One of the major challenges Canada faced during its extraordinary push to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees during a four-month period was to find housing for these newcomers. This report explores how the government, resettlement case workers, and private citizens tackled this challenge—balancing cost and location, access to services, and more—and how lessons learned can improve refugee housing practices for other countries going forward.

Marking the release of an MPI report, this webinar examines the intersection between immigration and child welfare systems and promising child welfare policies and agency approaches to address the needs of children of immigrants and their families.

Marking the release of an MPI report, researchers and practitioners on this webinar discuss brain waste among college-educated immigrants and initiatives that ease the barriers foreign-educated newcomers confront with regards to credential recognition, employment, and relicensure, as well as recent policy developments and ongoing challenges in the field.

Marking the release of a report on the barriers foreign-trained high-skilled immigrants face in the United States, this webinar examines programs and initiatives that assist with credential recognition, employment, and relicensure, as well as recent policy developments. Discussants review recommendations for community-based organizations, employers, and policymakers to expand successful efforts aimed at preventing brain waste. 

WASHINGTON – Four years since the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was signed into law, all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have developed accountability plans that include blueprints for serving English Learners (ELs), as well as measuring these students’ progress and being accountable for their outcomes. This marked a significant development, as EL performance was previously not well integrated with factors that determined whether a school was performing well or poorly.

Findings will be discussed during 25 February MPI Europe – SVR webinar

As the top destination in Europe for asylum seekers in recent years, Germany has rolled out a number of integration policy changes. Based on an early look at how newcomers’ integration is progressing, the report finds the policies have had ambiguous implications. The report also provides insights into the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the asylum seeker and refugee population.

With immigration a central plank of the Trump administration's policy agenda, the 16th annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference, held in October 2019, featured analysis by top experts in and out of government regarding changing policies implemented at the U.S.-Mexico border, narrowing of asylum, cooperation with migrant-transit countries, and actions that could reduce legal immigration, including revisions to the public-charge rule.

What goes on behind all the closed doors in politics? Most teachers never get a chance to find out, writes teacher-turned-politician John Waldron.

Teachers in Tennessee have an important voice in shaping state initiatives and policies.

The firing of a black staff member for repeating the n-word while telling a black student not to use it underscores how uneasy many districts, schools, and educators are with handling the use of racist language in any context.

Education policy analysts are closely watching Tuesday's races for governor and state legislature in both states to see what messages about K-12 could resonate when many more states hold elections next year.

Virginia Gov.-elect Ralph Northam has said he would further restrict that state's charter laws, and New Jersey Gov.-elect Phil Murphy has promised to pull the state out of the PARCC testing consortium.

The Urban Institute released a toolkit aimed at policymakers and investors interested in using private dollars to pay for public programs, such as prekindergarten.

The Trump administration weighed into a lawsuit, arguing that a state's transgender-athlete policy forces "biological girls to compete against biological boys who publicly identify with the female gender and want to compete on sex-specific athletic teams."

Guest blogger Andy Saultz explains that clear goals, built-in local decisionmaking, flexibility, and community involvement are the keys to the Student Success Act's success.

"The objective of this audit was to examine the extent to which Australian Government entities have implemented the Digital Continuity 2020 policy, and how effectively the National Archives of Australia is monitoring, assisting, and encouraging entities to meet the specified targets of the policy."--Pages 7-8.

This report provides an overview of the implementation of the Water plan (Mary Basin) 2006 and summarises the findings of the assessments undertaken for the last five years. The plan supports urban water supply and a variety of industries including significant agricultural production, a growing tourism industry and fisheries.

The use of behavioural insights in public policy has traditionally focused on small, low cost 'nudges' to improve communications, increase compliance and enhance the way services are delivered. But BETA has begun to look beyond to identify a smaller set of 'richer veins' where BI can offer high financial and social impact. These areas includes consumer choice, financial decision-making and personal wellbeing.

A program that lets retired teachers keep working while collecting retirement benefits is set to expire at the end of the month.

[Dorchester] : Dorset Community NHS Trust, 1997.

We study derivative-free methods for policy optimization over the class of linear policies. We focus on characterizing the convergence rate of these methods when applied to linear-quadratic systems, and study various settings of driving noise and reward feedback. Our main theoretical result provides an explicit bound on the sample or evaluation complexity: we show that these methods are guaranteed to converge to within any pre-specified tolerance of the optimal policy with a number of zero-order evaluations that is an explicit polynomial of the error tolerance, dimension, and curvature properties of the problem. Our analysis reveals some interesting differences between the settings of additive driving noise and random initialization, as well as the settings of one-point and two-point reward feedback. Our theory is corroborated by simulations of derivative-free methods in application to these systems. Along the way, we derive convergence rates for stochastic zero-order optimization algorithms when applied to a certain class of non-convex problems.

We propose expected policy gradients (EPG), which unify stochastic policy gradients (SPG) and deterministic policy gradients (DPG) for reinforcement learning. Inspired by expected sarsa, EPG integrates (or sums) across actions when estimating the gradient, instead of relying only on the action in the sampled trajectory. For continuous action spaces, we first derive a practical result for Gaussian policies and quadratic critics and then extend it to a universal analytical method, covering a broad class of actors and critics, including Gaussian, exponential families, and policies with bounded support. For Gaussian policies, we introduce an exploration method that uses covariance proportional to the matrix exponential of the scaled Hessian of the critic with respect to the actions. For discrete action spaces, we derive a variant of EPG based on softmax policies. We also establish a new general policy gradient theorem, of which the stochastic and deterministic policy gradient theorems are special cases. Furthermore, we prove that EPG reduces the variance of the gradient estimates without requiring deterministic policies and with little computational overhead. Finally, we provide an extensive experimental evaluation of EPG and show that it outperforms existing approaches on multiple challenging control domains.

Newly launched REBA Institute shares research suggesting multiple policy pathways increase access, lower costs and drive decarbonization of the electricity sector.

(PRWeb May 05, 2020)

Read the full story at https://www.prweb.com/releases/viable_policy_pathways_expand_access_to_renewable_energy_for_commercial_industrial_sector/prweb17099869.htm

Speech by Mr Agustín Carstens, General Manager of the BIS, to the Basler Bankenforum, Basel, 5 September 2019.

Op-ed by Mr Claudio Borio, Head of the Monetary and Economic Department of the BIS, published in Il Sole 24 Ore, 8 November 2019.

Keynote speech by Mr Agustín Carstens, General Manager of the BIS, at the 55th SEACEN Governors' Conference and High-level Seminar on "Data and technology: embracing innovation", Singapore, 14 November 2019.

As the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 continues to spread, questions have been raised about the potential impact on food supply and availability and on livelihoods around the globe.

FAO

The COVID-19 pandemic is currently one of the world’s most pressing issues and one that is increasingly shaping government policies. To help provide policy support and information to member [...]

BIS Bulletin No 9, April 2020. By allowing banks to run down some of their buffers, policymakers are sending a strong signal about their resolve to lessen the economic fallout from the pandemic. Such prudential measures complement the main policy levers: monetary and fiscal instruments. To avoid a reduction in credit to the real economy, authorities need to ensure that banks have the capacity and willingness to make use of the flexibility afforded by the buffer release. Payout restrictions on banks and risk-sharing between banks and the public sector will be key. For banks to continue playing a positive role in the supply of funding during the recovery, they should maintain usable buffers for a long period, as losses from a severe recession will take time to materialise.

Press release "Basel Committee coordinates policy and supervisory response to Covid-19", 20 March 2020

A look at support and regenerative policy initiatives by the Federal Reserve and the Government as more than 20 million jobs were lost in April 2020.

Opening statement by Mr Stephen S Poloz, Governor of the Bank of Canada, at the press conference following the release of the Monetary Policy Report, Ottawa, Ontario, 15 April 2020.

Remarks by Mr Olli Rehn, Governor of the Bank of Finland, at the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee Panel Discussion on "The world economy transformed: Reflections on policy responses and the future post pandemic monetary architecture", in the context of the virtual IMF Spring Meetings, Washington DC, 17 April 2020.

Daily data on monetary policy rates have been updated. This covers 38 central banks with the earliest data starting in 1946.

A look at support and regenerative policy initiatives by the Federal Reserve and the Government as more than 20 million jobs were lost in April 2020.

Bank of Italy Working Papers by Luca Metelli, Filippo Natoli and Luca Rossi

Bank of England Working Papers by Cristiano Cantore and Lukas Freund

Bank of England Working Papers by Cristiano Cantore, Filippo Ferroni and Miguel León-Ledesma

Central Bank of Chile Working Papers by Benjamín García and Juan Guerra-Salas

SA faces its gravest test in over 70 years, to rebuild an economy that was already in a protracted slump after the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, one could be forgiven for believing there's a wedge between the state's main actors tasked with the job of resurrecting a country that may see its jobless rate rise as high as 50%.

Dear Editor,On May 5, 2020, at about 8:40 am, I went completely berserk in the Scotiabank Liguanea Branch.I was astonished by my behaviour, to say the least, as this is the first time in the history of my existence that I had behaved in such a manner. I never used curse words. Thus, I have narrowed down my conduct to a moment of insanity.

LIKE Nicola Sturgeon, I blame the Tories. Not, like her, for everything everywhere, but for an off-key outing at FMQs.