Recently, fiscal decentralization, which involves the devolution of government fiscal responsibilities to lower levels of government, has been discussed in many developed and developing countries. In particular, the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth is a key issue in recent theoretical and empirical studies in public finance. The empirical evidences produce mixed results. In this study, the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth in a sample of several provinces will be explored. A province study offers several advantages: a bigger sample of data is available for province than for Indonesia; and panel data estimation is able to adjust the cultural, historical, and institutional differences and also to capture the local heterogeneities. By adopting a production-function-based estimation framework, the empirical estimation is done on a sample of cross section data that comprises of 26 province governments and the time series yearly data from 1992 to 2002. The Generalized Least Square method is used to test these data. The results indicate that: first, the fiscal decentralization variables (expenditure indicator) show the positive and significant coefficients, while, the revenue indicator shows the negative relationship with economic growth. Hence, several policy implications can be derived; i.e, the local government should be able: to increase their non taxes revenues; to create conducive conditions for capital inflows; and to develop a clear framework for fiscal decentralization assignment such as income redistribution and borrowingJEL classification: E60; E62; H62; H63; 04Keywords: province government financing; fiscal decentralization;localautonomy;fiscal policy; economic growth; cross-province data;
The dichotomy between pay-as-you-go (taxation financing) and pay-as-you-use (debt financing) methods of financing municipal projects, etc, is the area of concern in this paper. While there arc advantaees and disadvantages to both forms, debt financing carries a considerable amount of baggage known as interest. Interest or usury has been a concern of economic and religious thinkers through the ages. Given the potentially negative effect this has on the debtor, Indonesia is forewarned as it decentralizes fiscal administration to local governments. Besides reliance on taxation financing, an alternative public debt option is highlighted.
Nicolas Dousse, Grégoire Heitz, Felix Schill, Dario Floreano
Semi- or fully autonomous personal aerial vehicles (PAVs) are currently studied and developed by public and private organizations as a solution for traffic congestion. While optimal collision-free navigation algorithms have been proposed for autonomous robots, trajectories and accelerations for PAVs should also take into account human comfort. In this letter, we propose a reactive decentralized collision avoidance strategy that incorporates passenger physiological comfort based on the optimal reciprocal collision avoidance strategy. We study in simulation the effects of increasing PAV densities on the level of comfort, on the relative flight time and on the number of collisions per flight hour and demonstrate that our strategy reduces collision risk for platforms with limited dynamic range. Finally, we validate our strategy with a swarm of ten quadcopters flying outdoors.
The sharing economy, the business of collectively using privately owned objects and services, has fuelled some of the fastest growing businesses of the past years. However, popular sharing platforms like Airbnb or Uber exhibit several drawbacks: a cumbersome sign up procedure, lack of participant privacy, overbearing terms and conditions, and significant fees for users. We demonstrate a Decentralised App (DAPP) for the sharing of everyday objects based on a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. This contract enables users to register and rent devices without involvement of a Trusted Third Party (TTP), disclosure of any personal information or prior sign up to the service. With increasing distribution of cryptocurrencies the use of smart contracts such as proposed in this paper has the potential to revolutionise the sharing economy.
In Albania there are plenty of natural water resources, a fraction of these reserves cover the need of population for fresh, clean drinking water. But this sector presents several critical problems related with water suppliers. It seems they have not completed the decentralization process; they depend on state subsidies to cover losses from uncollectible bills. Literature shows traditional forms of financing of water supplier in different economies (developed or not). One of the classic financial forms is to increase the rate paid bills. The water should be seen as product that has its own market and an equilibrium price. But do the citizens of Vlora city perceive in adequate way this concept? Should be an economical problem for them if the water tariffs increase or are they using alternative resources of drinking water? The article aims to give a descriptive overview of water industry and suppliers in Albania and especially empirically conclusions about of the situation in Vlora city, focusing on the perceptions of citizens. Are the accumulated financial losses of water supplier correlated with the citizens’ perception about water as a public good? It's been used data through a structured questionnaire (Zeneli F., WP-Questionnaire, 2015) about 160 families, were part of the survey; also data from General Directorate of Water in Albania; elaborated using statistical software IBM SPSS 21, to identify link between determinants of drinking water demand in the sector. The main conclusion is that citizens see the water provider service a public good, while from water suppliers water distributed is their product that provides their market position and their economic sustainability. Let this paper be one of the first in the topic to determine drinking water demand determinants in Vlora city.
Background Mechanisms for and levels of financing for public health services in Europe are insufficiently documented and understood. Concerns have been raised in a number of countries over recent budget cuts. Methods Our study draws on (i) a review of grey and published evidence, (ii) detailed descriptions of the financing of public health services in nine European countries (England, France, Germany, Italy, Moldova, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia and Sweden) using a structured data collection template, and (iii) a review of WHO, Eurostat and OECD datasets as well as national statistics. Results Levels of financing for public health services remain difficult to assess, but available data suggest that funding is low as a percentage of total health expenditure. Available data differ between international and national databases, further complicating a detailed assessment. Public budgets at national, regional and local levels (financed mainly through taxation and social health insurance) are the main source of financing for public health services. In some countries, such as Poland, private sources also play an important role. Allocation mechanisms frequently do not allow for medium- to long-term planning. Approaches that bring together health and other sectors for the funding of public health programmes remain rare, as does the use of taxes dedicated to public health. Countries such as England and the Netherlands have seen major budget cuts for public health services in recent years, while others (Italy, Germany) saw increases in funding, sometimes linked to new policy developments, such as the new Prevention Law in Germany. There are also major differences in financing levels and mechanisms within countries, in particular in decentralized systems. Conclusions The lack of sufficient and sustainable resources is a challenge for public health services in several countries, but there are also positive examples that can be emulated.
Raffaella Aversa, Francesco Tamburrino, Relly Victoria Petrescu, Florian Ion Tiberiu Petrescu · 7 authors
The research shows a bioinspired approach to be adopted to design of systems based on Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs), a class of Smart Materials that has in common with muscles the capability to react to an impulse (thermal for SMAs) with a contraction. The biomechanically inspired machine that is discussed in the paper refers to the antagonistic muscles pairs, which belongs to the Skeletal Muscles and are normally arranged in opposition so that as one group of muscles contract another group relaxes or lengthens. The study proposes a model, a solution not only to design a specific application, but also to provide an approach to be used for a wide range of adaptive applications (switchable windows, smart shadow systems, parking and urban shelters, etc.), where the shape changes in response to different external stimuli. The use of antagonist pairs mechanism provides a solution for better optimized systems based on SMAs where the main and proven advantages are: Easier and faster change of shape, lower need of energy for system operation, lower cost for SMA training and no problem of overheating.
Marco Conoscenti, Antonio Vetrò, Juan Carlos De Martin
In the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario, the block-chain and, in general, Peer-to-Peer approaches could play an important role in the development of decentralized and dataintensive applications running on billion of devices, preserving the privacy of the users. Our research goal is to understand whether the blockchain and Peer-to-Peer approaches can be employed to foster a decentralized and private-by-design IoT. As a first step in our research process, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review on the blockchain to gather knowledge on the current uses of this technology and to document its current degree of integrity, anonymity and adaptability. We found 18 use cases of blockchain in the literature. Four of these use cases are explicitly designed for IoT. We also found some use cases that are designed for a private-by-design data management. We also found several issues in the integrity, anonymity and adaptability. Regarding anonymity, we found that in the blockchain only pseudonymity is guaranteed. Regarding adaptability and integrity, we discovered that the integrity of the blockchain largely depends on the high difficulty of the Proof-of-Work and on the large number of honest miners, but at the same time a difficult Proof-of-Work limits the adaptability. We documented and categorized the current uses of the blockchain, and provided a few recommendations for future work to address the above-mentioned issues.
In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life.
Many countries manipulate the value of their currency or use some form of capital control, yet the data usually used to detect these manipulations are low frequency, expensive, lagged, and potentially mismeasured. I demonstrate that the price data of the internationally traded cryptocurrency Bitcoin can approximate unocial exchange rates which, in turn, can be used to detect both the existence and the magnitude of the distortion caused by capital controls and exchange rate manipulations. However, I document that bitcoin exchange rates contain problematic bitcoin-market-speci c elements and must be adjusted before being used for this purpose. As bitcoin exchange rates exist at a daily frequency, they reveal transitory interventions that would otherwise go undetected. This result also serves as veri cation that Bitcoin is used to circumvent capital controls and manipulated exchange rates.
George Bissias, Brian Neil Levine, A. Pinar Ozisik, Gavin Andresen
We present and validate a novel mathematical model of the blockchain mining process and use it to conduct an economic evaluation of the double-spend attack, which is fundamental to all blockchain systems. Our analysis focuses on the value of transactions that can be secured under a conventional double-spend attack, both with and without a concurrent eclipse attack. Our model quantifies the importance of several factors that determine the attack's success, including confirmation depth, attacker mining power, and any confirmation deadline set by the merchant. In general, the security of a transaction against a double-spend attack increases roughly logarithmically with the depth of the block, made easier by the increasing sum of coin turned-over (between individuals) in the blocks, but more difficult by the increasing proof of work required. In recent blockchain data, we observed a median block turnover value of 6 BTC. Based on this value, a merchant requiring a single confirmation is protected against only attackers that can increase the current mining power by 1% or less. However, similar analysis shows that a merchant that requires a much longer 72 confirmations (~12 hours) will eliminate all potential profit for any double-spend attacker adding mining power less than 40% of the current mining power.
Andrew Miller, Yu Xia, Kyle Croman, Elaine Shi · 5 authors
The surprising success of cryptocurrencies has led to a surge of interest in deploying large scale, highly robust, Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) protocols for mission-critical applications, such as financial transactions. Although the conventional wisdom is to build atop a (weakly) synchronous protocol such as PBFT (or a variation thereof), such protocols rely critically on network timing assumptions, and only guarantee liveness when the network behaves as expected. We argue these protocols are ill-suited for this deployment scenario. We present an alternative, HoneyBadgerBFT, the first practical asynchronous BFT protocol, which guarantees liveness without making any timing assumptions. We base our solution on a novel atomic broadcast protocol that achieves optimal asymptotic efficiency. We present an implementation and experimental results to show our system can achieve throughput of tens of thousands of transactions per second, and scales to over a hundred nodes on a wide area network. We even conduct BFT experiments over Tor, without needing to tune any parameters. Unlike the alternatives, HoneyBadgerBFT simply does not care about the underlying network.
Fan Zhang, Ethan Cecchetti, Kyle Croman, Ari Juels · 5 authors
Smart contracts are programs that execute autonomously on blockchains. Their key envisioned uses (e.g. financial instruments) require them to consume data from outside the blockchain (e.g. stock quotes). Trustworthy data feeds that support a broad range of data requests will thus be critical to smart contract ecosystems.
Roman Matzutt, Oliver Hohlfeld, Martin Henze, Robin Rawiel · 6 authors
As transaction fees skyrocket today, blockchains become increasingly expensive, hurting their adoption in broader applications. This work tackles the saving of transaction fees for economic blockchain applications. The key insight is that other than the existing "default'' mode to execute application logic fully on-chain, i.e., in smart contracts, and in fine granularity, i.e., user request per transaction, there are alternative execution modes with advantages in cost-effectiveness. On Ethereum, we propose a holistic middleware platform supporting flexible and secure transaction executions, including off-chain states and batching of user requests. Furthermore, we propose control-plane schemes to adapt the execution mode to the current workload for optimal runtime cost. We present a case study on the institutional accounts (e.g., coinbase.com) intensively sending Ether on Ethereum blockchains. By collecting real-life transactions, we construct workload benchmarks and show that our work saves 18%\sim 47%18%-47% per invocation than the default baseline while introducing 1.81%\sim 16.59%1.81%-16.59% blocks delay.
Ethereum is a framework for cryptocurrencies which uses blockchain technology to provide an open global computing platform, called the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). EVM executes bytecode on a simple stack machine. Programmers do not usually write EVM code; instead, they can program in a JavaScript-like language, called Solidity, that compiles to bytecode. Since the main purpose of EVM is to execute smart contracts that manage and transfer digital assets (called Ether), security is of paramount importance. However, writing secure smart contracts can be extremely difficult: due to the openness of Ethereum, both programs and pseudonymous users can call into the public methods of other programs, leading to potentially dangerous compositions of trusted and untrusted code. This risk was recently illustrated by an attack on TheDAO contract that exploited subtle details of the EVM semantics to transfer roughly $50M worth of Ether into the control of an attacker.
For some years (2008-2010), territorial authorities have been facing a drastic decrease in their resources. The local business tax reform in 2010 has slowed down the dynamism of tax revenues. The regional political representatives no longer have the ability to determine the tax rate. The funds allocated by the State, after having first experienced a freeze in their value, are now reduced as a consequence of successive « stability », « responsibility » and "growth" pacts introduced by different governments. In parallel, the transfers of competences at the beginning of the 2000’s (rail transport and the second act of decentralization) are causing increasingly rigid financial charges for the Regions. Our research aims to understand the causes of these transformations and to qualify the changes that are impacting regional resources. It seeks to determine if there is a growing financialisation of regional politics or if, on the contrary, there is still some local political control despite budgetary constraint. Through a comparative analysis of three Regions (Limousin, Alsace and Nord-Pas-de-Calais), and based on the observation of the reorganization that is happening within regional institutions, our thesis envisages to understand how the political / financial duo evolves in a framework of unprecedented budget constraint.
Gina Gallegos-García, Vincenzo Iovino, Alfredo Rial, Peter B. Roenne · 5 authors
In e-voting protocols, cryptographers must balance usability with strong security guarantees, such as privacy and verifiability. In traditional e-voting protocols, privacy is often provided by a trusted authority that learns the votes and computes the tally. Some protocols replace the trusted authority by a set of authorities, and privacy is guaranteed if less than a threshold number of authorities are corrupt. For verifiability, stronger security is demanded. Typically, corrupt authorities that try to fake the tally result must always be detected.To provide verifiability, many e-voting protocols use Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge proofs (NIZK). Thanks to their non-interactive nature, NIZK allow anybody, including third parties that do not participate in the protocol, to verify the correctness of the tally. Therefore, NIZK can be used to obtain universal verifiability. Additionally, NIZK also improve usability because they allow voters to cast a vote non-interactively.The disadvantage of NIZK is that their security is based on setup assumptions such as the common reference string (CRS) or the random oracle model. The former requires a trusted party to generate a CRS. The latter, though a popular model for secure protocol design, has been shown to be unsound.We address the design of e-voting protocols that provide verifiability without any trust assumptions. We show that Non-Interactive Witness-Indistinguishable proofs can be used for this purpose. Our e-voting protocols are private under the Decision Linear assumption, while perfect individual verifiability, i.e. a fake tally is detected with probability 1, holds unconditionally. Perfect universal verifiability requires a trusted public bulletin board. We remark that our definition of verifiability does not consider eligibility or end-to-end verifiability. First, we present a general construction that supports any tally function. Then, we show how to efficiently instantiate it for specific types of elections through Groth-Sahai proofs.
The scientific credibility of findings from clinical trials can be undermined by a range of problems including missing data, endpoint switching, data dredging, and selective publication. Together, these issues have contributed to systematically distorted perceptions regarding the benefits and risks of treatments. While these issues have been well documented and widely discussed within the profession, legislative intervention has seen limited success. Recently, a method was described for using a blockchain to prove the existence of documents describing pre-specified endpoints in clinical trials. Here, we extend the idea by using smart contracts - code, and data, that resides at a specific address in a blockchain, and whose execution is cryptographically validated by the network - to demonstrate how trust in clinical trials can be enforced and data manipulation eliminated. We show that blockchain smart contracts provide a novel technological solution to the data manipulation problem, by acting as trusted administrators and providing an immutable record of trial history.
Spatial interaction among local governments in fiscal setting decisions is receiving increasingly attention in the applied public economics literature. Spatial interaction models rely on the presence of an externality from local budget making, that is external effects originate from inter-jurisdictional resource flows due to tax competition for a mobile base, or from local public expenditure spillovers into neighboring jurisdictions. Similarly, the intergovernmental grants competition exists when there is a rivalry among local governments to get them from central government. This paper attempted to identify how great the fiscal competition among local governments in Indonesia. Using spatial statistics, we concluded that the fiscal competition among municipalities was greater compared to the pre fiscal decentralization period. It seems that the local tax setting and expenditures decisions in particular municipality can be attributed to the mimicking behavior to neighbor regions. Also, we found that the fiscal competition among municipalities could be attributed negatively to the fiscal disparity. Those imply that in the regional autonomy era the local governments tend to increase their local own revenue intensively and demand for intergovernmental grants in order to finance their expenditures. In the long run, they could lead to the high cost economy, worsening fiscal dependency, and inefficiency of local government expenditures. Those findings above suggest that the distribution of intergovernmental transfers among regions should consider the local tax effort and the services minimum standard plays an important role to achieve the efficiency of local government expenditures.
Bitcoin (BTC) is often cited as Libertarian. However, the technology underpinning Bitcoin, blockchain, has properties that make it ideally suited to Socialist paradigms. Current literature supports the Libertarian viewpoint by focusing on the ability of Bitcoin to bypass central authority and provide anonymity; rarely is there an examination of blockchain technology’s capacity for decentralised transparency and auditability in support of a Socialist model. This paper conducts a review of the blockchain, Libertarianism, and Socialist philosophies. It then explores Socialist models of public ownership and looks at the unique cooperative properties of blockchain that make the technology ideal for supporting Socialist societies. In summary, this paper argues that blockchain technologies are not just a Libertarian tool, they also enhance Socialist forms of governance.