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.
This paper proposes a computationally secure and fault-tolerant conference key distribution scheme, which only requires the authenticated and encrypted point-to-point channels between each server and each user. By the combined use of knowledge proof and verifiable secret sharing, the scheme has the properties of simple structure and high security. Analysis shows that every honest user of a conference can get a common key after the running of the protocol, even if a minority of the servers malfunction or misbehave. We also show that on the assumption of a Diffie-Hellman decisional problem, a passive adversary gets zero knowledge about the conference key, and the active adversary cannot impersonate someone successfully. Because the knowledge proof method we adopt is non-interactive, both operation and communication overheads are reduced, thus making the schemes very efficient.
The Geological and Prospecting Units pursue a diversified economy and involve many subsidiary business units. This leads to decentralized finance accounting and unorganized financial management with other problems. In view of these problems the author considers that a concentrated financial account should be implemented in the Geological and Prospecting Units. Financial management rights must be concentrated in the Geological and Prospecting Units, but this does not mean that the Geological and Prospecting Units can interfere with the management of the subsidiary business units. The paper discusses the content and role of a concentrated financial account and the difficulties in implementing it in the Geological and Prospecting Units and puts forward four proposals for improving the concentrated financial account.
The National Community Driven Development Program seeks to improve living conditions, and reduce poverty, by consolidating a community development framework within the context of decentralization. In such a context, infrastructure development works will be supported to benefit communities. Land acquisition and expropriation will take place, causing potential adverse social impacts, such as to land, crops, and housing losses, including income losses. Three major objectives of the program can be summarized as follow: 1) Avoid displacement of populations or limiting their access to vital resources, and minimize the effects of relocation when displacement is unavoidable in the light of the comparative importance of overall benefits of the project; 2) Planning for resettlement in a participatory manner by the people concerned in a community development approach supported by theproject in regard to direct investments; 3) Ensuring those affected from conditions of compensation are put in a situation of quality of life at least equivalent to a situation before the implementation of the project.
Background: Health account is one method to acquire information about financial situation in the district or the state. Based on the information, the analysis on the policy can be made, such as priority setting and equity. The information is also used for policy decision and financial planning. Complete health finance data can be acquired in condition when there is a district health account.\nObjective: To describe health financial before and after the decentralization was implemented (1998 to 2002) in Sinjai District.\nMethod: This research is a quasi experiment research with before and after design. Method of health account development, is adopted from National Health Account.\nResult: This research showed that there was an increase of health funding since 1998 to 2002 in Sinjai District obtained from the government. Before decentralization central government role in health finance was high (11,6% to 60%), but after decentralization, the role of central government decreased and district government role increased (24% to 83%). From finance intermediary site the role of hospital as finance intermediary increased since 1999 to 2002 (11% to 40%). District Health Official still! took prominent finance intermediary point in Sinjai District. From health provider site, health expenditure allocation at community health center showed a trend to decrease. Health care administration and investment function showed escalation trend. Public health action constantly decreased since 1998 to 20002.\nConclusions: Sinjai District Health Finance increased since 1998 to 2002. Due to the increase of hospital health financial allodation, hospital finance intermediary also increased. On the other hand, the financial allocation in public health programs decreased. This pattern of health finance should be reserved for a pro-poor resource allocation.\n\nKeywords: health finance, District Health Account
If the political climate is stable, local elections in Croatia take place every four years. Budgets are planned for three years, while strategic development programmes cover periods of five to ten years. Technically, the political, financial and developmental programming cycles can be matched, and implementation of the programmes ensured. However, political programmes are generally vague, budgets are every so often fictive and revised mid year and development programmes grow into visionary shopping lists. Reality shows that programmes and plans are elaborated, presented in public and then neatly put into drawers. In the aftermath, local politicians are concerned mainly about the financing flows and this is what they are usually fighting for at council meetings and in various ministries. Regularly, local administration proceeds according to the wishes of the political decision makers, without referring to any program in the end. Consequently, political accountability is lacking, fiscal management is not transparent and development is lagging behind. The main aim of this paper is to show how strategic development programmes, budgetary plans and political programmes can be linked in the Croatian socio-economic and institutional environment. Also, in line with the initiated process of decentralization in Croatia, local governments have to improve their fiscal management in order to be able to take over new functions and responsibilities. Since by now a number of local development programmes exist in Croatia, where a participatory and strategic development planning approach was applied, an analysis of the political programmes, local budgets and development programmes can be done. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate that if local governments better understood the interdependencies between these three segments, they could create reference points for their actions visible in their programmes and budgets. In this way a platform could be created to enhance the political accountability, improve fiscal capacity and fulfil developmental goals in line with real needs and potentials of the local population.
China is one of the countries that can carry out successfully financial division of powers. Compulsory education carry out division of powers either. However, our country enormous compulsory education is undertaken by countries or villages' finance. It may be called Try to put out a burning cartload of faggots with a cup of water-an utterly inadequate measure. That children are not go to school is very common in poor rural areas. From this we can draw a conclusion that excessive division of powers in compulsory educational system is restricting the development of Chinese compulsory education.
Average citizens, working-class and low-income individuals in particular, have little, if any, impact on the formulation of educational policies that affect the schools in which their children are enrolled.Yet there are instances in which these typically disenfranchised citizens become politically active and are able to effect change in the educational policy arena.This study will focus on the process of transformation of marginalized and politically disempowered parents into citizens active in the formulation of educational policy. BACKGROUNDSchools tend to be the governmental institution with which the average citizen has the most contact.Ironically, most community members have little voice in the day-to-day operations of schools and tend to have insignificant influence on educational policy at the district, state, or federal level.In Tinkering Toward Utopia, Tyack and Cuban (1995) explain that a variety of groups have entered school politics, but that this apparent pluralism is misleading.They feel the politics of education has not been conducted on a level playing field.Members of the policy elite-people who manage the economy, who have privileged access to the media and to political officials, who control foundations, and who lead our city and state education agencies and universities-have disproportionate authority over educational reform.The authors go on to say: Policy elites often claimed to be "taking the schools out of politics."They sought to do this by centralizing control of schools and delegating decisions about education, wherever possible, to "experts."In the process they did not, of course, eliminate politics, but they acquired formidable powers: to set the agenda of reform, to diagnose problems, to prescribe solutions, and often to influence what should not [italics in original] be on the agenda of reform.(p.8) Stone, Henig, Jones and Pierannunzi (2001) explain that in addition to being controled by elites, educational policy occurs in subsystems and is decentralized, taking place "out of the limelight of public opinion" (p.100).This type of decentralization (toward the elites) occurs despite vocal support for parental involvement (decentralization toward the community) from the U.S. Department of Education and many state departments of education (Epstein, 2001).In Stone et al.'s (2001) words: "urban parents are scarcely visible as active [italics in original] stakeholders in the current school improvement movement" (p.83).Not only do the elites control the policymaking environment, but they also perceive problems differently.For example, the author's research determined that, in some cities, elites are likely to say that no educational problems exist while in others they may identify poor teaching and governance as concerns while other groups cite financing and social issues as key school problems.Issues of race, class, gender, education, and political knowledge further exacerbate this lack of power (Conway, 2000;Gee, 2001).In addition, the democratic environment in which these citizens live also affects their ability to act.As Greider (1992) points out, American democracy is in much deeper trouble than most people wish to acknowledge.Behind the reassuring faade, the regular election contests and so forth, the substantive meaning of self-government has been hollowed out.What exists behind the formal shell is a systemic breakdown of the shared civic values we call democracy.(p.11)
Innocent Semali, Don de Savigny, M Tanner, C. Akim
Following successful establishment of Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) in the 1970's as vertical program, the burden of disease for many of the vaccine preventable diseases was pushed to low levels. The current round of health reforms in Tanzania calls for decentralization and integration of vertical programs. This has the potential to assist or erode generally good performance of EPI. Reforms on the programme have been undertaken in Tanzania since 1996, and have included 1) integration of the procurement, storage, and distribution of vaccine and related equipment into the operations of a quasi-autonomous drug procurement agency. 2) government financing of procurement of the oral polio vaccine, cold chain kerosene, and 3) the integration of kerosene and vaccine distribution, supervision and monitoring to district health system. Our analysis shows that the integration of the procurement and distribution of vaccines into the operations of the drug procurement agency, and privatization of the distribution of the cold chain kerosene initially stalled EPI reforms for several reasons and had an adverse effect on EPI decentralization and coverage. The major cause of the problems was opposition from the EPI providers at district level who had to accept decreased income consequent to the reforms. We conclude that greater involvement of all stakeholders in the planning of the programme, would have presented an opportunity for forecasting the opposition and developing mitigating strategies.
Annika Silva-Leander, Estanislao Gacitúa Marió, Miguel Carter
The Country Social Analysis (CSA) is a new type of study financed by the Bank that proposes and offers, within a social development perspective, discussions on the main opportunities, and restrictions towards achieving sustainable development. This case study on Paraguay analyzes existing information, and summarizes characteristics within the country's socioeconomic, cultural, and political context. As a reference document, the CSA lays the foundation for the Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) and for other economic and sector work, including as well for project design. The report looks at the country's socioeconomic characteristics, and the main policy, and institutional elements, which despite its transition to democracy, has undergone difficult electoral processes, fiscal constraints, and a certain mistrust for policy making. This has lead to restricted poverty reduction practices, weak governance, non-inclusive institutional framework, and budgetary mismanagement. Aggravating this outlook are incomplete reforms, particularly regarding the financial sector, and the slow process of decentralization, which constitute a severe obstacle to improve fiscal management, and the provision of services to the poor. In addition, there is lack of reliable information on, and monitoring of poverty. The study suggests focusing on social inclusion, in particular that of the country's youth, through capacity building and skills development to generate income, and improve labor market characteristics. Likewise, constructive political leadership should be emphasized to prod institutional framework, and coordination. Further recommendations address the inclusion of indigenous populations, a participatory community development, institutional reforms, and improved governance, and budgetary practices.
In many countries fiscal decentralization characterizes the relationship among different levels of government. In those countries, local authorities have the prerogative to tax their constituencies. However, fiscal decentralization is seldom balanced in terms of tax and expenditure assignments. In order to equalize tax capacities, to internalize spillovers or to achieve national policy objectives, central governments often provide transfers to lower levels of government. These transfers may affect the incentives to manage or to improve fiscal performance. Specifically, according to Litvack, Ahmad and Bird (1998), such transfers may induce low `tax effort' in the regions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate theoretically and empirically this relationship between intergovernmental transfers and local tax effort. An initial problem to deal with is the definition of `tax effort' in itself. First, one can associate tax effort to high tax rates. Smart (1998) asserted that such association is inadequate. Second, one can measure tax effort using actual tax revenues or the difference between actual the predicted value of tax revenues. This approach has been mainly adopted by the empirical literature on the relationship between intergovernmental transfers and local tax effort [Baretti, Huber and Lichtblau (2000), Von Hagen and Hepp (2000), Jha, Mohanty, Chattergee and Chitkara (1999), Sagbas (2001)]. Although tax revenue is an accurate and observable variable, still one can hardly say that it is a good estimate of tax effort. The reason is for a given region in a given time period tax revenue is affected by many potential variables outside the control of local governments (like idiosyncratic shocks to some specific tax bases) which are seldom well controlled for in estimates of tax capacity. In practice local tax effort encompasses a broad set of actions. One of them is clearly the battle against tax evasion. In spite of its importance, this problem has been only recently addressed by the local public finance literature. Bordignon, Manasse and Tabellini (1996), presented a model where a local government exerts costless effort to catch tax evader workers and they showed how intergovernmental transfers affect tax enforcement. The drawback of this model is that, in reality, tax enforcement is not costless and the cost depends upon other variables chosen by local authorities, like the efficiency of the local tax administration. Although Prud'homme (1995) and Tanzi (1996) have informally signaled the possible inefficiencies of the local tax administrations, this feature has not been raised by the theoretical or the empirical literature. The purpose of this paper is precisely to incorporate such dimension in the assessment of the relationship between intergovernmental transfers and local tax effort. The theoretical framework assumes that in each region there is one representative habitant and a local government. The habitant posses a low or a high-valued property. The local government maximizes tax revenues. In a first period, the local government invests resources to improve the efficiency of the tax administration or to lobby the central government in order to obtain discretionary transfers. This decision is affected by the political cost of reforming the tax administration and on the ability of the local government to negotiate with the central government. Thus, in our model, intergovernmental transfers are endogenous and simultaneously determined with the reform of the local tax system. In a second period, the local government sets the property tax schedule. But, as the local government is unable to observe the value of the property, it has to rely on the habitant announcing this value. Finally, in the third period, the local government decides to enforce the tax law by randomly auditing such announcement. If the habitant is discovered having misreported, the local government sets the corresponding property tax and imposes a penalty. We assume that audit is perfect but costly; the cost depending on the efficiency of the local tax administration. We solve the model backwards. As the local government cannot commit to the auditing probability when it designs its tax policy, the equilibrium of the audit-report game is in mixed strategies, with auditing and tax evasion. Then we find the optimal tax schedule. In order to reduce the stake for tax evasion, the local government distorts downwardly the high-valued property tax. Finally, we solve for the decision of the local government regarding how much resources to invest for improving the efficiency of the tax administration. We find that this decision is negatively associated with the domestic political costs and positively with the ability to negotiate with the Federal Government. The predictions of the model are empirically tested using data for Argentina. The theory suggests a two-step approach. In a first stage we run a probit estimation where the probability of a certain province to reform its tax system (or receiving discretionary transfers) in a given year will be correlated with domestic political variables (e.g. divided government) and also with variables describing its bargaining power vis a vis the federal authorities (e.g. political representation at the National Congress, political party of the President vis a vis that of the Governor). In a second stage, we include this exogenous instrument of tax reform in a regression where the evolution of actual provincial tax receipts are regressed against this variable plus other controls like population, density, provincial income distribution and production structure. Notice that this two stage empirical approach allow us to deal with a frequent problem encountered in the empirical literature given by the endogeneity bias affecting some of the variables of interest, like federal transfers (e.g. Jha, Mohanty, Chattergee and Chitkara (1999), Sagbas (2001)).
Minimum asset and liability insurance requirements must often be met in order for parties to participate in potentially harmful activities. Such financial responsibility requirements may improve parties' decisions whether to engage in harmful activities and, if so, their efforts to reduce risk. However, the requirements may undesirably prevent some parties with low assets from engaging in activities. Liability insurance requirements tend to improve parties' incentives to reduce risk when insurers can observe levels of care, but dilute incentives to reduce risk when insurers cannot observe levels of care. In the latter case, compulsory liability insurance may be inferior to minimum asset requirements.
The validity of CAPM has been contingent on its security market line hypothesis, which asserts that higher-beta-risk assets should carry higher expected returns. Owing to a lack of empirical support for that hypothesis, many have declared CAPM dead. However, by surrogating assets' following-period ex-post returns as asset expected returns, most empirical studies have misinterpreted CAPM. This paper shows that higher-beta-risk assets will not necessarily generate higher or lower ex-post returns and that CAPM is such a common sense theory that one can literally observe its ex-post return paradigms at work in the daily capital marketplace.
This article provides a proof of Lorenz dominance criterion for two increasing income transformations. The criterion is extended on the most general case, without any restriction on the form of initial income distribution or the properties of the income transformations. The simplicity of the proof makes it suitable for teaching purpose.
The article explores the classic consumer-merchant dichotomy from the vantage of small businesses. Using empirical data and the psychology, economics, and management literature, it shows that small businesses, treated like large businesses throughout most of contract and commercial law, in fact behave more like consumers. Small businesses lack the financial strength of large businesses. They generally lack the information gathering ability of large businesses. Finally, they generally are more prey to cognitive errors than are large businesses. As a result, small businesses lose in two ways. When they deal with consumers, they are presumed to have the power, information, and cognitive capacity of large firms. The law thus obliges them to grant protections based on asymmetries that may not exist. When they deal with large businesses, the law treats them as essentially equal, even though small businesses may suffer from the same disadvantages that require legal intervention for consumers. The article considers the ways in which the law can deal with this false dichotomy and suggests some solutions, particularly in the way the law treats risk allocation.
The present paper aims to contribute to the literature on the foundations of incomplete contracts by providing conditions under which simple delegation of authority is the solution to the complete-contracting problem of the parties. We consider a hold-up framework where both parties profit from an investment that raises the value of an asset. Delegation turns out to be optimal if (i) the decision-dependent parts of the payoffs of the parties are linear in the asset value, and (ii) decisions have no investment-independent effect. If overinvestment might be an issue, delegation, however, with restricted competencies is optimal if some additional continuity requirements are met.
We present a model in which a sovereign country optimally decides on its consumption and investment policies as well as on the optimal time to default. In the paper we allow the sovereign borrower to keep the fraction of its augmented wealth in so-called international reserves. We further assume that these reserves can be deposited at the risk-free rate. In this framework, we obtain analytical solutions for optimal consumption and investment rules, as well as formulas for optimal default boundary and the value of the risky loan. In the paper we assume that in the case of default the lender can impose economic and political sanctions against the borrower and also can seize an implicit collateral. We show that when the country is getting very close to its default wealth level, then its relative risk aversion decreases and the country increases its consumption rate and the risky investment fraction at the expense of available liquid reserves.
A new threshold digital signature using the research result about the digital signature with zero knowledge proof was proposed in this paper. The security of this algorithm is based on large number of factorizations and security of RSA. The scheme doesn’t need to invert any elements in any structure, and then no algebraic extension is needed for any structure. It is useful for the information security.
A delegateable signature scheme is a signature scheme where the owner of the signing key(Alice) can securely delegate to another party(Bob) the ability to sign on Alice’s behalf on a restricted subset S of the message space. Barak first defined and constructed this signature scheme using non-interactive zero-knowledge proof of knowledge(NIZKPK)[1]. In his delegateable signature scheme, the function of NIZKPK is to prevent the signing verifier from tell which witness(i.e. restricted subset) is being used. Witness indistinguishable(WI) and witness hiding(WH) proof systems are weaker proof model than zero-knowledge proof and were proposed by Feige and Shamir in [2], however, the verifier cannot also distinguish the witness which is being used in these two protocols. In this paper, we construct delegateable signature scheme using WI and WH proof protocols.
The Baltic countries’ local governments have been functioned during the last decade in a permanently changing environment. Like other transition countries, they inherited from the past extremely centralized administrative system. Along with radical reforms, administrative system was decentralized and various functions were devolved from central to lower levels of government. Despite that, municipalities are still fiscally strongly dependent from central authorities. Often their fiscal capacity is not adequate to act in accordance with functions stipulated by laws. Many local governments’ revenues from taxes and user-charges are insufficient to finance efficiently their expenditures. Disparities in municipalities’ fiscal situation are correlated with unbalanced regional growth, social degradation in the low-income regions and growing differentiation by municipalities’ residents on access to education and healthcare. Membership of the European Union brings new tasks and responsibilities for the Baltic local governments. Municipalities should increase their economic sustainability and enhance administrative capacity to explore EU accession funds and implement EU policies. Considering the above-mentioned problems, the paper focuses on current fiscal situation of local governments in the Baltic countries. The main interest is to analyze local municipalities’ revenue level and structure, expenditure composition and fiscal autonomy conditions