Blockchain Papers

Gebre Miruts Beyene

This study was about the civil service leadership role to implement civil service reform in Tigray Region. In Ethiopia, civil service leaders are required to contribute towards the development of public sectors. To this regard, the district level decentralization in Ethiopia let civil service leaders to provide high quality public services and to ensure freedom of choice and customer participation since early 1991.The 1990s was the period of change in government from Central Planning to Federal system. It was during this time that the government has tried to restructure the civil service system as a structural adjustment with federal outlook. Not only theoretically but also in practical discipline, civil service leaders have the responsibility to implement effectively government policies and strategies. It was with this intention that, the autonomous Ethiopia civil service institutions in general and that of Tigray region’s in particular were established and the civil service leaders were begun to operate independently the civil service organizations. It is believed that, a successful leadership is the cornerstone of government institutions to implement public policy which intern can have a direct impact on the development performance of a nation. However, some empirical evidence indicates that, the civil service leadership approach is inhibited by many administrative bureaucracies. Therefore, the objective of this journal article was to examine leadership role in implementing civil service reform in Ethiopia: the case of Tigray regional state. To examine the leadership role, the relevant data was collected both from primary and secondary data sources. Finally, the factors that impede the role of leadership to implement the civil service reform were identified and the discussion was concluded that regardless of the institutional framework in-place, the civil service leaders were ineffective and were not played their role effectively as a result of the inadequate appointment of civil service officials and process owners.

Haeruddin Haeruddin, Agus Suryono, Mujibur Rahman Khairul Muluk, Tjahjanulin Domai

The regional administration in the context of regional autonomy brought significant changes to the centralization system of local governance turned into a decentralized system. This normative phenomenon is creating administrative boundaries and functional area for each local government as an autonomous region. While empirical phenomena in the administration of public services across the region hindered administrative problems and functional boundaries of each local government, as a solution to overcome these problems required cooperation among local governments. Researchers adopting the concept of cooperation between local government approach (Smith) consisting of; 1). Legal and political approaches; 2). Inter-Organizational Politics; and 3). Political Community, to be used as a tool dialogue and analysis of the research findings. This study used a qualitative approach to research instruments; people, events and documents. Data collection techniques are interview, observation and documentation. Data analysis techniques are grounded theory. Our study focus on: 1). The processed for determining the object of cooperation; 2). Implementation of cooperation in water resources management; 3). Factors that influence the management of water resources. The results showed that 1). The process of determining the object of cooperation has met the principles of law and administration, reduce regional ego; 2). Implementation of the cooperation is not only a formality but prefers the value of togetherness, efficiency and effectiveness of service provision for drinking water has been established well characterized by the distribution of drinking water services in the three local government in Malang; 3). The most influential factor is the regional head support, coordination and less harmonized local ego; 4). Cooperation model that built up is joint service agreement in written agreements and intergovernmental agreement model (government to government = G to G).

Pilco Loza, Lucía Alexandra

The present investigation had as general objective the, necessity to reform the art. 137 of the Organic Code of the Territorial Organization, Autonomy and Decentralization (COOTAD), with the purpose of establishing an administrative procedure for the handling of residual waters and solid wastes in the decentralized municipal autonomous governments from Ecuador. The article presents the results of an investigation based on the summary of bibliographical data, you interview carried out people that inhabit near sanitary fillers for end they are affected by the bad administration ejecutoriada, also related to the degradation of the rivers in Ecuador, the causes and consequences of the contamination as well as the position of alternative development to mitigate this impact. According to gathered information one can affirm that the rivers in Ecuador are in being the main cause of contamination the one poured of liquids and solidos.shtml solid urban residuals as well as discharges of industries. The most harmful consequence is given in relation to the appearance and proliferation of combined action and the communities constitute the main alternative of the development to mitigate this impact. The causes are shown, consequences and alternative of the development of the contamination of rivers and of the environment in Ecuador. The handling of the solid wastes and residual waters are so important as much in Ecuador as in the whole planet, for such a reason in the same Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador in the Chapter second, Rights of the good one to live Section second, set healthy, he/she speaks on; Art. 14. - are recognized the population's right to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced atmosphere that guarantees the sostenibilidad and the good one to live, sumak kawsay. It is declared of public interest the preservation of the atmosphere, the conservation of the ecosystems, the biodiversity and the integrity of the genetic patrimony of the country, the prevention of the environmental damage and the recovery of the natural degraded spaces. Art. 15.- the State will promote, in the public sector and private, the use of technologies environmentally clean and of energies alternative non pollutants and of under impact. The energy sovereignty won't be reached in detriment of the alimentary sovereignty; neither it will affect the right to the water. You prohibit the development, production, holding, commercialization, import, transport, storage and use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, of persistent highly toxic organic pollutants, internationally forbidden agroquimicos, and the technologies and experimental noxious biological agents and organisms genetically modified harmful for the human health or that they attempt against the 25 alimentary sovereignty or the ecosystems, as well as the introduction of nuclear residuals and toxic wastes to the national territory

Matteo Maffei, Giulio Malavolta, Manuel Reinert, Dominique Schröder

Cloud storage has rapidly become a cornerstone of many IT infrastructures, constituting a seamless solution for the backup, synchronization, and sharing of large amounts of data. Putting user data in the direct control of cloud service providers, however, raises security and privacy concerns related to the integrity of outsourced data, the accidental or intentional leakage of sensitive information, the profiling of user activities and so on. Furthermore, even if the cloud provider is trusted, users having access to outsourced files might be malicious and misbehave. These concerns are particularly serious in sensitive applications like personal health records and credit score systems. To tackle this problem, we present GORAM, a cryptographic system that protects the secrecy and integrity of outsourced data with respect to both an untrusted server and malicious clients, guarantees the anonymity and unlink ability of accesses to such data, and allows the data owner to share outsourced data with other clients, selectively granting them read and write permissions. GORAM is the first system to achieve such a wide range of security and privacy properties for outsourced storage. In the process of designing an efficient construction, we developed two new, generally applicable cryptographic schemes, namely, batched zero-knowledge proofs of shuffle and an accountability technique based on chameleon signatures, which we consider of independent interest. We implemented GORAM in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and ran a performance evaluation demonstrating the scalability and efficiency of our construction.

Berry Schoenmakers, Meilof Veeningen

Abstract. Multiparty computation can be used for privacy-friendly out-sourcing of computations on private inputs of multiple parties. A com-putation is outsourced to several computation parties; if not too many are corrupted (e.g., no more than half), then they cannot determine the inputs or produce an incorrect output. However, in many cases, these guarantees are not enough: we need correctness even if all computation parties may be corrupted; and we need that correctness can be verified even by parties that did not participate in the computation. Protocols satisfying these additional properties are called “universally verifiable”. In this paper, we propose a new security model for universally verifi-able multiparty computation, and we present a practical construction, based on a threshold homomorphic cryptosystem. We also develop a multiparty protocol for jointly producing non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs, which may be of independent interest.

Jon Roffe

That ancient rhetorical trope, symbolic patricide, is alive and well in contemporary philosophy. One need look no further than the fate of Gilles Deleuze at the hands of those who amass beneath the plural banner of contemporary philosophy for proof of this. Of course the great, unavoidable irony is that the position of father is often only occupied post mortem, symbolic murder being at the same time the installation of this or that thinker at the head of yesterday’s table. I mean here simply that in the rush to stake new theoretical ground beyond ‘post-modernism’, hermeneutics and deconstruction, wild empiricism, correlationism — in sum, all of those avatars of imperialism our autochthonous fairy tales warn us about in such dire tones — Deleuze’s name comes to stand in for everything we must not anymore want or think, despite his demonstrable innocence in many regards. This prosecutory fervor leads to critical attacks that engage very little with the work itself, unconsciously exemplifying Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis for the critic: ‘Polemics mean to destroy a book in a few of its sentences. The less it has been studied the better’ (2008: 67). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Monica Sassatelli

“What is a festival?” is a deceptively simple question – but also a deceptively complex one. This is reflected by much of the literature on festivals, in which discussion of their multiplicity and heterogeneity, their complex etymologies and histories, as well as the expansion in the second half of the 20th century, and exponentially since the 1980s in Europe, has seen festivals transformed into one of the dominant formats in the current cultural realm. However, beneath the apparent multiplicity, one major feature helps to clarify the issues at stake when considering their cultural significance: festivals tend to be either “‘traditional’ moments of celebration or... highly orchestrated mega-events” (Waitt, 2008: 513). The first are supposed to be the organic expression of a community; the second, which we may call post-traditional (Giorgi and Sassatelli, 2011: 1-11), are instead mostly associated with the contemporary culture industry and its rationales, their recent exponential growth seen as proof that we are faced by a non-organic, commercially driven phenomenon. The distinction is relevant because, whilst traditional festivals have been studied, in particular within anthropology and folklore studies, as expressions of a given society and an entry point into its culture, values and identity, post-traditional festivals have been dismissed by some writers as banal, and banalizing ‘spectacles’ (Debord, 1994). Different approaches and literatures contribute to deepen this gulf, with contemporary festivals on the whole dismissed by mainstream social science and cultural theory and assessed in terms of their (economic) impact only. In this chapter, after a brief review of the dominant approach in urban festivals research, I try to uncouple these associations. That is, to explore the possibility that contemporary festivals, as expressions of the contemporary society in which they flourish, can provide a valuable analytical perspective on its public culture.

Armağan Ebru Bozkurt Yüksel

OZ Internet [1] hayatin her alanini etkilemektedir. Gun gectikce Internet’e bagla­nan kisilerin sayisi artmaktadir. Pek cok alanda yararlanilan Internet’ten ticarette de yararlanilmaktadir. Internet’te herhangi bir calisma saati veya is­yeri ile siniri olmaksizin gerceklesen ticaret, isletmelerin giderek daha fazla ilgisini cekmektedir [2] . Elektronik ticaretin [3] yukselisi ve teknolojideki ilerlemeler yeni odeme sistemlerinin kullanimini baslatmistir. Bu makalede elektronik odeme yontemleri genel olarak degerlendirdikten sonra elektronik paranin bir cesidi olan sanal paranin en bilinen orneklerini olusturan Bitcoin ve Linden Dolari incelenmektedir. Calismada elektronik paranin avantaj ve dezavantajlari ve konu ile ilgili oneriler dunyadaki ve Turkiye’deki uygulamalar gozonunde tutularak degerlendirilmistir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Elektronik Para, Sanal Para, Kripto Para, Bitcoin, Linden Dollars ABSTRACT Internet affects all areas of life. The number of persons who connects to the Internet increases day by day. It has been benefited from the Internet in numerous fields and in commerce as well. The commerce which takes place on the Internet without any burdens of working hours or workplaces attracts the business concerns increasingly. The rise of electronic commerce and the developments in technology have started the use of new payment systems. This article attempts to assess the electronic payment methods generally and then analyse the best known virtual currencies Bitcoin and Linden Dollars which are also types of electronic money. In this work the advantages and the disadvantages of electronic money and the suggestions about the subject has been evaluated by looking at the practice in the world and in Turkey. Keywords: Electronic Money, Virtual Currency, Crypto Currency, Bitcoin, Linden Dollars [1] Bu calismada Internet kelimesinin ilk harfi ozel isim olmasi nedeni ile buyuk yazilmis­tir. Internet, birbirine bagli bilgisayar aglari kelimelerinin (Interconnection of computer networks) kisaltmasidir. http://www.Internetnedir.net/Internet-nedir-ne-degildir.html (Erisim: 22.03.2014); Turk Dil Kurumu, Internet kelimesinin karsiligi olarak genel ag demektedir. http://tdk.gov.tr/index.php?option=com_gtsa Oyle ki, elektronik ticaret Amerika Birlesik Devletleri’nde her yil %20 buyuyen 220 Milyar Amerikan Dolarlik bir endustri haline gelmistir. 2017 yilinda bu rakamin 270 Milyar Amerikan Dolari’na cikmasi beklen­mektedir. Avrupa’da ise elektronik ticaretin her yil buyume orani %11’dir.; Morrison, K.: The Growth of E-commerce, http://socialtimes.com/data-growth-e-commerce-infographic_b198687 (Erisim 31.08.23014); Turkiye’de 2009 yilindan 2013 yilina kadar olan donemde elektronik ticarette buyume orani % 379,91’dir. 2013 yili itibari ile elekt­ronik ticaret 35 Milyar Turk Lirasina yakin islem hacmine ulasmistir. Yillara gore elektronik ticaretin gelisim oranlari ve detayli bilgi icin bkz. http://www. platinmarket.com/2009-2013-arasi-turkiye-e-ticaret-buyume-orani/ (Eri­sim 30.10.2014). [3] 6563 sayili Elektronik Ticaretin Duzenlenmesi Hakkinda Kanun’un 1(a) maddesinde elektronik ticaret “fiziki olarak karsi karsiya gelmeksizin elektronik ortamda gerceklesti­rilen cevrimici iktisadi ve ticari her turlu faaliyet” olarak tanimlanmistir. Elektronik tica­retin doktrinde degisik tanimlari bulunmaktadir. “Elektronik ticaret, yazi, ses ve/veya goruntu seklindeki verilerin elektronik ortamda islenmesi ve iletilmesi suretiyle gercekles­tirilen ticari islemlerin butunudur.” seklindeki tanim icin bkz. Ozdemir Kocasakal, H.: Elektronik Sozlesmelerden Dogan Uyusmazliklarin Cozumunde Uygulanacak Hukukun ve Yetkili Mahkemelerin Tespiti, Vedat Kitapcilik, Istanbul 2003, s.5; Dar anlamda elektronik ticaretin Internet uzerinden ve bilgisayar vasitasi ile gerceklestirilen ticari faaliyetleri ifade ettigi seklinde tanim icin bkz. Kayihan, S. / Yildiz, H.: Elektronik Tica­retin Hukuki ve Vergi Boyutu, Seckin Yayinevi, Ankara 2004, s.39; Elektronik ticaretin ticari islemlerin tamaminin veya bir kisminin elektronik iletisim araclari araciligiyla gerceklestirilmesi seklinde tanimi icin bkz. Sariakcali, T.: Internet Uzerinden Akdedilen Sozlesmeler, Seckin Yayinevi, Ankara 2008, s.19.

Martina E. Greiner, Hui Wang

Trust has always been important in electronic commerce. Prior research in MIS has mainly focused on trust-building mechanisms and insurance against opportunistic behavior. We suggest a “trust-free system” approach, which addresses trust issues by eliminating the need for trust. Using Bitcoin, a decentralized electronic cash system, we illustrate how a system can solve trust issues by becoming “trust-free” through design. We discuss the design features of this approach, and explore research questions for generalizing the design to other information systems. The idea of a trust-free system opens a new way of thinking about trust issues in information systems. We believe that there is an untapped potential for new ideas and research on how to design and evaluate information systems.

Алексей Чурилов

Bitcoins and their use are a very actual issue, especially with high popularity and high cost of Bitcoins. Number of Bitcoin’s transactions increasing day to day. But many individuals and business owners do not understand what is Bitcoin, how it works and how could it be used in business. This article discusses the nature of Bitcoin, a decentralized, anonymous and largely unregulated virtual currency, its legal status and use in business. The article includes examination of both advantages and disadvantages of Bitcoin and international regulation of legal status and taxation of this currency.

J Wonglimpiyarat

This paper is concerned with the new Darwinism of the payment system. The researcher discusses the payment system to understand if Bitcoin would replace our cash-based society. The analysis is based on the technology S-curve and Schumpeter’s model of economic development. At present, there are problems hindering Bitcoin innovation to achieve a wide adoption as the innovation is not well received by the government central banks around the world. It is interesting to see that the swing of S-curves is not strong enough to cause a paradigm shift according to the Schumpeterian concept of creative destruction. The results have shown parallel S-curve trajectories of electronic money innovations signifying a move from a cash-based economy towards a less cash society. The study provides useful implications to support the diffusion of Bitcoin innovation.

Loi Luu, Viswesh Narayanan, Kunal Baweja, Chaodong Zheng · 6 authors

Abstract—In this paper, we design a new blockchain Byzantine consensus protocol SCP where the throughput scales nearly lin-early with the computation: the more computing power available, the more blocks selected per unit time. SCP is also efficient that the number of messages it requires is nearly linear in the network size. The computational scalability property offers the flexibility to tune bandwidth consumption by adjusting computational param-eters (e.g., proof-of-work difficulty). The key ideas lie in securely establishing identities for network participants, randomly placing them in several committees and running a classical consensus protocol within each committee to propose blocks in parallel. We further design a mechanism to allow reaching consensus on blocks without broadcasting actual block data, while still enabling efficient block verification. We prove that our protocol is secure, efficient and applicable to several case studies. We conduct scalability experiments on Amazon EC2 with upto 80 cores, and confirm that SCP matches its theoretical scaling properties. I.

Dominique Unruh

We present a new definition of computationally binding commitment schemes in the quantum setting, which we call “collapse-binding”. The definition applies to string commitments, composes in parallel, and works well with rewindingbased proofs. We give simple constructions of collapse-binding commitments in the random oracle model, giving evidence that they can be realized from hash functions like SHA-3. We evidence the usefulness of our definition by constructing three-round statistical zero-knowledge quantum arguments of knowledge for all NP languages.

Eike Kiltz, Hoeteck Wee

Non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs for algebraic relations in a group, such as the GrothSahai proofs, are an extremely powerful tool in pairing-based cryptography. A series of recent works focused on obtaining very efficient NIZK proofs for linear spaces in a weaker quasi-adaptive model. We revisit recent quasiadaptive NIZK constructions, providing clean, simple, and improved constructions via a conceptually different approach inspired by recent developments in identity-based encryption. We then extend our techniques also to linearly homomorphic structure-preserving signatures, an object both of independent interest and with many applications.

Shweta Chopra, Manasa Kondapalli

The healthcare system in the United States is comparatively superior to healthcare systems of other countries in terms of advanced and modern technology, drugs used, services offered, and required care. However, hospital management has to face the challenges in the managing of care and addressing safety issues for its patients due to the multiple stakeholders involved such as medical doctors, residents, nurses, diagnostic tool providers, as well as patients. Every year many people lose their lives due to medical errors caused by new employees in hospitals, errors that can be prevented by “mistake-proofing.” Similarly, teaching hospitals face an increase in medical errors in the month of July due to cohort turnover, which occurs when trained residents graduate and new ones begin their residency, resulting in increased fatalities and mishaps; this phenomenon is called the “July effect.” This sudden changeover of workforce puts the quality of healthcare in teaching hospitals at stake. In this paper, we discuss various reasons behind the July effect and several tools of quality that can be implemented to improve healthcare and increase patients’ safety.

Max M. Houck, Jay A. Siegel

No abstract is available for this record.

Spiros Athanasiou, N. Georgomanolis, Kostas Patroumpas, Michalis Alexakis · 5 authors

A wealth of data and services are available on the Web, and often have geographical context as well. But the vast quan-tity of offered geospatial information is rather difficult to explore, and its quality hard to assess, due to lack of suf-ficient metadata. Hence, the Open Geospatial Consortium has specified application profiles for publishing, accessing, and searching over collections of spatial metadata with stan-dardized Catalogue Services for the Web (CSW). Unfortu-nately, existing spatial metadata remain largely unexploited by Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we introduce TripleGeo-CSW, a middleware that can be used to discover metadata from existing CSWs through a virtual SPARQL endpoint. Acting as broker between a request (in SPARQL) and catalogue services (in XML/GML), this platform can provide on-the-fly information (as RDF triples) on available geodata according to multiple, user-specified criteria (e.g., area of interest, date of last update, keywords). As a proof of concept, we have set up an instance of this middleware against CSWs from public authorities across Europe, which involve datasets complying with the EU INSPIRE Directive. Our experience testifies that TripleGeo-CSW can assist stake-holders to repurpose existing CSWs with minimal overhead and readily expose spatial metadata on the Semantic Web.

Jiawen Yang, Chuanglin Fang

No abstract is available for this record.

Luis Andrés, S. A. Dan Biller, Matías Herrera Dappe

If the South Asia region hopes to meet its development goals and not risk slowing down or even halting growth, poverty alleviation, and shared prosperity, it is essential to make closing its huge infrastructure gap a priority. Identifying and addressing gaps in the data on expenditure, access, and quality are crucial to ensuring that governments make efficient, practical, and effective infrastructure development choices. This study addresses this knowledge gap by focusing on the current status of infrastructure sectors and geographical disparities, real levels of investment and private sector participation, deficits and proper targets for the future, and bottlenecks to expansion. The findings show that the South Asia region needs to invest between US$1.7 trillion and US$2.5 trillion (at current prices) to close its infrastructure gap. If investments are spread evenly over the years until 2020, the region needs to invest between 6.6 and 9.9 percent of 2010 gross domestic product per year, an estimated increase of up to 3 percentage points from the 6.9 percent of gross domestic product invested in infrastructure by countries in the region in 2009. Given the enormous size of the region's infrastructure deficiencies, it will need a mix of investment in infrastructure stock and supportive reforms to close its infrastructure gap. One major challenge will be prioritizing investment needs. Another will be choosing optimal forms of service provision, including the private sector's role, and the decentralization of administrative functions and powers.

David G. Birch

No abstract is available for this record.

Soumya Easwaran, Manu Dixit, Sitabhra Sinha

No abstract is available for this record.

Hans Fleischmann, Philipp Gölzer, Jens-Erik Franke, M. Amberg

Die umfassende Vernetzung intelligenter Produkte und Produktionssysteme in Industrie 4.0 erlaubt eine dezentral agierende Produktion sowie die Fähigkeit zur Selbststeuerung und Selbstoptimierung. Die Standardisierung von Kommunikation und Datenaustausch nimmt an dieser Stelle eine entscheidende Rolle ein und ermöglicht die system- und wertschöpfungsübergreifende Interaktion von Entitäten. Im Fachbeitrag werden formalisierte Anforderungen von Industrie 4.0 und Fähigkeiten propagierter Kommunikationsprotokolle gegenübergestellt.   Comprehensive networks of intelligent products and production systems in Industry 4.0 enable an autonomous and decentralized manufacturing organization and the capability for self-control and self-optimization. Standardized communication and data exchange is the key to establish the interaction of entities and systems along the entire value chain. This paper analyses requirements of Industry 4.0 and discusses the capabilities of propagated communication protocols.

Hong‐Seok Park, Ngoc-Hien Tran

Globalization, unpredictable markets, increased products customization and frequent changes in products, production technologies and machining systems have become a complexity in today’s manufacturing environment. One key strategy for coping with the evolution of this situation is to develop or apply an enable technology such as intelligent manufacturing. Intelligent manufacturing system (IMS) is characterized by decentralized, distributed, networked compositions of heterogeneous and autonomous systems. The model of IMS is inherited from the organization of the living systems in biology and nature so that the manufacturing system has the advanced characteristics inspired from biology such as self-adaptation, self-diagnosis, and selfhealing. To prove this concept, an innovative system with applying the advanced information and communication technology such as internet of things, cognitive agent are proposed to integrate, organize and allocate the machining resources. Innovative system is essential for modern machining system to flexibly and quickly adapt to new challenges of manufacturing environment.

Sorin Dan

This thesis asks whether the increased autonomy and decentralization associated with the New Public Management (NPM) have impacted on the coordination of organizations within the public sector. Ideas and practices once typical of the private sector have become increasingly common in public sectors around the world. Often times they have been promoted under the umbrella of fashionable terms such as rdquo;, “modernization” or New Public Management (NPM). Although not entirely new, these ideas gained momentum, starting in the early 1980s, in some Western democracies and then increasingly became promoted as a solution – and sometimes the solution nbsp;to public administration problems across the world. Great variation exists, however, in their spread and implementation across countries and sectors. Two of these proposals for change are the disaggregation of bureaucratic forms of organization and decentralization. The expectation has been that these reforms would improve operational flexibility, responsiveness to the needs of service users and ultimately quality and performance. Following these reform proposals, administrators are supposed to make use of greater discretion in the application of managerial principles and techniques. Managers and the entities they lead are expected to exercise initiative, to be proactive, and to act rather than just to react to imperatives from politicians, as it was traditionally common in public administration. A second major reform that has been widely experimented with in the public sector is decentralization. Decisions, it is argued, ought to be made as close to the citizen as possible. In this way it is assumed that information and understanding of local needs improve, which can further translate into better decision making. There is also an ambition to reduce the overload and delay associated with highly centralized decisions. However, the trend towards decentralization is neither new nor uniform across public sectors. Some governments have taken steps to recentralize certain functions after earlier efforts to decentralize while others have been initially reluctant to decentralize, but recently have taken more confident steps in this direction. The specific setting of this doctoral dissertation comprises public hospital systems in selected European countries: 1)nbsp; a Nordic country – Norway 2)nbsp; nbsp;Baltic, EU member state since 2003, formerly part of the Soviet Union – Estonia 3) a nation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a former communist state and an EU member state since 2007 – Romania. The thesis comprises eight chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the subject matter and motivates its academic and social relevance. Chapter 2 reviews the literature and shows how the subject matter of the thesis is embedded in the broad academic discourse. This consists of the public administration and management literature – particularly New Public Management, governance and coordination – on the one hand, and healthcare and hospital management and governance, on the other hand. It provides a theoretical review of the concept of coordination, and shows how different theories have dealt with coordination in a public sector context. The chapter also reviews existing analytical and empirical approaches to coordination. In chapter 3 we propose an analytical framework geared to the central coordination of publicly-owned hospitals. The framework builds on two theories – principal-agent theory and sociological institutionalism – and seeks to explain why coordination problems occur across the three cases. Chapter 4 includes the research design: the case selection and methods. The thesis uses an explanatory comparative case study approach to understand how reform affects coordination in hospital systems in the three country cases: Estonia, Norway and Romania. We use congruence analysis as a specific type of case study research. Congruence analysis connects empirical observations to expectations derived from theory. The main source of empirical material comprises of a program of semi-structured interviews conducted in all three countries with various stakeholders – both in central institutions and public hospitals. This evidence is supplemented with relevant documentary data and statistical information. Chapters 5 through 7 constitute the core of the thesis and they describe, evaluate and explain the relationship between organizational reform in public hospitals and coordination problems. Each of these three country chapters ends by discussing the compatibility between empirical findings and the theoretical propositions derived from the two theories. In each country chapter we seek to explain the relationship between organizational reform in public hospitals and central coordination by means of the theoretical framework introduced in Chapter 3. Chapter 8 concludes by comparing the empirical and theoretical findings across the three cases and discusses the implications of the results for theory and practice. The research has reached the following conclusions: nbsp; Organizational reform in public hospitals has constituted an important component of healthcare policy in all three countries in the past 10 to 15 years. All three countries have experimented with structural reform (including decentralization or centralization) and have grappled with granting management autonomy to public hospitals while seeking to solidify policy-making and coordination capacity at the center of government nbsp; This administrative change across the three hospital systems has not been marginal only – it has involved major resources and has received considerable attention from different stakeholders •nbsp; Although hospital decentralization and autonomy reform constitute on-going processes that may constantly undergo some degree of change, we have observed that in two of our three cases, Estonia and Norway, the reform model proposed more than 10 years ago has essentially endured to the present. While ideas for change to the model have been put forward, in Norway for example, it is unlikely that this change would radically reshape the type of reform model adopted years ago. Romania, while clearly experimenting with the same types of international ideas, has thus far only implemented decentralization. Granting greater autonomy to hospital management is still an idea that is being considered by central policy makers in Romania, but it is uncertain if, when and how it will be implemented nbsp; In the face of organizational reform the state capacity to coordinate the decentralized and autonomous hospitals has been put to the test nbsp; We have observed a reconsideration of the role of central institutions, most notably the ministries of health, but also health insurance funds in social insurance systems or other central bodies in tax-based systems nbsp; Hospital autonomy has overall posed serious challenges to the central coordination of autonomous hospitals in Estonia, much more so than in the case of Norway and Romania nbsp; However, the autonomy of hospitals is not the only factor that affects the effectiveness of coordination. Hospitals that enjoy a lower degree of autonomy, as in Romania for example, are not necessarily more effectively coordinated than hospitals that enjoy a high degree of decision-making discretion nbsp; nbsp;Norway, a high-trust society that is compliant with government regulation, coordination problems exist in more specific areas of ICT and in the case of elite medical specialties in the Oslo University Hospital. Overall, coordination in Norway has significantly improved following the 2002 hospital reform, but this does not necessarily mean that coordination in the public hospital sector is problem-free nbsp; Hospital system culture and principal-agent theory offer complementary insights into the dynamics of public hospital coordination. Conflicting interests and goals and cultural factors are particularly relevant in understanding the effectiveness of central coordination of public hospitals nbsp; There is more evidence for some propositions of principal-agent theory than for othersnbsp;more evidence was found in favour of conflicting interests and goals than in the case of imperfect information. Positive and negative incentives are situated in the middle with more evidence in some cases than in others. The thesis contributes to the existing literature in the following ways: nbsp; Directly compares two eastern and one western European system and shows that such comparison, although it does not follow a most similar research design, is both feasible and productive. This research finds that problems of coordination can occur in different systems and therefore to study public sector coordination comparatively one can choose to select cases that display differences between them and look for factors that can explain a similar outcome nbsp; Covers one country where only very limited research on hospital reforms has previously been published (Romania) •nbsp; Sets out new primary evidence in the form of original interviews and documentary evidence which has not previously been cited in academic research nbsp; Employs two theoretical approaches in a comparative and complementary way, and argues that conflicting interests and goals and hospital system culture help explain coordination in European public hospital systems nbsp; Proposes an analytical framework for analyzing coordination in public hospital systems and finds the framework to be useful in that it encourages researchers and practitioners to think specifically about the implications of coordination; that is, the problems and effects of coordination problems.