
to address the salient issues confronting the Food Stamp Program as it
prepared for reauthorization in the early 1990s. The major concern of the
day centered largely on the accessibility of the FSP to its eligible target
populationsparticularly the homeless,
the rural elderly, and American Indians.
Informative Literature Review
Literature Review to Support the Design of
a Medicare Alzheimer's Disease Demonstration. (Available from
Mathematica Policy Research. Co-author: Jennifer Schore.)
In the mid-1980s, little was known about caregiving services
for those who suffer from Alzheimer's disease or the respite services available
for the family and friends who are the major caregivers to the victims.
In response, Congress mandated a national demonstration to test a range
of services for Medicare beneficiaries with Alzheimer's and their "informal"
caregiverscase management, home and
community-based care, adult day care, and respite and other support services.
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Cowrote and edited an annotated literature review to guide
the implementation of the demonstrationthe
service package, eligibility criteria, and the selection of demonstration
sites.
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The review covered current literature on the prevalence and
incidence of the disease, its payment coverage, the cost of services, profiles
of caregivers and the burden on them, services at the federal, state, and
private levels, and diagnostic criteria. Documents included The Gerontologist,
Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Journal of Gerontology, Family
Relations, American Journal of Public Health, and Losing a Million Minds:
Confronting the Tragedy of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementia (U.S.
Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1987).
Although the demonstration did not come to fruition
(largely because HCFA's funding was slashed), the report suggested an avenue
for relief that has come to be the exception in our country's medical care
systemthat whatever money is available
for the disease be channeled not to the medical community itself, but to
beneficiaries and caregivers themselves, to enable them to direct and configure
the services they receive. As Bruce C. Vladek, the recent Administrator
of HCFA, said to the Alzheimer's Association Public Policy Forum on April
10, 1995. "In order to build a beneficiary-focused system, the dollars
. . . should follow the beneficiary."
Project Series
Evaluation of the Impacts of the Job Corps
Program. (Published by Mathematica Policy Research for the U.S.
Department of Labor.)
Of all the pre-Clinton models for encouraging and enabling
youths to choose productive employment over crime and welfare, the Job
Corps Programnow 34 years oldis
one of the documented successes. Yet because the program is expensive (since
Corpsmembers reside at Job Corps centers and the program's services are
so aggressive), the program has at times been the target of cuts, particularly
in the 1980s under the Reagan budgetary trimming.
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Served as project editor of 4 major reports on the impacts
of the program (which have survived intense analytical scrutiny), 3 reports
on the costs and benefits of the program, and 12 technical reports on topics
ranging from the difficulty of interviewing high-risks youths to the value
of the work output they generate as they benefit from and participate in
program services.
Despite being targeted for cuts over the years,
the program has persevered, largely because these evaluations of the impacts
of the program indicated that the program pays off. More than 40% of Job
Corps students complete their vocational training, and more than 70% secure
jobs or enroll in full-time education. The increases in Corpsmembers' earnings,
employability, employment positions, and investments in education and training
have in turn reduced their criminality and dependence on public transfers.
Series of Reports on the Same Topic
Americans with disabilities are no longer a population
cut off from the mainstream. Public advocacy, legislative and judicial
action, and improved medical and therapeutic techniquesall
have effected a shift in perceptions about the willingness and ability
of mentally and physically challenged Americans to engage productively in employment
or, as with nondisabled Americans, any pursuit they choose.
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Edited a 300-page report on a U.S. Department of Labor initiative
in the mid-1980s to assess a "structured training and transitional support"
(STETS) model for enabling mentally challenged Americans to secure and
engage productively in mainstream employment. Helped write and edit a spin-off
paper, published in "Exceptional Children" (vol. 53, April 1987), which summarized
the experimental design of the demonstration, its impacts on labor-market
behavior, training and schooling, public transfer use, and lifestyles,
and conclusions for the policy community in general.
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Edited and coordinated the production of a series of descriptive
and quantitative reports on a project for the Social Security Administration
to enable mentally challenged SSI recipients to become more self-sufficient
economically and socially. Also wrote introductory material and prepared
and edited copy for a series of case histories (entitled "Making the Move",
available from Mathematica Policy Research) that documented the
specific successes and failures of individual participants as they strived
for greater economic and social independence.
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A successful businessman (and the founder of the
National Cristina Foundation) wanted to test the premises of the Americans with
Disabilities Act that citizens with disabilities would engage in productive
employment if offered a job. His research came as a surprise
that
"employable" Americans with disabilities were not in fact so willing to
accept jobs offered to them, largely because the positions did not offer
meaningful work or required overly intensive training. I helped the author
transform these research findings into a successful doctoral dissertation
and thence into a spin-off position paper submitted to the U.S. Department
of Labor.
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