This paper addresses the decentralization of health services financed by the Unified Health System (SUS) in the city of Natal initiated in the mid 90s. This decentralization primarily involved the transference of health services financed by SUS, which had previously been developed by the state of Rio Grande do Norte, to the city government of Natal. Based on the data gathered mainly from SUS¿ Ambulatory Information System (SIS/SUS), the authors attempted to verify to what extent this decentralization of health services provided by SUS in the city of Natal had improved public access to health services or, on the contrary, had resulted in a privatization process, implying more difficult access to those services.
The Indonesian authorities are exploring options for the establishment of subnational government endowment funds and the Ministry of Finance (MoF) has drafted regulations in that context. However, the motivations and objective for establishing an endowment fund at the subnational level diverge across various stakeholders. Clarity of the objectives and purpose of the endowment fund will be critical for informing features of its architecture, and the endowment fund should be aligned with the national fiscal policy objectives. Establishing such funds at a time of fiscal deficit entails a “borrowing-to-save” approach which is not optimal from a fiscal policy perspective. Currently, there is a misalignment between the design of inflow and outflow rules, the endowment fund’s objectives, and the fiscal/economic context. In addition, the current draft MoF regulations restrict the investment policy to conform with the law on decentralization enacted in 2022. This report emphasizes that regardless of the structure of the endowment fund, it needs to be fully integrated within the budget. The report also provides recommendations on assessing the full cost of the subnational government endowment fund, its design and implementation, and provides suggestions to improve the draft MoF regulations.
In response to the nation’s economic and agricultural system reform, Chinese agricultural schools have begun the transformation from academic institutions to vocational and technical education. Significant efforts have been made to reform the curricula, as it is the key element needed for the formation of the new educational system. Prior to the nation’s reform starting in 1978, the curriculum in agricultural schools was theoretical information based and the instruction was teacher-centered. Students usually had little involvement in teaching and learning. In addition, the value of practical “hands-on” experiences in agricultural education had been neglected. During the past decade new ideas and approaches in curriculum development and instruction have been gradually incorporated into the agricultural vocational education through new policy initiatives and a pilot project launched by the Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations during 1994-1998. The decentralization is one major feature of these changes. Introduction/Background China is undergoing a large transformation as its economic system is shifting from a centrally planned to a market-driven system (State Council, 1999). Agriculture the traditional foundation of Chinese society faces an especially great challenge in restructuring its system to meet the needs of the market economy. In particular, agricultural education is playing an important role in preparing people for a new phase of rural development. During the past decade, agricultural schools have started to take actions to reform their existing educational systems and to strengthen their vocational programs (Ministry of Agriculture, 1997). There are 360 agricultural schools distributed among the provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities throughout China. Agricultural schools are typically resident schools that require students to pass standardized admission exams. Schools usually enroll graduates from junior secondary schools and each program lasts for three or four years. The average enrollment for each school ranges from 1000-3000 students. One-third of agricultural schools are governed at the provincial level, while two-thirds are administered by prefectures. None of the schools falls directly under the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA). However, the Ministry undertakes the function of guidance and macro-management for all agricultural schools. In the past, agricultural schools were academic institutions classified as secondary specialized schools. The mission of these schools was officially described as to train intermediate-level specialists who were political and technical experts. Students were required to master basic theory, to have specialized knowledge, and to develop practical technical skills. Graduates from these schools were graded as “middle-level specialists” (Henze, 1984). Students were usually trained theoretically and narrowly. Most subjects studied in the schools were academic and usually had little relevance to the students’ workplace and reality. Upon leaving school, graduates were often assigned jobs according to a centrally organized plan. Just like graduates from higher education institutions or at least in theory every graduate would be assigned to a job position that could be characterized as “white collar.” In recent years, significant changes have taken place to reflect the continued reform and the development of the “socialist market economy.” Today, jobs for graduates are no longer guaranteed and the government can only hire approximately 50% of agricultural graduates (Chen, 2000). As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult for an agricultural graduate to find a job in the public sector. Accordingly, graduates need to find their employment in the private sector or they need to be self-employed. Students’ education has become more purposive and selective, since it now must relate to their training and to employment opportunities in the labor market. Moreover, the feedback to schools has indicated
Ana Luiza d’Ávila Viana, Luiza Sterman Heimann, Luciana Dias de Lima, Roberta Gondim de Oliveira · 5 authors
This article discusses the trends and limits of the Brazilian health system decentralization process, identifying the three elements that constitute the strategic induction performed by the national system administrator in accordance with the guidelines contained in the Operational Norms of the Unified National Health System: systemic rationality, intergovernmental and service provider financing, and health care model. The effects of the Federal regulations are analyzed based on the results of the evaluation study focused on the implementation of the full management scheme at the Municipal level. The decentralization strategy induced by Basic Operational Norm 96 has succeeded in improving institutional conditions, management autonomy, and supply, as measured by the Federal resources transferred, installed capacity, production, and coverage of outpatient and hospital services, with the Municipalities authorized to conduct fully autonomous management, without altering the existing patterns of inequity in the distribution of funds to poorer Municipalities.
Abstract. A commitment multiplication proof, CMP for short, allows a player who is committed to secrets s, s ′ and s ′ ′ = s · s ′ , to prove, without revealing s, s ′ or s ′ ′ , that indeed s ′ ′ = ss ′. CMP is an important building block for secure general multi-party computation as well as threshold cryptography. In the standard cryptographic model, a CMP is typically done interactively using zero-knowledge protocols. In the random oracle model it can be done non-interactively by removing interaction using the Fiat-Shamir heuristic. An alternative non-interactive solution in the distributed setting, where at most a certain fraction of the verifiers are malicious, was presented in [1] for Pedersen’s discrete log based commitment scheme. This CMP essentially consists ofa few invocations ofPedersen’s verifiable secret sharing scheme (VSS) and is secure in the standard model. In the first part ofthis paper, we improve that CMP by arguing that a building block used in its construction in fact already constitutes a CMP. This not only leads to a simplified exposition, but also saves on the required number ofinvocations ofPedersen’s VSS. Next we show how to construct non-interactive proofs of partial knowledge [8] in this distributed setting. This allows for instance to prove non-interactively the knowledge of ℓ out of m given secrets, without revealing which ones. We also show how to construct efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs for circuit satisfiability in the distributed setting. In the second part, we investigate generalizations to other homomorphic commitment schemes, and show that on the negative side, Pedersen’s VSS cannot be generalized to arbitrary (black-box) homomorphic commitment schemes, while on the positive side, commitment schemes based on q-one-way-group-homomorphism [7], which cover wide range ofcurrently used schemes, suffice. 1
We analyze the governance structure and the financing of Kyrgyz education, with special emphasis on the general secondary education system. General secondary schools are under the authority of oblasts and rayons. Our main findings are as follows: 1. The oblast and rayon authorities in Kyrgyzstan are in fact delegated offices of the central administration, with highly non-transparent reporting lines, very little budgetary independence, diffused political responsibility and politicized control over financial flows to lower levels of government. 2. The principle that funds from the central budget for specific functions should be transferred directly (without any intermediaries) to the level of government responsible for those functions is not observed in Kyrgyzstan. In particular, the categorical grants for education are determined and negotiated in a very non-transparent way. 3. The Kyrgyz education sector is fragmented, and the divided responsibilities for management and for finances make rationalization and reform very difficult to accomplish. Moreover, the situation is compounded by the fact that education decentralization has a formal character, and is not accompanied by real delegation of authority and responsibility. 4. The general secondary education system in Kyrgyzstan, although managed according to the rules and procedures common to other post Soviet republics, displays a remarkable degree of regional and ethnic differentiation. The financing levels also vary significantly among oblasts. 5. Parental contributions make up at least 30% of the school budgets in Bishkek. Their collection and use vary greatly among schools, but in all cases are beyond the effective control of either parents or the central and local authorities. Moreover, the emerging system of entrance fees for first grade students is unconstitutional and violates human rights and pedagogical principles. In order to deal with these issues, the Kyrgyz Republic needs to correct the present non-transparent and dysfunctional governance structure of Kyrgyz education, because otherwise any efforts to improve the delivery of educational services or their financing may remain ineffective. The Kyrgyz Republic also needs to define education standards that it will be able to enforce and finance in all schools. Finally, it needs to implement a regulatory system governing parental contributions, which would serve the schools and at the same time allow for transparent and well-monitored use of private funds in public schools.
This article examines the influence of New Public Management ideas on recent changes in the Portuguese central government. Its purpose is to analyse the tendency to make public organizations more autonomous and to decentralize following the example of other countries inspired by the practice of the private sector and New Public Management stressing managerial flexibility. The message it conveys is that changes were primarily guided by values of the public domain, juridicial concerns and the primacy of politics, building a public governance that emphasizes the role of politicians and opens the administrative system to the sociopolitical environment.
Carlos Eduardo Frickmann Young, Carlos A. Roncisvalle
The objective of this study is to examine the evolution and characteristics of the financing for the nvironment in Brazil, in order to identify the advances and retreats after the Rio 92 Conference. Brazil has a very decentralized administration, composed of three independent levels of public administration: the federal government, 27 state governments, and more than 5000 municipios, " or municipalities; all of them with specific environmental institutions. However, at the time of the completion of this report, there were no indicators that aggregate information from these different institutional levels for the 1992-2001 period.(1) Thus, this study was a first effort to generate this kind of figures. Given the very short time for its completion, the main priority was to identify the resource flows from the federal government and some selected states. Efforts to estimate spending on pollution control and other environmental activities by the private sector were also made. In addition, the issue of funding sources is also discussed. Despite many methodological problems involved in the elaboration of these indicators, it was possible to identify trends and conclusions for environmental spending. At the federal government level, it was estimated that environmental expenditures were between 0.4% and 1% of the federal spending. Another important finding was that, although there was an official commitment to increase efforts in this area after the Rio 92 Conference, the overall federal government expenditures in environmental issues did not increase during the 1993-2000 period. Moreover, a matter of concern was the declining quality of this spending, with fewer resources directed to end-activities and more money diverted to means-expenditures. An important cause of this was the increasing share of debt related expenditures (interests and amortization) in the total budget. On the other hand, investments suffered cutbacks, particularly in the more recent period, and the expenditures in personnel fell systematically by 25% in constant prices during the second half of the nineties. Environmental projects are the most important single element in international cooperation agreements. However, the flow of foreign resources presented a declining trend since 1994, oscillating between 6% and 17% of total expenditures. Most of these resources come from external credit operations (loans), which means that in the long term, they represent an extra pressure of financial expenses in the budget. The proportion of international donations/total expenditures in 2000 fell to the lowest level in the series (2.0%), clearly indicating the decline of international support for environmental projects in Brazil. Results for the 1996-98 period show that, if sanitation costs are included (an overestimate since it also considers water supply), environmental expenditures are relatively more important for local governments: around 9% of the total public spending in the sample of municipios considered. State governments are in the second position, spending around 1.5% of their budget on environmental issues, in contrast to the less than 1% of the federal government. For this reason, there remains a clear need to generate better aggregate figures for the states and municipios for the whole period. The methodologies used for public budgeting and expenditure control vary widely, making it very hard to supply compatible aggregate numbers. In the three states where longer time series were estimated (São Paulo, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul), there was no consistent trend of increasing expenditures on environmental objectives. Another gap that needs to be fulfilled refers to the private sector environmental spending. There were positive signals which indicated that the private sector is getting more concerned with the environmental issues, particularly those agents that have interests/responsibilities at the international level. It was calculated that the environmental spending of the industry sector was around R$ 160 million per year, slightly less than 1% of its value added. Although it is expected that this number will increase in the future, it is considerably lower than the public sector spending on environmental issues. It is very difficult to aggregate all these figures, but assuming for the year 2000 that the public spending on environmental issues was of 1.5% of the total, the public environmental spending would be of 0.33% of GDP, and an annual expenditure per capita of R$ 22.9 per capita (US$ 9.2 per capita). If the estimated industrial environmental spending (R$ 160 million) is added, the total spending becomes R$ 4.1 billion (0.34% of GDP), or R$ 23.9 per capita (US$ 9.6 per capita). Most of the funding for environmental projects comes from the government (mainly federal, through BNDES), international development agencies, or from companies' own resources. The private financial sector has a minor role on the financing of environmental expenditures but, gain, there are signals of positive changes, with the creation of innovative private funds specialized in environmentally friendly projects that combine financial and "green" interests as an example. The consolidation of economic instruments in international environmental agreements, particularly the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases emissions, may accelerate this new financial market. Another potential source of funding for environmental projects is connected to the implementation of economic instruments in the environmental management system. Command-andcontrol procedures, such as licensing and emission standards, largely dominate the environmental regulation in Brazil. However, some interesting experiences, such as the "green" tax rebound (ICMS verde) and the recent changes in the water resources policy adopting the user/polluter-pays principle, indicate that the role of economic instruments will increase and, consequently, that there is potential for developing self-sustained financial mechanisms to sponsor environmental expenditures. (1) After the completion of this research, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) published estimates of public spending for the 1996-98 period (IBGE 2001). Whenever relevant, these figures were also added to the analysis, but with an alert that they were obtained using different methodological procedures."
Fernando Filgueira, Herman Kamil, Fernando Lorenzo, Juan Andrés Moraes · 5 authors
This paper analyzes the reasons behind Central Government (CG) bailouts of Subnational Governments (SNGs) in the case of Uruguay. We argued that Uruguay represents a good example of the risks of fiscal decentralization, in the context of adjustment policies, and when SNGs` responsibilities and resources have not been carefully defined. We show that, in unitary countries where SNGs lack the opportunities to misbehave that they have in federal countries (e. g. , public debt issuance, international borrowing), SNG officials find ways to finance deficits through non-compliance with politically contestable obligations. In particular, SNGs in Uruguay finance their deficits by accumulating debts with other government agencies and obtaining discretionary transfers from the CG. Through statistical analyses we show that debts and deficits are mainly related to vertical fiscal imbalances and economic conditions in the SN jurisdictions. Yet, the analysis of recent bailout episodes suggests that institutions and political factors play a role (i. e. , they are important ex-post factors). This implies that bailouts have been more than simple compensations for structural imbalances, thus creating opportunities for strategic behavior on the part of SNG authorities (partly confirmed by the disparate fiscal performance of Montevideo vis-à-vis the rest of the country).
We analyze Georgian education finance and show that it is embedded in the overall structure of Georgian rayon finances, reflecting all their weaknesses: inequalities, lack of transparency, unmanageability, room for corruption. The budgetary and political independence of rayons is very limited. The steep fiscal inequalities between rayons are only partially and ineffectively addressed by the system of transfers. The transfers moreover are heavily negotiated and non-transparent. Thus education finances depend on general income of the rayons, which effectively determines the level of financing. At the same time, however, the role of the rayons in the management of the sector is very limited. The actual spending patterns for Georgian general education schools are very closely related to per capita income of the rayons without the transfers (about 75% of education spending), and to student teacher ratio (about 25% of education spending). The dependence of the education system on rayon wealth is our main empirical finding, and it contradicts widespread belief among Georgian education professionals. It is not surprising therefore that the education sector in poorer and in mountainous rayons with very low student teacher ratio has to adapt to this situation. It responds by reducing the number of teachers per class, thus lowering standards of service delivery despite high per student costs. The first step required to change this situation is to increase budgetary independence and education management role of rayons. Without strong local governments it will not be possible to decentralize Georgian education. Moreover the influence of fiscal inequalities on education finance should be broken by taking it out of general rayon income and by basing it on a per student education grant to rayons (education subvention). This would lead to significant redistribution of public funds in Georgia. Such a move needs to be carefully prepared. It is necessary to subject education subvention to buffer mechanisms, in order to protect rayons from drastic changes to their present education spending patterns. Moreover, Georgia should begin thinking about a per student formula for education subvention, which recognizes unavoidable higher per student costs of providing education in different geographical and social settings.
We consider the situation of a physical entity that is the compound entity consisting of two ‘separated ’ quantum entities. In earlier work it has been proved by one of the authors that such a physical entity cannot be described by standard quantum mechanics. More precisely, it was shown that two of the axioms of traditional quantum axiomatics are at the origin of the impossibility for standard quantum mechanics to describe this type of compound entity. One of these axioms is equivalent with the superposition principle, which means that separated quantum entities put the linearity of quantum mechanics at stake. We analyze the conceptual steps that are involved in this proof, and expose the necessary material of quantum axiomatics to be able to understand the argument. 1
Goldreich and Krawczyk proved that there do not exist 3-round black-box zero-knowledge proofs or arguments for languages outside BPP. In 1998, Hada and Tanaka used non-standard assumptions to provide a 3-round zero-knowledge argument for every language in NP which was not black-box zero-knowledge. We present a non-black-box simulatable 3-round zero-knowledge proof system for NP, which is secure even when the prover has unbounded computational resources. However, we require a non-standard assumption (similar to those used by Hada and Tanaka) in order to prove our protocol is zero-knowledge. Additionally, we provide a proof of knowledge framework in which to view this type of non-standard assumption. In this thesis, I designed and implemented a compiler which performs optimizations that reduce the number of low-level floating point operations necessary for a specific task; this involves the optimization of chains of floating point operations as well as the implementation of a "fixed" point data type that allows some floating point operations to simulated with integer arithmetic. The source language of the compiler is a subset of C, and the destination language is assembly language for a micro-floating point CPU. An instruction-level simulator of the CPU was written to allow testing of the code. A series of test pieces of codes was compiled, both with and without optimization, to determine how effective these optimizations were.
The decentralisation of educational administration in Indonesia has recently been the focus of much interest throughout the Asia-Pacific region. With its massive population and multi-ethnic social background, Indonesia serves as an interesting example when considering the real impact of decentralized systems on the financing of Junior Secondary Education in developing countries. In this paper, first, the decentralisation scheme and the current financial budgeting system at the school level of junior secondary education in Indonesia are outlined. Second, a quantitative analysis of the unit cost among provinces, districts and schools is detailed. Finally, policy tasks for the further development of decentralised administration will be identified. Even under the former centralised regime, each school or district was operating in a varied way, while it is also true that the process of this diversified financial budgeting was not always a strategic one.
During the last three decades the planning region "Amazônia Legal" with 5 million km2, the world's largest area of tropical forests, endured six phases of regional development programmes with far-reaching state and private activities: 1) National Integration, 2) Polamazônia, 3) Integrated rural development, 4) Grande Carajás, 5) Strategies of sustainable development in the Pilot Programme, 6) Avança Brasil. Consequence of all regional development programmes, with the exception of the Pilot Programme, has been an increasing destruction of tropical forests, comprising 14 % of the total forest area. The new Avança Brasil Mega-Programme, financed mostly by the government, with enormous expansion of infrastructure and complex economic activities, is provoking large environmental impacts, representing a major challenge for the future development of Amazonia. After the abolishment of SUDAM because of fraud and corruption, decentralized regional development will have to satisfy the basic needs of the regional population on the basis of sustainable management of forest resources and the preservation of biodiversity in Amazonia.
This paper compares optimal financial contracts with centralized and decentralized\nfirms. Under centralized contracting headquarters raises funds on behalf of multiple projects and then allocates the funds on the firm’s internal capital market. Under decentralized contracting each project raises funds separately on the external capital market. The benefit of centralization is that headquarters can use excess liquidity from high-cash flow projects to buy continuation rights for low cash-flow projects. This allows headquarters to make greater repayments to investors, which eases financing constraints ex ante. The cost is that headquarters may pool cash flows from several projects, thereby accumulate internal funds, and make follow-up investments without having to return to the capital market. Absent any capital market discipline, however, it is more difficult for investors to force headquarters to pay out funds, which tightens ex-ante financing constraints.
In this tutorial, selected topics of cryptology and of computational complexity theory are presented. We give a brief overview of the history and the foundations of classical cryptography, and then move on to modern public-key cryptography. Particular attention is paid to cryptographic protocols and the problem of constructing the key components of such protocols such as one-way functions. A function is one-way if it is easy to compute, but hard to invert. We discuss the notion of one-way functions both in a cryptographic and in a complexity-theoretic setting. We also consider interactive proof systems and present some interesting zero-knowledge protocols. In a zero-knowledge protocol one party can convince the other party of knowing some secret information without disclosing any bit of this information. Motivated by these protocols, we survey some complexity-theoretic results on interactive proof systems and related complexity classes.
Canetti and Fischlin have recently proposed the security notion <em>universal composability</em> for commitment schemes and provided two examples. This new notion is very strong. It guarantees that security is maintained even when an unbounded number of copies of the scheme are running concurrently, also it guarantees non-malleability, resilience to selective decommitment, and security against adaptive adversaries. Both of their schemes uses Theta(k) bits to commit to one bit and can be based on the existence of trapdoor commitments and non-malleable encryption.<br /> <br />We present new universally composable commitment schemes based on the Paillier cryptosystem and the Okamoto-Uchiyama cryptosystem. The schemes are efficient: to commit to k bits, they use a constant number of modular exponentiations and communicates O(k) bits. Furthermore the scheme can be instantiated in either perfectly hiding or perfectly binding versions. These are the first schemes to show that constant expansion factor, perfect hiding, and perfect binding can be obtained for universally composable commitments.<br /> <br />We also show how the schemes can be applied to do efficient zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge that are universally composable.
We present several new and fairly practical public-key encryption schemes and prove them secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack. One scheme is based on Paillier's Decision Composite Residuosity (DCR) assumption, while another is based in the classical Quadratic Residuosity (QR) assumption. The analysis is in the standard cryptographic model, i.e., the security of our schemes does not rely on the Random Oracle model.<br /> <br />We also introduce the notion of a universal hash proof system. Essentially, this is a special kind of non-interactive zero-knowledge proof system for an NP language. We do not show that universal hash proof systems exist for all NP languages, but we do show how to construct very efficient universal hash proof systems for a general class of group-theoretic language membership problems.<br /> <br />Given an efficient universal hash proof system for a language with certain natural cryptographic indistinguishability properties, we show how to construct an efficient public-key encryption schemes secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack in the standard model. Our construction only uses the universal hash proof system as a primitive: no other primitives are required, although even more efficient encryption schemes can be obtained by using hash functions with appropriate collision-resistance properties. We show how to construct efficient universal hash proof systems for languages related to the DCR and QR assumptions. From these we get corresponding public-key encryption schemes that are secure under these assumptions. We also show that the Cramer-Shoup encryption scheme (which up until now was the only practical encryption scheme that could be proved secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack under a reasonable assumption, namely, the Decision Diffie-Hellman assumption) is also a special case of our general theory.
The term "development finance \n institutions" (DFI) encompasses no only government \n development banks, but also nongovernmental micro-finance \n organizations, that match grants to attempt to promote \n community development, decentralization of power, and local \n empowerment. Measures of the social cost of DFIs that \n receive public funds, help to check whether DFIs are good \n uses of public funds, i.e., if the social benefit of a DFI \n exceeds the social cost, then public funds are indeed \n well-spent, further improving social welfare. This report \n describes the measurement of costs but not of benefits; but \n even without knowledge of benefits, knowledge of costs can \n help to adequately spend funds. Two measures of social cost \n are presented: first, the Subsidy Dependence Index (SDI) - \n the ratio of subsidy received to revenue from loans; and, \n subsidy is the social cost of the public funds used to run a \n DFI - which does not discount flows, rather it works in \n short time frames, or when the rate of time preference is \n low; second, the Net Present Cost to Society (NPCs) - like \n standard present-value measures, it discounts cash flows, \n and works in any time frame. Both SDI and NPCs are tools, to \n help establish benchmarks, chart trends, and compare a DFI \n with identical clients, and services. It is stipulated that \n measurement of the social cost of public DFIs matters \n because funds earmarked for development are scarce, while \n subsidies for DFIs could be adequate, provided social \n welfare improves in a broader scale.