In the context of the recent democratic transition in Mexico, this dissertation explores the affect that new institutional arrangements have on municipal performance and accountability. The hegemonic one party regime that ruled Mexico for seventy-one years was marked by an extreme centralization of financial and political power that left local governmental functions and responsibilities ill defined and municipal government ill equipped to provide for its citizenry. ^ Decentralization emerged as a widely promoted management strategy for the public sector as a means to reverse the negative policy effects wrought by years of centralized control. In Mexico, the first concrete decentralization reform came with the passage of the Municipal Reform Act of 1983 that granted municipalities the constitutional authority to levy and collect the property tax in order to provide basic services. The Act marks a watershed in Mexico's public finance system by empowering municipalities to garner their own financial resources and in the process a degree of autonomy from federal and state government, historically dominant within Mexico's federalist system. ^ The purpose of this dissertation is to test the decentralization-performance thesis positing that such reforms enable governments to improve their performance. Decentralization reforms are also believed to increase opportunities for citizen participation, which is a more democratic and effective means of targeting service delivery when citizen preferences are taken into account. In the case of Mexico, the decentralization-performance thesis is further refined by testing for the impact of a variety of independent variables on government performance. Direct revenues, the decentralization measure, is found to be the most potent predictor of performance along with other contributing factors such as increased party competition, governance quality and population size. ^ The contribution of this dissertation to the decentralization literature is that instead of a single case study, a more systematic approach testing a representative sample of 300 Mexican municipalities is undertaken. Such a large sample permits a thorough testing of the theory. The results of the study are potentially generalizable to other federalist states in Latin America. ^
Open fund is the most representive and most revolutionary financial tool and new organization in the financial innovation. It has many advantages such as combinating investment, decentralized risk, financial affairs charged by experts, net valuble deal and management in scale. It can promote finance market development by making stock market prosper, optimizing financial organization and in the establishing internal relations.
Marjorie Opuni, Stefano Bertozzi, José-Antonio Izazola, Juan Pablo Gutiérrez · 5 authors
Introduction In the past 2 years, political commitment to respond to the HIV/AIDS pandemic has increased sub-stantially. The United Nations General Assembly Special Session on AIDS in 2001 and the recent creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are two indicators of this commitment at the global level. At the regional level, HIV/AIDS has been an issue on the agenda of the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Organization of African Unity, to name but a few institutions. At the national level, low-income and middle-income countries, home to over 95% of people living with HIV/AIDS, have made important progress in HIV/AIDS planning and program development [1,2]. In this policy environment, the importance of information on resources for HIV/AIDS prevention and care has increased. More and more, policy-makers are looking for data on the level and flow of current allocations to HIV/AIDS. They want to know where money for HIV/AIDS prevention and care is coming from, the services and commodities that are purchased with these funds, and the population coverage of implemented interventions. At the same time, to identify gaps between what is and what should be and to plan strategically, policy-makers are seeking information on the scale of resources required to prevent the further spread of HIV and to provide adequate care for those people living with HIV/AIDS. Because the epidemic is so concentrated in low-income and middle-income countries, estimating HIV/AIDS resource allocations and requirements in these countries is key to responding effectively to HIV/AIDS world-wide. It is also in these countries that this task is most complicated. Program data, ideally produced by national health information systems, are required to monitor resource flows. In many of these countries, however, such systems are weak or nonfunctioning. Similarly, to derive estimates on resource needs, one requires a range of demographic, economic, and health data that are scarce or nonexistent in many developing countries. Notwithstanding these obstacles, significant progress was made during the past year in both monitoring the level and flow of current allocations to HIV/AIDS and estimating HIV/AIDS resource requirements in developing countries. The present article reviews the latest data and examines their policy implications. It identifies the gaps and limitations of current research. The article also discusses future directions to strengthen the quality of data on resources for HIV/AIDS prevention and care. Resources allocated to HIV/AIDS Few countries, whether low, middle or high income, regularly monitor resource flows to the HIV prevention activities conducted by government and nongovernmental institutions within their territory. To date, no country has developed a system that regularly tracks expenditures on HIV/AIDS care. The most well-established data collection activities documenting resource allocations to HIV/AIDS in developing countries are international initiatives. Each year, donors report their official development assistance (ODA) to HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections (STI) to the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) [3]. Similarly, the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute surveys donors (annually) and developing countries (biannually) for UNFPA and UNAIDS on their HIV/AIDS/STI expenditures as part of their Resource Flows Project. The most detailed information on resource allocations to HIV/AIDS in developing countries comes from indepth country studies conducted on an ad hoc basis. Most recently, the Regional AIDS Initiative for Latin America and the Caribbean (SIDALAC) and the Partnerships for Health Reform have investigated HIV/AIDS financing in several countries using the National Health Accounts (NHA) framework [4]. The present section discusses the latest data from these sources. Table 1 presents the HIV/AIDS/STI ODA data reported to the Resource Flows Project between 1998 and 2000, with data reported to the OECD DAC imputed when no data was reported to the Resource Flows Project. Donor countries disbursed a total of US$ 454 million in 2000. According to reports to the OECD DAC, this represents 87% of the US$ 521 million that were committed or allocated to HIV/AIDS/STI projects during 2000. Total disbursements for 2000 represent a significant increase from the US$ 294 million and US$ 279 million disbursed by donors in 1998 and 1999, respectively.Table 1: HIV/AIDS/sexually transmitted infections official development assistance disbursements, 1998–2000 (US$ million)As in previous years, the United States was by far the largest donor of HIV/AIDS/STI ODA in 2000. However, when this ODA is broken down as a proportion of gross national income for each country, Luxembourg contributed the largest proportion of its gross national income (Fig. 1).Fig. 1.: HIV/AIDS/sexually transmitted infections (STI) official development assistance (ODA), 2000. Total amount obligated in US$ million and obligations per US$ million gross national income (GNI).What is revealed by these data and past surveys on HIV/AIDS/STI ODA [5–7] is that surveys provide reasonable information on these expenditures, albeit varying in comprehensiveness and accuracy. Past global surveys have also illustrated that questionnaires can provide relatively good data on HIV/AIDS resource allocations that flow into developing countries from the United Nations system and nongovernmental institutions in high-income nations. Although as HIV/AIDS is increasingly integrated into projects addressing broader health or development issues, HIV/AIDS expenditures are becoming more difficult to track even among these international institutions. However, questionnaires sent to national HIV/AIDS coordinating institutions to collect data on domestic resource allocations to HIV/AIDS are much less efficient tolls for gathering quality data. In part, this is because regularly updated information systems do not exist and it is difficult for national HIV/AIDS coordinating bodies to gather expenditure data from the many ministries and organizations implementing HIV/AIDS interventions in a country. In addition, for large portions of HIV/AIDS expenditure, data must be estimated with special studies. To estimate domestic expenditure on HIV/AIDS care, for example, studies costing selected services must be undertaken. Likewise, to capture how much individuals themselves spend on HIV/AIDS services (out-of-pocket spending), which in many countries constitutes the majority of overall AIDS spending, requires household or clinic-based studies of people living with HIV/AIDS. It is these information gaps that in-depth country studies using the NHA framework aim to fill. These studies attempt to account for all expenditures by looking not only at public sector financing, but also at spending within the private sector, including spending by individuals. They collect the data that are available and conduct special studies, such as limited household surveys, as necessary. Most of the studies on HIV/AIDS resource allocations using the NHA framework have been carried out in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) [8]. Referred to as National HIV/AIDS Accounts, they were first carried out in Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico and Uruguay in 1997/1998 [9–12], with substantial scaling-up of efforts occurring in the past year. SIDALAC recently completed studies in 12 countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay) and studies in three additional countries are underway (Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras)[13]. Total HIV/AIDS spending in the 12 countries in Latin America studied (representing 75% of the population of the region) [14] in 2000 was estimated at US$ 1.04 billion. This represents an average of US$ 2.70 per capita for the 12 countries, with individual country per-capita expenditure ranging from US$ 0.30 and US$ 0.60 in Bolivia and El Salvador to US$ 5.60 and US$ 4.90 in Uruguay and Argentina (Table 2). In terms of average expenditure per person living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in the 12 countries, this translates into a little over US$ 1000 regionally, with over US$ 3000 spent per PLWHA in Uruguay and only US$ 175 per PLWHA spent in Guatemala.Table 2: HIV/AIDS expenditure in 12 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2000.Overall, US$ 753 million (73%) of HIV/AIDS resources in the 12 countries were spent on care, with only US$ 283 million (27%) spent on prevention. This trend was true across countries with the exception of Bolivia and Nicaragua, countries with relatively lower prevalence rates, where only 34 and 36% of HIV/AIDS resources, respectively, were spent on care. Almost 72% of the resources spent on HIV/AIDS care in the 12 countries were spent on drugs, with the vast majority (almost 90% of drug expenditure) spent on antiretroviral drugs (ARV). Of course, social pressure for access to ARV in the region is high, and three of the 12 countries (Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay) provide universal access to these drugs. However, this estimate does appear to be extremely high and may represent a bias since drug expenditures are easier to monitor than other components, especially when procurement of ARV is centralized through national HIV/AIDS programs, such as is the case in Brazil. With 60% of prevention expenditure on condoms and 14% on mass media campaigns, most of the prevention expenditure in the 12 countries was spent on interventions targeting the general population. This is notable in countries where HIV prevalence is still extremely low in the general population and the epidemic is concentrated among specific population groups [1]. In Mexico, Nicaragua and most of the Andean region, sex between men is the most prominent route of HIV transmission. Similarly, in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, injecting drug use is the main route of transmission. Given the epidemiology of the epidemic in the region, one would therefore expect that significant proportions of HIV prevention expenditures would be allocated to interventions targeting these population groups that are key to the expansion of the epidemic. However, only limited funds in the region (7% of prevention expenditure) were reported as allocated to such interventions. The major sources of HIV/AIDS funds also varied across countries. In Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Panama, the government health sector was the primary source of resources allocated to HIV/AIDS. In Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, private funds from enterprises, nongovernmental organizations and households were the primary sources of resources allocated to HIV/AIDS, while international sources provided most of the funding in Bolivia and Nicaragua. Even though studies using the NHA framework provide the most detailed estimates on resource flows in countries, they remain estimates that vary in completeness and accuracy. Although the studies attempted to account for all expenditures, the quality of the estimates depended on the availabilityand quality of financial and accounting data within relevant government and non-governmental institutions, and on the capacity of personnel within these organizations to formulate estimates where data were not available. It is probable, as mentioned earlier, that certain categories of expenditures, including spending on information, education and communication interventions, were underestimated because they were more difficult to track than expenditure on commodities such as drugs and condoms. It is also probable that expenditure by nongovernmental organizations, especially those that were community based, were under-reported since donated goods and services were not quantified adequately. Likewise, it is probable that in decentralized governments, with weak financial tracking at lower administrative levels, funds were missed or, alternatively, double counting occurred with expenditures being reported at higher and lower administrative levels. To estimate the expenditure on HIV/AIDS prevention and care for all countries in LAC, a regression was run to extrapolate the estimates for these 12 countries to the region. [A regression was run for these 12 countries with SIDALAC country totals as the dependent variable and the values from the care imputing exercise (described later) as the independnt variable.] The result is an estimate of US$ 1.4 billion for all countries in LAC. The only country outside of LAC where the NHA framework has also been used to estimate expenditures on HIV/AIDS is Rwanda. A study conducted for 1998 concluded that a total of US$ 10 million or US$ 1.27 per capita were spent on HIV/AIDS during that year [15]. This represents a total of US$ 25 per person living with HIV/AIDS, compared with the average of US$ 1000 per PLWHA in the 12 countries in Latin America already discussed. While spending in Latin America is large compared with spending in Rwanda (and presumably other countries in sub-Saharan Africa), even this expenditure is very small compared with expenditure by high-income countries such as the United States. The Federal Government spent US$ 10.8 billion on HIV/AIDS in the year 2000 [16]. If this amount is raised by the same proportion as that which prevails between public and total spending on health in the United States, then total HIV/AIDS spending can be estimated just below US$ 25 billion in 2000 [17,18]. This amount translates into nearly US$ 90 per capita, or just over US$ 30 000 per PLWHA. A check on the credibility of this seemingly high level of spending is provided by an analysis of spending on Medicaid-covered AIDS patients, which projected that expenditure would average almost US$ 36 000 per patient [19]. Resource needs for HIV/AIDS Similar progress was made in the area of estimating resource needs for HIV/AIDS over the past year. Two major studies of resource requirements estimates were published. The first, undertaken for the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (CMH), estimated resources needed to scale-up a package of core interventions to address HIV/AIDS and other priority illnesses in 83 low-income and middle-income countries (including all of sub-Saharan Africa) by the years 2007 and 2015 [20,21]. The second, carried out in preparation for the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS), estimated the cost of HIV/AIDS prevention and care needs in 135 low-income and middle-income countries in 2005 [22]. These two studies built on prior work on estimating resource needs for HIV/AIDS and used similar methodologies [23,24]. The methodologies used have been detailed previously [20–22]. Both studies included a selection of interventions that were costed based on published and unpublished project assessments (Table 3). Estimates were then made intervention-by-intervention and country-by-country using demographic, economic and epidemiological data to adjust the estimates to different country contexts. The main difference in methodology between the two studies was the inclusion in the CMH study of the costs for infrastructure strengthening necessary for scaling-up. In addition, there were differences in assumptions, with the most important being differences in target population coverage rates for the different interventions.Table 3: HIV/AIDS prevention and care interventions.The UNGASS study called for the annual spending of US$ 9.2 billion on HIV/AIDS prevention and care in low-income and middle-income countries by the year 2005, with up to US$ 6 billion coming from international sources. The CMH study concluded that, depending on coverage assumptions and price estimates, between US$ 13.6 billion and US$ 15.4 billion should be spent on HIV/AIDS prevention and care annually (including necessary infrastructure strengthening) in selected low-income and middle-income countries by the year 2007 in addition to what is already being spent, and that this should increase to between US$ 20.6 billion and US$ 24.9 billion by 2015. The ranges of the results within and across studies underline the fact that these are estimates with limitations. They underscore the data gap in low-income and middle-income countries and the many assumptions required while building each model to derive parameter estimates for which no data exist. As discussed further later, they should therefore be interpreted with caution and be seen as works in process that can be refined as new information becomes available on cost data, current intervention coverage estimates, and country capacity to expand services. Nonetheless, sensitivity analysis conducted usingthe UNGASS model confirms that study results provide a consistent estimate of the scale of resources needed. A probabilistic analysis that varied assumptions on intervention coverage, costs and country capacity to expand services produced a range of results that were comparable with the ranges reported in the CMH study. So, in short, the UNGASS and CMH estimates provide policy-makers with consistent information on the scale of the resources needed. But it would be inappropriate to use them to guide resource allocations among interventions at the national level. Although these two studies did differentiate across countries whenever possible, data limitations did not allow them to pay significant attention to individual country characteristics and the way in which those may affect overall costs. To improve the estimates so as to have them serve as tools for country strategic planning, both study teams recognized that additional country-level work would be necessary. This process has begun with individual country validations of the UNGASS estimates for the LAC region. The 10 countries to participate in a first phase of this effort were Brazil, Chile, the dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, and Trinidad and Tobago [25]. These countries increased the estimated resource requirement for HIV prevention by 15% and the estimated care requirements by 27%. The main differences in prevention estimates are accounted for by an increase in estimated resource needs for the social marketing of condoms and prevention of mother-to-child transmission, while the main differences in care estimates were due to important differences in the expected costs for highly antiretroviral Total expected resource needs for highly antiretroviral increased by compared with UNGASS To estimate the HIV/AIDS prevention and care needs for all countries in LAC, the estimates for these 10 countries were to the region using were run for the prevention and care estimates Because a was between the care data estimated by the countries and those estimated for used to the The used of to values for the countries that have not their The prevention exercise was similar in addition, it used the results of the care as an variable that was imputed with the regression than with the The UNGASS model called for US$ with US$ million for prevention and US$ million for care and prevention were refined the of the model estimates the estimate for Latin America and the Caribbean from US$ increased this by US$ million to almost US$ with US$ million for prevention and US$ million for care and the between the UNGASS estimates and those of the 10 is these estimates provide further for the overall of the To plan and to the policy-makers data on resources for HIV/AIDS prevention and care. a of public and private spending on the are to track and the of their to HIV/AIDS. estimate of the of resource needs to address the epidemic they are to plan and resources for the data that are available the for additional resources and for in the of those resources available. But to date, few policy-makers in low-income and middle-income countries countries that this information most have these data for their countries. are available on the annual official development assistance allocations to HIV/AIDS by high-income countries with limitations. These data that there was a significant increase in the flow of HIV/AIDS funding from high-income countries to developing countries in 2000, US$ represents only a of the estimated US$ billion in international resources required annually to respond to the epidemic in these countries. Similarly, in-depth country studies of which have been carried out in the vast in spending on people living with HIV/AIDS that exist These studies that an average of US$ 1000 per person living with HIV/AIDS was spent in Latin countries in 2000. This is more than estimates for sub-Saharan of people with HIV/AIDS of less than US$ and far less than estimates for the United States at over US$ 30 the results of the UNGASS model for LAC (almost US$ billion for the year with those of the National HIV/AIDS Accounts studies to the region (US$ 1.4 billion for further of the important policy that are raised by these of data. The higher estimates of current expenditure are due in part to the fact that the two estimates do not the resources with of interventions. The two also different assumptions on costs of and estimates of current intervention In addition, they are also based on different of countries and there are therefore different of in these estimates to the region. However, the difference in the assumptions made in the UNGASS model that the procurement of commodities such as and HIV is and that there is and in the of HIV interventions. The fact that estimates of current expenditure are higher than those for future resource needs in part the that result from that countries in the region to pay less for condoms and To strengthen the quality of HIV/AIDS financing data in developing countries, necessary the of studies to track National HIV/AIDS SIDALAC has that the process is The studies conducted in the region with the National Health Accounts by the Health Organization and the OECD have cost between US$ 25 000 and US$ 000 per year per country depending on country and This that in financial resources not be a to the of a system for monitoring HIV/AIDS resource flows. At the same time, estimates of country-level resource needs should be for all low-income and middle-income countries. are for the of the LAC region. Similar should be undertaken in sub-Saharan and one important HIV/AIDS prevention and care resources in developing countries is still estimates of resource needs should a not only resource needs, but also the provided by the resources on the expected from new would provide data to on the of resources within and across countries and The are to and of UNAIDS for the use of the HIV/AIDS/STI data reported to the Resource Flows Project. They the of the SIDALAC country from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay the data on the National HIV/AIDS They also of SIDALAC for assistance with the of the National HIV/AIDS Accounts data.
We consider the problem of dynamic pricing in a bandwidth market, where users arrive into a network according to a known stochastic traffic model, and request resource according to their class-specific demand functions. The aim of the bandwidth owner (vendor) is to maximize its revenue. We first consider the single-vendor case and provide three different pricing schemes for this setting. Using simulation results we show that model-based schemes outperform an appropriately tuned model-free scheme. We then extend the problem formulation to a Markov game by considering two vendors in the market. We give heuristic pricing schemes for this problem that attempt to find a Nash equilibrium in a restricted policy space, and provide simulation results. We then present an opportunistic pricing scheme that exploits knowledge of the pricing scheme being used by its opponent and empirically show that this scheme indeed benefits from such knowledge. The success of this opportunistic scheme emphasizes the need for sophisticated strategies for Markov games with large state spaces. Motivated by this need, we present a key approximation theorem for zero-sum, discounted Markov games, and use it to prove statespace-size—independent performance bounds on two sampling techniques. Specifically, we extend the policy-rollout technique for Markov decision processes to Markov games, and establish that under certain conditions, the policy generated by this algorithm outperforms the base policy in the sup norm. We also provide an alternate proof of near-optimality of the sparse-sampling algorithm developed by Kearns et al. We provide simulation results to empirically evaluate the new policy-rollout technique.
Ernesto Rezk, Lucrecia Rodas, María Cecilia Gáname
ADMINISTRACION FISCAL, FINANZAS LOCALES, DESCENTRALIZACION GUBERNAMENTAL, GOBIERNO MUNICIPAL, TRIBUTACION, TAX ADMINISTRATION, LOCAL FINANCE, DECENTRALIZATION IN GOVERNMENT, MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT, TAXATION
An identification scheme based on a generator matrix of error-correcting codes over GF(q) is proposed, it is proved that the given protocol is a zero-knowledge interactive proof in the random oracle model, and it is shown that the scheme is secure when parameters are selected properly.
The project would be national in scope, with intensive pilot-testing of certain institutional innovations in eight selected aimags. In parallel with the pilot-testing of new approaches, selected NPAP activities would continue to be implemented nation-wide, with the aim of facilitating convergence between the new approaches and existing anti-poverty interventions over the medium term. The outputs that in combination will contibute to achieving the project development objective are: a) Pastoral Risk Management: an integrated strategy developed, piloted, and adopted in eight selected aimags for managing covariant risk in pastoral livestock production, with a primary emphasis on risk preparedness. In combination with other project components, this component would aim to assist in addressing the underlying causes of rising vulnerability to drought and dzud ('winter disasters'); b) Micro-Finance Outreach: the outreach of financially and institutionally sustainable micro-finance services (including savings, credit, and micro-insurance) to targeted poor and vulnerable non-poor households and individuals in rural areas of selected aimags achieved; c) Local Initiative Fund: efficient, socially inclusive, and transparent community-driven mechanisms identified and established to facilitate community prioritization, selection, co-financing, and execution of investments in basic infrastructure and social services provision in rural areas, combining local resource mobilization with matching government grants based on clear and transparent criteria for inter-governmental transfers; and
The objective of this article is to discuss alternatives to finance investments by municipalities. In general, current revenues are insufficient to finance large investments, what brings about the necessity of municipal indebtedness. These could assume different manners, according to the nature of the investment: if it is typically public or if it offers private return. For the first case, we discuss the possibilities of a municipal bond market and, for the second, we discuss project finance and the participation of the private sector.
The need for secondary education financing has been growing since independence, due to persistence of household poverty in the country. Since its inception in 1988, the bursary scheme for secondary education was managed by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in conjunction with school Boards of Governors (BOGs). However, in 2003, management responsibility was decentralized to constituencies under the patronage of Members of Parliament (MPs). Three years down the line, there were indications that the Constituency Bursary Fund (CBF) experienced challenges such as delayed disbursement, over-funding of some students, while others are under-funded and lack of transparency in the awarding process among others. Using a survey design, primary data were sourced from 308 students, 243 parents, 52 teachers and 3 officials from the MOE. Secondary data were obtained from school attendance registers and bursary allocation records. The study found that the CBF played the greatest role in financing secondary education. However, the potential of the scheme was undermined by inadequacy of funds, ineffective committees, lack of appropriate institutional linkages, delayed disbursement of funds and financial malpractices among other issues. The study recommended the need to: revamp the bursary kitty; strengthen monitoring and evaluation frameworks; spearhead resource mobilization; develop strategic plans; improve record keeping; empower households, especially women; and initiate Income Generating Activities (IGAs) in schools, among others.
David S. McCauley, Robert Bruce Anderson, Richard L. Bowen, Ibrahim Elassiouty · 6 authors
Egypt seems to be on the brink of a new era in water management. The country suppose to follow a different operational mode that is “water conservation oriented, decentralized, environmentally sensitive, private sector oriented, equitable and operationally efficient” The focus of this study was on market-based instruments (MBI’s) as complements to traditional command and control measures for managing water quantity and quality. Prior to evaluating potential water MBIs, it was necessary to identify the water management problems and challenges that need to be addressed through policy adjustments. \nThese challenges were threat of water shortages, service delivery in municipal water supply, lake Nasser pollution, Irrigation service delivery challenges, Nile River pollution above Cairo, Insufficient irrigation system upkeep, water pollution in the Nile Delta, Pollution of lakes , low user contribution to irrigation system upkeep, groundwater contamination, and Weak attention to in-stream flows. \nSuch challenges have impacts on: (1) Nonrenewable groundwater management, (2) Adverse effects on human health, (3) Subsidies affecting water use efficiency, (4) Reduced agricultural productivity, (5) Rainfall capture and flash flood protection. The impacts generated some Threats to aquatic ecosystems, particularly, Negative consequences of rising water tables and Negative impacts on aesthetics (incl. tourism) \nA two-step screening process was developed and utilized to evaluate the likely success of alternative market-based policy instruments in response to one or more of water management challenges. The instruments were screened based on economic efficiency and equity and other economic factors relating to the nature of the instrument itself. They also were evaluated based on criteria that considered the specific social, cultural, political, and institutional context in which the instrument will be applied. \nThereon, the study explored the applicability of economic instruments to help address Egypt’s current water management challenges. It resulted in an initial evaluation of twenty instruments that seemed most promising. Screening criteria were developed and applied to assess the merits of each, and direction also was received from nearly 60 participants who attended the study’s concluding Workshop on Economic Incentives for Water. The most promising policy instruments that concluded from the study were: \nWoith respect to the water quantity management deemed of highest priority for follow-up analysis and possible policy action were: Groundwater Extraction Charges, Tariff Reductions for Imported Water Meters and Water Conserving Equipment, Several other measures were identified as warranting careful further analysis. These include area-based irrigation service charges; volumetric water delivery charges for large agricultural enterprises; and increased user fees for the supply of urban and industrial water services. \nLikewise, the most promising policy measures identified to address water quality \nproblems were: Increased User Fees for Wastewater Treatment, Increased Subsidies to Finance Wastewater Treatment Facilities, Subsidized Rural Sanitation, and Subsidized Pollution Control Equipment \nTo achieve such model four approaches to positive change have been identified. These include Creating incentives and disincentives for water management to protect its quality. In addition to Institutionalizing the role private participation; environmental protection and identifying mechanisms to ensure appropriate benefits for participating private sector partners, decentralizing decision making, institutionalizing environmental protection, changing the role of government and improving personnel policies at macro-level decision making regarding uses of the Nile River, and improving awareness of water resources and associated environmental issues.
During the past decade, many countries throughout the world have attempted to improve their generally poor performance record of agency-managed irrigation systems by designing and implementing institutional policy programs. This thesis analyses the institutional viability and the local impact on irrigation performance of two such institutional intervention programs. This is done in the context of the Alto Río Lerma irrigation district (ARLID), a large-scale irrigation system with a command area of more than 112,000 hectares located in the State of Guanajuato, Central Mexico. The central notion that runs through this study is the recognition that new institutional arrangements do not necessarily follow institutional design principles and top-down directives from policy makers and government interveners, but rather are created in a process of local negotiation between water users, farmer leaders and irrigation managers. This requires detailed observations on local practices, strategies and interactions on how users, leaders and managers cope with building and transforming irrigation institutions.The first intervention program analyzed in this thesis aims to transfer management responsibilities from the irrigation agency (CNA) to local newly established water user organizations (WUAs) and to make them responsible for cost-recovery. The neoliberal belief behind this program is that greater farmer involvement in irrigation management and financing would eventually lead to a reduction in public investments in irrigated agriculture as well as to higher levels of irrigation performance. The second institutional intervention program that is analyzed in this thesis deals with the introduction of water markets, aiming at re-allocating water use to uses of higher economic value. Both intervention programs clearly embark on the 'less state, more market' approach to design and implement institutional arrangements for more use and cost-effective management of scarce resources such as water and funds. The central theme of this thesis is to study how water users and local water managers deal with the problems that result from these interventions and arrangements.In 1992, ARLID was one of the first of Mexican districts were irrigation management transfer (IMT) was introduced. The Mexican IMT program is worldwide considered to be the most successful and ambitious institutional programs in its kind, both because of its scale and the speed with which the policy was designed and implemented. The claims on the successes of these and similar programs are generally ideologically driven, and empirical evidence to support the policy claim that these institutional interventions have achieved these goals remain largely undocumented. This thesis fills some of this empirical void.This thesis comprises ten chapters. After the conceptual and methodological introduction in chapter 1, two contextual chapters follow. Chapter 2 introduces the research site, and chapter 3 presents the political economic history and context in which the institutional interventions took place. Chapter 4 to 9 provide the empirical data from the intensive case study in ARLID. Chapter 10 evaluates the main empirical, conceptual and methodological findings and discusses possible implications for policy and research orientations.The first chapter provides a review of the conceptual approaches and methodologies used to study the viability of new institutional arrangements in the context of market-oriented reforms. This thesis explores the kind of conditions, processes and mechanisms that help to create viable institutions. These mechanisms do not only refer to institutional and economic relationships, but also to the relationship between institutions, and water scarcity and irrigation technology. In that sense the thesis follows the notion that irrigation technology is a sociotechnical phenomenon, with institutional requirements for use.A key concept used for analyzing the viability of new irrigation institutions is accountability. This study shows that four forms of accountability can be separated: operational, financial, political and administrative accountability. Studying these forms of accountability (and the relationship between them ) demonstrates that practices and strategies of decision making in water management are only partly influenced by rational choice and (economic) incentives for utility maximization. They are also influenced by socio-political factors.The methodological concern of this thesis is to develop a set of tools and indicators that help to assess the impacts of institutional interventions, both in terms of changes in irrigation performance levels, and in qualitative terms of processes of institutional viability. Two sets of performance indicators are presented. The first set comprises indicators that measure actual performance against set performance targets. The second set compares performance levels over time and across different system levels. The field work for this thesis comprised a wide set of methods and research techniques, ranging from intensive observations of practices and strategies for coping with the new institutional arrangements, to daily measurements of water flows in two selected WUA areas and several canals and fields in the irrigation district. Field research took place during the period from early 1995 to mid-1998.Chapter 2 provides background information on the location, history, water availability and layout of ARLID. It also introduces the two main groups of farmers that now jointly are organized in the new WUA: ejidatarios and private growers. It shows how these two groups have historically and economically been separated for almost 70 years. The chapter also provides a brief description of the Cortazar and Salvatierra module areas, their canals and WUAs that were selected for the intensive case study.Two important notions form the basis of the chapter 3, in which a detailed description of the historical and political economic context of IMT and water marketing is given. The first notion is that the legitimization for institutional interventions should be viewed in the political economic context of privatizing the Mexican country-side through dramatic constitutional revisions in the way distribution of land and water rights are organized. These reforms and revisions were started in the 1980 as a result of both a political and an economic crisis and were accompanied by wave of programs on the liberalization, decentralization and technocratization of the economy. Institutional intervention programs like the Mexican IMT program do not come on their own, but are preceded, accompanied and followed by other intervention programs that share the same neoliberal legitimization for restructuring the political and economic control over resources. The second notion is that to achieve the economic goals of these neolibral programs, the Salinas and subsequent administrations needed intervention policies such as IMT and water marketing as these would help to recover costs from the users. However, to improve greater involvement of farmers in water management, neoliberal programs are not a necessity.Chapter 4 shows how IMT and water markets were implemented, both at the national level and in ARLID. The IMT program is a typical example of institutional engineering, comprising detailed prescriptions on institutional design and a top-down approach for implementing these designs. Yet, farmers and local managers do not fully disregard these proposed arrangements. Rather than using them as prescriptive dictates, the new principles and arrangements served as a strategic starting point for the WUAs for negotiating irrigation fee levels, water marketing, mode of user representation, maintenance programs, and redistribution of O&M responsibilities between the WUAs and CNA. Local recipients have partly adopted and accommodated the new institutional arrangements. The IMT program allowed local irrigation managers, new leaders of WUAs and farmers to jointly create room and institutional flexibility to alter the proposed arrangements. This was made possible mainly because from the initial stage of implementation, CNA officials in ARLID have shown to users that they are credible and willing to share knowledge and information in a transparent way. Credibility, transparency, institutional flexibility and probity were among the most important factors to explain how operational accountability from CNA to WUAs, and from WUAs to water users, was earned in a continuous process of negotiating institutional arrangements. Furthermore, given the wider set of market-oriented reforms and constitutional revisions that farmers had become familiar with, they realized that they could hardly resist IMT.Chapter 5 provides a detailed analysis of practices, results and operational accountability for local water management. It demonstrates that official post-transfer arrangements for O&M in ARLID do not always reflect actual irrigation practices. As result, outputs of these practices in terms of relative water supply and land and water productivity remained unchanged after IMT. The main reason for this is the conflict in forms of accountability, which could not be resolved under the new institutional arrangements. Rather than adhering to new principles of using water as an economic good, farmers and local managers adhered to pre-IMT arrangements and practices of distributing water. Daily measurements of water flows and observation of irrigation practices revealed that ditch tenders (who are now employed by the WUAs) generally report planned water deliveries rather than actually supplied volumes. In that sense, they continued the practice of being administratively accountable to both users and CNA. This runs counter to the idea of encouraging efficient water use through water pricing and cost-recovery and hence being both financially and operationally accountable. Com
The economy based on knowledge is that economy that passed the developing stage beyond which knowledge represents the key-resource. An extremely important issue in the functioning of the educational system is represented also by the methods of financing, afferent to each level. So that, according to the Education Law no. 84/1995 with the ulterior changes and completions, the state education is free being financed mainly from the state budget and local budgets, but also from the economical agents' funds, as well as of other physical and juridical persons. To the superior education there is allocated a separate fund for university scientific research, from the global budget of research, on competitive criteria, in terms of national priorities and of obtained or anticipated performances. The financing system of the state pre- university education must provide the decentralization of the funds at teaching units' level. The financing of the state pre-university teaching units consists of basic financing and complementary financing. Other form of financing is represented by auto-financing realized on the basis of their own resources. The financing of the Romanian education system has to be in accordance to the law concerning the competition and state help, as well as to the communitarian practice in the field. The economy based on knowledge is that economy that passed the developing stage beyond which knowledge represents the key-resource. What makes this knowledge to become such an important resource? The more capable a society would be to develop, to accumulate and to use the information, the richer it would become. Knowledge can be associated with human capital. The information's accessibility makes that the persons could investigate and express easier, it can determine the growth of communication between human beings, the development of new types of business (e- commerce), and the development of new on-line information centers. Because of the science's development, ever many persons are employed in the development of new activities. The number of the research fields has grown a lot and, thus, in order to become a good specialist, a person needs ever many years of training. The importance of education-as an act of conscience on whose quality depends not only the welfare of the future nation, but, at the same time, the power, the influence and even its existence as a different entity in the world and regional configuration, is unanimously recognized. The strategic objectives established by the European Commission in the year of 2002, within the European Council of Barcelona, as well as the decisions adopted at European level within the Bologna have determined the speeding up of the reform process of the educational system. Romania's assuming the obligations established through the process of Bologna, has took shape in structural changes brought to the educational system, such as the extension of the period of obligatory education from 8 to 10 years, reorganization of
In this paper, we introduce the concept of subliminal channels with its historical background and the major application as it being a kind of information hiding technology. We give the meaning of closing subliminal channels. After analyzing some failed schemes for closing subliminal channels, wepresent an improved Chaum's zero-knowledge proof protocol and a divertible protocol which can close the known subliminal channels.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This project provides an evaluation and analysis of the Education Financing and Management Reform Project. Among the few larger-scope reform projects designed for more expansive changes in the education system of Armenia, Education Financing and Management Reform Project is the most Important, in terms of both its financial aspects and the scale of targeted changes. The project provides an evaluation and analysis of the Education Financing Management Reform Project from two points of view: the choice of textbook and publication/provision and achieving successful decentralization of schools. It will also try to find out to what extent the proposed changes match the general development of the country, thus evaluating the chances of success also from this aspect. With a rather pessimistic attitude regarding the effectiveness of the project, the two project questions will be put in the negative: (i) why is this project irrelevant for achieving improvement of the quality of the general education system in Armenia? and (ii) why this project cannot achieve its concrete goals - improved textbook publication and provision and successful school decentralization? The project comprises of two chapters, each of which covers one of the two questions stated above. The first chapter provides an analysis of the textbook and decentralization components as tools for quality improvement in the general education system. The second chapter analyzes the actual chances of the project to achieve its concrete objectives - successful textbook publication and provision, and school decentralization. For avoiding complication and setting a logical line of analysis, each of the chapters is divided into several sections (some of these having also subsections).
William N. Goetzmann, Jonathan E. Ingersoll, Matthew I. Spiegel, Ivo Welch
Over the years numerous portfolio performance measures have been proposed. In general they are designed to capture some particular enhancement that might result from active management. However, if a principal uses a measure to judge an agent, then the agent has an incentive to game the measure. Our paper shows that such gaming can have a substantial impact on a number of popular measures even in the presence of extremely high transactions costs. The question then arises as to whether or not there exists a measure that cannot be gamed? As this paper shows there are conditions under which such a measure exists and fully characterizes it. This manipulation-proof measure looks like the average of a power utility function, calculated over the return history. The case for using our alternative ranking metric is particularly compelling in the hedge fund industry, in which the use of derivatives is unconstrained and manager compensation itself induces a non-linear payoff and thus encourages gaming.
Limited observability is the assumption that economic agents can only observe a finite amount of information. Given this constraint, contracts among agents are necessarily finite and incomplete in comparison to the ideal complete contract that we model as infinite in detail. We consider the extent to which finite contracts can approximate the idealized complete contracts. The objectives of the paper are: (i) to identify properties of agents' preferences that determine whether or not finiteness of contracts causes significant inefficiency: (ii) to evaluate the performance of finite contracts against the ideal optimal contracts in principal-agent and bilateral bargaining models.
When circumstances surrounding the contract change, a party might consider breach a more attractive option than performance. Threatening breach, this party may induce the other party to modify the original agreement. The contract law doctrine of modification determines whether and when these modifications are enforceable. To promote social welfare as well as the interests of the threatened party, the law should enforce modifications if and only if the modification demand is backed by a credible threat to breach. This paper argues that credibility is not a function of pecuniary interests alone. A decision to breach can be motivated also by sentiments towards the fairness of the division of the surplus between the parties. A party whose share in the surplus is reduced in an unexpected fashion might have a credible threat to breach, even if his absolute payoff from performance is still positive and greater than his payoff from breach. The paper explores the patterns by which such fairness concerns arise. Recognizing the prevalence of these concerns suggests that modifications should be enforced in a larger set of circumstances than previously perceived. Lastly, the paper offers a fresh perspective on some of the landmark cases in the law of modification and duress.
This article shows that the concept of decentralization used in the New Public Management (NPM) discussion is neither applicable to the concept of state decentralization, nor can it be transferred to developing countries. The concept of state decentralization presented here is based on the devolution of competencies, resources and capacities to subnational governments, which supposes a simultaneous, coordinated and interdependent decentralization in the fields of politics, administration and finance in order to develop an efficient decentralization process. In the case of Nicaragua the proposed goal of the NPM strategy, to increase the state's legitimacy through its reduction and rationalization, serves to justify privatization and budget consolidation. The municipalities have far too few resources and capacities at their disposal to successfully carry out their legal competencies. NPM decentralization in Nicaragua has not yet made a decisive contribution to poverty reduction.
This paper investigates a model where a decentralized manager gathers private information about the profitability of an investment project that must be financed internally. The choice of information acquisition effort depends on a tradeoff between her expected marginal information rent and the associated private effort cost. Expected information rents are higher if asymmetric information arises endogenously rather than being exogenous. Therefore, the manager puts in too much information-gathering effort and headquarters reacts with a sharp rationing of capital. Monitoring the manager's information acquisition mitigates underinvestment but even increases the manager's information gathering activity. Finally, efficiency unambiguously rises if headquarters can commit to an investment budget before the manager gathers the information.
We show how to efficiently transform any public coin honest verifier zero knowledge proof system into a proof system that is concurrent zero-knowledge with respect to any (possibly cheating) verifier via black box simulation. By efficient we mean that our transformation incurs only an additive overhead (both in terms of the number of rounds and the computational and communication complexity of each round), and the additive term is close to optimal (for black box simulation): only ω(log n) additional rounds, and ω(log n) additional public key operations for each round of the original protocol, where n is a security parameter, and ω(log n) can be any superlogarithmic function of n independent of the complexity of the original protocol. The transformation preserves (up to negligible additive terms) the soundness and completeness error probabilities, and the new proof system is proved secure based on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption, in the standard model of computation, i.e., no random oracles, shared random strings, or public key infrastructure is assumed. We prove our main result...
The purpose of this paper is to find a better intergovernmental fiscal transfer system in Korea in a rapidly changing world. In doing so. this paper analyzed the current status of the intergovernmental fiscal transfer system in Korea in various ways. In the pursuit of the reform of the intergovernmental fiscal transfer system the following four factors are particularly considered: (1)the current problems and limitations of the intergovernmental fiscal transfer system, (2)strengthening fiscal decentralization, (3)globalization. and (4)the unification of the Korean peninsula. Perhaps the key goals for reform in the fiscal system will be to provide local public services efficiently and effectively while, at the same time, maintaining macroeconomic stability. With regard to this, this paper comes up with some policy suggestions, particularly. focused on the changes in the intergovernmental fiscal transfer system in Korea. Most of all, the optimal level of fiscal decentralization in Korea must be determined. Seeking council of many. Based on the consensus build-up, there needs to be a policy shift from the current grants-oriented policy to the policy of considering both the grants and the tax assignment. It is desirable in the future that the intergovernmental fiscal transfer system be consolidated into two types. that is. the general grant and the specific grant. In addition, this change must be embodied by Changes in the structure, distribution formula, distinction of the current financing and capital financing, and etc. Furthermore, the implementation of the horizontal fiscal transfer system and the preparation of the fiscal transfer mechanism between the regions of South and North Korea must be considered seriously in terms of the prospective unification of the Korean peninsula.