Blockchain Papers

Kayo YASUDA

This article analyzes the process through which WHO was established on the basis of the experience of the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO). The article particularly focuses on the LNHO technocrats. Through their prewar experiences, technocrats realized that international health governance could promote international cooperation, while it could be utilized by various national representatives as one of their diplomatic strategies. Technocrats tried to alleviate this vulnerability by balancing big powers with smaller powers, national representatives with specialists, and centralization with decentralization. Their efforts and the development of international security in which economic and social cooperation were evaluated as a means towards international security resulted in the international health governance's autonomous establishment under the UN system, which can be termed as the origin of “human security.” The development of social cooperation in the postwar period can be considered to be an extension of their efforts in the League of Nations.

Abderrazak Dhaoui

No abstract is available for this record.

Immanuel Wallerstein

It is in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth that the organizational structures of the sciences of man which we use today became fixed. In 1800 the categories (or ‘disciplines’) which today are standard – history, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science – did not for the most part exist as concepts, and certainly were not the basis of sharply differentiated groups of teachers and researchers. The somewhat tortuous process by which certain combinations of concerns and concepts took particular forms resulted in major ‘methodological’ debates, which we sometimes still hear about under the rubric, ‘philosophy of history’. Among the debates, one of the most influential was that between so-called nomothetic and idiographic knowledge, between the possibility and impossibility of generalizations about human behaviour, between the universalizers and the particularizers. The universalizers spoke of themselves as ‘scientists’. They tended to argue that human behaviour was a natural phenomenon like any other, and could therefore be studied on the same basis as any other natural phenomenan, using the same rules of logic (‘the scientific method’) and capable eventually of yielding precise results comparable to those achieved in the natural sciences. The particularists, in contrast, often termed themselves ‘humanists’. They tended to argue that human life, being thinking life, could not be viewed in the same way as other natural phenomenon, for one of two reasons. Either it was because, said some, humans have souls and are therefore resistant to arbitrary uniformities, or it was because, said others, the human researcher inevitably distorted the human subject of analysis in the very process of observing him and therefore the generalizations would never be valid. Like all such grand debates there is just so much that can be said on the subject, and it has largely been said. This does not mean that the debate is over or forgotten but simply that the divisions have been institutionalized and thereby contained. Grosso modo, the universalizers were assigned the departments of economics, sociology, and political science, and the particularizers the departments of history and anthropology. Obviously, given the high capriciousness of the organizational dividing lines, there were dissidents in each ‘disciplinary’ structure (such as political ‘theorists’ in political science, and linguists in anthropology). But no matter! Spheres of influence had been demarcated, and the status quo enshrined. This crude picture has to be qualified by taking into account regional variation. My description works best for the Anglo-American core of the world-system. The Germans chafed at British definitions of social knowledge and gave birth to an uncertain cross-breed, Staatswissenschaft. Some French chafed at the failure of other Frenchmen to chafe, which led to the birth of the Annales school. And the Western European working classes chafed at the system in general, and nourished outside the academy a critical perspective, Marxism, which challenged the universality of the ‘universals’. Underlying the dominant institutionalization of the great methodological split, universalizer versus particularizer, there turned out to be, as there usually is, a hidden but very important consensus, the concept of the individual society as the basic unit of analysis. Everyone seemed to agree that the world was composed of multiple ‘societies’. They disagreed about whether it was the case that all societies pursued similar paths down the road of history (albeit at differing rates) or that each society went its own historic way. They disagreed whether society in question took the form of a ‘state’ or a ‘nation’ or a ‘people’, but in any case it was some politico-cultural unit. The period after World War II saw in this field, as in so many others, the culmination of these intellectual tendencies in the elaboration of a perspective we may call ‘developmentalism’, which for most of its devotees went hand in hand with ‘behaviorism’. This perspective assumed that all states were engaged in ‘developing’ (which for many meant ‘becoming nations’), that their progress along this path could be measured quantitatively and synchronically, and that on the basis of knowledge derived from such measurements, governments could in fact hasten the process, which was a highly commendable thing to do. Since these states were proceeding down parallel paths, all states were intrinsically capable of achieving the desired results. The only serious intellectual question was why many resisted doing so. This viewpoint swept the scholarly world – not only of the hegemonic power, the United States, and its allies, old Europe, but also of its chief antagonist, the U.S.S.R. The theories of what governmental actions would promote development, and what social forces impeded it varied widely, but the plausibility of ‘development’ as a matrix of analysis reigned supreme until the mid-1960s, when it foundered on one economic reality and two political developments. The economic reality was that, despite all the theories, and all the presumed effort (aid, technical assistance, human investment), the so-called ‘gap’ between the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ countries was growing bigger, not smaller. The two political developments were in fact ultimately a reflection of this economic reality. One was the emergence of national liberation movements throughout the world which engaged in armed struggle with more or less success – Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba. Their struggle had a resonance within the United States and Western Europe – among students, professors, and the ‘Third World within’– which in fact shook the up-to-then facile dominance of the developmentalists in the academy. But this same political upheaval affected the Communist countries as well, where a long series of interrelated crises – the XXth Party Congress of the C.P.S.U., the ‘upheavals’ in Eastern Europe, the split between the Chinese and the Russians, the cultural revolution, the rise of ‘Euro-communism’– similarly has undermined the internal credibility of the Stalinist version of developmentalism, the crude sequence through which each state was destined to ‘pass’. When a theory no longer seems to serve an adequate social function, scholars usually begin to question its intellectual credentials. As ‘developmentalism’ seemed less and less to explain the social reality through which we are living, various authors criticized one or another of its premises, groping towards an alternative framework of explanation, which I shall call a ‘world-system perspective’. The key difference between a developmentalist and a world-system perspective is in the point of departure, the unit of analysis. A developmentalist perspective assumes that the unit within which social action principally occurs is a politico-cultural unit – the state, or nation, or people – and seeks to explain differences between these units, including why their economies are different. A world-system perspective assumes, by contrast, that social action takes place in an entity within which there is an ongoing division of labour, and seeks to discover empirically whether such an entity is or is not unified politically or culturally, asking theoretically what are the consequences of the existence or non-existence of such unity. By throwing overboard the presupposition that there is a ‘society’ we are forced to look at the alternative possibilities of organizing the material world. We in fact rapidly discover that there are a limited number of possibilities, which we may call varying ‘modes of production’, meaning by that something very close to what the phrase seems on the surface to convey: the way in which decisions are made about dividing up productive tasks, about quantities of goods to be produced and labour-time to be invested, about quantities of goods to be consumed or accumulated, about the distribution of the goods produced. One mode, historically the earliest, we may call the reciprocal-lineage mode. It is based on limited and elementary specialization of tasks in which the products are reciprocally exchanged among producers. In this mode the chief productive resource is human labour and therefore the chief guarantee of sub-group survival the control of reproduction (via the control of women and their offspring). Production over a certain level is politically unsettling by enabling younger persons to escape the control of elders and therefore inequalities though real are limited. Empirically, it is the case (and I think it could be established that theoretically it must be the case) that such systems are small in physical scope, and that the economic boundaries are largely identical with political and cultural boundaries. Mini-systems seem a reasonable name. I believe it is the case that such mini-systems are not only small in physical scope but short-lived historically (meaning a life of say six generations or so). This short life can be accounted for in various ways: the dangers for such a technologically primitive group of physical extinction (through warfare or natural calamity); the possibility of conquest; fission of the group as the result of slow growth in accumulated stock; reorganization of the division of labour resulting from physical flight and consequent ecological adjustment. If this is an accurate description, the world has known countless such groups over historical time and has virtually no historical records of how they functioned. Some ethnologists claim to have recorded such groups, but for the most part I am sceptical that the units studied were truly autonomous systems, since one of the preconditions of most such study has in fact been imperial control of the area studied by a larger political entity which in turn existed within a far wider division of labour. Our empirical knowledge is largely limited to larger divisions of labour which I shall term world-systems, using the word ‘world’ to signify larger space and longer time than mini-systems, and operationally to mean an arena, or division of labour, within which more than one ‘cultural’ grouping exists, but which may or may not be politically unified. There have in fact, up to now, been two basic forms of world-systems. Since in one form the prototype is the unified political system, we shall call this type the ‘world-empire’, by contrast with the other type which is precisely defined by the continuing absence of such political unity, the ‘world-economy’. The ‘world-empire’ has many variations in terms of the political superstructure and the cultural consequences. A large part of Weber's Economy and Society is a morphology of these variations. But the mode of production is common to these variant forms. It is a mode of production which creates enough of an agricultural surplus (based therefore on a more advanced technology than the reciprocal-lineage mode) sufficient to maintain both the artisans who produce non-agricultural goods and, in the widest sense, an ‘administrative’ stratum. Whereas the agricultural and artisanal producers in some sense ‘exchange’ goods, either reciprocally or in local markets, goods are transferred from producers to ‘administrators’ by a forced appropriation, ‘tribute’, which is centralized by someone or some institution – how remote this institution is from the producer is one of the major variables of the differing forms – and thereupon ‘redistributed’ to the ‘administrative bureaucracy’. The principal difference in this mode of production from the reciprocal-lineage mode was the fact that a class which did not produce ‘goods’ was supported (and indeed supported well). But there was a major similarity common to both pre-modern forms. In neither mode of production was maximal production desirable or desired. The reason is clear. Since the channel upward of the surplus appropriation in the redistributive-tributary form was the same ‘bureaucracy’ to whom the top of the structure ‘redistributed’ this surplus, too large a surplus created a strong temptation for ‘pre-emption’ of this surplus on the way upward. This of course constantly happened. But it meant that the ruling groups were always caught in the contradiction of wanting more, but not ‘too much’. The consequences were manifold. Technological advance was not desirable per se. It no doubt occurred, but it was probably less the desire to expand production than the need, when it occurred, to stem a decline in real production that served as its spur. Secondly, the contradictory needs of the ruling groups (more, but not too much) were communicated to the direct producers in terms of socially-fixed as opposed to socially-open quotas of appropriation. That is not to say that these quotas never changed. They changed constantly, but discontinuously, and the myth of the was a of the social In this mode of inequalities were in to the reciprocal-lineage mode, but there were some The ruling groups have the of life and by the over the direct but they were to since the of the ruling groups was on a level of appropriation from a despite the of the local ruling groups but their it is the case (and I think it could be established that theoretically it must be the case) that such systems were larger in physical than the reciprocal-lineage forms (and very as for the at its the economic division of labour, multiple – parallel groups of agricultural groups, ‘administrative’ But the of this mode of production was the political of the whether this or high have existed since the and up to very The number was but not The life of such systems varied to their their their ecological and so But the of such systems was a one – of and to the point where the of the surplus the surplus that in be at which point decline and The of and the and of when outside the ‘world-empire’, reciprocal-lineage mini-systems, but which when within one more out of which was and was thereby these two of production on the for of is a term which is often to mean the of by the ruling and ‘administrative’ in such And since there was a certain of the forms of a particular each time a was created in the same we can also use the concept to those cultural forms that are common to in the same is the of a long series of such Since the needs of were by in the of was and we have from which to the of such systems, which we may historical time (or in terms of The is a of social system from a ‘world-empire’ and a from a – both in structure and as a mode of As a a is defined as a division of labour within which are multiple – it is a world-system like the – but which has no political a political structure to the surplus, the surplus can only be the states within the to the the mode of production is A mode is one in which production is for that is, it is by its on a a in which each to (and therefore that which is, in the long most produced and but in which each to (and therefore is that the of are not to the individual as and as political to The basic contradiction that as a social system results from the of for the and its for the – of labour, of the of the of of the The of and that results is the of a This about its its its social Whereas the quantities of production in a redistributive-tributary mode were more or less precisely the is of a mode. There is no social to only the of the of and of individual producer not a but as much as and that can him to produce more, and more – science and technology – is But it must be or no is And is the less that is consumed the more be But as this way – the of there a point where production not but there are too – not the political of the but the economic of the There are to be inequalities of distribution and probably inequalities than in social science has always the The reason has to with the to be a result of and the by which the is In a system, the of the is the to the political but life for the producer is the basic of political But in a mode, with economic the life of the producer can be more as of surplus than as producer of the can best serve to by both and were very were probably less than a century and had to an They the political structures to of from the system and the that from time to time often they did it was a state to the boundaries of the division of labour, the being into a and the of a mode rapidly to a redistributive-tributary mode of is about the world is the emergence of a that it did more than it has to the (and thereby all mini-systems and and about a and ecological in the use of natural There are intellectual that may be about this world-system. The is the of its how is it that the European such The question is how such a system, The is what are the basic of a system, and therefore what account for its decline as a social of these is a long and one and be with any of I have longer to these I of these in the most of The is to be in the process of of a particular that of Europe, which seems to have its in its great of In the of of the two the real of the ruling seemed to a real One reason was the real of the the result of A was the that of of the level of and the warfare of the ruling of their the of economic The was there been a on the capable of the core of the system old of or had Europe been more there have been a more political reorganization of But there there was a of of on the part of the ruling It an alternative mode of that of the to whether it serve to the real of the ruling This economic the rise of the state – in the of a The of was not in the of a the over the it be as the of into an of the ruling it as any look from say 1800 at can The of was no The was in the of the producers. The had been created as a major social The of the system, two basic One was the of versus in which control by ruling groups not through in the through of in the but through to decisions about the and of the production of goods (via accumulated control over The other basic was the of economic core versus in which there was an appropriation of surplus from the producers of high goods by the producers of so-called The of the system, is the of these two of which but are not identical and the cultural and political (and of the Among other it has made it to to the of economic crises by class The by which the system ultimately its is and in terms of the of the – the basic about the for the and for the – the of labour and the of of these have In the case of these were largely by the of the twentieth In the case of internal there is still much The world is probably more or in the process of the of But too the world eventually an at which point the possibility of economic crises largely and thereby we into a of the system as to these are the of political A system of distribution known systems is only by which is a of the of two the and of the to the and of the to But over historical within the the is down in and the is The reason is The of is the of the surplus to the who are in fact the The process is But each is less than the since it from a of the surplus by the top in to the does not The point is to the with which one others, that is, the be what we are the appropriation of the producers has about as high in as in of the the distribution of this surplus has to from the top to the This is politically The so-called of the is often as politically it is this is the of their I it It is politically it is the top of a high enough to be This is the of that is the are in fact not despite but of the of the This rise has in fact made it that the of the producers are not to the needs and of the historically in movements and for reorganization of the distribution of the continuing of the are possibilities of political of direct producers in in success to success in the sense of its this and the from a to a in which we are and which a long time to is theoretically the of two the of the of which is to maintain the economic of the the of the between the two political of the to of the ruling groups and the direct producers on a world is about a developmentalist perspective is the fact that these historical are not one the politico-cultural entity as the unit of analysis. It is only by that it is we must study that we can begin to the of history, both those that are and those that are within the process of the social structures the world has over historical It is only that we can begin to be about a natural phenomenon, the human and in for the that in fact all of to and within

Andre Baechtiger, Seraina Pedrini

The inclusion of structural minorities and disadvantaged groups looms large in the study of democracy. There is ample recognition that “simple political egalitarianism on which the institutions and mechanisms of modern representative democracy were established has given way to increasing demands for group recognition as well as for forms of equality related directly to people's needs, characteristics, identities and conditions.” (Castiglione and Warren 2005: 2) There is also ample recognition that the standard liberal and majoritarian model of democracy is frequently unable to safeguard the most vital interests of structural minorities and disadvantaged groups. Several representation models and institutional devices have been proposed in order to advance the interests of minorities and disadvantaged groups. In the past decade, however, the study of inclusion and representation has increasingly taken a deliberative turn (Williams 1998; Urbinati 2000; Mansbridge 2003; 2009; Dryzek and Niemeyer 2008). Rather than focusing on formal and institutional means of inclusion (such as proportional representation, minority veto, or re-districting), deliberative approaches take an informal and dynamic view on inclusion and representation. In their mainstream and Habermasian-inspired version, deliberative approaches entail the idea of equal participation and symmetric dialogue, reasoned argument, common good orientation, serious and respectful listening (and responding) to other participants' claims, as well as mutual agreement based on the “forceless force of the better argument”. With their focus on equality, symmetry, serious listening, and respect, deliberative approaches spark hope to be susceptible to the interests of structural minorities and disadvantaged groups. Yet, despite tremendous interest in deliberative approaches in recent years, the exact specification and empirical translation of deliberative ideals in the context of minority and group inclusion has lagged behind. This may not be so surprising, given the fact that deliberative approaches are far from being fool-proof devices for the inclusion of disadvantaged groups. The major problem is that mainstream and Habermasian-inspired forms of deliberation might actually hamper inclusionary goals. On the one hand, feminists and difference democrats have argued that many disadvantaged people do not engage in rationalistic forms of deliberation, which may suit only a privileged few. On the other hand, why should disadvantaged groups respectfully listen to privileged groups or even transcend their interests in the light of the “better” argument, especially if they have experienced inequality or if their vital interests are at stake? As Williams (1998) has noted, requiring selflessness and self-transformation of the disadvantaged is deeply unfair. These are two valid objections, not easily addressed by the mainstream deliberative approach. Therefore, we propose a deliberative approach with “friendly amendments”. Our approach focuses on two central principles of deliberation, equality of participation and reciprocity, but it does so with a twist for reciprocity. First, equality of deliberation requires that all affected are included and “that no one person or advantaged group completely dominate the reason giving process, even if the deliberators are not strictly equal in power and prestige.” (Thompson 2008: 507). Second, reciprocity means that discourse participants should listen and respond to each other and do so in a respectful way (Chambers 1999). However, the trick here is to put the “burden” of reciprocity primarily on majorities and privileged groups: it is mainly their obligation to seriously listen and respond to the demands and arguments of minorities and disadvantaged groups and show a willingness to respect and accommodate these interests. Conversely, structural minorities and disadvantaged groups are not fully held accountable to these standards. They may be deliberative, but they may also adopt a more adversarial stance towards majorities and privileged groups. This relaxation is conditional though: the less inequality structural minorities and disadvantaged groups have experienced and the less their vital interests are at stake, the more we expect them to converge to the standards of majorities and privileged groups (and the more privileged groups are dispensed from taking a deliberative attitude vis-a-vis the disadvantaged). Finally, contrary to standard models of political inclusion and representation, our deliberative approach focuses only on the horizontal relationship among different (group) representatives and the ways they interact – rather than on the vertical relationship between representatives and constituents. We think that the former aspect of representation is critical though: it is the moment when inclusion and representation are in action and when constituent interests are turned into binding decisions. So far, there has been little empirical and systematic examination of deliberative forms of inclusion in the context of structural minorities and disadvantaged groups. In this study, we investigate equality of participation and reciprocity in the context of linguistic minorities in Switzerland (French, Italian and Romansch-speakers). To be sure, linguistic groups in Switzerland do not directly qualify as “disadvantaged” groups (such as Blacks in the United States), since they have not experienced deep inequality or oppression in the past. However, when their vital interests are at stake, they do not have formal means of veto power to prevent unwanted legislation but are generally dependent on the decisions of the German-speaking majority to realize their interests (both in representative and direct democracy). Moreover, there have been recurrent complaints of linguistic minorities of being marginalized and ignored by German speakers. As such, an empirical investigation of deliberative inclusion of linguistic minorities in Switzerland is far from being misdirected. At the same time, the institutional architecture of the Swiss political system is also conducive to deliberative forms of policy-making: it involves a consensus system with non-parliamentary features, enabling political actors to engage in consequential deliberation (see Steiner et al. 2004). Moreover, the party system is not organized along linguistic cleavages reducing partisan incentives to politicize linguistic conflicts. This combines with a specific motivation on part of the German-speaking majority to be receptive to the demands of linguistic minorities (Bachtiger and Steiner 2004). Thus, favorable institutional conditions and appropriate actor motivations should provide fertile ground to see our conception of deliberative inclusion “in action”. Put differently, the Swiss case enables us to explore how well the ideals of equality of participation and reciprocity are realized in practice when conditions are fairly ideal. In concrete, we focus on two Swiss parliamentary decision cases that deal with linguistic issues and directly concern linguistic minorities‟ vital interests (language article and language bill); in addition, we focus on a contrast decision case, the labor law revision which does not touch upon vital interests of the linguistic minorities. For the three cases, we explore patterns of participation and reciprocity in the committees of the first and second chambers of parliament. With regard to equality of participation, we analyze how often linguistic minorities speak up compared to the German-speaking majority. With regard to reciprocity, we analyze how often linguistic minorities are referred to, how often linguistic minorities refer to other actors, and whether this is done in a respectful and disrespectful way. Furthermore, we also perform an in-depth analysis of reciprocity and explore how often arguments of linguistic minorities are referred to by the German-speaking minority and whether this is done in a respectful (or, disrespectful) way. Our empirical analysis of deliberative inclusion draws from Steven Levitt‟s (2004) analysis of discrimination in the United States. We calculate frequencies for participation and reciprocity rates as a function of the speakers status – linguistic minority or linguistic majority -, controlling for other characteristics of the speaker (such as gender, role, or partisan affiliation) as well as characteristics of the context (different issues or first vs. second chamber). The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section II presents our model of deliberative inclusion. Section III provides background on deliberative inclusion in the context of linguistic groups in Switzerland, discusses the methodological approach, and presents the empirical results. Section IV concludes.

Desislava Stoilova

This study is intended to examine the influence of the current worldwide financial and economic crisis on financial decentralization process in Bulgaria and identify the answers of the central and lo-cal governments to the critical situation in the context of specific conditions of the national economy and the stage of financial decentralization reform. Analysis is focused on dynamics of the main mac-roeconomic indicators, based on fact figures for the period 1990–2009 and forecast for the period 2010-2011, and its impact on the public finance. The most important actions, taken by the national government to consolidate the crisis are described and evaluated on the base of their effects on the lo-cal finance. A comparison is made between the loss of Bulgarian economy in the beginning of transition (1991-1993), during the financial crisis in 1996-1997, caused by credit crunch and series of bank bankruptcies, and the current financial and economic crisis. Finally, some conclusions and pol-icy recommendations are outlined, intended to improve crisis management in Bulgaria both on the national and local level.

Thomas Stratmann, Ernesto Crivelli, Adam Leive

Government spending on health has grown as a percent of GDP over the last 40 years in industrialized countries. Widespread decentralization of healthcare systems has often accompanied this increase in spending. In this paper, we explore the effect of soft budget constraints on subnational health spending in a sample of OECD countries. We find countries where subnational governments rely primarily on central government financing and enjoy large borrowing autonomy have higher healthcare spending than those with more restrictions on subnational government borrowing.

Jan Camenisch, Sebastian Mödersheim, Dieter Sommer

No abstract is available for this record.

Man Ho Au, Willy Susilo, Yi Mu

No abstract is available for this record.

Kadeřábková Jaroslava, Marek Jetmar

Decentralization of decision-making on the availability of essential public goods for regional and local level raises questions regardless of ability to ensure or guarantee the supply by the small municipalities. It affects the delicate problem of fiscal decentralization and own limits of decentralization process. In this paper, we deal with problems concerning primarily the development of small municipalities as independent public corporations, their ability to play the self-government role and to ensure the availability of essential public goods and services. The main criteria for defining small rural communities are the population and the status of municipality in the settlement structure, which is a predetermined by range of services provided at territory of municipality (market services, public services) to its citizens and residents of surrounding villages. We deal with problems of financing small communities, their participation in the distribution of revenue from shared taxes, the availability of other resources. We monitor the factors that enter into models of reallocation of public resources. We base their findings mot only on information from literature, but also from terrain research, which not only confirmed some previously published facts, but allowed to reveal the factors that significantly affect the financial situation of small municipalities. This led to the determination of parameters, the key mechanism for setting the allocation of public resources. On the basis of the investigation, we analyze the parameters, the key mechanism for setting the allocation of public resources. In conclusion, the authors summarize the main issues and articulate the principles that should be respected in the formulation and adjustment of the budget determination.

Jung Hwan Lee

Well known for its centralized local economic system under the national equity principle, Japan has experimented with transforming this regional redistribution system into a new local economic system of governance for more autonomous local economic growth over the past decade. This new local economic governance has been characterized by the increasing involvement of social actors, such as large private corporations and local communities, in policy processes.This dissertation reveals that new local economic growth strategies for the new local economic governance have operated under very different models in different regions of Japan, although all new local programs have been introduced under the banner of public-private partnership. New partnership programs in the local economic policy arena in the 2000s have moved toward the market model, in which local authorities pursue growth by attracting international business resources, in the major metropolitan areas around Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, whereas they have moved toward the community model, in which local authorities purge growth by mobilizing local organizational resources, in the rest of Japan. The market model is embedded in market reform for deregulation that makes large private corporations' freer activities easy, whereas the community model is an attempt to strengthen the structure of endogenous networks among local authorities and local economic and social elites.This dissertation highlights two variables to explain regional variations of local economic growth strategies: dual local economic structures and diverging politico-economic coalitions. First, under the rule of Koizumi Junichiro, a coalition of promoting market reform among neoliberal politicians and large private corporations has won politically over a coalition for maintaining national equity among politicians embedded in traditional conservative center-local linkages, local business groups, and local leadership of underdeveloped areas, in national politics. The regional redistribution mechanism stopped functioning in this political choice. Instead, market reform and local community participation have been introduced as alternatives to regional redistribution mechanisms. Second, the major metropolitan areas and other underdeveloped areas, which came to stand on equal conditions for autonomous local economic growth strategies under decentralization reforms, are characterized by different situations in attracting private investment. The competitive regions of the major metropolitan areas have taken the market model as their main local economic growth strategy because they are competitive to attract private investment. In contrast, the protected regions outside the major metropolitan areas have taken the community model as their key local economic growth strategy because they have less competitive local economic structure of fading industries and scare population for attracting private investment.Over the past decade, reforms for public-private partnership in the local economic policy arena resulted in the disturbance of the Japanese way of balancing market powers and local interests in the postwar period. In the postwar period, the centralized regional redistribution mechanism, led by national politicians and central bureaucracies, functioned as a tool for social integration with consideration for national equity. However, experiments with the new form of local economic governance were not successful in balancing market reform with local community mobilization. The mobilization of local community resources could not match the political role of the regional redistribution mechanism outside the major metropolitan areas. In addition, market reform, which has been more effective in the advanced major metropolitan areas, has produced increasing regional economic disparity. Japan has faced a complicated stand-off between large private corporations detached from specific localities and local communities locked in place, which were connected by national political coordination mechanisms in the postwar period. Although each of two diverging local economic growth strategies has been effective in different regions, there was no national political mechanism for mediating local variations of these localized programs in the 2000s.

Bojana Perovic

The author explores distinctiveness of the regional state mostly in Spain as third model of territorial organization. Unlike unitary and federal, regional state is not wide-spread and broad accepted concept of vertical organization although modern Spain and Italy represents examples of good practice. Having in mind diversity of regional identities and strong cultural distinctiveness in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and other areas, author is wondering if any other model of territorial organization could be sustainable in such socio-cultural environment. After the period of Franco?s dictatorship, which had been trying to exterminate cultural and historical particularities among Spanish nations, decentralization demands have become more stronger resulting with the new constitution adopted in 1978. This act has set the corner-stone of modern Spanish democracy based on Autonomous Communities as specific forms of decentralized state and territorial autonomy.

Cătană Emilia Lucia, Cătană Marius Cristian

Improving quality and efficiency in providing public services by accelerating the decentralization process represents one of the fundamental premises of a democratic, rule of law state that is oriented towards achieving performance in public services for its citizens. Bringing public decision-making closer to the citizen, improving quality in providing public services to citizens, as well as reducing their costs, are but a small part of the advantages brought about by public services decentralization, with the major role in decentralization being played by both education institutions, and local public authorities. In this context, the study focuses firstly on approaching empirically and epistemologically the decentralization of Romanian public education system, which presupposes transfer of authority, responsibility and resources concerning decision-making, and of general and financial management towards education institutions and local community. What is also revealed in this study is the premises and stages of Romanian public education decentralization, the advantages but also disadvantages and limitations of decentralization, as well as the education public service prospects from the perspective of decentralization. Last, but not least the study approaches the subject from the viewpoint of related public policies and legislation; the research puts emphasis on the fact that in accordance with the present Romanian legislative framework, the entire patrimony of public schools- land and premises- is public property and belongs to communes, cities and municipalities, and it is managed by the respective local public authorities. Furthermore, it is local budges that finance schools, and school patrimony and funds are currently being handled by local councils. Insufficiency of financial resources on the part of local communities may represent a serious drawback in the way of achieving efficient and effective decentralization in Romania, thus indicating a need to identify feasible solutions for finding the resources necessary for the conclusion of this process.

Chris Jensen, Walt Scacchi

No abstract is available for this record.

Nikolai Bogduk, Eduardo M. Fraifeld

Interventional pain medicine faces a crisis. In the interests of bringing relief to their patients, pain specialists practice a variety of invasive procedures that interrupt pain pathways in order to stop pain, or modulate physiological processes in order to reduce pain perception. Few of these interventions have been subjected to randomized controlled trials. Meanwhile, in an effort to reign in increasing costs, third-party payors are implementing “evidence-based medicine” (EBM) standards. Unfortunately, the version of EBM that they apply is increasingly demanding multiple, randomized, controlled trials before interventions are recognized and reimbursed. Conversely, when randomized controlled trials are lacking, their absence is becoming accepted as proof of ineffectiveness of a procedure, and reimbursement is being denied. As a result, a conflict has developed. Practitioners unfortunately are faced with patients today whose treatment cannot be ignored while waiting for someone to generate the evidence. Meanwhile, payors cannot afford to recognize and reimburse every intervention when they cannot tell if it amounts to no more than a source of income for practitioners, with no benefit to patients. Preventing resolution of these tensions is an obstacle that has not attracted attention and consideration in debates and treatises on EBM. To test and validate a single intervention requires enormous funding. For example, a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of radiofrequency neurotomy for neck pain [1] cost some $500,000. The costs of a placebo-controlled trial of intradiscal electrothermal therapy [2] were estimated at over $1,000,000. But single trials are not enough. Pundits do not credit single controlled trials; they require replication studies. Therefore, costs are doubled. Furthermore, various authorities require evidence for their particular populations. Thus, some insurers are interested in workers' compensation patients, whereas the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wants data on Medicare patients. Therefore, costs double again. Table 1 lists many of the contentious procedures in interventional pain medicine that lack randomized prospective studies. Producing a single study of each would result in an estimated conservative cost of $19.5 million. Reproducing these studies could result in a potential total cost of $58.5 million. Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health do not have either the funds or the disposition to fund the research required. Nor is it a solution that industry should share the burden of costs. Agencies who adjudicate evidence consider industry-sponsored research to be suspect and do not accept it as valid evidence [3]. Nor can the burden be shared overseas, because many insurers and agencies such as Current Procedural Terminology (http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/no-index/physician-resources/3882.shtml) currently only accept studies conducted on U.S. patients and published in U.S. journals. The responsibility for funding would seem to fall back to independent medical societies. The social reality is that it is economically impossible to satisfy the ad hoc academic standards demanded by regulatory authorities. Yet, at stake is the welfare of millions of patients. A selection of interventional pain procedures that require randomized controlled trials A selection of interventional pain procedures that require randomized controlled trials A resolution of this situation is possible by adopting a set of principles from jurisprudence that define the burden of proof. For serious criminal matters, the criterion is “beyond all reasonable doubt.” For lesser matters, the standard is “on the balance of probabilities.” For interventional pain medicine, randomized controlled trials are analogous to proof beyond all reasonable doubt. The corresponding device for “on the balance of probabilities” are well-designed, properly conducted observational studies. This is not an unreasonable alternate conceptually, academically, or economically. The crucial requirement is that the observational studies be well designed and properly conducted. Poor studies do not provide evidence, but well-designed observational studies do. A particular virtue of observational studies is that they can refute the efficacy of an intervention, without requiring a control. If an intervention fails to work when properly audited, it clearly does not work, and it does not require an expensive randomized controlled trial to refute it. Therefore, ineffective practices in interventional pain medicine can be eliminated relatively cheaply by conducting good observational studies. However, if observational studies are positive, they provide prima facie evidence of efficacy. Subordinate questions might then be raised, as to why the intervention works, or if it works better than other treatments. These amount to academic or socioeconomic questions, and do not vitally affect the prima facie status of an intervention. Accordingly, we propose a two-sided resolution to the crisis in interventional pain medicine. In consideration of regulatory authorities countenancing observational studies as evidence, proponents of interventions should provide well-designed, properly conducted observational studies. To assist both sides in this enterprise, the American Academy of Pain Medicine and the International Spine Intervention Society have undertaken to develop a set of guidelines that define the necessary components of an observational study, and how they might be assessed. In brief, those components are independent monitoring of the following: 1) pain scores before treatment and at a sufficient number of times after treatment until the outcomes have stabilized; 2) the proportion of patients who achieve reductions of pain greater than the minimal clinically important change, and reductions to zero and other end points; 3) the proportion of patients who genuinely reduce or eliminate the need for other health care; 4) the proportion of patients who achieve clinically meaningful—and personally meaningful—improvements in quality of life measures; and 5) the incidence of side effects, harms, and cessation of treatment. Depending on the objectives of the intervention, other components may be relevant, such as emotional or psychological functioning. Studies that gather this sort of information do not need to be complicated or expensive. They have two cardinal requirements: an assessor, such as a research nurse, independent of the practitioners who perform the intervention; and the willingness of practitioners to expose themselves to independent audit. Adoption of well-designed observational studies is an economically realistic, and achievable, means of bringing evidence to bear on behalf of the patients who suffer pain. Unless this is carried out, under the current academic nihilism that has been applied to interventional pain medicine, soon no patient with pain will be able to get any form of treatment.

Anton Korinek

No abstract is available for this record.

Ariunaa Lkhagvadorj

Fiscal federalism has been an important topic among public finance theorists in the last four decades. There is a series of arguments that decentralization of governments enhances growth by improving allocation efficiency. However, the empirical studies have shown mixed results for industrialized and developing countries and some of them have demonstrated that there might be a threshold level of economic development below which decentralization is not effective. Developing and transition countries have developed a variety of forms of fiscal decentralization as a possible strategy to achieve effective and efficient governmental structures. A generalized principle of decentralization due to the country specific circumstances does not exist. Therefore, decentralization has taken place in different forms in various countries at different times, and even exactly the same extent of decentralization may have had different impacts under different conditions. The purpose of this study is to investigate the current state of the fiscal decentralization in Mongolia and to develop policy recommendations for the efficient and effective intergovernmental fiscal relations system for Mongolia. Within this perspective the analysis concentrates on the scope and structure of the public sector, the expenditure and revenue assignment as well as on the design of the intergovernmental transfer and sub-national borrowing. The study is based on data for twenty-one provinces and the capital city of Mongolia for the period from 2000 to 2009. As a former socialist country Mongolia has had a highly centralized governmental sector. The result of the analysis below revealed that the Mongolia has introduced a number of decentralization measures, which followed a top down approach and were slowly implemented without any integrated decentralization strategy in the last decade. As a result Mongolia became de-concentrated state with fiscal centralization. The revenue assignment is lacking a very important element, for instance significant revenue autonomy given to sub-national governments, which is vital for the efficient service delivery at the local level. According to the current assignments of the expenditure and revenue responsibilities most of the provinces are unable to provide a certain national standard of public goods supply. Hence, intergovernmental transfers from the central jurisdiction to the sub-national jurisdictions play an important role for the equalization of the vertical and horizontal imbalances in Mongolia. The critical problem associated with intergovernmental transfers is that there is not a stable, predictable and transparent system of transfer allocation. The amount of transfers to sub-national governments is determined largely by political decisions on ad hoc basis and disregards local differences in needs and fiscal capacity. Thus a fiscal equalization system based on the fiscal needs of the provinces should be implemented. The equalization transfers will at least partly offset the regional disparities in revenues and enable the sub-national governments to provide a national minimum standard of local public goods.

José Bacelar Almeida, Endre Bangerter, Manuel Barbosa, Stephan Krenn · 6 authors

Abstract. Zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (ZK-PoK) are important building blocks for numerous cryptographic applications. Although ZK-PoK have very useful properties, their real world deployment is typically hindered by their significant complexity compared to other (noninteractive) crypto primitives. Moreover, their design and implementation is time-consuming and error-prone. We contribute to overcoming these challenges as follows: We present a comprehensive specification language and a certifying compiler for ZK-PoK protocols based on Σ-protocols and composition techniques known in literature. The compiler allows the fully automatic translation of an abstract description of a proof goal into an executable implementation. Moreover, the compiler overcomes various restrictions of previous approaches, e.g., it supports the important class of exponentiation homomorphisms with hidden-order co-domain, needed for privacy-preserving applications such as idemix. Finally, our compiler is certifying, in the sense that it automatically produces a formal proof of security (soundness) of the compiled protocol (currently covering special homomorphisms) using the Isabelle/HOL theorem prover.

Gilberto Alfredo Pucca, Edson Hilan Gomes de Lucena, Patricia Tiemi Cawahisa

This article discusses the model of oral health care implemented in the Unified Health System of Brazil in the last decade. This model was conceived as a sub-sector policy that, over the years, has sought to improve the quality of life of the Brazilian population. Through a chronological line, the study presents the National Policy on Oral Health as a counter-hegemonic patient care model for the dentistry practices existing in the country before this policy was implemented. The reorganization of the levels of oral health care, the creation of reference facilities for secondary and tertiary care, through Centers of Dental Specialties and Regional Dental Prosthesis Laboratories, and the differential funding and decentralized management of financial resources were able to expand the actions of oral health for more than 90 million inhabitants. The evolution shown after the deployment of the National Oral Health Policy, as of 2004, demonstrates the greater integration of oral health care under the Unified Health System and provides feedback information to help this policy to continue to be prioritized by the Federal Government and receive more support from the state and local levels in the coming years.

Sarah Meiklejohn, C. Chris Erway, Alptekın Küpçü, Theodora Hinkle · 5 authors

In recent years, many advances have been made in cryptography, as well as in the performance of communication networks and processors. As a result, many advanced cryptographic protocols are now efficient enough to be considered practical, yet research in the area remains largely theoretical and little work has been done to use these protocols in practice, despite a wealth of potential applications. This paper introduces a simple description language, ZKPDL, and an interpreter for this language. ZKPDL implements non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge, a primitive which has received much attention in recent years. Using our language, a single program may specify the computation required by both the prover and verifier of a zero-knowledge protocol, while our interpreter performs a number of optimizations to lower both computational and space overhead. Our motivating application for ZKPDL has been the efficient implementation of electronic cash. As such, we have used our language to develop a cryptographic library, Cashlib, that provides an interface for using e-cash and fair exchange protocols without requiring expert knowledge from the programmer. 1

Huijia Lin, Rafael Pass, Wei-Lung Dustin Tseng, Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam

No abstract is available for this record.

Richard Briffault

Tax increment financing (TIF) is the most widely used local government program for financing economic development in the United States, but the proliferation of TIF is puzzling. TIF was originally created to support urban renewal programs and was narrowly focused on addressing urban blight, yet now it is used in areas that are plainly unblighted. TIF brings in no outside money and provides no new revenue-raising authority. There is little clear evidence that TIF has done much to help the municipalities that use it, and it is also a source of intergovernmental tension and a site of conflict over the scope of public aid to the private sector. Yet, the expansion of TIF makes sense in light of the basic structure of American local government law. Studying TIF can illuminate central features of our local government system. TIF succeeds -- in the sense of its widespread adoption and use -- because it, like local government more generally, is highly decentralized; reflects and reinforces the fiscalization of development policy; plays off the fragmentation of local governments and the resulting interlocal struggle for investment; and fits well with the entrepreneurial spirit characteristic of contemporary local economic development policy. A better understanding of TIF contributes to a better understanding of the political economy of American local government.

Paul Starr

THE IDEA THAT WE ARE—or should be—moving from an “industrial age government” to an “information age government” is a staple of political rhetoric. But has the information age significantly altered government in the liberal democracies? And if it has not yet done so, should we expect the liberal state to change in any fundamental way, or be entirely replaced, because of the chain of consequences set in motion by new technology? Since the early development of computers, there have been, broadly speaking, three phases in thinking about the potential of new technology to improve government. Beginning in the 1950s, the application of digital technology to the public sector was conceived of as automation and the hope was mainly for greater efficiency and control in governmental operations. A second phase, dating from the 1980s and rising to a climax in the following decade, pitted two alternative visions against each other—privatization and reinvention—each premised on the idea that the information age made traditional forms of public administration obsolete. Finally, in the most recent phase, digital democracy has become a central theme of visions of new forms of governance based on the diffusion of cheap computing and online communication. Each of these phases has brought some notable but far from revolutionary achievements, and that is what we should continue to expect. Digital technology does enhance some features of democratic government, but the fundamental problems of democracy are not susceptible to technological solutions, and the same developments that strengthen some democratic capacities degrade others. In this new environment, it will be a struggle just to maintain some of the minimal conditions of political accountability that democracy requires. The U.S. federal government, particularly the military, was initially a leader in the development of computers, and from World War II to the 1960s, the state stood on the frontier of information technology. The application of computers to the public sector raised expectations not of radical change but of doing what government agencies already did, only faster and more cheaply—that is, automating the bureaucratic status quo. Top-down control and economy of administration were the primary purposes of computerization. Computers were supposed to cut paperwork and costs, reduce crime, and give managers and policymakers better information. The pursuit of control is at the core of bureaucratic administration. Bureaucracy is ideally supposed to ensure adherence to rules through such means as hierarchical command, specialization of functions, uniformity of procedure, and formal documentation. By limiting individual discretion, these elements of bureaucracy are supposed to increase the capacity of the state to carry out whatever purposes animate it. Democracy, far from being antithetical to bureaucracy, has often stimulated its growth. Scandals regularly prompt demand for new rules. The progressives who brought America the popular referendum and direct election of senators also introduced unified budgetary control and stricter rules about the award of government jobs and contracts. They sought as well to professionalize administration and make it more scientific. Computerization fit the progressive bureaucratic paradigm perfectly. The introduction of computers in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with budgetary reform efforts that were intended to give chief executives and their finance officers greater control over how money was spent. Computerization offered the promise of achieving the elusive fiscal goals of unified control and accurate cost accounting for public services. The very nature of early mainframe computers seemed to dictate centralized control, although line agencies fought to get their own computers. Thus, the most widely anticipated effect of computers on government was the centralization of power. Greater executive control over the bureaucracy was an explicit reform objective, but many critics feared that computerization would augment the state's dominion over the individual, and this concern focused the attention on privacy protection. These anxieties were hardly unreasonable. At all levels, government was oriented not to the computerization of service but to the computerization of constraint—that is, to computerizing functions such as police, revenue collection, and motor vehicle licensing. Within the service agencies, computerization chiefly involved functions in back offices such as record keeping. The “backstage” locus of automation concerned both supporters, who thought the public might not appreciate the value of computers, and critics, who thought the public might fail to appreciate the threat to privacy. The early decades of computerization did bear positive fruit. The mid-twentieth century saw enormous growth in government, and after 1955, computers helped public agencies cope with the sheer increase in transactions. Despite the rise in federal expenditures in the United States, the number of federal civilian employees fell; productivity gains from computerization helped to make that possible. But by the 1980s, new developments in both politics and information technology led to a dramatic turn in thinking. Instead of improving bureaucracy, the goal became overthrowing it. The rise of conservative antigovernment sentiment in the Reagan era coincided with a shift in the relationship of government to technological change. The private sector had now moved into the forefront in the use of information technology. In 1983, a Reagan administration commission was stating the obvious when it declared that although the federal government in the 1960s had been “the acknowledged leader in using state-of-the-art computer hardware and software,” the government had fallen “farther and farther behind.” The technological lag of the public sector was particularly evident at government's front end—that is, where the public had direct contact with government. By this time, businesses were using telecommunications and information technology to improve customer service and produce a wider array of products tailored to different tastes; consumers had become used to the convenience of automated teller machines (ATMs), credit cards, and free, round-the-clock calls to 800 numbers. By comparison, public agencies were far slower to take up the new possibilities. The shift from mainframes to minicomputers and the rise of personal computers also turned earlier assumptions upside down; instead of favoring centralized control, the new technology could be a means of decentralization. Conservatives and liberals responded to this situation in different ways. To conservatives, the failure of government to keep up with information technology confirmed the need for privatization. As many corporations were outsourcing specialized functions, so government should do the same—indeed, the state should generally cut back its size and role. The information revolution thereby provided a legitimizing rhetoric for policies that conservatives had long favored for other reasons. To liberals, the logical response to public sector lag was not to privatize government but to “reinvent” it by making public agencies more flexible in organization, more focused on results rather than procedures, and more responsive to “customers.” The Clinton administration's National Performance Review, led by Al Gore, embodied this approach and linked it to the information revolution. In the same period as this debate was playing out, the Internet was becoming a popular medium, and the vision of a reinvented state increasingly emphasized the use of online communication in making government more customer friendly. The focus on improving government at the point of contact with the public involved more than a pretty new interface; electronic access offered the promise of better integrated and more consistently delivered services. But besides improving government's output, the Internet also awakened an interest in giving citizens more input. And with the development of the Web and tools built on it, that interest has gained traction. Digital media have unquestionably expanded the democratic repertoire. Political campaigns and social movements now have cheap, instant means of communication that circumvent the established mass media, and they can use those resources to mobilize followers, coordinate their activity, and aggregate contributions of money, labor, and knowledge. The successful use of new media in politics has raised expectations about its use in government, particularly for three purposes—increased transparency, collaboration, and participation. Transparency is the most readily achievable of these goals. Just as some early advocates of “teledemocracy” envisioned, the Internet now provides instant access to government documents and data, and allows the public to track legislation and regulatory decisions. The idea of transparency has grown, moreover, into the notion of government as a “platform” that routinely makes granular data available in a form that enables others to build applications on top of it. Here, the goal of open government moves from transparency to collaboration and participation, which raise more difficult questions. Other ideas along these lines call for crowdsourcing proposals for government action and putting such proposals up for electronic voting. The further one moves along the spectrum of actions from transparency to participation, the more vexed the idea of digital democracy becomes. Even though the digital divide has narrowed, any reliance of government on digital technology will put people with less income and education at an inequitable disadvantage because of persistent differences in digital skill as well as access. Moreover, where online participation is opened up, highly committed minorities and special interests are likely to dominate. In a crowdsourcing initiative after the election, the Obama transition effort invited the public to submit and vote on ideas, but the results were embarrassing. As the New York Times reported, “In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas.” Conceived this way, digital democracy recapitulates the classic problems of direct democracy—skewed participation and lack of deliberation. Other difficulties with the idea of revitalizing democracy through online communication arise from the indirect effects of new media on traditional mechanisms of political accountability. By providing an alternative platform for advertising as well as news, the Internet has undercut the sources of newspaper revenue, plunging journalism into a deep crisis and weakening the ability of the press to keep watch on government, particularly at the state and local levels. Resources for journalism are now disappearing from the old media faster than the new media can create them. Furthermore, newspapers have assembled a broad public, including many people who have bought a paper for the sports or crossword puzzle but nonetheless scanned the front page and learned something about the news of their community and the world. Online, however, they can go to a sports or puzzle site without any exposure to the news. In the early years of television, when the evening news was on all three available channels, the national news had a similarly broad public. But beginning with cable television, the advent of new media has brought a profusion of choices of different kinds of entertainment. The share of the public who regularly follows the news and public affairs has declined, though those with the most interest in politics (usually people with strong partisan commitments) have access to more news and a wider range of opinions than before. Despite the cornucopia of information, the politically attentive public has diminished and become more sharply divided along ideological lines. The gains for democracy from new technology are real, but unfortunately, so are the losses. It may be a long time before we can add them up and determine the net impact. In each phase, early enthusiasms have run up against stubborn and uncomfortable limits, even as new democratic possibilities have opened up. We are still in the midst of tremendous ferment in technology, media, and politics, and the creativity now being unleashed is our best hope that when the digital revolution finally runs its course, free societies and popular self-government will be left standing.

Sophie Esmann Andersen, Anne Ellerup Nielsen

Studies of the city have been addressed from many different approaches such as law, political science, art history and public administration, in which the economic, political and legal status of the city have played a major role. However, a new agenda for conceptualizing the city has emerged, in which the city assumes new roles. By using stakeholder theory as a framework for conceptualizing the city, we argue that the city assumes a political-economic agenda-setting role as well as providing a stage for identity constructions and relational performances for consumers, organizations, the media, politicians and other stakeholders. Stakeholder theory allows us to conceptualize the city as being constituted by stakes and relationships between stakeholders which are approached from three analytical positions (modern, postmodern and hypermodern, respectively), thereby allowing us to grasp different stakes and types of relationships, ranging from functional and contractual relationships to individualized and emotionally driven or more non-committal and fluid forms of relationships. In order to support and illustrate the analytical potentials of our framework for conceptualizing urban living, we introduce a project which aims to turn the city of Aarhus into a CO2-neutral city by the year 2030, entitled Aarhus CO2030. We conclude that applying stakeholder theory to a hyper-complex organization such as a city opens up for a reconceptualization of the city as a web of stakes and stakeholder relations. Stakeholder theory contributes to a nuanced and elaborate understanding of the urban complexity and web of both enforced and voluntary relationships as well as the different types of relationships that characterize urban life.

Snezana Hristova

This paper examines the financial crisis in light of the local economic development and sets out some policy recommendations. Local economic development is a process in which the local authorities cooperate with the public sector, business community, and NGOs, in order to create more appropriate environment for economic development and for unemployment decreasing. The last months saw the world economy facing to the worst financial crisis in history, causing unprecedented drop in demand and sales and record‐breaking unemployment levels worldwide. No country can escape certain economic and social consequences from the global financial crisis. The main research question is the following: How does the gobal crisis affect local governments? The local governements are facing several problems such as: higher unemployment and social needs at the community level, pressure for increased spending, difficulties of investment financing, need of deferring maintenance. Then, the paper sets some policy recommendations adressed to the following aspect‐ what should and can local governments do? The crisis offers some chances for change in the context of strengthening the role of local governments.The central government will rely on local governments to bring policies rapidly to bear on the economy. This could and should intensify the intergovernmentaldialogue and it could also lead to strengthening fiscal autonomy of municipalities. Improving the competitiveness at the local level and developing a strong local economy can help the country cope with the effects of the global economic slowdown. Local government units should improve their competitiveness to attract more investments and to develop their local economy. Given that the responsibility of assisting the national government in mitigating the impact of the crisis through stimulation of the local economy are given to local governments, this paper aims to discuss issues related to enhancing local economic development and fiscal decentralization as a means of improving overall service delivery in the country, in the context of global economic and financial crisis. Local governments may also be succesful in the promoting productivity locally in order to enhance the country’s competitiveness in anticipation of a greater role in global trade during the recovery in the next few years. The special focus of this paper has been given to the case of local economic development in the Republic of Macedonia.