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The Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) Service System was created in 1973 in the United States as a way to help people with disabilities access necessary supports and services to return to work and live independently. The program receives federal funds and operates in all 50 states and territories. The program is designed to allow consumers to develop a rehabilitation plan in collaboration with a VR counselor and receive necessary services and supports in order to meet their rehabilitation goals. Unfortunately, there are serious issues with access to services and rehabilitation success for minority individuals in the program, particularly African Americans. The chapter will first provide a brief overview of the Rehabilitation Act and its purpose, then we will introduce some of the research that has been conducted to evaluate the program over the years, with particular emphasis on the outcomes for African Americans, and then will focus on a series of studies that have been conducted by the authors in the state of Illinois. The chapter will conclude with some suggestions about ways in which the system could be improved and ways to empower African Americans in pursue of their rehabilitation and independent living goals, including peer-support and supported employment.

This chapter evaluates the effectiveness of states' research and development (R&D, used to represent creditable research expenses) tax credits. Prior studies report mixed results on the effect of state R&D tax credit incentives. Generally, such studies consider the influence of state R&D tax credits by applying the statutory income tax and R&D credit tax rates. We reexamine the effect of a state's entire tax burden instead of the statutory tax rates in moderating the effectiveness of a state's R&D tax credit incentives. After controlling for several nontax factors, such as the workplace environment, political environment, and workforce education levels in a regression analysis during the 2010–2013 period in 50 states, we find that statewide private-sector R&D spending is a positive function of the R&D tax credit and this effect increases with the overall level of the state tax burden. We attribute this finding to the fact that high tax burdens increase the present value of the R&D tax credits.

This study investigates the implications of trade, institutional and geographical variables on economic growth. The proposed analytical framework extends the seminal works of Frankel and Romer (1999), Rodrik et al. (2004), Silva and Tenreyro (2006) and Squalli and Wilson (2011).

Applying a comprehensive panel database that includes 133 countries during the period 1996–2014. Our estimators encompass three dimensions (fixed effects) and use the Pseudo Poisson Maximum Likelihood (PPML) approach to create an instrument for trade. This approach effectively addresses the issues associated with endogenous regressors.

Findings from this study demonstrate a significant correlation between economic growth and the variables of trade, institutions and geography, with trade surfacing as the most influential factor. Notably, the impact of these factors appears to be diminished in low-income countries, especially in the parameters that reflect the role of institutions on per capita income.

The originality of the study is underscored by four key aspects: the employment of a unique econometric approach, the use of a three-dimensional panel database with fixed effect estimators and PPML, the inclusion of a novel measure of trade openness diverging from the conventional literature in the bilateral trade equation, and finally, the implementation of robustness tests probing the sensitivity of per capita income to institutions, trade and geography.

Global Account Management (GAM) is not a recent phenomenon. Xerox first appointed global account managers in 1988 and Citicorp has a history of using GAM processes that go back over twenty‐five years. What is new is that GAM has emerged as one of the major strategic issues facing multinational companies operating markets that are thinking globally. As a consequence GAM has stimulated growing interest among academics and a flurry of experiential articles in practitioner journals and “How we did it” presentations at conferences. Over the past few years a number of major research initiatives have produced papers that attempted to build upon the rather fragmented outputs addressing GAM related issues that began to emerge during the middle of the 1990s. Three of the recent studies of particular interest are: The SRT/SAMA Global Account Management Study; The GAM Contingency Model; and The St.Gallen GAM Study. Even though each has provided valuable insights into the GAM process the new conceptual model provided in this paper is the first attempt to integrate all of the individual findings. A number of propositions are offered in an attempt to stimulate research in the area.

This paper gives a bibliographical review of the finite element and boundary element parallel processing techniques from the theoretical and application points of view. Topics include: theory – domain decomposition/partitioning, load balancing, parallel solvers/algorithms, parallel mesh generation, adaptive methods, and visualization/graphics; applications – structural mechanics problems, dynamic problems, material/geometrical non‐linear problems, contact problems, fracture mechanics, field problems, coupled problems, sensitivity and optimization, and other problems; hardware and software environments – hardware environments, programming techniques, and software development and presentations. The bibliography at the end of this paper contains 850 references to papers, conference proceedings and theses/dissertations dealing with presented subjects that were published between 1996 and 2002.

Sterilisation in India (and globally) has a contentious and deeply politicised history. Despite this troubling legacy, India continues to rely on female sterilisation as the main form of contraception and family planning. Abortion, which has been legal under broad grounds since 1971, intersects with sterilisation at different points over women's reproductive lifecourse. Drawing on three case studies exploring women's abortion trajectories in Karnataka, India (2017), this chapter examines sterilisation as a reproductive technology (RT) in women's abortion narratives. These include experiences of failed sterilisation necessitating abortion, as well as narratives around pre- and post-abortion counselling with sterilisation conditionalities. Women report healthcare workers shaming or scolding them for not being sterilised after their last pregnancy – demonstrating the prominence of sterilisation as an enforced social norm using ‘health’ frames. Using reproductive justice (RJ) as a lens, I analyse how sterilisation interacts with abortion and the narratives of shame and stigma that surround the two technologies and make visible the ways in which it results in the denial and restriction of women's reproductive freedoms.