During the last three decades the planning region "AmazÎnia Legal" with 5 million km2, the world's largest area of tropical forests, endured six phases of regional development programmes with far-reaching state and private activities: 1) National Integration, 2) PolamazÎnia, 3) Integrated rural development, 4) Grande Carajås, 5) Strategies of sustainable development in the Pilot Programme, 6) Avança Brasil. Consequence of all regional development programmes, with the exception of the Pilot Programme, has been an increasing destruction of tropical forests, comprising 14 % of the total forest area. The new Avança Brasil Mega-Programme, financed mostly by the government, with enormous expansion of infrastructure and complex economic activities, is provoking large environmental impacts, representing a major challenge for the future development of Amazonia. After the abolishment of SUDAM because of fraud and corruption, decentralized regional development will have to satisfy the basic needs of the regional population on the basis of sustainable management of forest resources and the preservation of biodiversity in Amazonia.
OBJECTIVE: The objective of the paper is to describe the impact of Spanish psychiatric reform on the organization and functioning of mental health services. METHOD: This paper is based on official administrative reports and on relevant related publications. RESULTS: The most significant achievements of Spanish psychiatric reform have been: (i) the development of a new organization of mental health care, decentralized in character and territorially based; (ii) the integration of psychiatric patients in general health care; (iii) the creation of an extensive community network of health centres; and (iv) the development of more positive attitudes towards mental illness. However, our analysis also reveals the existence of significant deficiencies. CONCLUSION: Analysis of the Spanish experience shows that the process of psychiatric reform depends basically on long-term commitments, which in a system such as Spain's must come from central administration and also from the autonomous communities.
This paper compares optimal financial contracts with centralized and decentralized\nfirms. Under centralized contracting headquarters raises funds on behalf of multiple projects and then allocates the funds on the firmâs internal capital market. Under decentralized contracting each project raises funds separately on the external capital market. The benefit of centralization is that headquarters can use excess liquidity from high-cash flow projects to buy continuation rights for low cash-flow projects. This allows headquarters to make greater repayments to investors, which eases financing constraints ex ante. The cost is that headquarters may pool cash flows from several projects, thereby accumulate internal funds, and make follow-up investments without having to return to the capital market. Absent any capital market discipline, however, it is more difficult for investors to force headquarters to pay out funds, which tightens ex-ante financing constraints.
The paper argues that agricultural loans granted by commercial banks in Peru are not being properly structured because they have not adequately considered the additional risks faced regarding commercial loans. Therefore, in order to improve their credit practices and policies, they require (i) to understand in detail the functioning of production and price formation processes in agricultural markets and (ii) to seek adequate measures to cover the risks that are not controllable by them or by farmers. The first aspect aims to reduce existing information asymmetries to contribute to lower interest rates and better structure financing, especially with credits in national currency indexed to inflation for agricultural loans that are not directed to exports. The second aspect is to manage price risk with the access to an efficient and decentralized agricultural commodity exchange, while climatic and biological risks should be covered by agricultural insurances.
Following a conceptual analysis of the term âquasi-marketâ, this article will look at four national efforts to reform healthcare management in what can be regarded, in respect of the degree of solidarity and universality applied, as three different health-care models. The changes in Chile are a continuation of the countryâs previous reform, which went further than any other in the region in undermining the solidarity and universality of the health-care model. The conclusion is that it would be beneficial to consolidate purely managerial aspects so that progress can be made with the use of administered prices, relevant information on the quality and cost of care can be produced, and efficiency and effectiveness criteria can be applied to clinical services. In Argentina and Colombia, while there are large differences between the two, the changes that have been made are part of a reform process aimed at encouraging competition while upholding the principles of solidarity and universality. Because change has mainly centred on the financing model, management has had a subordinate place since the outset. In the case of Colombia, the article highlights the excessive complexities of hospital financing, which have combined with regulatory shortcomings to inhibit management change. In the case of Argentina, where hospitals are excessively large, it describes the wide range of hospital management reforms that have resulted from past decentralization, the degree to which management is independent of fiscal discipline and the different ideas that exist of the part played by hospitals in referral systems. In the case of Costa Rica, where health care is primarily public and based on principles of solidarity and universality, the article looks at the creation of internal health markets that resulted from the introduction of a new performance-related organizational and financing model in the Costa Rican Social Security Fund; it notes that the management contracts used have interesting features as regards organization and information and the shaping of a health-care system, but that they are excessively complex and involve high transaction costs, and it analyses the difficulties involved in introducing real provider decentralization and creating performance incentives.
In this tutorial, selected topics of cryptology and of computational complexity theory are presented. We give a brief overview of the history and the foundations of classical cryptography, and then move on to modern public-key cryptography. Particular attention is paid to cryptographic protocols and the problem of constructing the key components of such protocols such as one-way functions. A function is one-way if it is easy to compute, but hard to invert. We discuss the notion of one-way functions both in a cryptographic and in a complexity-theoretic setting. We also consider interactive proof systems and present some interesting zero-knowledge protocols. In a zero-knowledge protocol one party can convince the other party of knowing some secret information without disclosing any bit of this information. Motivated by these protocols, we survey some complexity-theoretic results on interactive proof systems and related complexity classes.
This article examines the process by which motor carriers took freight business away from railroads. Today they carry more than 70% of domestic freight by value, more than 85% by gross revenues. The reasons go beyond trucks' use of publicly financed highways. Among them are: shorter, faster routes because today's highways correspond better to modern population centers than 19th-century rail lines, pay-as-you go costs for using highways, decentralization and deregulation and entrepreneurial management.
This policy review examines major government policies and reforms regarding higher education development in three distinct periods, and analyzes their impact on financing higher education in China. The analysis reveals that with the expansion of enrollments, declining funding from central government, increasing demand for greater quality and efficiency, and ascendance of market orientations and solutions, a new mechanism of administration and financing has emerged to adapt Chinese colleges and universities to change. The study describes four trends in higher education financing in China: (1) decentralization - shifting financing higher education from state government to provincial governments; (2) diversification of financing - supporting higher education with income from university enterprises, contract training for enterprises, contract research and consultancy, and donations and endowments; (3) cost sharing - sharing cost of higher education with students, parents, and other social sectors; and (4) optimization - increasing efficiency through consolidations and mergers among institutions. These reform attempts are parallel to the worldwide trends in the financing of higher education described by Johnstone. Results show that the financing mechanism of higher education has evolved to meet demands imposed by the changing political and social environment.
This watching brief reports on trends in centrally-directed health spending through January 1, 2001 when Indonesia moved to more decentralized funds channeling, decision making, and allocation arrangements. The note focuses on health spending during the economic crisis of the late 1990s, touching on overall trends and intra-sectoral and province-wise adjustments. The main finding is that government health expenditures per capita were not sustained at the peak pre-crisis figure, but were protected at or above the mid 1990s level. Nevertheless, average per capita outlays remained very low overall and were especially low in provinces such as West Java. During the economic downturn, much greater use was made of donor assistance, but such support did not, it appears, contribute to the sustainability of health financing and spending. There also were shifts in the composition of expenditures, including reduced per capita public spending on primary health care and a rise in per capita hospital outlays. These trends in outlays ran counter to policy rhetoric and actual needs. In short, spending patterns exhibited significant weaknesses as the country shifted to new funding and allocation arrangements in 2001.
Canetti and Fischlin have recently proposed the security notion <em>universal composability</em> for commitment schemes and provided two examples. This new notion is very strong. It guarantees that security is maintained even when an unbounded number of copies of the scheme are running concurrently, also it guarantees non-malleability, resilience to selective decommitment, and security against adaptive adversaries. Both of their schemes uses Theta(k) bits to commit to one bit and can be based on the existence of trapdoor commitments and non-malleable encryption.<br /> <br />We present new universally composable commitment schemes based on the Paillier cryptosystem and the Okamoto-Uchiyama cryptosystem. The schemes are efficient: to commit to k bits, they use a constant number of modular exponentiations and communicates O(k) bits. Furthermore the scheme can be instantiated in either perfectly hiding or perfectly binding versions. These are the first schemes to show that constant expansion factor, perfect hiding, and perfect binding can be obtained for universally composable commitments.<br /> <br />We also show how the schemes can be applied to do efficient zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge that are universally composable.
We present several new and fairly practical public-key encryption schemes and prove them secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack. One scheme is based on Paillier's Decision Composite Residuosity (DCR) assumption, while another is based in the classical Quadratic Residuosity (QR) assumption. The analysis is in the standard cryptographic model, i.e., the security of our schemes does not rely on the Random Oracle model.<br /> <br />We also introduce the notion of a universal hash proof system. Essentially, this is a special kind of non-interactive zero-knowledge proof system for an NP language. We do not show that universal hash proof systems exist for all NP languages, but we do show how to construct very efficient universal hash proof systems for a general class of group-theoretic language membership problems.<br /> <br />Given an efficient universal hash proof system for a language with certain natural cryptographic indistinguishability properties, we show how to construct an efficient public-key encryption schemes secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack in the standard model. Our construction only uses the universal hash proof system as a primitive: no other primitives are required, although even more efficient encryption schemes can be obtained by using hash functions with appropriate collision-resistance properties. We show how to construct efficient universal hash proof systems for languages related to the DCR and QR assumptions. From these we get corresponding public-key encryption schemes that are secure under these assumptions. We also show that the Cramer-Shoup encryption scheme (which up until now was the only practical encryption scheme that could be proved secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack under a reasonable assumption, namely, the Decision Diffie-Hellman assumption) is also a special case of our general theory.
REVIEWS 78I Kirchner, Emil J. (ed.). Decentralization and Transition in the Visegrad. Poland, Hungagy, theCzechRepublic andSlovakia. Macmillan, Basingstoke, and St Martin's Press, New York, I 999. XViii + 237 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?47.50. LOCAL governmentreformin CentralEuropewas one ofthe earliestinitiatives in the process of institutional change characteristic of post-communist democratization.Decentralization was an importantelement of the platforms of Solidarityin Poland and Civic Forum/Public againstViolence in Czechoslovakia , not least to counter the oppressive, unresponsive bureaucratic centralismof the old regime. At the same time, completing the reformprocess proved difficultand halting, with both structuresand proceduresemerging as areas of technical and political controversythroughout the course of the first decade of transformation. Despite the book's title, the examination of this disjuncture provides the stuff of four solid empirical chapters by local specialistson the Visegrad Four, about half the book. In general the regional similarities are more striking than the differences, though the precise time periods underdiscussionare not alwaysclear, nor are they uniform. In I990 all three Visegrad governments enacted legislation to break the links between local government and the state administration by restoring genuine autonomy to communes (Poland) and municipalities (the Czech Republic, Slovakia,and Hungary),alongwith some reinstatementofproperty. The opportunities and obstacles for local democracy are effectively charted here, and three areas will serve to illustratesome of the common difficulties. First,there was a range of size, expertise and resourcesacrossthe local units, raisingseriousproblems of inequality.At the same time there was a growthin particularism, with few developed mechanisms for horizontal coordination and cooperation. In Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakiathere was a tendency for still furtherfragmentation into smaller units, though territorial settlementwas alreadyfragmentaryand dispersed. Secondly, the Centre gladly transferredextensive responsibilities to this lowest tier of government, but failed to secure the funds to ensure that they could fulfil them. This was especially acute in Slovakia from I994-98 when all spheres of social life based upon the principle of self-government came under attack'(Flatanand Krivy,p. Io8). Thirdly, decentralizationwas limited by the failureto addressintermediate levelsof government,the natureand cope ofwhich remainedhighlycontested. The Centre was anxious to retain control by direct as well as by financial means, despite the rhetoric of local democracy. In Poland and the Czech Republic this issue was still unresolved at the time the chapterswere written. In Poland resistance by the Polish Peasant Party, in coalition with the social democrats from 1993-97, meant that only a change of government could achieve the controversial restructuringof the provinces (wojewodztwa) from forty-nine to sixteen and the (re-)introductionof the county in I999. In the Czech Republic the provinceswere strippedof theirpolitical and administrative functions in I990, leaving seventy-eightdistrictsoperating as 'uncomfortably strongarmsof the centralgovernment and vehicles of centralism'(Illner, p. 9I). Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus was no friend of decentralization (nor 782 SEER, 79, 4, 2001 indeed of civil society), seeing it as a potential threat to a unified economic reform process. It was not until late I997 that the territorialdivision of the country into fourteen (small)provinces was resolved, but with their functions and finance still undefined. In both Hungary and the Czech Republic a 'politicalvacuum' emerged because of the weaknessof the intermediatelevel. In Slovakia the 1996 restructuringof the country's regions and districtswas certainly not final either: it was not only politically controversial but representeda clear attemptboth at partisangerrymanderingand to dilute the strengthof the Hungarian minority. Aside from the core studies a number of chapters cast differentangles on questions of decentralization. Issues of inequality surface in Andrzej Kowalczyk 's discussion of the development of Polish-German Euroregions, which notes the problems arising from economic differences between Poland and Germany. Successful cooperation can bring enormous benefits, as with the cooperation between Frankfurt-on-Oderand Stubice within the ProEuropa Viadrina Euroregion. Stubice became one of the wealthiest towns in Poland, thus magnifyinginternalinequalitieson the Polishside, while also castinginto starkreliefthe lack of comparablemotors of development on Poland'seastern borders. In other respects, however, this is a disparatecollection. It seems unlikely thatreaderswould expect to locate studiesof EU-Polish trade(Zielinska-Glebocka ) or European security and Polish debt finance (Sperling)in a study of decentralization;and these two sit especiallyuneasilyin thisvolume. They do not support or indeed refer to the questionable thesis...
This paper describes the institutional aspects of the education sector, the education system, and education expenditures. Within the institutional aspects, the main objective of the restructuring process was to de-concentrate, decentralize, and simplify the education administration to promote efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of quality education services. The education system in Guatemala has shown marked improvements since 1996, but a lot still remains to be done. The system as a whole suffers from low coverage, inequities, low internal efficiency and low quality. Access to initial, pre-school, secondary and tertiary levels is very limited for rural area children and young adults. There is less female enrollment throughout the country, at all levels. Within this group, indigenous women, are at a greater disadvantage. Female students who attend primary school have lower achievement than their male counterparts, and indigenous children who attend primary school have lower achievement than non-indigenous children do. High repetition rates, and late enrollment in primary school are conducive to a high percentage of over-age students, whose achievement is lower compared to their younger counterparts. Finally, the Guatemalan education system has inadequate financing, compared to countries in the region, and to Latin America as a whole, and costly inefficiencies, particularly in the first grade of education.
The term "development finance \n institutions" (DFI) encompasses no only government \n development banks, but also nongovernmental micro-finance \n organizations, that match grants to attempt to promote \n community development, decentralization of power, and local \n empowerment. Measures of the social cost of DFIs that \n receive public funds, help to check whether DFIs are good \n uses of public funds, i.e., if the social benefit of a DFI \n exceeds the social cost, then public funds are indeed \n well-spent, further improving social welfare. This report \n describes the measurement of costs but not of benefits; but \n even without knowledge of benefits, knowledge of costs can \n help to adequately spend funds. Two measures of social cost \n are presented: first, the Subsidy Dependence Index (SDI) - \n the ratio of subsidy received to revenue from loans; and, \n subsidy is the social cost of the public funds used to run a \n DFI - which does not discount flows, rather it works in \n short time frames, or when the rate of time preference is \n low; second, the Net Present Cost to Society (NPCs) - like \n standard present-value measures, it discounts cash flows, \n and works in any time frame. Both SDI and NPCs are tools, to \n help establish benchmarks, chart trends, and compare a DFI \n with identical clients, and services. It is stipulated that \n measurement of the social cost of public DFIs matters \n because funds earmarked for development are scarce, while \n subsidies for DFIs could be adequate, provided social \n welfare improves in a broader scale.
I. INTRODUCTION The exclusionary rule has been under near-constant attack (1) since its inception as a federal constitutional device more than forty years ago. (2) The Supreme Court has consistently limited the rule's operation in criminal cases (3) and has refused to extend it to most contexts outside the criminal trial. (4) In Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole v. Scott, (5) the Court's most recent case addressing the exclusionary rule's application in a non-criminal proceeding, the Court refused to apply the rule to parole revocation hearings even though they might result in longer periods of incarceration than many criminal trials. (6) The Court concluded that police officers would not be sufficiently deterred by the suppression of evidence at revocation hearings to justify the relatively high costs that suppression would inflict. (7) This conclusion raises a fundamental question--if the exclusionary rule does not produce enough deterrence to police when illegally seized evidence puts a person at risk of going to jail, why would the rule produce any more deterrence when mere property is at stake? Scott suggests that the Court might retreat from its prior decision in One 1958 Plymouth Sedan v. Pennsylvania, (8) in which the Court applied the exclusionary rule to civil forfeiture. (9) One Plymouth Sedan remains the only Supreme Court case to apply the rule outside the criminal trial context. (10) Under the analysis employed in Scott, however, the application of the exclusionary rule in civil forfeiture hearings is in serious doubt. (11) If police officers are not sufficiently deterred by the prospect of evidence being suppressed at a hearing where a person's liberty is in jeopardy, it is a fortiori that they will not be deterred by the possibility of suppression at a civil forfeiture hearing where only the person's property is in jeopardy. Law enforcement officials have much to gain in the outcome of the issues raised in Scott, and will likely bring challenges to the exclusionary rule in civil forfeiture. While the court's trend is moving away from applying the exclusionary rule in civil contexts, law enforcement agencies are increasingly relying on civil tools to attack crime. (12) At the forefront of this movement is the use of civil forfeiture to seize the fruits and instrumentalities of the narcotics trade. (13) Civil forfeiture statutes allow law enforcement officers to seize privately held assets that have been used in a crime, a practice that not only frustrates narcotics traffic, but also fills public coffers. (14) Moreover, most civil forfeiture statutes carry with them low burdens of proof and few defenses, (15) thus providing governments with a powerful device that is far more streamlined than the time-consuming process of prosecuting a criminal. With so much at stake, law enforcement officials are likely to use Scott to mount challenges to the exclusionary rule in civil forfeiture. In fact, lower courts have not been silent on the vulnerability of One Plymouth Sedan. (16) A California appellate court has outright rejected the exclusionary rule in civil forfeiture: [The] application of the exclusionary rule in civil forfeiture actions is unnecessary and of little additional benefit, particularly when the property is owned by a third party claimant who has not been convicted of any offense. To date the United States Supreme Court has rejected application of the exclusionary rule to civil cases, and we decline to do so as well in this civil forfeiture case. (17) A Maryland court put it more bluntly: Has One 1958 Plymouth Sedan, whatever it stood for, retained its vitality over the thirty-three years since it was handed down? No, it has not. (18) This Article presents a counterargument to the encroachments on the continued use of the exclusionary rule in civil forfeiture proceedings. Part II examines briefly the Supreme Court's existing exclusionary rule case law. âŠ
The Municipal Sector Investment Project, partly financed by a $75 million World Bank loan made in 1992, marked the successful beginning of a decentralization effort in Tunisia to strengthen municipalities and transform them into effective agents for local urban development. The Tunisian government highlights this project as a catalyst and platform for the country's broader decentralization policy.
The Municipal Sector Investment Project, partly financed by a $75 million World Bank loan made in 1992, marked the successful beginning of a decentralization effort in Tunisia to strengthen municipalities and transform them into effective agents for local urban development. The Tunisian government highlights this project as a catalyst and platform for the country's broader decentralization policy.
The Municipal Sector Investment Project, partly financed by a $75 million World Bank loan made in 1992, marked the successful beginning of a decentralization effort in Tunisia to strengthen municipalities and transform them into effective agents for local urban development. The Tunisian government highlights this project as a catalyst and platform for the country's broader decentralization policy.