This article analyses aspects of public financial decentralization in Romania, enlightening major problems in public money allocation at county’s administrative level. Actual public finance law and state budget law allow inefficiency and inequity in local public money spending. This happens, in our point of view, because of many rules, criteria and computations missing economic fundamentals and which skip state’s principal objective: to insure citizens’ welfare by providing public goods and services. Our research finds which Romanian counties have difficulties to satisfy local public needs, by confronting financial decentralization level, economic development and public expenditures.
In recent years, sponge city construction has aroused widespread concern; the financing mode of the sponge city also has the discussion value due to its important safeguard function to smoothly carry on the construction of sponge city. The financing mode of the sponge city is divided into two parts in this paper, including the financing mode in Japan and America with the developed capital market, and the financing mode & experience in Germany whose capital market is less developed but has the complete market economy system, and introduces significance to our country brought by the successful experiences of the financing mode of the overseas -the decentralization of the local government bond issuance right, the establishment of the effective supervision mechanism; the flexible use of bank loans, supported by the preferential fiscal policy; the establishment of the government credit rating system, perfect the credit information publicity system; charge to the residents of the installation fee of the sponge city, relief the cost to who build the devices by themselves.
Bitcoin is the most popular virtual currency yet developed. Proponents assert that bitcoin can remove frictions involved in payment and settlement systems by eliminating the need for the financial intermediaries that exist in traditional currencies. In this blog post, we show that while bitcoin transfers themselves are relatively frictionless for the user, there are significant frictions when bitcoins trade in exchange markets resulting in meaningful and persistent price differences across bitcoin exchanges. These exchange-related frictions reduce the incentive of market participants to use bitcoin as a payments alternative.
This dissertation comprises three empirical essays in political economy. The first essay analyzes the implementation of a French social program by subnational governments following a decentralization reform. Using program implementation data, it shows that local political environments strongly influence implementation decisions after decentralization, and that decentralization results in an overall tightening of benefits. The second essay reports the results of a conjoint field experiment involving German welfare offices. Using random assignment of cues about ethnicity and other characteristics in requests to welfare offices, it is shown that putative non-German applicants receive replies at the same rate as putative Germans, but are disadvantaged in terms of the substantive quality of responses. This suggests that minority populations do experience discrimination when attempting to access social benefits. Finally, the third essay uses micro-level voter file data from Illinois to measure whether property tax limitations reduce participation in local elections. In contrast with prior research, results from panel regressions with matching adjustments suggest that tax limitations do not affect political participation negatively. Together, these essays contribute to our understanding of public finance and social policy in contexts characterized by multi-level governance.
In the early twentieth century British colonial authorities continued their efforts to decentralize the governance and financial system of British India by providing greater administrative and financial authority to provincial governments, which required delineation of powers and the financing of the government of British India and the provincial governments. Governor-General of India, Lord Curzon tried to escape the disadvantages of the "Ripon scheme" and introduced a scheme of "quasi-permanent nature", based on three principles. The basic idea of the scheme was to raise the interest of the provinces to increasing of their income. The lack of success of the reforms led to the establishing by Edward VII in September 1907 of "Royal Commission on Decentralization of India", which was to examine the situation on the ground and then to make suggestions. In February 1909 the Commission submitted a report, which laid out the arguments both in favor of centralization of governance and in favor of decentralization. In order to enhance the decentralization they proposed measures for increasing of the powers of provincial governments and authorities subordinate to administrative units, governance of public services on a wide range of issues, primarily "provincial" and "subordinate" parts of the Indian Civil Service, the police, as well as medical, sanitation and so on. Particular emphasis was placed on the need to develop local government throughout India, particularly in rural areas. The most important role among them was assigned to panchayati. They envisaged the establishment of self-government at the district level and at the lowest level - a village or a group of villages. Accordingly, the proposed redistribution of competences between different levels of government and self-government. To implement the changes, the commission recommended to redistribute sources of financing government bodies at each level and discussed specific taxes thoroughly enough. They also mentioned some situations when the income did not cover the costs of provinces, districts and villages. The report revealed the need for changes in the cost structure of different levels of authorities. The article suggests some measures for implementation of recommendations of the Commission, the assessment of its activities by a number of researchers and sources, and makes a brief conclusion.
Open access
Social and Economic Development in India
Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
Based on fiscal panel data of Guang-Foshan from 2005 to 2013,the likelihood which is not the correlation and regression analysis, the author studies the tax competition of fiscal decentralization on the government financial resources in Guangzhou. The result shows that the role of tax competition is of a clear asymmetry: it can enhance Guangzhou government financial resources in terms of sales tax,personal income tax,resource tax,real estate tax revenue while tax VAT,corporate income tax and real estate taxes in Foshan inhibits the increases of Guangzhou government financial resources. On the whole,stimulus effect of personal income tax,resource tax and real estate on Guangzhou government financial can is obvious; tax VAT and corporate income tax have opposite effects.These findings can help to build local tax system and strengthen government finance of local governments.
Proof-of-work is a central concept in modern cryptocurrencies and denial-ofservice protection tools, but the requirement for fast verification so far has made it an easy prey for GPU-, ASIC-, and botnet-equipped users. The attempts to rely on memory-intensive computations in order to remedy the disparity between architectures have resulted in slow or broken schemes. In this paper we solve this open problem and show how to construct an asymmetric proof-of-work (PoW) based on a computationally-hard problem, which requires a great deal of memory to generate a proof (called a ”memory-hardness” feature) but is instant to verify. Our primary proposal, Equihash, is a PoW based on the generalized birthday problem and enhanced Wagner’s algorithm for it. We introduce the new technique of algorithm binding to prevent cost amortization and demonstrate that possible parallel implementations are constrained by memory bandwidth. Our scheme has tunable and steep time-space tradeoffs, which impose large computational penalties if less memory is used. Our solution is practical and ready to deploy: a reference implementation of a proof-of-work requiring 700 MB of RAM runs in 15 seconds on a 2.1 GHz CPU, increases the computations by a factor of 1000 if memory is halved, and presents a proof of just 120 bytes long.
This article unpacks the significance of tendering a painted canvas as proof in a native title claim in Australia. The painting is a collaboration of around 50 artists, all members of the Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, Mangala and Juwaliny peoples. The painting works in three ways: as proof of laws about country required under the criteria for native title (law), as establishing the credibility of the claimants (truth) and as a map. I disassemble the painting’s function along these three axes, and argue that in each case it targets a particular orthodoxy in the common law and pushies towards a realisation of the transformative and plural character of evidentiary practices in native title. Part 2 takes up the claim that the Ngurrara Canvas is evidence of Indigenous law. Although subordinated to the category of ‘fact’, the painting must be taken on its own terms in order for it to be meaningful as proof, including a very different person-place relation as the basis for entitlement and the point that, for the claimants, the painting embodies the law. In Part 3, I argue that the painting makes a claim to credibility that confronts conventional legal understandings of truth because it operates aesthetically, rhetorically and therefore a-rationally. Lastly, to read the painting as a map entails a challenge to the European valuation of land, the way it is thought and depicted. Where maps have historically colluded with property law in order to communicate a particular mode of entitlement, the canvas insists on disrupting the universality of this vision. In all three instances, there is a strong normative aspect to the canvas which is missed in a conventional reading of it as something purely factual, purely aesthetic or purely cartographic. I will show that it is this much larger challenge which must be met if Australia is, as was claimed for the recognition of native title in Mabo (1992), to reject terra nullius.
Money laundering can be defined as any act or attempted act to conceal or disguise the identity of illegally obtained proceeds so that they appear to have originated from legitimate sources (Money Laundering, 2016). It is difficult to determine the magnitude of money laundering because these illicit financial flows remain hidden (Schott, 2006). A report issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) quoted that the total of all criminal proceeds amounted to $2.1 trillion in 2009. The study also shows that “Less than 1 percent of global illicit financial flows are currently seized and frozen” (Pietschmann & Walker, 2012). This is concerning because money laundering not only enables the operation of criminal organizations such as drug and human traffickers but can also significantly distort the economies in which they enter.\nThe Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is an inter-governmental policy-making body that has helped to promote anti-money laundering efforts since its formation in 1989. It has issued 40 recommendations to fight money laundering and nine special recommendations to combat terrorist financing which have been adopted by 32 countries (About - Financial Action Task Force, 2016). Unfortunately, implementing these strategies has proved to be difficult for both developed and lesser developed countries. According to a study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2016, “over the last few years, in the U.S. alone, nearly a dozen global financial institutions have been assessed fines in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars for money laundering and/or sanctions violations" (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2016). It stands to say that if financial institutions are having difficulties implementing frameworks to prevent and detect money laundering, then our enforcement agencies are unable to adequately address the issue as well.\nA new hurdle that enforcement agencies have had to face is the emergence of Bitcoin, as well as other cryptocurrencies, that can be described as “a digital currency and online payment system in which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, operating independently of a central bank” (Swan, 2015). Being an often unrecognized currency, many banks and financial institutions have not had to worry about modifying their compliance programs. The biggest benefit of cryptocurrencies to money launderers is its decentralized nature. There is no governing authority, as members of the network handle issuances and payments. Once a disruptive technology, Bitcoin is beginning to lose momentum for a number of reasons and some its strongest proponents are now referring to it as nothing more than an experiment. The purpose of this paper is not to examine Bitcoin, but rather its underlying technology that has been found to be the actual value: blockchain. After providing a brief overview of the technology and the hurdles that financial institutions face when implementing anti-money laundering compliance programs, the possible ways in which blockchain can help alleviate these difficulties will be examined.
Abstrak The series of disasters that occurred late show is still much work to be completed by the various parties, namely the Government, Private / World of Business and Society. Included in this is the local society in terms of the decentralization policy, to reduce the risk and impact of disasters. One of the strategic effort should continue to be pursued in order to achieve disaster risk reduction program is to encourage people to responsive and resilience in disaster management. The impact of losses resulting from the emergence of huge losses predicted disaster, if then the entire risk of catastrophic losses that are charged only to the government, either through APBN (national level) and APBD (provincial and district level) can definitely be devastating to the performance of the government and posture as well as the health of the existing budget. This condition may eventually make the budget deficit, so as to reduce the burden that large budget caused by the disaster need to look for the best alternative, which can provide a solution without sacrificing the performance of the budget and the government efforts to improve the protection and welfare. One alternative option is to do the initiation of the need for disaster insurance for people living in disaster-prone areas, in an effort to transfer of risk financing and certainty of disaster impact protection for the community. Immediate steps for districts within the framework of autonomy and efforts to protect the public from threats, while improving the quality of life, particularly of the threat of disasters in the region, it is expected, and this step requires the political will of the holder of the mandate in the area, to realize the program of disaster insurance as one a safeguard for people in disaster-prone areas, especially if it will be focused for the poor. In this connection, data collection on poor people who are entitled to receive the insurance is the most important thing to ensure that the program with a limited budget, will be able to reach the right target and useful for people residing in vulnerable and high risk.
This article develops and demonstrates an improved system for measur ing court financial support utilizing LEAA block grant appropriations in Arizona and Florida. More accurate measures, based on both grantee and the functional use of the funds, allow a variety of court financing policy issues to be examined, many for the first time. ients in the context of state and local budget processes, as well as in various federal programs. Measuring the extent of this external court support is important for a variety of reasons. Policy debates over the adequacy of court funding, the implications of different funding patterns for the overall justice system, the extent of external control over court finances, and the relative ability of unified and decentralized court sys tems to compete for funds are examples of the issues in which reliable and valid measures of court support are required. A measurement system which permits accurate portrayal of financial support, regardless of fund ing source, is essential to deal with these questions. Unfortunately, scholarly research on judicial policy and administration is confounded by the lack of readily available and reliable data on court finances. The fragmentation of responsibility in our federal and state adversary systems makes determination of court support figures more difficult than similar assessments in other justice agencies. Ambiguity of terms is great and courts are particularly sensitive to any manipulation of finances that could be construed as affecting their neutrality. These com plexities make court support data especially vulnerable to distortion in bureaucratic and political environments. The deficiencies in both available data and valid measures of court financial support became apparent when attempts were made to analyze court participation in grant programs of the Law Enforcement Assistance
In the article we overview how to implement zero knowledge proof authentication protocol in the web. The proposed system consists of two parts: a server side and Android application. Despite the classical password-based approach, users have to install special application and use it as authentication manager. We use QR-codes to send necessary data from the server to the application, so login experience is just scanning this code. Finally, because of zero knowledge proof features the system is resistant to interception, secret-cracking and fishing, so supposed even to use on insecure public devices.
The objective of this article is to analyze the tie between the financings of the Decentralized Financial System (DFS) and the agricultural growth in Senegal. We use a linear equation model. The survey covers the active period of 1999 to 2013. Results show that the Decentralized Financial System has a positive and significant impact on the agricultural GDP in Senegal.
This world is being increasingly inundated with new technologies. Some fit in and improve the existing system, while others create imbalances in the market and challenges to the present legal structure. Examples of the latter include the Model T Ford assembly line, cellular telephones and the Internet. One such emerging and potentially disruptive technology taking the technological world by storm is the blockchain, the technology underlying Bitcoin. The blockchain is a distributed ledger which allows for a decentralised system of interactions. Its nascent application, Bitcoin, allows for secure financial transactions in virtual currency between parties who do not otherwise know each other and without the need of centralised services, such as banks or Paypal. The blockchain is now being developed to work with a variety of interactions between parties, whether to create autonomous self-executing smart contracts or establish a dependable and inviolable land title registry, all without the need for intermediaries. It has vast potential to change social constructs which have traditionally relied upon third parties to act as trusted intermediaries. However, in order for this innovation to develop its full potential and not become subject to misuse, some form of regulatory response is necessary.
Abstract In this essay I examine gold’s semiotic claims in the context of perceptions of gold in global financial markets, beginning with an intriguing parallel drawn by my informants between gold and Bitcoin. I make several interrelated arguments: (1) that in a variety of cultural contexts, gold has become a site for a very particular semiotic claim—that of not signifying at all; (2) that in the contemporary instance of physical gold in relation to other assets based on gold, this is expressed in an attention to gold’s material, tactile qualities (represented both iconically and indexically), and its extrasocial character; (3) that similar claims are made for Bitcoin, often drawing on a “digital metallism,” and idiom of gold; and (4) that the self-reflexive semiotic properties of gold have a long and diverse cultural history. In concluding, I speculate on how gold’s particular semiotic stance reflects one possible articulation of nature and convention as sources of meaning.