Blockchain Papers

Ivan Damgård

No abstract is available for this record.

Giovanni Di Crescenzo

No abstract is available for this record.

David Trytko

The Public Finance Department of the University of Economics in Prague (VŠE Praha) recently held an international conference on Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Public Finance. The main topics discussed were the public and the taxation sectors' respective decentralization, efficiency, and financial instruments. Economists from England, Czech Republic, Scotland, Italy, Belgium, Russia, Slovenia, Turkey, Slovakia, and several international organizations were present.

Ajay Mahal, Vivek Srivastava, Deepak Sanan, Mahal, Ajay · 6 authors

The paper has two main objectives. The first is to trace the progress in the process of decentralisation in the provision of public services in India. The second is to test the hypothesis that decentralisation in the system of public service delivery in primary health care and education led to improved outcomes for the rural Indian population. Before 1992, with few exceptions, there was little movement towards decentralisation. Rural local bodies functioned primarily as program executing agents for government line departments, with little control over finances, administration, or the pattern of expenditure. The only decentralisation that existed was in the importance of state governments vis-à-vis the centre. After the 1992 Constitutional Amendments, significant progress has taken place in the form of the passing of conformity legislation by state governments, the setting up of State Finance Commissions to examine the distribution of resources from states to local bodies, and accelerated moves towards transfer of planning and expenditure responsibilities to village bodies. The paper used data from the 1994 NCAER survey to test the hypothesis that increased decentralisation/democratisation positively influences enrolment rates and child mortality once the influence of socioeconomic circumstances, civil society organisations, the problem of capture of local bodies by elite groups, and so on are controlled for. Our main empirical findings are that indicators of democratisation and public participation, such as frequency of elections, presence of non-governmental organisations, parent-teacher associations and indicator variables for decentralised states generally have the expected positive effects, although these are not always statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Abdul Rahim Anuar

The Malaysian Federalism is highly centralized in terms of revenue powers, expenditure responsibilities and borrowing powers. Interpreting from the Federal-State fiscal relationship, decentralization is a non-issue in the Malaysian Federalism context. The Federal Government had a very strong commitment in the economic development and transformation of the States. In fact, the Federal government is better positioned to manage social and economic agendas with the good effect of scale economy. Federal-State fiscal relations have however been afilected by the problems of both vertical (Federal-State) and horizontal imbalances (State-State). This is however warranted by negotiations with the State in concerned by directing Federal sponsored development projects, transfer of financial resources (grants and loans) to the States and the setting up National Finance Council (NFC). The issue of fiscal decentralization in the future is likely to be, at best, a series of ad hoc changes and improvements in technical aspects of intergovernmental relationships for public service provisions and their finance.

Danny Gutfreund, Michael Ben-Or

No abstract is available for this record.

Emanuele Cisbani, Giuseppe Damiano, Daniele Ribaudo

This document defines a standard to extend Time Stamp Tokens with Time Attestations recorded on Distributed Ledgers. The aim is to provide long-term validity to Time Stamp Tokens, backward compatible with currently available software.

Alfredo De Santis, Giovanni Di Crescenzo, Giuseppe Persiano

No abstract is available for this record.

Ronald Cramer, Ivan Damgård, Philip MacKenzie

No abstract is available for this record.

Shahid Javed Burki, Guillermo Perry, Florence Eid

As the world's economy marches toward globalization, people are debating globalization's effect on the poor in developing countries. Will the developing countries be left behind? How can they be helped? What does globalization have to offer them? Since most of the countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region are considered developing countries, the issue of these effects is especially pertinent and it formed the focus of the discussions at this conference. This publication presents some of the papers submitted at this annual conference, the fifth one focusing on developing economies in the region. The 1999 Proceedings talks about decentralization and the need to bring government closer to the people in a rapidly changing global economic environment. For developing countries to realize the power of globalization, they need to concentrate on the power of decentralization, that is, getting their citizens involved in their own development and defining their own future. The aim of these discussions and this publication is to impart the knowledge needed to turn globalization into an asset rather than a liability. To accomplish this goal, the publication focuses on three subject areas: a framework for fiscal federalism; sectoral issues; and local financing and management capacity. This publication will be of interest to academics, policymakers, and decentralization experts.

Kaspar Wyss, Nicolaus Lorenz

As part of reforms in the health care delivery sector, decentralization is currently promoted in many countries as a means to improve performance and outcomes of national health care systems. Switzerland is an example of a country with a long-standing tradition of decentralized organization for many purposes, including health care delivery. Apart from the few aspects where the responsibility is at the federal level, it is the task of the 26 cantons to organize the provision of health services for the population of around 7 million people. This permits the system to be responsive to local priorities and interest as well as to new developments in medical and public health know-how. However, the increasing and complex difficulties of most health care delivery systems raise questions about the need for mechanisms for coordination at federal level, as well as about the equity and the effectiveness of the decentralized approach. The Swiss case shows that in a strongly decentralized system, health policy and strategy elaboration, as well as coordination mechanisms among the regional components of the system, are very hard to establish. This situation may lead to strong regional inequities in the financing of health care as well as to differences in the distribution of financial, human and material inputs into the health system. The study of the Swiss health system reveals also that, within a decentralized framework, the promotion of cost-effective interventions through a well-balanced approach towards promotional, preventive and curative services, or towards ambulatory and hospital care, is difficult to achieve, as agreements between relatively autonomous regions are difficult to obtain. Therefore, a decentralized system is not necessarily the most equitable and cost-effective way to deliver health care. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Jean-Jacques Dethier

Preface J. von Braun. 1. Introduction: Governance, Decentralization, and Reform: An Introduction J.-J. Dethier. Part I: Fiscal Federalism. 2. Some Politically Incorrect Remarks on Decentralization and Public Finance V. Tanzi. 3. The Russian Federal System of Finance: Trends, Politics, and Presssing Issues D. Treisman. Comments W. Schrettl. 4. Efficiency and Redistribution in China? Revenue-Sharing System Li Shi. Comments K. Fukasaku. 5. Market-Hampering Federalism: Local Incentives for Reform in Russia E. Zhuravskaya. Comments S. Voigt. Part II: Decentralization and Public Goods. 6. Local Governance and Delivery of Public Goods P. Bardham. 7. Fiscal Features of Local Government in India I. Rajaraman. Comments E. Ahmad. 8. Decentralization and Public Sector Delivery of Health and Education Services in India A. Mahal, et al. Comments J. Dreze. 9. Reform of the Agricultural Tax System in China W.T. Jun. Part III: Legal Reforms. 10. Courts as Agents of Legal Governance K. Pistor. 11. Legal Reform in Developing Countries: Comparative Law and Law-and-Economics K. Mechlem. 12. Some Issues in Law Reform in India B. Debroy. Comments W.-P. Zingel. 13. Legal Reforms in China L. Junhai. Comments R.W. Jagtenberg. 14. Effectiveness of Legal Institutions in the Transition Economy in Post-Soviet Russia K. Hendley. Comments W. Simons. Contributors and other Conference Participants. Subject Index.

D. D. M. Waidyasekera

No abstract is available for this record.

Shenglan Tang, Gerald Bloom

Many low and middle-income countries have decentralized their public health services in an effort to improve their equity, efficiency and effectiveness. This paper presents a case study of a poor rural county in China that devolved finance and management of basic health services to townships, the lowest level of government. It finds little evidence that townships mobilized additional financial resources or that they were able to address major management problems effectively. It cautions against unrealistically rapid decentralization of health services in poor rural areas. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Pranab Bardhan, Dilip Mookherjee

Corruption and targeting failures in the delivery of public services in developing countries has frequently been argued to result from absence of controls on the behavior of central bureaucrats delegated authority over their implementation.This has motivated recent initiatives towards decentralization of service procurement and delivery to elected local governments that are expected to be more accountable to user interests.However, if local democracy is prone to capture by local elites, decentralization can also be subject to diversion and targeting failures.This paper presents an analytical framework to evaluate the resulting trade-off, and predict the effects of decentralization on volume and allocation of service delivery under different financing mechanisms.

Colin Sindall

D. Drache and T. Sullivan (eds) Routledge, London, 1999 Quality, Evidence and Effectiveness in Health Promotion: Striving for Certainties J. K. Davies and G. Macdonald (eds) Routledge, London, 1998 Managing for Health: Implementing the New Health Agenda D. J. Hunter Institute for Public Policy Research, London, 1999 Health sector reform has been high on the international agenda for more than a decade, driven by rising costs, globalization and a political resurgence of interest in market solutions to what were previously seen as the responsibility of the welfare state. For many it is hard to remember that less than 20 years ago, ideas now taken as part of conventional wisdom were to some extent unimaginable. The first of the three books reviewed here, Drache and Sullivan's Health Reform: Public Success, Private Failure provides a useful reminder of the relationship of current health care reform discourse to its wider political origins. Health Reform: Public Success, Private Failure began as a seminar on reforming Canada's health care system, held in 1996. The book contains papers presented at that meeting, and many commissioned expressly for publication. Contributors include leading international commentators on health and social policy, e.g. Yale University's Ted Marmor, Columbia's Mary Ruggie and Canadian economist, Robert Evans. Throughout, the major theme is that of the tensions between publicly funded health care and the increasing enthusiasm of decision-makers for health systems driven by market dynamics. While consideration of the Canadian system forms the core of the content, papers from US and Australian authors, and the way the topics are approached, ensure that the book has an international perspective and relevance. The 18 chapters are organized into five parts. Their titles give something of a sense of the flavour and organization of the book. They are as follows. Public–private conflicts in health policy. Restructuring Anglo-Saxon health systems: shifting state/market boundaries. Decentralization and devolution: new state forms and practices. The political economy of health care reform in Canada. On the frontier of reform. In their introductory chapter, Drache and Sullivan identify three major objectives for health reform, which provide the conceptual organizing framework for much of the book's content. The first, and they argue, most important consideration, is ‘how to sustain a public commitment to a comprehensive range of health services for all citizens’. The second is how to improve the efficiency of health care services in times of fiscal constraint. The focus on these objectives, particularly the first, reflects the fact that this publication is clearly more sympathetic to a Beverage-style model of publicly financed health service provision than much of the literature on health care reform. In fact, the views of many of the contributors appear well encapsulated in a comment (attributed to Robert Evans in Ted Marmor's chapter), which refers to the influence of market-oriented US ideas on health system reform as ‘intellectual acid rain’, which falls on their Canadian neighbour. Many in the health promotion field may see the book's title and think that this is a publication purely concerned with health ‘care’, and hence perhaps focused too ‘downstream’ to be of great interest. If so, they would be mistaken on two counts. Firstly, the third objective proposed by the editors indicates why this is one of the more relevant publications on health reform for a health promotion audience. According to Drache and Sullivan, the third objective of health reform should be how to ‘devise social arrangements which engender healthy populations’. This perspective is canvassed most fully in the book's final chapters, which deal with the social determinants of health. For example, in their chapter ‘Governing Health’, Lavis and Sullivan examine the important contribution of working life and labour market arrangements to health as well as considering the type of governmental structures required to take a broader, more holistic view of health determinants. The book's final chapter, titled ‘Health, Health Care and Social Cohesion’ by Canadian J. Fraser Mustard, sets out a persuasive argument for social investment in the early years of life, and for the significance of trust and social capital as the basis for a healthy society. There is a second reason why this book should be of more than passing interest for readers of Health Promotion International. This is that the book's contributors make a persuasive case that how a health care system is organized and funded can itself be health promoting, in ways perhaps not widely recognized. This capacity of a publicly funded health system to foster a sense of a caring society, in which people see themselves as citizens rather than consumers, is a theme running throughout the book. As the editors comment in their introduction ‘markets may be back with a vengeance but health care remains a stabilizing instrument of citizenship at a time of global instability’. Publicly financed health care systems which provide universal coverage and access to care do appear to offer equity benefits and better health outcomes than alternative models. However, even in these circumstances there remain non-financial barriers to health care usage, and disparities still exist, e.g. in uptake of preventive care by lower income groups. Nevertheless, there appear to be broader, if diffuse, benefits to health from a publicly financed system. As Mustard states: A society that decides to make health care available to all of its citizens through a universal insurance system, makes provision of health care a potential institutional structure to help sustain social cohesion and trust (p. 334). While much of the book therefore is concerned with social and health care arrangements that are ‘health promoting’ in the broadest sense, health promotion tends to be treated as a strategy targeted at individual lifestyle. For example, Gail Donner's challenging chapter on the ‘fallacy of demand reduction’, i.e. demand reduction as increasingly embraced as part of managed care in the US, equates health promotion with health education efforts to, e.g. stop people smoking. Donner argues that demand reduction strategies in isolation from broader system reforms and ‘upstream’ public policy change, can themselves become both victim blaming and ineffective. In their chapter, ‘The Virus of Consumerism’, Feldberg and Vipond argue that health promotion itself represents one of the instances in which market-oriented health care systems treat people as ‘consumers’ rather than citizens. The answer to why health promotion is viewed in this way, in a book explicitly concerned with the social determinants of health, may perhaps in part be explained by the relationship of several contributors to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR), an organization closely associated with the development of the ‘population health’ perspective on health improvement in Canada. For example, Fraser Mustard was the founder of CIAR, and another contributor, economist Robert Evans, is a CIAR fellow. Perhaps not surprisingly then, to the extent that Health Reform deals with the health care system's role in the broad domain of prevention, the perspective is strongly ‘population health’ rather than ‘health promotion’.1 For those who have not been engaged with this peculiary Canadian debate see Frank, J. W. (1995) why “population health?” and Labonate, R. (1995) Population health and health promotion: what do they have to say to each other? both in the Canadian Journal of Public Health.86, 162-168. In contrast to the ‘whole of system’ policy perspective of Health Reform: Public Success, Private Failure, the focus of John Davies and Gordon Macdonald's book is on the more specific elements of health promotion research and practice. The contributors are drawn from the UK, Australia, the USA, Canada and a number of European countries, and most are well known in international health promotion circles. As with the Canadian book, Quality, Evidence and Effectiveness in Health Promotion has its origins in a conference, in this case the Third European Conference on Effectiveness: Quality Assessment in Health Promotion and Health Education, held in Turin in 1996. However, while many of the contributors participated in that event, the book's 11 chapters were developed after the conference, and many include references as recent as 1998. The book is divided into three parts, broadly reflecting the themes in the title. Part 1, ‘Methods for Assessing Evidence and Effectiveness’, contains three chapters, one an overview of health promotion in the United States, and two which are concerned with measuring effectiveness and evaluating health promotion in various community settings. Part 2, ‘Methods for Assessing Quality’ consists of three chapters which each provide practical guidance on different aspects of quality assurance and assessment in health promotion. The four chapters of Part 3, ‘Approaches to Synergism’ are more of a mixed bag, with the first two chapters providing case studies intended to illustrate the synergy of linking effectiveness measures with quality assurance. Of the final two chapters, one provides an international overview from the perspective of a World Health Organization working group on quality assurance and effectiveness, and one, by the book's editors, provides a summary of the ‘state of the art’, and suggests a number of steps and principles for improving effectiveness and quality assessment in health promotion. The real strength of this book is the range of practical models, tools and techniques presented. For example, the chapter by Baum contains a useful tool for monitoring the changing expectations of key players in a community-based health promotion initiative. An approach of this type, as Baum notes, could potentially be of great value in helping make explicit changing and conflicting objectives, and in analysing progress of an initiative. What results is the construction of a ‘stakeholder-focused’ approach to outcome assessment, which recognizes that interventions in human systems are likely to have multiple impacts, and that assessments of the value of these effects are likely to differ according to where one stands. Similarly, Speller and colleagues provide useful guidance in tracking and evaluating the progress of alliances for health; Springett provides a framework for indicator development to track the effects of policy change on health and social well-being in a healthy cities initiative (and highlights the difficulties involved); Haglund and colleagues present a quality assurance instrument based on the SESAME health promotion planning model. The book contains many more examples than this brief selection can do justice to. While issues of effectiveness and quality assurance are well covered, the book is less helpful on the question of evidence in health promotion. Accepting that this is intended as a publication to improve and inform practice, nevertheless one might have expected from the title a more organized and comprehensive discussion of the challenges associated with ‘evidence-based’ health promotion, e.g. those associated with theories of knowledge, power and the nature of social systems. Some of these issues have been raised in recent issues of Health Promotion International. Another issue which the authors might have considered for inclusion, and one which often figures strongly in discussions of quality assurance elsewhere, is the role of management and leadership. This topic is well covered in David Hunter's short publication Managing for Health, prepared for the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research. Hunter is Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Nuffield Institute. This report is primarily concerned with the contribution of management to achievement of the Labour Government's objectives for Britain's National Health Service (NHS), and its main theme is the importance of effective management in moving from a focus on health care to a focus on health. Hunter argues that a new type of management is needed to move beyond the market-oriented approach of the so-called ‘new public management’ which has dominated the health system since the early 1980s. This does not mean, however, a return to the inflexible bureaucratic models of the past, but needs to consider a management approach consistent with the ‘third way’ in British politics championed by intellectuals, such as Anthony Giddens. Hunter suggests a way of thinking about ‘managing for health’, where the goal of management is health gain and health outcomes, rather than the management of inputs for health care. Hunter identifies a number of key health policy themes that managers will need to deliver on in the policy context created by the government's NHS reforms. These include: a commitment to narrowing the health gap; a commitment to quality; a greater emphasis on primary health care. The first theme Hunter suggests will require nothing less than a paradigm shift in the way health services are managed, requiring managers to develop a ‘whole systems’ way of thinking and to actively promote ‘joined up solutions to joined up problems’. For Hunter, good management is critical to closing the gap between policy and effective implementation, and this is particularly true in terms of addressing health inequalities. Hunter identifies a number of key skills health managers will need to develop. These include the following. Building alliances and networks with non-health organizations, and the capacity to work within alliances. Talking and listening to users of services. Developing information and intelligence databases to support the new public health. Having a strategic framework based on health improvement. Paying attention to the organizational forms needed to fulfil these functions; including development of vision, culture, people and skills. While Hunter's report is very much focused on the UK, the principles it espouses have international relevance, and its public health perspective makes it highly relevant to a health promotion audience. It is useful to see these three publications as a ‘package’. Together they provide a policy overview of health care reform; some specific guidance, on how, within that context, health promotion can move to more effective practice; and a consideration of the role of management as the key linkage between policy and practice. A comment contained in the editors' introduction to Quality, Evidence and Effectiveness in Health Promotion provides an example of the lessons for health promotion in the health care reform literature. Davies and Macdonald note that a key theme at the conference which inspired their book was that the development of an evidence-based approach to health promotion would help ensure that health promotion remains ‘at the forefront of local, national and international health policy development and investment ...’ However, a reading of Drache and Sullivan's book perhaps provides a more realistic perspective on where health promotion sits in the eyes of both policy commentators and health system decision-makers. While health promotion as yet is not at the top of the health reform policy agenda, the insights contained in these three publications help point the way to how health promotion might achieve this position in the future. The author would like to thank Jenny Jefferson for her assistance in the preparation of this review.

V. Krčméry, I.M. Gould

No abstract is available for this record.

Biagio Bossone

In any economic environment where decisions are decentralized, agents consider the risk that others might unfairly exploit informational asymmetries to their own disadvantage. Incomplete results, especially, lies at the heart of financial transactions in which agents trade real claims for promises of future real claims. Agents thus need to invest considerable resources to assess the trustworthiness of others with whom they know they can interact only under conditions of limited and asymmetrically distributed information. Thinking of finance as the complex of institutions and instruments needed to reduce the cost of trading promises among anonymous individuals who do not fully trust each other, the author analyzes how incomplete trust shapes the transaction costs in trading assets, and how it affects resource allocation and pricing decisions from rational, forward-looking agents. His analysis leads to core propositions about the role of finance and financial efficiency in economic development. He recommends areas of financial sector reform in emerging economies aimed at improving the financial system's efficiency in dealing with incomplete trust. Among other things, the public sector can improve trust in finance by improving financial infrastructure, including legal systems, financial regulation, and security in payment and trading systems. But fundamental improvements in financial efficiency may best be gained by eliciting good conduct through market forces.

Vijay Varadharajan, Yi Mu

No abstract is available for this record.

Susan Bibler Coutin, Josiah McC. Heyman

In this short but complex monograph Heyman uses his expertise as an ethnographer of both borderlands and border enforcers to devise moral and practical improvements in U.S. immigration policy. Heyman argues persuasively that current U.S. immigration policies are both unjust and unworkable. They are unjust, he contends, because they are fueled by antiimmigrationism, a sentiment that fails to recognize the common humanity of others. They are unworkable, he notes, because numerical controls have not prevented the influx of immigrants who are not authorized to live and work in the United States. Heyman reasons that as a member of a profession that is dedicated to analyzing the human condition, he is ethically obligated to promote policies that are both realistic and moral. Finding a moral heart for U.S. immigration policy is devoted to this endeavor. Heyman proposes that immigration to the United States be governed by compacts between the local communities where immigrants reside and employers or relatives who want to bring an immigrant into the country. Local communities would assess the improvements in housing, education, and public services that would be needed to accommodate new residents. Immigrant sponsors would then contribute to the costs of these improvements. According to this plan, immigration would be decentralized, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service would become a clearinghouse, illegality and law enforcement activities along U.S. borders would be reduced, immigrants could travel more freely, and all immigrants would be legal permanent residents entitled to live, work, receive public services, and even vote in local elections within the United States. There is much to commend about this proposal. Shifting the focus of the INS from enforcement to regulation would make crossings less hazardous, thus reducing death tolls along the U.S.-Mexico border. The current artificiality of the categories of kin who can sponsor immigrants would be replaced by a system that more realistically reflects individuals' actual relationships. Immigrants would be able to come and go legally, instead of being trapped within U.S. borders by a pending legalization case or by a fear of being apprehended upon reentry. According immigrants greater (indeed almost all) legal rights would reduce discrimination. I do, however, have some doubts about the proposal. For instance, migration from one part of the United States to another also adds new residents to local communities, and could potentially burden local services. Why then should employers only have to contribute to local infrastructure if they hire individuals from outside of the country? Also, if employers face extra costs for hiring immigrant workers, immigrant workers may face job discrimination. It seems more equitable to hold the federal government responsible for allocating resources to local communities based on their population sizes and demographics. Financing such allocations through across-the-board taxes instead of through compact costs charged to immigrant sponsors would further reduce distinctions between permanent residents and citizens. Heyman grounds his policy critique and proposal in what he characterizes as core anthropological values and the common characteristics of moral systems. …

Wilbur G. Lewellen, Michael S. Long

Because of the presence of substantial informational asymmetries between borrowers and lenders, and an incomplete legal framework dealing with creditors' rights and bankruptcy, many debt financing vehicles which are used in developed market economies are poorly suited to economies that are in the transition from being centrally-planned to market-- driven. Our analysis indicates that asset leasing is an effective and efficient solution to the financing needs of borrowers in such countries, in that it lowers the risks and monitoring costs borne by lenders as compared with more traditional loans. INTRODUCTION Since the lifting of the Soviet Union's control over the former communist states of central and eastern Europe approximately a decade ago, and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR itself, the countries affected-- some of which have only recently been created--have been in the process of making the transition from centrally-planned to market-driven economies. In that process, they have been the recipients both of financial support and economic advice from the developed nations of the West. Among the critical choices the countries have had to face is the speed with which they should seek to accomplish their respective transitions. That has been a contentious domestic political issue in virtually every instance, and has been the subject of differences of opinion among the nations' Western advisors as well. Some have recommended taking the decentralization and privatization plunge immediately and comprehensively, while others have argued for a more deliberate pace. The choices made and the results achieved have varied widely across jurisdictions. While the debate about the most appropriate pace of transitioning continues, there appears to be general agreement that the creation of a well-functioning capital market at some point along the way is integral to the success of the effort. This involves more than simply setting up a securities exchange. It necessitates the establishment of ownership and control rights, transfer procedures, disclosure requirements, provisions for investor protection, bankruptcy laws and creditors' rights--and an effective regulatory and judicial system to enforce the rules fairly and reliably. These of course were and remain among the least-developed features of all the previously-socialist economies. The issue we address here is the means by which firms in such countries might most logically arrange to finance the acquisition of capital assets during the current early stages of the transition of their economies, when financial markets are in an embryonic state. We argue that leasing provides a near-ideal solution to firms' financing problems in that setting. LAWS, CAPITAL MARKETS, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT The overriding goal of privatizing the stateowned enterprises of a transitioning economy is to promote increased economic efficiency by exposing those enterprises to the discipline of competition in both the product and capital markets. There is evidence from a number of studies that privatization in fact generally accomplishes this objective. In the vast majority of cases, output and employee productivity rise, cash flow and profit margins improve, capital expenditure rates increase, debt levels are reduced, and more workers are ultimately employed (Boardman and Vining, 1989; Galal, Jones, Tandon, and Vogelsang, 1992; Megginson, Nash, and van Randenborgh, 1994; Pohl, Anderson, Claessens, and Djankov, 1997). In order to achieve these gains, not only goods and services but also the ownership claims to the newly-privatized corporate assets must trade freely among consumers and investors in the marketplace. The trading of those claims is what enables the economy's factors of production to be priced, and its assets thereby to be allocated to their most productive uses. The more efficient the marketplace for the claims, the better the resulting allocation. …

Joseph J. Capuno

Like many developing countries, the Philippines has decentralized its public health system. Despite its supposed advantages, however, the decentralization, has not led to widespread improvements in local provision. This is partly because many local government units are found financially inadequate since the current revenue-sharing scheme does not factor in the distribution of the devolved expenditure responsibilities across LGU. Moreover, this particular flaw in the present revenue-sharing scheme has made corrective policy measures more difficult to undertake since it is no longer sufficient to compensate those LGUs originally with financing difficulties. More crucially, it has also become politically necessary to compensate those adversely affected by the corrective policy measure. If only to avoid the added cost of further adjustments, the experience of the Philippines underscores the importance of a well-designed and carefully implemented decentralization program.

Caroline Hoxby

No abstract is available for this record.

William Experton

This study demonstrates the challenges of the new phase of educational reform in Argentina, and, the unique characteristics of the objectives of reform, its broad human capital investments, all conducive to ambitious fiscal reforms. Likewise, the global reform process affected every aspect of the educational system, including curricula, financing, evaluation, and management, as well as the strategic implementation, which launched simultaneously, every reform component, completed in a relatively short period. The education reform program is based on decentralization, and increased participation; on academic quality for all; on equity of, and access to quality education for all; and, on the transformation of educational institutions, framed within a legislative process. Each of the first six chapters of the study, addresses one of the reform objectives, i.e., educational restructuring and introduction of the new curricula; increased access to, and improved efficiency of education; equity in the access to education; establishment, and evaluation of expenditures; educational decentralization and strengthened institutional capacity; and, education sector financing. Projections on educational enrollment, and educational expenditures are presented in chapter seven, in an attempt to evaluate the sector's financing needs, and, the last chapter, discusses future reform priorities, and the challenges ahead.