Putting two and two together? Early childhood education, mothers’ employment and care service expansion in Chile and Mexico

In recent years, several middle-income countries, including Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, have increased the availability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. These developments have received little scholarly attention so far, resulting in the (surely unintended) impression that Latin American social policy is tied to a familialist track, when in reality national and regional trends are more varied and complex. This article looks at recent efforts to expand ECEC services in Chile and Mexico. In spite of similar concerns over low female labour force participation and child welfare, the approaches of the two countries to service expansion have differed significantly. While the Mexican programme aims to kick-start and subsidize home- and community-based care provision, with a training component for childminders, the Chilean programme emphasizes the expansion of professional ECEC services provided in public institutions. By comparing the two programmes, this article shows that differences in policy design have important implications in terms of the opportunities the programmes are able to create for women and children from low-income families, and in terms of the programmes’ impacts on gender and class inequalities. It also ventures some hypotheses about why the two countries may have chosen such different routes.     

Possible hellenistic influences in the historical parts of the old testament

There is an agreement among scholars concerning the meaning of the Hebrew verb from the root in the OT. They all suppose that this verb means “sexual desire”. However, they base their opinion neither on the origin of this root nor on the study of all the verses in which it appears in the OT. The aim of the present study is to show that this Hebrew verb is originated in another language where it has many other meanings. In addition, it aims to prove that in most of the appearances of this verb in the OT there is no need to assume it has a sexual meaning.     

Telephone Communication Patterns in Austria: A Comparison of the IPFP-based Graph-Theoretic and the Intramax Approaches

Two alternative methodological approaches (the IPFP-based and the intramax procedures) to the problem of pattern identification in spatial interaction data are compared and evaluated in this paper. After a general discussion of the major characteristics and shortcomings of these methodologies, the paper presents the findings of a case study relying on telecommunication data measured by the Austrian PTT in 1991, in terms of erlangs. The results clearly illustrate the superiority of the intramax approach in the context of medium-sized and relatively centralized flow systems.