Abstract: The past two decades have witnessed numerous attempts in developing countries at institutionalizing decentralization. Political leaders tended, before then, to believe that centralized planning was the key to economic growth and development. Ghana has not been excluded from this wave towards the transfer of power, competences, resources and functions from the centre to local levels of government. While Ghana has achieved significant political and administrative decentralization as well as decentralized planning, fiscal decentralization has been the unyielding component of the process. This paper examines the desirability, or otherwise, of fiscal decentralization in the context of funding arrangements. It uses the funding regime model as a basis for analysing how regulatory provisions, political and economic factors and practices, determine financial capacity of subānational governments. Evidence in the paper leads to the conclusion that subānational governments in Ghana do not support fiscal autonomy. They, instead, prefer being served and financed by the central government.
Information, as an expression of knowledge is probably the most valuable asset of humanity today. By enabling relatively cost-free, fast, and accurate access channels to information in digital form, computers have radically changed the way we think and express ideas. As increasingly more of it is produced, packaged and delivered in digital form in a fast, networked environment, one of its main features threatens to become its worst enemy: zero-cost verbatim copies. The inherent ability to produce duplicates of digital Works at virtually no cost can be now misused e.g. for illicit profit. This dramatically increases the requirement for effective protection mechanisms. Different avenues are available, each with its advantages and drawbacks. Enforcement by legal means is usually ineffective, unless augmented by a digital counter-part such as Information Hiding. Digital Watermarking deploys Information Hiding as a method of Rights Protection to conceal an indelible rights witness (watermark) within the digital Work to be protected. The soundness of such a method relies on the assumption that altering the Work in the process of hiding the mark does not destroy the value of the Work, and that it is difficult for a malicious adversary (Mallory) to remove or alter the mark beyond detection without destroying the value of the Work. The ability to resist attacks from such an adversary (mostly aiming at removing the embedded watermark) is one of the major concerns in the design of a sound watermarking solution.
With the notable exception of software watermarking, the overwhelming majority of research efforts have been invested in the framework of multimedia data (e.g. images, video and audio). In this work, I analyze digital watermarking from a higher level, domain-independent perspective. I propose a theoretical model [Sion et al, IEEE ITCC 2002] and in [Sion et al, SPIE 2004] ask: are there any limitations to what watermarking can do? What are these and when can they be reached? I then propose, design and analyze watermarking solutions for (i) numeric sets [Sion et al, IWDW 2002], (ii) numeric relational data [Sion et al, SIGMOD 2003, ICDE 2004], (iii) categorical data [Sion, ICDE 2004], (iv) streams [Sion et al, under review] and (v) semi-structures [Sion et al, IWDW 2003, NSF EIA-9903545]. I also explored the ability to hide information in natural language text [Atallah et. al., IHW02, Springer-Verlag], and developed a text tamper-proofing proof-of-concept [Naval Research grant N00014-02-1-0364/2002].
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
NASA is reconsidering its support for an innovative experiment designed to capture direct evidence of elusive antimatter. At stake is an unusual 16-nation effort, led by a Nobel Prize winner, that until recently was cited by agency managers as proof that the space station can host high-quality science.
We show how a polynomial-time prover can commit to an arbitrary finite set S of strings so that, later on, he can, for any string x, reveal with a proof whether x /spl isin/ S or x /spl notin/ S, without revealing any knowledge beyond the verity of these membership assertions. Our method is non interactive. Given a public random string, the prover commits to a set by simply posting a short and easily computable message. After that, each time it wants to prove whether a given element is in the set, it simply posts another short and easily computable proof, whose correctness can be verified by any one against the public random string. Our scheme is very efficient; no reasonable prior way to achieve our desiderata existed. Our new primitive immediately extends to providing zero-knowledge databases.
This article introduces new methodology for the design of two-party cryptographic protocols using Graph Theory tools. In this sense, several Oblivious Transfer and Bit Commitment algorithms are proposed as primitives in the design of more complex protocols. Special attention is paid to the strong identification problem through Zero Knowledge Proofs, and new solutions based on graphs are given.
With recourse to two main sources, trading almanacs and ledgers, this article is intended to establish the crucial role played by eighteenth-century Parisian shopkeepers in accelerating new modes of consuming. The uniqueness of Paris as a market rested on the strong influence of the court. Craftsmen and shopkeepers knowingly exploited the rule of distinction borne by their clients and invented novelties and launched fashions capable of enticing them. Their advertising thus focused on a multi-faceted notion of quality: quality as it related to the shopkeeper, to the consumer, to the shop and to the products. Always on the lookout for novelty, aristocrats were the great suppliers of quality goods. Invariably short of cash, they used such goods as a means of payment to tradesmen, who stood at the centre of a triple market, made up of new and second-hand goods and those sold on credit. High quality and imitation, new and old: shopkeepers used a wide qualitative vocabulary to attract customers. This is how the semi-luxury market developed also among the less affluent. Thus, apparently archaic practices such as barter were in fact used to promote a new market, a semi-luxury market, and are essential to understanding the eighteenth-century consumer explosion.
Decentralization policies are an integrated component of health sector reform in an increasing number of countries. The ability of such policies to improve the health system's quality and efficiency is backed up by limited scientific evidence. This study intends to evaluate the impact of decentralization on a specialized field of disease control (leprosy control) in Colombia and Brazil. It analyses the respective juridical base, epidemiological indicators and local publications. Furthermore, 39 semi-structured interviews with key informants were conducted. In both countries, the devolution of technical responsibility and financial resources to the municipalities was the implemented form of decentralization. Access to preventive and curative health care and the community participation in decision-making improved clearly only in Brazil. The decentralization to private providers in Colombia had dubious effects on service quality in general and still more on public health. The flow of finances (including finance collection through state-owned taxes instead of insurance companies) seemed to be better controlled in Brazil. Leprosy control in Brazil took advantage of the decentralization process; in Colombia, it came close to a collapse.
Businesses are deploying Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs) to support internal business processes, implement virtual private networks, and secure corporate assets. The ability to establish business relations inside the company as well as with other companies in a secure way is important for the operability of business in today's world; corporate PKIs may implement different architectures, security policies, and cryptographic suites in order to accomplish this goal. But communication beyond the PKI is established with other companies based on a trust relationship (B2B), which brings vulnerability provided by PKIs from different companies. A flexible mechanism is needed to link these corporate PKIs and translate corporate relationships with security mechanisms and policies. This is accomplished through a Password Authentication Protocol (PAK), which provides means to authenticate or validate users across Bridge Certification Authorities (BCA), where certificates authorities (CA) are limited and cannot reach over to the other side of the BCA. In such a way, PAK can guarantee authentication of end points without modifying the original PKI structure of companies and offer flexibility in the process of implementation. Additional to this, there are several other issues that must be solved; such as the ability to connect different company PKI without compromising any sensible information that might cause a conflict of commercial interests and still guarantee a certain level of security through an accreditation and validation of the parties in order to be certain with whom we are doing business. In order to achieve accreditation and validation of PKIs and not expose any sensible information that could compromise either parties, we also based our work on a zero-knowledge security protocol, letting each PKI continue with their security policies without having to adjust to specific needs, achieving a better security level of commercial transactions through such hardening process.
Taxpayer's suit or citizen suit will be reintroduced in Korea by the end of this year. It is specified in the Korea Local Government Act in accordance with the Decentralization of the Administration Power Act which was enacted in the early 2003. Korea local autonomy system and the monitoring system of the finance and accounting of the local governments are under the stage of transformation. Taxpayer's suit will be functioning as the monitoring system which will make the finance and accounting of the local governments more effectively and transparently. But the newly reintroducing citizen suit covers only the problems of local governments stage, and the execution of the national finance and accounting remains beyond the coverage.
Japan is stuck between lots of rocks and several hard places. It confronts the escalating costs of the world's most rapid pace of ageing with a low and declining birthrate and virtually no support for mass immigration. Moreover, the country faces these costs while severely handicapped by a public debt 1.5 times its GDP plus dramatic declines in the high rate of savings that has hitherto financed it. In addition to all this, the poorly performing economy is in its fourth year of deflation with little hope of producing a recovery in tax revenues. Indeed, deflation and minimal economic growth have eroded national income- tax revenues to their lowest level since the collapse of the bubble economy.
Geeta Sethi, Fitz Ford, Roy Bahl, LuĆs Constantino
The objective of this study is to review panchayat finances, identify issues and make recommendations to improve the fiscal decentralization system. Using Karnataka and Kerala as case studies, this report describes the context for rural decentralization in India, summarizes the current fiscal situation of district, block and village panchayats, identifies the main problems arising from the current practice, and outlines a set of reform options that might better satisfy the objectives of the central and state governments. Karnataka and Kerala were examined because these two states are generally thought to be more advanced than others in implementing rural fiscal decentralization and are therefore relevant for drawing lessons for the rest of India. This study focused on Karnataka and Kerala because these states are perceived to be ahead on rural decentralization. However, even in these states, and even 10 years after the Constitutional Amendment, the agenda and implementation plan for rural local government finance is not clear.
We propose a novel approach to modeling advertising dynamics for a firm operating over distributed market domain based on controlled partial differential equations of diffusion type. Using our model, we consider a general type of finite-horizon profit maximization problem in a monopoly setting. By reformulating this profit maximization problem as an optimal control problem in infinite dimensions, we derive sufficient conditions for the existence of its optimal solutions under general profit functions, as well as state and control constraints, and provide general characterization of the optimal solutions. Sharper, feedback-form, characterizations of the optimal solutions are obtained for two variants of the general problem.
Support for integrated capacity building focusing on learning support for government organizations, communities, networks and small business is the most important contribution foreigners can make to local development.Excessive equipment and action assistance with minimal learning support, is more likely to create dependence.However learning support without locally financed working resources and improved motivation is hardly effective.Decentralization of authority requires decentralization of skills.Learning support focusing on specialist and management training without integrated courses for all staff limits organizational effectiveness.Aid/ cooperation should be much better integrated.This can only be achieved through deeper dialogue and better strategies.To seek a reasonable future for the region
Starting from January 1, 2001, the provincial governments in Indonesia suddenly faced a huge problem in managing their public finance. The management of certain sectors and their budgeting were, including education, decentralized. Government regulation No. 25 in 2001 gave the local governments more freedom to establish a suitable education system for their respective regions. This paper will attempt to analyse the performance of secondary schools across regions. The production function theory will be used due to the governmentās intention to make the secondary school (years 7-12) the compulsory minimum level of education for the Indonesian people. The results show that the government budget cannot significantly affect the efficiency in the secondary school industry because the inputs that are financed are not significant for inducing efficiency. Instead, external factors like population and also the existence of financial loans is likely to be significant. The policy on loans has to be reconsidered to see the cost benefit or the comparison between returns on human capital improvement through secondary schools and the interest rate of the loan
Due to globalization in finance, the restructuring of Japanese banking industry is accelerating. This paper focuses on the changes in the location of Japanese overseas banking and explores the backgrounds behind the trends. Two Japanese regional banks are taken as case studies. As a result, Japanese regional banks gravitated their overseas business into Asia throughout the 1990s. Simultaneously, decentralization from Hong Kong was proceeding among the locations of their overseas offices within Asia. The paper concludes that the business style of Japanese banks, which used to be very uniform, is becoming more diversified.
Although local government is not allowed to raise loan by themselves, there are a lot of debts raised by local government agencies in the name of decentralization of financing. So whether local government has the right to issue their bonds is a question that should be addressed immediately. In our country, we think, there exist the theoretic basis and practical conditions of issuing local government bonds. Allowing local government to issue bonds is inevitable to expand local government's debt and is the necessary step towards perfecting our country's fiscal system.
ABSTRACT - The Portuguese National Health Service (SNS), a universal, centralized and public owned health care system, exhibits an extraordinary record of equalization in the access to health care and health gains in the late thirty years. However, the most recent history of the Portuguese health reform is pervaded by the influence of decentralization and privatization. Decentralization has been present in the system design since the 1976 Constitution, at least in theory. Private ownership of health care suppliers and out-ofpocket expenditures, on the financing side, both have a long tradition of relevance in the NHS mix of services. The initial aim of this study was to demonstrate expected parallelism between health reforms and public administration reforms, where a common pattern of joint decentralization and privatization was observed in many countries. Observers would be tempted to consider these two movements as common signs of new public management (NPM) developments. They have common objectives, are established around the core concepts of gains in effectiveness, efficiency, equity and quality of public services, through improved accountability. However, in practice, in Portugal, each movement was developed in a totally separated way. Besides those rooted in the NPM theory, there are few visible signs of association between decentralization and privatization. Decentralization, in the Portuguese SNS, was never intended to be followed by a privatization movement; it was seen merely as a public administration tool. Private management of health services, as stated in the most recent SNS legislation, was never intended to have decentralization as a condition or as a consequence. Paradoxically, in the Portuguese context, it has led invariably to centralized control. While presented as separate instruments for a common purpose, the association between decentralization and privatization still lacks a convincing demonstration. Many common health care management stereotypes remain to be checked out if we want to look for eventual associations between these two organizational tools.
The government dominates health care in Britain, France and Germany, but there are a number of significant differences between the three countries. In Britain, health care is financed by general taxation, whereas the French and German systems are both insurance-based. Spending on health is higher, and the health systems are more decentralized, in France and Germany than in Britain. 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.