Balancing Protection And Opportunity

The conversion from planned to market economies spawned new opportunities and challenges in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Since the social safety nets of guaranteed employment and retirement security disintegrated, the transition governments are trying to develop new social protection systems or adapt the old ones to emerging welfare needs and fiscal realities. Political upheavals, macroeconomic instability, and the difficulty of implementing reforms have hampered progress. Thus the World Bank needs to address social protection issues to inform future Bank activities. To that end, this report presents a social protection strategy for transition economies rooted in three pillars of analysis: a conceptual framework based on risk management, an understanding of the context, challenges, and choices in each country, and Bank experience in social protection in the region.

How does copyright law take into account the interests of third parties, especially the general public’s interest in the greatest possible dissemination of knowledge and culture? Twelve basic questions give copyright law experts from more than forty countries the opportunity to provide answers related to their national law on the following matters: categories of works and subject matter, eligibility conditions, duration, “users’ rights,” the three-step test, misuse, differentiations between categories of right holders, TPM, and relations of copyright law to other legal areas such as fundamental rights, competition law, consumer protection law, media law etc. The standardized form of the reports makes it easy to see the impacts of copyright law in the industrialized countries as well as in emerging economies; in common-law and civil-law approaches; in countries of the Andean Community and of the European Union, as well as in countries that are not party to the WIPO Treaties. A detailed preliminary chapter provides an approachable overview of issues and results. This chapter also discusses the voice of academia, represented by the European Copyright Code of the “Wittem Group.”

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.