Human rights as codified in international documents are claims every human being have by virtue of being a human. Meaning that every state must ensure, through its laws, that each individual is guaranteed these claims or rights equally. Islamic principles like other religions are obligations that its members (Muslims) must perform rather than claims. Therefore, it is possible that individual rights may not be respected within Islamic principles because, of the differences in their origin and emphasis, one is a claim and the other a duty of believers. The concern of violating rights of other people within Islamic law calls into attention how Islamic principles can be applied in a state while guaranteeing human rights as universal principles. This study discusses various approaches proposed by Muslim authors on how human rights can be justified in Islam. Since human rights are political concepts, in the sense that each state must ensure that human beings go about their life freely, they should be the focus of consensus among different doctrines in a modern state. That is a principle to justify human rights in Islam must consider the fact of pluralism of religious doctrines and how all are included in the political process of the state.

Tax systems are used for economic and social concerns such as promoting the economic growth or decreasing the income inequality and tax evasion, increasing the social welfare, etc. Researchers argue that the consumption taxes are quite high in Turkey compared to other OECD countries. Therefore, the proposed tax reform in this study is to decrease the Value Added Tax (VAT) rate and to increase the top statutory income tax rate. This thesis constructs and presents first set of a 55-period overlapping generations (OLG) model for Turkey to analyze and evaluate the impact of tax reform on the Turkish macroeconomic variables and welfare. The results show that the proposed tax reform provides welfare gains to the low and middle income individuals while high income individuals are suffered.

This thesis contributes to the fields of Public Economics and Development Economics by studying human capital formation under three scenarios. Each scenario is represented in an individual paper between Chapters 2 to 4 of this thesis. Chapter 2 examines the effect of child care financing, through human capital formation, on growth and welfare. There is an extensive literature on the benefits of child care affordability on labour market participation. The overall inference that can be drawn is that the availability and affordability of appropriate child care may enhance parental time spent outside the home in furthering their economic opportunities. In another front, the endogenous growth literature exemplifies the merits of subsidizing human capital in generating growth. Again, other contributions demonstrate the negative implications of taxes on the returns from human capital on long run growth and welfare. This paper assesses the long run welfare implications of child care subsidies financed by proportional income taxes when human capital serves as the engine of growth. More specifically, using an overlapping-generations framework (OLG) with endogenous labour choice, we study the implications of a distortionary wage income tax on growth and welfare. When the revenues from proportional income taxes are channelled towards improving economic opportunities for both work and schooling investments in the form of child care subsidies, long run physical and human capital stock may increase. A higher level of growth may ensue leading to higher welfare. Chapter 3 answers the question of how child care subsidization works in the interest of skill formation, and specifically, whether child care subsidization policies can work to the effect of human capital subsidies. Ample studies have highlighted the significance of early childhood learning through child care in determining the child’s longer-term outcomes. The general conclusion has been that the quality of life for a child, higher earnings during later life, as well as the contributions the child makes to society as an adult can be traced back to exposures during the first few years of life. Early childhood education obtained through child care has been found to play a pivotal role in the human capital base amongst children that can benefit them in the long run. Based on this premise, the paper develops a simple Overlapping Generations Model (OLG) to find out the implications of early learning on future investments in human capital. It is shown that higher costs of child care will reduce skill investments of parents. Also, for some positive child care cost, higher human capital obtained through early childhood education can induce further skill investments amongst individuals with a higher willingness to substitute consumption intertemporally. Finally, intervention that can internalize the intra-generational human capital externalities arising from parental time spent outside the home - for which care/early learning is required to be purchased for the child - can unambiguously lead to higher skill investments by all individuals. Chapter 3 therefore proposes policy intervention, such as child care subsidization, as the effect of such will be akin to a human capital subsidy. The objective of Chapter 4 is to understand the implications of inter-regional mobility on higher educational investments of individuals and to study in detail the impact of mobility on government spending for education under two particular scenarios – one in which human capital externalities are non-localized and spill over to other regions (e.g. in the form of R&D), and another in which the externalities are localized and remain within the region. It is shown that mobility enhances private investments in education, and all else equal, welfare should be higher with increased migration. The impacts on government educational expenditures are studied and some policy implications are drawn. In general, with non-localized externalities, all public expenditures decline under full-migration. Finally under localized externalities, the paper finds that governments will increase their financing of education to increasingly mobile individuals only when agglomeration benefits outweigh congestion costs from increases in regional population.

Despite abundant studies of the application of pension systems in developed countries, little work has been done on how to apply a sustainable pension system in developing countries. The set-up of pension systems in developed countries and developing countries are expected to be different because in developing countries, labor is concentrated in the informal production sectors, while labor in developed countries is concentrated in the formal production sectors. Informal production sectors are sectors where the government, either central or local government, has little access to implement fiscal policies (taxes and subsidies) on firms and labor. This research develops a comprehensive system on how to set-up pension policies generally in developing countries and specifically in Indonesia. The basic set-up of the pension system suggested in this dissertation is as follows: a short run consumption tax policy to finance a defined benefit plan to support minimum physical needs of the older population, a medium run labor income tax policy to finance individuals' defined contribution fully funded savings plan, and a long run skilled labor creation through university education so that individuals are able to self-finance their own pension savings through the fully funded savings plan. The defined benefit plan is important because it can serve as a societal redistribution tool, while the defined contribution plan serves as a household savings tool. In addition, the skilled labor creation serves as a supporting tool so that the pension program is sustained in the long run. A theoretical model is developed from Auerbach and Kotlikoff overlapping generation (OLG) computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and specified for the Indonesian economy by introducing heterogeneity in households, where skilled and unskilled labor exist. In writing the model in terms of computer language, we apply an approach named mathematical programming system for general equilibrium analysis (MPSGE), developed by Thomas Rutherford. Some parameters used in the model are estimated by using econometric methods. The OLG-CGE model is applied in order to analyze the impact of consumption taxes and pension taxes on labor supply and also to calculate the equivalent variation of the distribution of consumption taxes burden across generations. Meanwhile, the impact of skilled labor creation on economic growth is calculated by applying linear algebra. The main macroeconomy data is taken from the Indonesian social accounting matrix (SAM) year 2000. Meanwhile, labor data are taken from the Indonesian labor conditions 1998-2003. The findings in this dissertation are as follows: for the equivalent variations, the consumption taxes for USD 1, USD 2, and USD 3 cash transfers per day person gave more benefit to the skilled labor than to the unskilled ones. In the meantime, the consumption taxes for USD 1 cash transfer gave incentives to the highest amount of labor, both skilled and unskilled labor, to work in the formal sector. The amount of labor after the consumption taxes for USD 1 cash transfer is higher than the initial condition. Increasing the consumption taxes for the USD 2 cash transfer only decreased the amount of labor work in the formal sector, with the amount of skilled labor decreased more than the unskilled labor. In addition, increasing the consumption taxes for the USD 3 cash transfer would also decrease the amount of labor work in the formal sector, with the amount of unskilled labor decreased more than skilled labor. We also find that the elasticity of government education expenditures on skilled labor creation is roughly 0.3. This means that if the Indonesian central government would like to eliminate the informal sector by 25 percent within 20 years, or an average 1.25 percent annually, they should increase the government education expenditures to 8 percent of total annual government budget. Other findings are that the increase of skilled labor would contribute positively to Indonesian economic growth, while the consumption taxes and the fully funded pension taxes would be likely to reduce current economic growth but increase the future one. Finally, these are the theoretical contributions to public finance literature: first, given dual formal and informal labor sectors present in an economy, where the latter is dominant, taxation of expenditures is preferred to taxation of income because the first may induce labor to work in the formal sector; second, given dual formal and informal labor sectors present in an economy, where the latter is dominant, there exists an optimal rate of consumption taxes that provides incentives for the highest amount of labor, skilled and unskilled labor, to work in the formal sector.

This thesis contributes to the fields of Public Economics and Development Economics by studying human capital formation under three scenarios. Each scenario is represented in an individual paper between Chapters 2 to 4 of this thesis. Chapter 2 examines the effect of child care financing, through human capital formation, on growth and welfare. There is an extensive literature on the benefits of child care affordability on labour market participation. The overall inference that can be drawn is that the availability and affordability of appropriate child care may enhance parental time spent outside the home in furthering their economic opportunities. In another front, the endogenous growth literature exemplifies the merits of subsidizing human capital in generating growth. Again, other contributions demonstrate the negative implications of taxes on the returns from human capital on long run growth and welfare. This paper assesses the long run welfare implications of child care subsidies financed by proportional income taxes when human capital serves as the engine of growth. More specifically, using an overlapping-generations framework (OLG) with endogenous labour choice, we study the implications of a distortionary wage income tax on growth and welfare. When the revenues from proportional income taxes are channelled towards improving economic opportunities for both work and schooling investments in the form of child care subsidies, long run physical and human capital stock may increase. A higher level of growth may ensue leading to higher welfare. Chapter 3 answers the question of how child care subsidization works in the interest of skill formation, and specifically, whether child care subsidization policies can work to the effect of human capital subsidies. Ample studies have highlighted the significance of early childhood learning through child care in determining the child’s longer-term outcomes. The general conclusion has been that the quality of life for a child, higher earnings during later life, as well as the contributions the child makes to society as an adult can be traced back to exposures during the first few years of life. Early childhood education obtained through child care has been found to play a pivotal role in the human capital base amongst children that can benefit them in the long run. Based on this premise, the paper develops a simple Overlapping Generations Model (OLG) to find out the implications of early learning on future investments in human capital. It is shown that higher costs of child care will reduce skill investments of parents. Also, for some positive child care cost, higher human capital obtained through early childhood education can induce further skill investments amongst individuals with a higher willingness to substitute consumption intertemporally. Finally, intervention that can internalize the intra-generational human capital externalities arising from parental time spent outside the home - for which care/early learning is required to be purchased for the child - can unambiguously lead to higher skill investments by all individuals. Chapter 3 therefore proposes policy intervention, such as child care subsidization, as the effect of such will be akin to a human capital subsidy. The objective of Chapter 4 is to understand the implications of inter-regional mobility on higher educational investments of individuals and to study in detail the impact of mobility on government spending for education under two particular scenarios – one in which human capital externalities are non-localized and spill over to other regions (e.g. in the form of R&D), and another in which the externalities are localized and remain within the region. It is shown that mobility enhances private investments in education, and all else equal, welfare should be higher with increased migration. The impacts on government educational expenditures are studied and some policy implications are drawn. In general, with non-localized externalities, all public expenditures decline under full-migration. Finally under localized externalities, the paper finds that governments will increase their financing of education to increasingly mobile individuals only when agglomeration benefits outweigh congestion costs from increases in regional population.

Una gran variedad de sistemas reales están compuestos por subsistemas compartidos. Por razones estructurales y/o computacionales es a menudo conveniente construir controladores descentralizados. Encontramos un sinfín de problemas de control en áreas tan diversas como problemas de tráfico, estructuras flexibles, sistemas de potencia, etc. en donde se hace imprescindible aplicar este tipo de técnicas. Todo ello ha motivado la creación de un marco matemático conocido como Principio de Inclusión, en donde se dan las condiciones bajo las cuales se pueden desarrollar y aplicar tales procedimientos.El Principio de Inclusión fue introducido a principios de los años ochenta dentro del contexto del análisis y del control de los sistemas de gran escala. Esencialmente, dicho principio establece las condiciones para que dos sistemas dinámicos de dimensiones distintas puedan tener comportamientos relacionados. Esto significa que es posible construir un sistema de mayor dimensión que el sistema dado a través de una expansión, de tal forma que el sistema expandido contenga toda la información a cerca del sistema dado. También es posible extraer la información del sistema de mayor dimensión a través de un proceso de contracción.El Principio de Inclusión se basa en la elección de unas apropiadas transformaciones lineales entre los espacios de estado, salida y control. Dichas transformaciones están influenciadas por una matrices conocidas como matrices complementarias. El papel que juegan las matrices complementarias ha sido extensamente probado. Sin embargo, a lo largo de la historia únicamente se han utilizado dos tipos concretos de expansiones, llamadas restricciones y agregaciones, aunque el estudio de otras posibilidades ha sido considerado como un problema de gran interés.El diseño de controladores descentralizados centra nuestra atención. Básicamente, la idea consiste en expandir el sistema inicial con subsistemas solapados ("overlapping") a un sistema de mayores dimensiones en donde los subsistemas aparezcan ahora disjuntos y lo más débilmente acoplados posible entre sí. Entonces, se diseñan controladores descentralizados para cada subsistema aplicando técnicas estándar de diseño. La principal contribución de la Tesis consiste en ofrecer una nueva y mucho más general caracterización de las matrices complementarias así como un procedimiento para su selección. Además, los resultados se han extendido a otros temas de interés, tales como la estabilidad, la controlabilidad y la observabilidad de sistemas, problemas sobre control óptimo, suboptimalidad, etc. Finalmente, se presenta un ejemplo ilustrativo en donde se pueden apreciar las ventajas que conlleva el uso de las nuevas matrices complementarias. / A large variety of real world systems consists of subsystems sharing common parts. For either structural or computational reasons it is often convenient to construct decentralized controllers by using overlapping information sets. There exist control problems in different areas such as traffic problems, flexible structures or power systems, where this is a particularly effective way to proceed. This has motivated to formalize these ideas and conditions in a general mathematical framework, which has been named Inclusion Principle. The Inclusion Principle was proposed in the early eighties in the context of analysis and control of complex and large-scale systems. Essentially, this principle establishes a mathematical framework in which two dynamic systems with different dimensions have a related behavior. This means that the big system can be built from the small one through an expansion process, in such a way that the big system contains the essential information about the behavior of the small system and the other way this information can be extracted from the big system by a contraction process. The Inclusion Principle relies on the choice of appropriate linear transformations between the inputs, states and outputs of both systems, which have the freedom of the selection of the so-called complementary matrices. The important role of the complementary matrices within this context has been proved. However, only two simple standard choices have been commonly used in practice, restrictions and aggregations, while the exploitation of the degree of freedom offered by the selection of the complementary matrices has been considered as one of interesting research issues. Particular attention has been given in the design of overlapping decentralized controllers. Basically, the idea is to expand the system with overlapped components into a larger dimensional system that appears decomposed into a number of disjoint subsystems. Then, decentralized controllers are designed for the expanded system and contracted to be implemented in the original system by using well-known control design methods. The main contribution of this thesis is to present a new characterization of the complementary matrices, which gives a more explicit way for their selection. A general structure for the complementary matrices together with a procedure to select them is presented. Moreover, these results have been extended to other issues such as stability, contractibility and observability of systems, linear quadratic optimal control problem, suboptimality concept, etc. Finally, an illustrative example to demonstrate the advantages of the new characterization of the complementary matrices is supplied.

For the last several years, speaker diarization has been attracting substantial research attention as one of the spoken language technologies applied for the improvement, or enrichment, of recording transcriptions. Recordings of meetings, compared to other domains, exhibit an increased complexity due to the spontaneity of speech, reverberation effects, and also due to the presence of overlapping speech. Overlapping speech refers to situations when two or more speakers are speaking simultaneously. In meeting data, a substantial portion of errors of the conventional speaker diarization systems can be ascribed to speaker overlaps, since usually only one speaker label is assigned per segment. Furthermore, simultaneous speech included in training data can eventually lead to corrupt single-speaker models and thus to a worse segmentation. This thesis concerns the detection of overlapping speech segments and its further application for the improvement of speaker diarization performance. We propose the use of three spatial cross-correlationbased parameters for overlap detection on distant microphone channel data. Spatial features from different microphone pairs are fused by means of principal component analysis, linear discriminant analysis, or by a multi-layer perceptron. In addition, we also investigate the possibility of employing longterm prosodic information. The most suitable subset from a set of candidate prosodic features is determined in two steps. Firstly, a ranking according to mRMR criterion is obtained, and then, a standard hill-climbing wrapper approach is applied in order to determine the optimal number of features. The novel spatial as well as prosodic parameters are used in combination with spectral-based features suggested previously in the literature. In experiments conducted on AMI meeting data, we show that the newly proposed features do contribute to the detection of overlapping speech, especially on data originating from a single recording site. In speaker diarization, for segments including detected speaker overlap, a second speaker label is picked, and such segments are also discarded from the model training. The proposed overlap labeling technique is integrated in Viterbi decoding, a part of the diarization algorithm. During the system development it was discovered that it is favorable to do an independent optimization of overlap exclusion and labeling with respect to the overlap detection system. We report improvements over the baseline diarization system on both single- and multi-site AMI data. Preliminary experiments with NIST RT data show DER improvement on the RT ¿09 meeting recordings as well. The addition of beamforming and TDOA feature stream into the baseline diarization system, which was aimed at improving the clustering process, results in a bit higher effectiveness of the overlap labeling algorithm. A more detailed analysis on the overlap exclusion behavior reveals big improvement contrasts between individual meeting recordings as well as between various settings of the overlap detection operation point. However, a high performance variability across different recordings is also typical of the baseline diarization system, without any overlap handling.

George Klosko attempts to solve a problem put forth by Rawls, namely how to create a persisting, just and stable liberal democracy in light of pluralism. He believes Rawls has failed at this task through the employment of political constructivism. Klosko claims that since Rawls does not utilize actual views within the existing public to form principles of justice, his method would fail to reach an overlapping consensus. As an alternative, Klosko proposes the method of convergence, which utilizes actual societal views to find overlapping concepts that inform the principles of justice. My argument is that Klosko misconstrues the method and aims of political constructivism. Klosko seems to incorrectly believe that stability is primary to establishing a liberal democracy, whereas it is secondary to the achievement of justice. Because of this error, Klosko’s method of convergence potentially has the consequence of creating a society which is stable but unjust.

The purpose of our study was to identify and present experiences encountered by parents with a child with diagnosis. Those narratives are made open for the public. Data has been collected through ten interviews with parents having children with a diagnosis. These interviews have also been complemented by interviews with one child and one youth. The parents and the children who have been interviewed, all have their own stories and experiences of how it is to live with a diagnosis in the family and for all families there are different diagnosis. Some of the families have had the diagnosis confirmed, and some are living with overlapping diagnosis, everything dependent on the symptoms picture of the child. A qualitative research method has been used using semi structured interviews. The interviews have been analysed using a narrative method, which in our case resulted in nine different stories. The narrative way of doing analysis in this study has been chosen, as the purpose of the study has been to make the different narratives public. The narratives are tied to the following theories: normality, stigmatization, categorization and economic motives. This study concludes, based on the family interviews, that there is no strong correlation to support any firm conclusion due to different experienced in all cases. However, one result which is evident in all cases is that the families are continuously struggling to get help in school, to get special support from society.

The purpose of this essay is, in a political philosophy perspective, to offer an illumination of John Stuart Mill¡¦s thoughts on modernity. In this essay, firstly, in the first chapter, I will try to elaborate the reason why I write this essay and take a perspective of history and political philosophy as my analytic viewpoint. Moreover, I also briefly introduce Mill¡¦s writings and the frameworks of this essay. In the second chapter, I describe the events, movements, and thoughts that gradually shape the modernity. From the standpoints of Weber, Hume and Romanticism, I also refer to one of the most important characteristics of modernity in political philosophy: value pluralism. In Mill¡¦s thoughts, how to response to the problem derived from value pluralism is my most important discourse. In the following chapter, I offer an exposition to detail Mill¡¦s discourses on modernity, focusing on his utilitarianism and liberalism. I mainly discuss how Mill¡¦s principles of utility and liberty response to the problem derived from value pluralism. I also discuss two contemporary thinkers¡¦ thoughts to find Mill¡¦s discourses on modernity, namely John Rawls and John Gray. In the fourth chapter, I assess and review the criticisms on Mill¡¦s discourses on modernity. In the conclusion chapter, I briefly go through the major viewpoints of this essay.