Improving quality and efficiency in providing public services by accelerating the decentralization process represents one of the fundamental premises of a democratic, rule of law state that is oriented towards achieving performance in public services for its citizens. Bringing public decision-making closer to the citizen, improving quality in providing public services to citizens, as well as reducing their costs, are but a small part of the advantages brought about by public services decentralization, with the major role in decentralization being played by both education institutions, and local public authorities. In this context, the study focuses firstly on approaching empirically and epistemologically the decentralization of Romanian public education system, which presupposes transfer of authority, responsibility and resources concerning decision-making, and of general and financial management towards education institutions and local community. What is also revealed in this study is the premises and stages of Romanian public education decentralization, the advantages but also disadvantages and limitations of decentralization, as well as the education public service prospects from the perspective of decentralization. Last, but not least the study approaches the subject from the viewpoint of related public policies and legislation; the research puts emphasis on the fact that in accordance with the present Romanian legislative framework, the entire patrimony of public schools- land and premises- is public property and belongs to communes, cities and municipalities, and it is managed by the respective local public authorities. Furthermore, it is local budges that finance schools, and school patrimony and funds are currently being handled by local councils. Insufficiency of financial resources on the part of local communities may represent a serious drawback in the way of achieving efficient and effective decentralization in Romania, thus indicating a need to identify feasible solutions for finding the resources necessary for the conclusion of this process.
Open access
Education, Management, Technology, Human Resources
The HiT profiles are country-based reports that provide a detailed description of a health system and of policy initiatives in progress or under development. HiTs examine different approaches to the organization, financing and delivery of health services and the role of the main actors in health systems; describe the institutional framework, process, content and implementation of health and health care policies; and highlight challenges and areas that require more in-depth analysis. The Ukrainian health system has preserved the fundamental features of the Soviet Semashko system against a background of other changes, which are developed on market economic principles. The transition from centralized financing to its extreme decentralization is the main difference in the health system in comparison with the classic Soviet model. Health facilities are now functionally subordinate to the Ministry of Health, but managerially and financially answerable to the regional and local self-government, which has constrained the implementation of health policy and fragmented health financing. Health care expenditure in Ukraine is low by regional standards and has not increased significantly as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) since the mid 1990s; expenditure cannot match the constitutional guarantees of access to unlimited care. Although prepaid schemes such as sickness funds are growing in importance, out-of-pocket payments account for 37.4% of total health expenditure. The core challenges for Ukrainian health care therefore remain the ineffective protection of the population from the risk of catastrophic health care costs and the structural inefficiency of the health system, which is caused by the inefficient system of health care financing. Health system weaknesses are highlighted by increasing rates of avoidable mortality. Recent political impasse has complicated health system reforms and policy-makers face significant challenges in overcoming popular distrust and fatigue in the face of necessary but as yet unimplemented reforms.
In recent years, immunization strategies have been developed for stopping epidemics in complex-network-like environments. Yet it still remains a challenge for existing strategies to deal with dynamically-evolving networks that contain community structures, though they are ubiquitous in the real world. In this paper, we examine the performances of an autonomy-oriented distributed search strategy for tackling such networks. The strategy is based on the ideas of self-organization and positive feedback from Autonomy-Oriented Computing (AOC). Our experimental results have shown that autonomous entities in this strategy can collectively find and immunize most highly-connected nodes in a dynamic, community-based network within a few steps.
One of the fascinating aspects of ancient Greek and Latin lyric poetry is its multiplicity. Having staked his claim as a Roman Alcaeus in the Roman Odes, Horace goes on to prove his absolute mastery over the multiple possibilities of lyric poetry in general in Odes 3.7-12. In this article I would like to illustrate how Horace, at the beginning of Book 3, prepares renewed proof for a lasting monument of lyric poetry (Odes 3.30.1) - a monument based on his mastery of both metrical variety as well as multifaceted content.
In order to solve the issue that existing direct anonymous attestation (DAA) scheme can not operate effectively in different domains,based on the original DAA scheme,a novel direct anonymous attestation protocol used in multi domains environment is proposed and designed,in which,the certificate issuer located in outside of domain can be considered as a proxy server to issue the DAA certificate for valid member nodes directly.Our designed mechanism accords with present trusted computing group (TCG) international specification,and can solve the problems of practical authentication and privacy information protection between different trusted domains efficiently.Compared with present DAA scheme,in our protocol,the anonymity,unforgeability can be guaranteed,and the replay-attack also can be avoided.It has important referenced and practical application value in trusted computing field.
We motivate, define and construct quantum proofs of knowledge, proofs of knowledge secure against quantum adversaries. Our constructions are based on a new quantum rewinding technique that allows us to extract witnesses in many classical proofs of knowledge. We give criteria under which a classical proof of knowledge is a quantum proof of knowledge. Combining our results with Watrous’ results on quantum zeroknowledge, we show that there are zero-knowledge quantum proofs of knowledge for all languages in NP.
Interventional pain medicine faces a crisis. In the interests of bringing relief to their patients, pain specialists practice a variety of invasive procedures that interrupt pain pathways in order to stop pain, or modulate physiological processes in order to reduce pain perception. Few of these interventions have been subjected to randomized controlled trials. Meanwhile, in an effort to reign in increasing costs, third-party payors are implementing “evidence-based medicine” (EBM) standards. Unfortunately, the version of EBM that they apply is increasingly demanding multiple, randomized, controlled trials before interventions are recognized and reimbursed. Conversely, when randomized controlled trials are lacking, their absence is becoming accepted as proof of ineffectiveness of a procedure, and reimbursement is being denied. As a result, a conflict has developed. Practitioners unfortunately are faced with patients today whose treatment cannot be ignored while waiting for someone to generate the evidence. Meanwhile, payors cannot afford to recognize and reimburse every intervention when they cannot tell if it amounts to no more than a source of income for practitioners, with no benefit to patients. Preventing resolution of these tensions is an obstacle that has not attracted attention and consideration in debates and treatises on EBM. To test and validate a single intervention requires enormous funding. For example, a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of radiofrequency neurotomy for neck pain [1] cost some $500,000. The costs of a placebo-controlled trial of intradiscal electrothermal therapy [2] were estimated at over $1,000,000. But single trials are not enough. Pundits do not credit single controlled trials; they require replication studies. Therefore, costs are doubled. Furthermore, various authorities require evidence for their particular populations. Thus, some insurers are interested in workers' compensation patients, whereas the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wants data on Medicare patients. Therefore, costs double again. Table 1 lists many of the contentious procedures in interventional pain medicine that lack randomized prospective studies. Producing a single study of each would result in an estimated conservative cost of $19.5 million. Reproducing these studies could result in a potential total cost of $58.5 million. Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health do not have either the funds or the disposition to fund the research required. Nor is it a solution that industry should share the burden of costs. Agencies who adjudicate evidence consider industry-sponsored research to be suspect and do not accept it as valid evidence [3]. Nor can the burden be shared overseas, because many insurers and agencies such as Current Procedural Terminology (http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/no-index/physician-resources/3882.shtml) currently only accept studies conducted on U.S. patients and published in U.S. journals. The responsibility for funding would seem to fall back to independent medical societies. The social reality is that it is economically impossible to satisfy the ad hoc academic standards demanded by regulatory authorities. Yet, at stake is the welfare of millions of patients. A selection of interventional pain procedures that require randomized controlled trials A selection of interventional pain procedures that require randomized controlled trials A resolution of this situation is possible by adopting a set of principles from jurisprudence that define the burden of proof. For serious criminal matters, the criterion is “beyond all reasonable doubt.” For lesser matters, the standard is “on the balance of probabilities.” For interventional pain medicine, randomized controlled trials are analogous to proof beyond all reasonable doubt. The corresponding device for “on the balance of probabilities” are well-designed, properly conducted observational studies. This is not an unreasonable alternate conceptually, academically, or economically. The crucial requirement is that the observational studies be well designed and properly conducted. Poor studies do not provide evidence, but well-designed observational studies do. A particular virtue of observational studies is that they can refute the efficacy of an intervention, without requiring a control. If an intervention fails to work when properly audited, it clearly does not work, and it does not require an expensive randomized controlled trial to refute it. Therefore, ineffective practices in interventional pain medicine can be eliminated relatively cheaply by conducting good observational studies. However, if observational studies are positive, they provide prima facie evidence of efficacy. Subordinate questions might then be raised, as to why the intervention works, or if it works better than other treatments. These amount to academic or socioeconomic questions, and do not vitally affect the prima facie status of an intervention. Accordingly, we propose a two-sided resolution to the crisis in interventional pain medicine. In consideration of regulatory authorities countenancing observational studies as evidence, proponents of interventions should provide well-designed, properly conducted observational studies. To assist both sides in this enterprise, the American Academy of Pain Medicine and the International Spine Intervention Society have undertaken to develop a set of guidelines that define the necessary components of an observational study, and how they might be assessed. In brief, those components are independent monitoring of the following: 1) pain scores before treatment and at a sufficient number of times after treatment until the outcomes have stabilized; 2) the proportion of patients who achieve reductions of pain greater than the minimal clinically important change, and reductions to zero and other end points; 3) the proportion of patients who genuinely reduce or eliminate the need for other health care; 4) the proportion of patients who achieve clinically meaningful—and personally meaningful—improvements in quality of life measures; and 5) the incidence of side effects, harms, and cessation of treatment. Depending on the objectives of the intervention, other components may be relevant, such as emotional or psychological functioning. Studies that gather this sort of information do not need to be complicated or expensive. They have two cardinal requirements: an assessor, such as a research nurse, independent of the practitioners who perform the intervention; and the willingness of practitioners to expose themselves to independent audit. Adoption of well-designed observational studies is an economically realistic, and achievable, means of bringing evidence to bear on behalf of the patients who suffer pain. Unless this is carried out, under the current academic nihilism that has been applied to interventional pain medicine, soon no patient with pain will be able to get any form of treatment.
New Public Management (NPM) assumes that task specialization results in efficiency gains (Hood 1991). Following this logic governments have structurally disaggregated major monolithic public sector organizations into smaller parts, with some degree of autonomy. Since the 1980s, this has been visible in the increase in decentralization and devolution, as well as in a clear expansion of the types and numbers of autonomous agencies. Two other changes in the political-administrative system occurred at the same time. First, the split between politics and administration was re-emphasized; secondly, the different phases in the policy cycle, i.e. policy design, policy implementation and policy evaluation, were organizationally split (Bouckaert et al. 2010). 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.
In this note, we show the existence of constant-round computational zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge for all N P. The existence of constant-round zero-knowledge proofs was proven by Goldreich and Kahan (Journal of Cryptology, 1996), and the existence of constant-round zeroknowledge arguments of knowledge was proven by Feige and Shamir (CRYPTO 1989). Although it is widely believed that there exist constant-round zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge for all N P, to the best of our knowledge, no proof of this fact has been published. 1
A zero-knowledge proof of identity protocol is a special cryptographic algorithm for identity verification. The security of most of the zero-knowledge proof of identity protocols is based on complex mathematical algorithms and requires heavy computations for both parties involved, the proverb and the verifier. Thus, the two parties must depend on computing devices (computers) to perform these computations. Visual cryptography is a special kind of the cryptography that does not require one to know the cryptography and the corresponding complex mathematical computations. In this paper, we propose a new method of zero-knowledge proof of identity based on a non-expansion visual cryptography to overcome the disadvantage of complex computation in the current zero-knowledge proof of identity protocols, thus overcoming the dependence on computing devices.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Local governments can make an important contribution to public well-being through the execution of local government policies and the delivery of public services that are important to the local citizens. For this reason, through the local budgets are financed the public goods that are selected to be more important. But if the own revenues of the local budgets are low, the local authorities are dependent on the central ones, fact that affect the allocation of resources by the destinations. Because of the unlimited needs, the local governments search for alternative sources of financing, like bank loans, loans from the capital market, leasing, using some collaboration formulas with the private sector, like public-private partnerships and other financing forms. In a analysis on Romanian case, we shows that a greater level of decentralization give to local governments greater possibilities to cover local needs by attracting new resources, also from alternative ways.
Fiscal federalism has been an important topic among public finance theorists in the last four decades. There is a series of arguments that decentralization of governments enhances growth by improving allocation efficiency. However, the empirical studies have shown mixed results for industrialized and developing countries and some of them have demonstrated that there might be a threshold level of economic development below which decentralization is not effective. Developing and transition countries have developed a variety of forms of fiscal decentralization as a possible strategy to achieve effective and efficient governmental structures. A generalized principle of decentralization due to the country specific circumstances does not exist. Therefore, decentralization has taken place in different forms in various countries at different times, and even exactly the same extent of decentralization may have had different impacts under different conditions. The purpose of this study is to investigate the current state of the fiscal decentralization in Mongolia and to develop policy recommendations for the efficient and effective intergovernmental fiscal relations system for Mongolia. Within this perspective the analysis concentrates on the scope and structure of the public sector, the expenditure and revenue assignment as well as on the design of the intergovernmental transfer and sub-national borrowing. The study is based on data for twenty-one provinces and the capital city of Mongolia for the period from 2000 to 2009. As a former socialist country Mongolia has had a highly centralized governmental sector. The result of the analysis below revealed that the Mongolia has introduced a number of decentralization measures, which followed a top down approach and were slowly implemented without any integrated decentralization strategy in the last decade. As a result Mongolia became de-concentrated state with fiscal centralization. The revenue assignment is lacking a very important element, for instance significant revenue autonomy given to sub-national governments, which is vital for the efficient service delivery at the local level. According to the current assignments of the expenditure and revenue responsibilities most of the provinces are unable to provide a certain national standard of public goods supply. Hence, intergovernmental transfers from the central jurisdiction to the sub-national jurisdictions play an important role for the equalization of the vertical and horizontal imbalances in Mongolia. The critical problem associated with intergovernmental transfers is that there is not a stable, predictable and transparent system of transfer allocation. The amount of transfers to sub-national governments is determined largely by political decisions on ad hoc basis and disregards local differences in needs and fiscal capacity. Thus a fiscal equalization system based on the fiscal needs of the provinces should be implemented. The equalization transfers will at least partly offset the regional disparities in revenues and enable the sub-national governments to provide a national minimum standard of local public goods.
There is a growing recognition within the global development community that the public sector in developing and transition countries must be made to function more effectively and efficiently in the pursuit of their own development and poverty reduction ambitions. This cannot be done without considering the critical role of the local public sector, since most (pro-poor) public services are delivered at the local level, whether by the deconcentrated departments of line ministries or by devolved local government authorities. While the development community seeks to better understand the complex interrelations that drive the performance of decentralized political, administrative and fiscal systems, there is a dearth of relevant comparative information and data when it comes to the details of these decentralized systems, especially in developing and transition economies. This paper proposes a comparative decentralization assessment framework which guides a rapid assessment of a country’s local public sector, including its political-administrative structures, its system of intergovernmental relations and the financing and functioning of the country’s decentralized local governments. Copyright 2010, The Urban Institute Center on International Development and Governance. No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the copyright owner.
In this note, we provide a formal proof of the fact that any protocol that is a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge for a relation R is also a secure protocol for the zero-knowledge proof of knowledge functionality, where the latter is defined according to the standard framework of stand-alone secure computation. Although this is a well-known fact, to the best of our knowledge, no full proof of this has been published. 1
José Bacelar Almeida, Endre Bangerter, Manuel Barbosa, Stephan Krenn · 6 authors
Abstract. Zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (ZK-PoK) are important building blocks for numerous cryptographic applications. Although ZK-PoK have very useful properties, their real world deployment is typically hindered by their significant complexity compared to other (noninteractive) crypto primitives. Moreover, their design and implementation is time-consuming and error-prone. We contribute to overcoming these challenges as follows: We present a comprehensive specification language and a certifying compiler for ZK-PoK protocols based on Σ-protocols and composition techniques known in literature. The compiler allows the fully automatic translation of an abstract description of a proof goal into an executable implementation. Moreover, the compiler overcomes various restrictions of previous approaches, e.g., it supports the important class of exponentiation homomorphisms with hidden-order co-domain, needed for privacy-preserving applications such as idemix. Finally, our compiler is certifying, in the sense that it automatically produces a formal proof of security (soundness) of the compiled protocol (currently covering special homomorphisms) using the Isabelle/HOL theorem prover.