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The paper tries to shed some light on the problems of centralization and decentralization within an economic union and the federal member states. Integration and decentralization are not opposite policy strategies but both meaningful if the single public goods and services supplies are analyzed in more detail. Both strategies doubtlessly have advantages, which can be realized if the manifold possibilities are combined in an efficient approach of good governance. Best practice approaches in inter- or supra-national integration, fiscal federalism and taxation do exist and have to be successfully implemented. Obviously such a modern fiscal policy has to be accompanied by an appropriate monetary policy, which in an economic union has to be carried out by an independent central bank as one of the necessary countervailing powers in a democratic setting. A modern fiscal policy strategy efficiently controls budget deficits, which naturally have to be limited to finance reliable public investments. Such strategy has to be safeguarded through modern methods of budgeting and fiscal planning. Modern public management with a clear code of conduct for the government officials ensures corruption free administration.
This dissertation examines Peruvian ministries' implementation of administrative decentralization, 2003-2006, and identifies factors shaping their decentralization policymaking. In administrative decentralization, implementation involves translating broad guidelines into sectoral transfer policies. Sectoral policymakers who execute decentralization mandates are, therefore, responsible for relinquishing authority and resources to subnational governments. Despite this challenging situation, little is known said about factors-- or otherwise--shaping the implementation of administrative decentralization. The initiation of state decentralization programs throughout Latin America has been examined and largely attributed to national political factors, rather than technical considerations. However, transferring power is not an assured outcome of national politicians' decisions to decentralize. This study explores a process that continued to be shaped by ministries after national political actors ceased to be involved; after a rapid start of top-down reforms, administrative decentralization virtually stalled under their control. Peruvian policy sectors are very heterogeneous, suggesting a need for distinct approaches to reform. Nevertheless, ministries' collective failure to implement rapidly has been attributed to generalized resistance to relinquish authority. This view is consistent with a bureaucratic politics-type understanding of public policymaking. However, my comparative analysis of decentralization policies reveals that self-interested resistance is significant but does not coherently explain policymaking or variation between policies. Furthermore, while resistance is ubiquitous, there are different types of resistance to reform, coming from autonomous offices, top policymakers, or the Presidency. In contrast, institutionalist lenses identify rules and processes that significantly condition possibilities for administrative decentralization. Policymakers face distinct challenges and opportunities in each sector; some ministries had deconcentration programs underway when national reforms started. While institutionalist lenses elucidate distinct conditions for reform, focusing on "audacious reformers" highlights the role of individual agency. The exceptional case of Health features a complex organization led by a reform-minded minister to the forefront of reforms. All three approaches to analyzing the implementation of administrative decentralization are complementary in providing coherent accounts of sectoral policymaking. Different combinations of institutional conditions, sectoral characteristics and individual motivations are ultimately responsible for variation among approaches to reform. Administrative decentralization emerges, not as one process, but as a constellation of particular paths of reform.
This book analyzes political decentralization and fiscal federalism in Canada and Germany, both traditional federal countries, and in Spain, a unitarian country engaged in the last two decades in a process of decentralization. Three key issues required for a well designed financing system are analyzed in depth, namely: tax assignment, equalization grants â i.e. redistribution of money from the wealthy regions or the national government to poorer regions, and the role of local governments in the administration of taxes.
Daniela Feldkamp, Wolf Siberski, Barbara Thönssen, Holger Wache
E-Government is no longer a concern of single public administration units. State wide E-Government strategies, E-Government architectures and frameworks are established now and public administrations are willing to suit the action to the word. Also, semantically enriched techniques for service description, discovery and invocation are ready to come into practice. The challenge is the appropriate use of all the relevant parts to meet the technical, organizational and legal requirements. The paper at hand provides an approach, how available techniques can be implemented in a light-weighted way to build âone-stop E-Government services â on completely decentralized components. This allows to leave the control to where it belongs (every service contributor is responsible for its parts), to execute a service according to the local ICT but at the same time to meet the requirements for automated cross-administration cooperation. The introduced approach is illustrated with the example of Switzerland.
Interoperability between autonomous systems like robot swarm or mobile software agents rely on efficient and seamless communication. Such mobile and dynamic environments pertain self-organization and self configuration of computing entities, a need for autonomic publishing and discovery of resources, and communication from and to outside world. Furthermore, such systems are attributed by heterogeneous communication capabilities of various computing entities. We take Web services approach for robot swarm based on robotic communication capabilities and propose a collaborative and decentralized services discovery and management middleware. Our approach provides a loose coupling in terms of space and time and uses both Internet based communication and RFID tags as message post boxes/relays for communication between robots when communication over the Internet is not available.
Contents:PrefaceNuria Bosch and Jose M DuranINTRODUCTION1. The Financing System of Spanish Regions: Main Features, Weak Points and Possible ReformsNuria Bosch and Jose M DuranPART I: TAX ASSIGNMENT2. Revenue Assignments in the Practice of Fiscal DecentralizationJorge Martinez-Vazquez3. Tax Assignment and Tax Autonomy in OECD CountriesHansjorg Blochliger4. Tax Assignment and Regional Co-responsibility in SpainJuan A. Gimeno UllastresPART II: FISCAL EQUALIZATION5. Fiscal Equalization: The Canadian ExperienceRobin Boadway6. Fiscal Equalization in GermanyThiess Buettner7. Fiscal Equalization in Spain Jesus Ruiz-Huerta Carbonell and Ana Herrero AlcaldePART III: TAX ADMINISTRATION8. Tax Coordination under the Canadian Tax SystemPaul Berg-Dick, Michel Carreau, Deanne Field and Mireille Ethier9. The Decentralisation of Tax Administration in Germany: ConsequencesAlexander Ulbricht10. Current Situation and Proposals for Reform of Spain's Tax AdministrationAlejandro Esteller MoreIndex
SSO (single sign on) provides e-commerce users with easy access to applications and network resources, using a single, secure login identity. Web services (WS) based on SSO provide the potential to achieve interoperability of distributed electronic commerce (e-commerce) application integration among autonomous organizations, regardless of platforms, operating systems or languages. The most important challenge about the WS based on security SSO is the cost of implementation. After reviewing the paradigm of developing WS security standards and challenges, this paper presented a security model of JSON (JavaScript object notation) based on SSO architecture for e-commerce enterprise. The decentralized SSO security architecture is presented which is easy to integrate legacy system and new developed system.
Abstract. We study the question whether the number of rounds in public-coin perfect zero-knowledge (PZK) proofs can be collapsed to a constant. Despite extensive research into the round complexity of interactive and zero-knowledge protocols, there is no indication how to address this question. Furthermore, the main tool to tackle this question is instance-dependent commitments, but currently such schemes are only statistically hiding, whereas we need perfectly hiding schemes. We give the first perfectly hiding instance-dependent commitment scheme. This scheme can be con-structed from any problem that has a PZK proof. We then show that obtaining such a scheme that is also constant-round is not only sufficient, but also necessary to collapse the number of rounds in PZK proofs. Hence, we show an equivalence between the tasks of obtaining the commitment, and collapsing the rounds. Our idea also yields an elegant equivalence between zero-knowledge and commitments. In the second part of the paper we construct a non-interactive, perfectly hiding scheme whose binding property holds on all but an exponentially small fraction of the inputs. Informally, this shows that the rounds in public-coin PZK proofs can be collapsed if we can guarantee that the prover is not choosing its randomness from a small set. We formalize this condition using a preamble, which we then apply to some simple cases. An interesting consequence of independent interest is that we use the circuits from the study of NIPZK in the commitment scheme of Naor [39], and this leads to a new perfectly-hiding instance-dependent commitment for NIPZK problems with a small soundness error. Key words: constant-round, perfect zero-knowledge, instance-dependent commitment schemes. 1
Abstract Perfect zero-knowledge proofs enable one party (the prover) to prove an assertion to another party (the verifier) but without revealing anything but the truth of the assertion. The class of problems admitting such proofs is rich, including GRAPH-ISOMORPHISM, QUADRATIC-RESIDUOUSITY, and other problems that play a key role in cryptography and complexity theory. Due to their strong privacy guarantee, perfect zero-knowledge proofs are very difficult to study. Despite extensive research since the 1980s, especially in the area of statistical zero-knowledge proofs, many fundamental questions about them remain open, and it is not even clear how to address these questions. This thesis initiates a general investigation of perfect zero-knowledge proofs. Our main results are as follows. (1) We prove that all the known problems admitting perfect zero-knowledge (PZK) proofs can be characterized as non-interactive instance-dependent commitment schemes, and use this result to generalize and strengthen previous results, as well as to prove new results about PZK problems. (2) We give a new error shifting technique that allows us to overcome barriers in the study of PZK. Using this technique we present the first complete problem for the class of problems admitting noninteractive perfect zero-knowledge proofs (NIPZK), and the first hard problem for the class of problems admitting public-coin PZK proofs. (3) We make the first investigation into one of the most important questions in the field, namely, whether the number of rounds in PZK proofs can be collapsed to a constant. We give the first perfectly hiding commitment scheme, and prove that obtaining such scheme that is also constant round is equivalent to collapsing the rounds in PZK proofs to a constant.
It is well known that all the known black-box zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge for NP are nonconstant-round. Whether there exit constant-round black-box zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge for all NP languages under certain standard assumptions is a open problem. This paper focuses on the problem and give a positive answer by presenting two constructions of constant-round (black-box) zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge for the HC (Hamiltonian Cycle) problem. By the recent result of Katz, our second construction which relies on the existence of claw-free functions has optimal round complexity (5-round) assuming the polynomial hierarchy does not collapse.
This paper proposes RSA-based zero-knowledge proof watermark verification protocols.It can tackle the problem of disclosing sensitive information.In the protocols,the public key encryption are used to encrypt the watermark and the watermarked data of the watermark embedding locations,the open verification of copyright watermarking is achieved through estimating the relativity of them.Furthermore,the authors research how to resist cheat-attack,and propose the way that prover and verifier can only communicate with each other to resist this attack.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The economic transition in China since the late 1970s has led not only to drastic social transformations but also rapid advancements in science and technology, as well as a revolution in information and communications technology. In order to enhance the global competence of the Chinese population in coping with the challenges of the knowledge-based economy, the higher education sector has been going through restructuring along the lines of marketization, privatization and decentralization. Responding to the challenges of globalization, the Chinese government has opened up the education market by allowing private/minban higher education institutions and even overseas universities to offer academic programmes in the mainland. Hence, we have witnessed a proliferation of education providers, a diversification of education financing, and an increase in private-public partnerships in education provision since the policy of educational decentralization was introduced in the mid-1980s. This article sets out to examine the politics of educational decentralization in this wider policy context by critically analysing the tensions between the central education ministry, conventional minban higher education institutions and the newly emerging state-endorsed independent minban colleges (second-tier colleges or independent colleges). It also reflects critically upon the policy implications for the evolving "governed market" in education, and analyses the challenges for the new regulatory regime now that the higher education sector has become highly diversified in post-Mao China.
This book analyzes political decentralization and fiscal federalism in Canada and Germany, both traditional federal countries, and in Spain, a unitarian country engaged in the last two decades in a process of decentralization. Three key issues required for a well designed financing system are analyzed in depth, namely: tax assignment, equalization grants ĂąâŹâ i.e. redistribution of money from the wealthy regions or the national government to poorer regions, and the role of local governments in the administration of taxes.
Indonesia has been undergoing a reform process. One of its features is the introduction of new decentralization guidance in 2001 under Law 22/1999 on regional governments and Law 25/1999 on fiscal balance between the central and regional governments and in 2004, they were replaced by Law 32/2004 and Law 33/2004. This thesis scrutinizes the practices of decentralization in Indonesia, which is commonly known as âregional autonomyâ under this new legal framework. Besides looking at the practices, it also attempts to reveal the impacts of decentralization practices on intraregional economic competitiveness, as it is becoming one of the objectives of decentralization policy in Indonesia. A conceptual framework is made by exploring most recent development of the concept of decentralization and intraregional competitiveness to help analyse the practices of decentralization under the new laws and their subsequent. The general analysis suggests that decentralization in Indonesia is still undermined by various problems stemming from the design of legal framework and poor implementation such as poor institutional arrangement, lack of local finance and low human resource capacity. Furthermore, a comparative case study is arranged to reveal the impacts of decentralization to intraregional competitiveness in two cities in Indonesia, Semarang and Surabaya. Because of some technical constraints to collect primary data needed, the analysis is based on secondary sources only. The objective of the case study to reveal the factors behind the difference investment growth trends between Semarang and Surabaya, especially related to the introduction of decentralization, could not be achieved here. However, the analysis may provide tentative answers to describe the impacts of decentralization on local competitiveness. Several general implications can be drawn from the results: First, decentralization here is seen as an instrument to improve the performance of local governments in providing public services, including the services to business communities. Thus, the impacts of decentralization on local competitiveness, either positive or negative, depend on how decentralization is practiced. Second, in line with the problematic practices in Indonesia, the analysis found that decentralization âunder the most recent lawshas not yet provide an appropriate level of support to improve local
Non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs can be an extremely powerful tool, allowing one to prove a statement in a single message without revealing any information besides the truth of the statement. Blum et al. showed that NIZK proof systems exist for all languages in NP. However, in practice, NIZK proofs are rarely used, because existing protocols are extremely inefficient. Here we examine some useful languages for which we can give efficient proof system.
We define two useful building blocks: one for proving that a message has been signed, and a second for proving that a value has been chosen according to a pseudorandom function. We give applications of these building blocks to anonymous credential systems, to electronic cash, and to the design of other efficient NIZK proofs systems.
The abstraction of cryptographic operations by term algebras, called DolevâYao models, is essential in almost all tool-supported methods for proving security protocols. Recently significant progress was made in proving that DolevâYao models offering the core cryptographic operations such as encrypt ion and digital signatures can be sound with respect to actual cryptographic realizations and security definitions. Recent work, however, has started to extend DolevâYao models to more sophisticated operations with unique security features. Zero-knowledge proofs arguably constitute the most amazing such extension. In this paper, we first identify which additional properties a cryptographic (non-interactive) zero-knowledge proof needs to fulfill in order to serve as a computationally sound implementation of symbolic (DolevâYao style) zero-knowledge proofs; this leads to the novel definition of a symbolically-sound zero-knowledge proof system. We prove that even in the presence of arbitrary active adversaries, such proof systems constitute computationally sound implementations of symbolic zero-knowledge proofs. This yields the first computational soundness result for symbolic zero-knowledge proofs and the first such result against fully active adversaries of DolevâYao models that go beyond the core cryptographic operations.
The abstraction of cryptographic operations by term algebras, called Dolev-Yao models, is essential in almost all tool-supported methods for proving security protocols. Recently significant progress was made in proving that Dolev-Yao models offering the core cryptographic operations such as encryption and digital signatures can be sound with respect to actual cryptographic realizations and security definitions. Recent work, however, has started to extend Dolev-Yao models to more sophisticated operations with unique security features. Zero-knowledge proofs arguably constitute the most amazing such extension. In this paper, we first identify which additional properties a cryptographic zero-knowledge proof needs to fulfill in order to serve as a computationally sound implementation of symbolic (Dolev-Yao style) zero-knowledge proofs; this leads to the novel definition of a symbolically-sound zero-knowledge proof system. We prove that even in the presence of arbitrary active adversaries, such proof systems constitute computationally sound implementations of symbolic zero-knowledge proofs. This yields the first computational soundness result for symbolic zero-knowledge proofs and the first such result against fully active adversaries of Dolev-Yao models that go beyond the core cryptographic operations.
The last decade has witnessed a world trend of fiscal decentralization in the developing countries as an escape from inadequate growth and inefficient governance. With respect to China, fiscal decentralization has been a fundamental aspect of its transition to a market economy; and the country has made substantial efforts to break down its highly centralized fiscal management system. Chinaâs fiscal system currently has five levels â central, provincial, prefecture, county, and township. Sub-national governments have been assigned primary responsibility for public services provision and financing. Chinaâs highly decentralized system could be a boon to managing service delivery, but the countryâs crave for rapid economic growth in the last two decades has kept the reform of the public services on the fringes of political agenda. Under the current arrangements, public services are extensively decentralized with sub-national governments taking a much larger portion of expenditure responsibilities that are out of line with international practice. The over-devolution of spending responsibilities has resulted in insufficient financing and provision for core public services, and particularly a default in the delivery of vital services in many rural and poor localities. Further, in the absence of mechanisms to ensure national minimum service standards, the decentralized public services delivery system is faced with growing inequality across the country due to the widening regional disparity in economic development over the past decade. This paper reviews fiscal decentralization policies in China, identifies prominent issues in the current pubic service delivery system, and examines the deficiencies in the existing intergovernmental fiscal system that have contributed to insufficiency and inequality in public services provision. It advises plausible reform options to further national objectives.
This paper explores a theory of decentralization as a political choice to respond to growing electoral pressures. In this theory, decentralization to local jurisdictions (such as villages, towns or districts) is a political response to increasing political participation among citizens, both in the form of new interest groups and in the form of swing voters who cannot be easily identified and targeted. Politicians select jurisdiction boundaries, both physical and fiscal, to enable themselves to target pivotal voters to win elections, akin to the phenomenon of gerrymandering districts in electoral politics. Under gerrymandered decentralization, multiple small local jurisdictions would be created, financed almost entirely by grants, and grants and local spending would be allocated to target private benefits to political supporters, at the expense of broad public goods. The paper examines available evidence on the characteristics of decentralization in several large countries that is consistent with this theory. The implications for international development assistance are also explored. 2 1.
This book takes a look at the past to gain insights for the future. Nearly 30 years ago, when the world urban population was only about half of the 3 billion that it is today, when most Less Developed Countries (LDCs) were primarily rural, and before the wave of decentralization of the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank developed an instrument with great potential. The key characteristics of this instrument, the Urban Infrastructure Fund (UIF), are several. It provides finance for an array of urban services, not just one sector, such as water and sanitation, leaving flexibility for local beneficiaries to set their priorities. UIF projects operate in more than one city. Perhaps the most important distinctive feature is that these projects use local institutions to do the work of identifying, appraising and channeling finance to subnational entities (municipalities, local utilities, or community groups) on behalf of the World Bank. This arrangement makes it feasible to reach beyond the major capitals or business centers such as Chongqing, Mumbai, or Sao Paulo, or even regional capitals, to fund much smaller subprojects, suited to the needs and capacities of smaller cities and towns, because local agents are tasked with identifying and appraising these projects. Delegating these functions makes it practicable not only for a large International Financial Institution (IFI) such as the World Bank but also for national governments to reach small municipalities. Providing support to large numbers of municipalities with relatively small investment needs is a complex task, but it is fundamental to scaling up beyond small pilot projects to programs improving urban services countrywide.