The Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (1609, 1611, 1612, 1617, 1618) by Marc Lescarbot (v. 1570--1641) is read as a symbolic foundation for the young colony of Port-Royal, Acadia (Annapolis, Nova Scotia), a construct which functions as a valid genesis for French America (thus, "New France" in the title refers specifically to this habitation as well as to the men who contributed to its making). Chapter I is devoted to a reading of the work's abundant paratext and identifies the topics at stake in the unfavourable rumours about the Acadian expeditions as well as about the lieutenant of Port-Royal, Jean de Biencourt, sieur de Poutrincourt. Moreover, this chapter explores the subjective marks, disseminated in the paratext, that build up the historian's ethos, which works as a proof of the validity of his object. This chapter investigates as well the metadiscursive comments on the writing of history and their incidence on the referentiality of the work. Chapter II compares the compilation of travel accounts contained in the Histoire with its sources. This comparison shows how the alteration of these accounts of travellers---who recorded themselves the result of their American expeditions---strengthens the division of the stereotyped dichotomy between the man of letters and the man of action, two functions respectively assigned to Lescarbot and Poutrincourt in the Histoire. The order of this compilation as well as the organisation of its various parts according to a diegetical logic shape specific places where a tension emerges between a reliable discourse, intended to a readership interested in the actual conditions of a colonial establishment, and the production of a textual "coating" aiming at attracting a courtly readership, to which the Jesuits, who challenged Poutrincourt's colonial project, addressed their requests. In chapter III, where are confronted the written and mapped representations of Port-Royal, this tension is even more manifest.
Introduction, Mila Freire. Part I: City Management and Strategy: Globalization and the new urban challenge, Yeung Yue-man The challenges of peri-urban growth in East Asia: the case of China Hangzhou-Ningbo Corridor, Douglas Webster and Larissa Muller Planning Singapore growth for better living, Belinda Yuen Strategic management and citizen empowerment: the Naga City experience, Jesse Robredo City strategy and governance, Mila Freire and Angela Griffin. Part II: Finance and Budget Issues: From conceptual framework to practice: the municipal budget, Markus Stadler Decentralization, devolution and development in the Philippines, Alex Brillantes, Jr Revenue sources of local governments: nature and determinants, Robert Ebel and Francois Vaillancourt The private sector in water and sanitation, Penelope J. Brook and Nicola Tynan. Part III: Land, Poverty and Other Issues: Strengthening local government capacities in urban planning and finance: lessons from the East Asia city development strategies, Nathaniel von Einsiedel Industrial estate planning and development: case studies, Seetoh Kum Chun The city poverty assessment: a primer, Jesko Hentschel and Radha Seshigirl Preserving the cultural (built) heritage of cities, Heng Chye Klang. Resume: Lessons Learned, Belinda Yuen.
Much of the interest in ‘post-bureaucracy’ in both managerialist and critical circles resides in its perceived potential to break with the traditions of bureaucratic, hierarchical control in work organizations. In response to the challenges of the post-bureaucratic form, project management has been put forward by many as a ‘tried-and-tested’ package of techniques able to cope with discontinuous work, expert labour and continuous and unpredictable change while delivering the levels of reliability and control of the traditional bureaucracy. In this article I explore some of the contradictions and tensions within a department where such a ‘hybrid’ mode of control is implemented, embodying both bureaucratic and post-bureaucratic logics. In particular, I focus upon the discursive tactics employed to sell ‘rebureaucratization’ as ‘debureaucratization’, and the complex employee responses to this initiative. I argue that the tensions evident here cast significant doubt on the feasibility of a seamless integration of bureaucracy and the postbureaucratic.
Which effect the constitutional reform of the title V will have on the decentralization of resources to the Italian regions? This work, starting from a review of the scientific and political debate on the new constitutional text, aims to offer estimates on the to-tal amount of fiscal decentralization as well as on the different ways to finance this process. Our results point out the need to find a balance between fiscal autonomy of local governments, territori-al equity and the maintenance of sound finance at the national lev-el.
This article discusses the contemporary problem of the county or village-town fiscal difficulties from the view of the fiscal decentralization theory, and points out that the root of the county or village-town fiscal difficulties lies in the irrational system arrangement of fiscal decentralization on the basis of the statement of several basic principles of rational fiscal decentralization. The essential way to extricate from the county or village-town fiscal difficulties is to aim at rational fiscal decentralization among various levels of governments.
A publicly verifiable secret sharing scheme is more applicable than a verifiable secret sharing because of the property that the validity of the shares distributed by the dealer can be verified by any party. In this paper, we construct a non-interactive and informationtheoretic publicly verifiable secret sharing by a computationally binding and unconditionally hiding commitment scheme and zero-knowledge proof of knowledge.
Nathaniel E. Baughman, Marc Liberatore, Brian Neil Levine
We explore exploits possible for cheating in realtime, multiplayer games for both client-server and serverless architectures. We o#er the first formalization of cheating in online games and propose an initial set of strong solutions. We propose a protocol that has provable anti-cheating guarantees, is provably safe and live, but su#ers a performance penalty. We then develop an extended version of this protocol, called asynchronous synchronization,which avoids the penalty, is serverless, o#ers provable anticheating guarantees, is robust in the face of packet loss, and provides for significantly increased communication performance. This technique is applicable to common game features as well as clustering and cellbased techniques for massively multiplayer games. Specifically, we provide a zero-knowledge proof protocol so that players are within a specific range of each other, and otherwise have no notion of their distance. Our performance claims are backed by analysis using a simulation based on real game traces.
In order to strengthen the real ownership and leadership of the communities in rural water supply implementation the\nCommunity Development Fund (CDF) approach was developed in Rural Water Supply and Environmental Programme in\nAmhara Region. The purpose of the CDF approach is to create an alternative funding mechanism, which is separate from the\nconventional governmental funding mechanisms, which are many times slow and bureaucratic and cannot support natural\nprivate sector development. In this approach the funds for the water supply construction are not anymore channelled to\nthe implementing Water Office, instead the funds are transferred to the community using private credit institution in fund\nmanagement. In CDF the community elects an executive body called WATSANCO, which manages the funds, construction\nand material management as well as the management of the water point after construction. Amhara Credit and Savings\nInstitution (ACSI), a share company, which has branches in each Woreda (District) carries out the fund management with\n2% commission only. The CDF project coordination at the Woreda level is carried out by the Woreda Community Development\nFund Board (CDFB) having members from government offices and local organizations and private sector. CDF\napproach in funding will support the decentralization of responsibilities, i.e. initiating and implementing water supply\nprojects by communities and user groups themselves, which will have a significant impact on the ownership issue from the\nvery start. This approach has had enormous impact on the community’s capacity and it has also increased the rural water\nsupply implementation pace. The approach builds the community capacity to take the lead of their own development with\nother sector development projects as well.
National governments often choose to delegate tasks and burdens to lower levels in a comprehensive system of administration. Local and regional governance thereby becomes an important factor in policy implementation. This paper focuses on the incentive problem that follows from such a delegation of competences to collect taxes and do lending at the local level in a multi-level geo-administrative system. The paper uses the Danish administrative system to illustrate the actual outcomes from such incentive problems. A two-step estimation procedure will be used to derive results on the importance of incentive problems in multi-level geo-administrative systems. Setting up elaborate administrative systems will introduce agency problems that lead to inefficiencies in both local and national governance.
U radu se proucava financiranje lokalne samouprave sa stanovista procesa decentralizacije u Hrvatskoj i svijetu. Najprije se daje pregled suvremene politicke ekonomije lokalne samouprave. Nakon toga se prikazuju politike decentralizacije u razlicitim dijelovima svijeta. U trecem dijelu se prikazuju suporedni sustavi financiranja lokalne samouprave u europskim zemljama.
The effective economy must be able to allocate resources, opportunities,risks,and furthermore social power effectively. From the aspect of finance, how to allocate the tax revenue between central and local statement and make it optimal will influence the enthusiasm of central and local statement to supply demanded public goods for economic activities. The analysis of the Cobb-Douglas production function on the variables of the national public goods, the local public goods and the private capital reveals that the degree of finance decentralization is optimal when the proportion of the tax revenue possessed by the local government equals to the rate of the elasticity of the local public goods to the sum of the elasticity of the local public goods and the elasticity of the national public goods.
The tax-sharing system reform since 1994 has hardened budgetary constraints on local governments, but has not derailed the fiscal decentralization trend since China started the reform and opening up. This fiscal decentralization has provided a strong impetus to local finance, so that local governments have become quite enthusiastic in pursuing local economic development and improving local economic efficiency. As market competition intensifies, the public-owned enterprises have gradually become a financial burden on local finance. Meanwhile, the non-state sector has made an increasing contribution to the local economy and to local coffers. Therefore, it has become the optimal choice for local governments, in pursuit of their own interests, to reform the ownership structure of public-owned enterprises.
Comprising the finance ministers of the euro area, the informal Eurogroup plays a central role in the economic governance set-up, albeit one widely unnoticed in the literature on economic and monetary union (EMU). The group not only pre-agrees all critical Council decisions with relevance for the euro area member states, it also functions as a forum where ministers decide on the overall orientation of economic governance in the euro area and establish common interpretations of EMU's core policy instruments. This might seem surprising given that the group is not mentioned by the Treaty and does not have any formal decision-making competences.This article responds to the lack of more detailed empirical information on the functioning of the Eurogroup. In theoretical terms the analysis is based on legal approaches to EU comitology, the literature on policy learning and research on the role of arguing and deliberation in international negotiations. The main argument is that the Eurogroup's informal working method creates a negotiation environment which is particularly suited for the conduct of a close policy dialogue among the euro area's key decision-makers. This dialogue supplements EMU's formal co-ordination instruments - the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines and the Stability and Growth Pact. The Eurogroup's emphasis on consensus formation through informal discussion is of particular importance in EMU's decentralized policy framework which lacks any significant concentration of political authority at the supranational level and relies on the voluntary commitment of individual member states to commonly agreed policy objectives.
Fiscal federalism implies a challenge of holding fiscal discipline at the local level. Recent analyses of fiscal adjustment have addressed the design of fiscal and political institutions for the U.S. states, and have shown how tax limits and anti-deficit rules strengthen immediate shock adjustment. Here we extend the evidence to the case of centralized financing in Norway. In this system central government takes a larger responsibility in smoothing decentralized government revenue, but at the same time the localities are more vulnerable to shocks because of their limited room to maneuver. The empirical analysis of responses to budgetary shocks shows that local public investment is the main shock absorber in this system and that investments are procyclical. Local fiscal crisis is avoided, but decentralized government is destabilizing.
It took Hasidism only two or three decades to establish an efficient, long-lasting leadership in the Jewish communities throughout the territory of pre-partitioned Poland. This rapid spread of the new movement within the traditionally homogeneous Jewish society required much more than an appealing religious ideology.1 To gain power over East European Jewry, Hasidism had to become a full-fledged social movement as well. The transformation of Hasidism from a religious philosophy available to a few elitist and self-sufficient circles of Jewish mystics in Brody or Kuty in Eastern Galicia into a social movement available to any Jew in Berdichev or Warsaw was twofold. While Hasidism considerably changed the outlook of the Jewish society, above all its modus vivendi, the community simultaneously changed Hasidism, in the first place its modus operandi. The necessity to spread Hasidic ideas to the Jewish society at large—be it the idea of dvekut (cleaving to God) or that of the tsadik (spiritual leader)—compelled Hasidism to address Jewish society in its own communal language. In other words, in order to convey its ideological message Hasidism had to use the available communal forms and patterns. In turn, these communal patterns shaped the social message of Hasidism. This article will cover only one aspect of the spread and transformation of Hasidism—namely, the role of havurot (or hevrot), Jewish traditional self-governing institutions.2 Analyzing the relationship between the Hasidic movement and the institutions of Jewish communal organization in Eastern Europe, Shmuel Ettinger wrote: "The main obstacle has been the dislocation and probable destruction of the bulk of the evidence—the minute books (pinkasim) in which community councils (kehalim) as well as various societies (havurot) which operated within [End Page 20] their organizational framework had kept their records for centuries."3 Ettinger reiterated his complaints about the "small number" of available original documents and "scarcity of communal records," upon which scholars relied in their "sweeping generalizations" as well as "far- fetched assumptions."4 It was the rediscovery of a bulk of primary documents that radically changed the available pool of sources—namely, pinkasim, or record books of Jewish societies.5 I will analyze the relations between Hasidism and havurot through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, projected against broader geographical, social, and historical context, drawing from some 25 (out of 100 newly uncovered) pinkasim that originated from the Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev provinces.6 This article defines, systematizes, and comments on a variety of patterns of the encounter between Hasidism and havurot. It revisits the assumption that the spread of Hasidism did not alter the established patterns of communal administration. It introduces new methodology in the research of communal documents, and it provides insights into the sources previously unknown to scholarship. Methodological Concerns The transformation of Hasidism into a wide-ranging social movement is poorly documented and has, therefore, been neglected by scholarship. New trends in Jewish social studies have contributed to the reassessment of this important issue. However, beyond David Assaf's recently published monograph on Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin, Paul Radensky's dissertation on Rabbi David Twersky of Talnoe, and Glenn Dynner's ongoing research on the spread of early Polish Hasidism,7 almost no substantial survey exists of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century developments of Hasidism in terms of social history. Yet several insights suggested by Jewish social historians are worth mentioning, particularly in view of the fact that this article supports some of their insights with new documentary evidence, and raises questions concerning others. As most historians have tended to see it, the spread of the Hasidic movement was promoted by vagabond preachers and healers who became sedentary tsadikim8 or Hasidic pietists who joined havurot and enforced halakhic rules,9 or by the decentralization of the traditional Jewish authority (kahal) and the emerging new forms of autonomous activity of the local Jewish communities,10 or by the Mishnah study societies that spiritually accommodated Jewish families in case of the loss [End...
It is not so difficult to design a fully automatic control system for the chemical plant, if control engineers and instrumentation engineers understand the static and dynamic characteristics of that plant. However the behavior of those plants specially so-called bio-plants is not easily measured and understood. If a plant in an organization does not perform a vital role or dose not require very accurate control, a relatively simple control system, i.e. only to maintain the plant at its current state or prevent it from moving into abnormal states, may be sufficient from point of view of reducing the operative personnel. The aim of this study is to establish the effectiveness of the autonomous control system for such a situation.