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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 research—global and domestic—on 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 induced—Bolivia'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 poverty—the World Bank's philosophical mission in developing countries—has 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. 
 
  My Assignment
 
  • 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. 
  • 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 credits—but 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." 

 
  My Assignment
 
  • Edited 1,235 pages of transcripts from panel discussions and conference presentations into a 375-page report. 
  • 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 organizations—those "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 Government—a country's infrastructure, including roads, railways, seaports, water and sanitation, electric power, and telecommunications. 

 
  My Assignment
 
  • 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. 
  • 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. 
  • 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 automated—all 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. 

 
  My Assignment
 
  • 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 populations—particularly 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" caregivers—case management, home and community-based care, adult day care, and respite and other support services. 

 
  My Assignment
 
  • Cowrote and edited an annotated literature review to guide the implementation of the demonstration—the service package, eligibility criteria, and the selection of demonstration sites. 
  • 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 system—that 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 Program—now 34 years old—is 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. 

 
  My Assignment
 
  • 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 techniques—all 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. 
 
  My Assignments
 
  • 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. 
  • 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. 
  • 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.