Gabriel T. W. Wong

Understanding and Preventing Financial Fraud Against Older Citizens in Chinese Society Results of a Focus Group Study

This study examines the public discourse on financial fraud against older citizens in Chinese society using six focus groups with 45 stakeholders comprising social workers, police officers, caregivers, nurses, community representatives, and insurance and banking personnel. This study uses qualitative data to describe the patterns and social features that facilitate this specific type of crime in Hong Kong. The narratives of the community stakeholders reveal several specific social features of Hong Kong that contribute to financial fraud against older persons, such as traditional Chinese values and ideologies, increasing cross-border activities, the Internet and technological advancements, and unfavourable economic situations. The results of this study support the assumptions of the routine activity approach and have a number of theoretical and practical implications.

Adolescent illicit drug use and policy options in Australia: A multicriteria decision analysis

The etiology of illicit substance involvement is a multidimensional problem shaped by factors across individual, social, and environmental domains. In this study, a multicriteria framework is employed to incorporate the input of specialists regarding risk and protective factors and the effectiveness of alternative interventions to mitigate the adverse harms and consequences associated with adolescent drug initiation and subsequent use. Using a seven-stage drug use continuum (nonuse, priming, initial use, experimental use, occasional use, regular use, and dysfunctional use), experts rate social and environmental factors as the most important from nonuse to occasional use. Experts often support preventive and harm-minimizing strategies to interrupt the progression of drug involvement and accumulation of drug-related harms among adolescents. Compared with preferable interventions, less preferable options (e.g., drug testing/monitoring) are considered to have a negative policy impact on key social, environmental, and drug dimension domains, which tend to override their positive impacts on other areas.

Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA)

This chapter summarises the major steps used in CBA. It includes a discussion of incremental cost-comparison analysis, the optimal choice of programme and incremental cost-analysis. Nine steps are identified and described: (1) specifying alternatives, (2) deciding whose costs and benefits to include, (3) deciding what costs to count, (4) identifying impacts and selecting indicators, (5) predicting impacts over the lifetime of the proposal, (6) monetisation of costs and benefits, (7) discounting costs and benefits for present values, (8) computation of net present value, and (9) production of sensitivity analysis.

Conceptual Foundation of Economic Analysis (EA)

This chapter summarises the conceptual foundations of EA and the importance of EA to the decision-making process and the development of policy aimed at moderating crime more generally. In broad terms, it considers how EA can influence the strategic allocation of resources by a crime reduction agency over some time horizon (e.g., the planning of annual budgets), and how it can influence the selection of interventions from a set of alternatives given budget constraints (an activity that may be independent of, or a subordinate element of, longer-term planning).

A Scale for Rating Economic Analyses

This chapter introduces a rating scale that can be used to assess the adequacy of economic analyses. The rating scale sits alongside sister rating scales that have been developed collectively to assess evaluation studies and reviews for their utility as sources to inform decision-makers. Collectively, the overall rating scale is referred to as ‘EMMIE’ and relates to effect size, mechanisms or mediators, moderators, implementation conditions, and finally, economic assessment. The proposed new rating scale for economic assessment has five levels.

Economic Analysis and Public Policy

This chapter explains the rationale for the use of economic analysis to inform policy decisions. Economic analysis can contribute, for example, to setting priorities and plans, identifying the best way of achieving strategic objectives, helping to develop cost-effective plans, informing users as to the policy that can be implemented at lowest cost, identifying which alternative has lowest impact on third parties, providing an analysis on returns on investment, and documenting the decision-making process.

The Costing Tool

This chapter describes a comprehensive costing tool that can be used to capture the various costs that are incurred in developing and delivering a new intervention and that decision-makers need to consider. The costing tool has two parts. Part 1 uses the traditional techniques employed in the HM Treasury Green Book. Part 2 adds in other techniques that allow cost estimates to be made in the absence of reliable accounting data. Either part can be used, as they produce similar outputs, but if reliable data are available, Part 1 should be used.