Foreword Haim Ben-Shahar Introduction Efraim Sadka, David Pines and Itzhak Zilcha Part I. New Perspectives on Urban Development: 1. A 'slime mold' model of city formation Paul A. Krugman 2. The size of regions: transport and housing as factors in agglomeration Elhanan Helpman Part II. The Economics of Clubs: 3. First and second welfare theorems for economies with collective goods Vicky Barham and Myrna H. Wooders 4. Anonymous pricing in Tiebout economies and economics with clubs John Conley and Myrna H. Wooders 5. Decentralization in club economies: how multiple private goods matter Robert P. Gilles and Suzanne A. Scotchmer 6. Incentives and disagglomerative forces: some modelling problems Roger Guesnerie Part III. The Provision of Public Goods: 7. Self-financing of congestible facilities in a growing economy Richard Arnott and Marvin Kraus 8. The monopolistic provision of congested public goods William H. Oakland 9. Imperfect solutions to the musical-suburbs problem John D. Wilson 10. Nationalism and secession Daniel Berkowitz Part IV. Taxation and Distribution: 11. Why is there corporate taxation in a small open economy? The role of transfer pricing and income shifting Roger H. Gordon and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason 12. Patterns of tax arbitrage and decentralized tax autonomy Bernd Genser 13. Destination- and origin-based taxation under international capital mobility A. Lans Bovenberg 14. Factor mobility, risk, and redistribution in the welfare state David E. Wildasin.
We show how to transform any interactive proof system which is statistical zero-knowledge with respect to the honest-verifier, into a proof systemwhich is statistical zero-knowledgewith respect to any verifier. This is done by limiting the behavior of potentially cheating verifiers, without using computational assumptions or even referring to the complexity of such verifier strategies. (Previous transformations have either relied on computational assumptions or were applicable only to constant-round public-coin proof systems.) Our transformation also applies to public-coin (aka Arthur-Merlin) computational zero-knowledge proofs: We transform any ArthurMerlin proof system which is computational zero-knowledge with respect to the honest-verifier, into an Arthur-Merlin proof system which is computational zero-knowledge with respect to any probabilistic polynomial-time verifier. A crucial ingredient in our analysis is a new lemma regarding 2-universal hashing functions. 1 Introduction Zer...
This article explains (1) the origins of central banking and (2) variations in the spread and durability of central banks across nations. Early central banks helped bind governments to honor their debts and thereby furthered governments' capacities to efficiently finance military expenditures. The origins of central banking are problematic because government credit-worthiness and efficient wartime fiscal policy are public goods, subject to the free-rider problem. Applying a variant of the joint-products model, I argue that governments offered private benefits (monopoly privileges) to select creditors to induce participation in central banks. To explain cross-national differences, I argue that the level of domestic political decentralization negatively affected the incidence and durability of central banking. Countries with decentralized political systems faced regulatory competition from strong local authorities as licensers of banking monopolies, making it difficult to adopt or sustain central banking. Qualitative and statistical evidence from Europe and the United States to about 1850 support the arguments.
Concurrent executions of a zero-knowledge protocol by a single prover (with one or more verifiers) may leak information and may not be zero-knowledge in toto . In this article, we study the problem of maintaining zero-knowledge.We introduce the notion of an (α, β) timing constraint : for any two processors P 1 and P 2 , if P 1 measures α elapsed time on its local clock and P 2 measures β elapsed time on its local clock, and P 2 starts after P 1 does, then P 2 will finish after P 1 does. We show that if the adversary is constrained by an (α, β) assumption then there exist four-round almost concurrent zero-knowledge interactive proofs and perfect concurrent zero-knowledge arguments for every language in NP . We also address the more specific problem of Deniable Authentication , for which we propose several particularly efficient solutions. Deniable Authentication is of independent interest, even in the sequential case; our concurrent solutions yield sequential solutions without recourse to timing , that is, in the standard model.
Financing Schools for High Performance: Strategies for Improving the Use of Educational Resources by Allan Odden and Carolyn Busch, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, 1998. $31.95 ISBN 0-787-94060-7 Review by Carla Edlefson Ashland University Ashland, Ohio long-term task is to get schools...to act more like producers of high levels of student achievement rather than mere consumers of educational resources or providers of traditional educational services (p. 25). Thus begins Financing Schools for High Performance, a book that links the current best thinking about school funding with what we know about school improvement. The central theme of the book is that there are ways to use current resources better and...schools can begin the process of increasing student achievement with funds already in the education system (p. 164). The first chapter summarizes research indicating that wealthy and poor school districts have similar patterns of resource allocation. High-spending districts do not pay salaries that are all that much higher, and they don't have a lower student-to-teacher ratio in the core academic subjects. They do hire more staff who are specialists, to deal with various kinds of student needs, but these specialists have little effect on student achievement. What does affect student achievement, according to chapter two, is to center change on student learning and a rigorous instructional program (p. 29) and to decentralize decisions about staff and resources to the building level. Part two, chapters three through five, describes three models that state governments could emulate in order to decentralize school funding. Chapter three presents the charter school model and provides a useful comparison of legislation passed by 26 U.S. states, as of December 1996. The authors stress that the success of charter schools will depend on whether or not they are adequately funded and given real authority over the use of their resources. Chapters four and five describe in some detail the funding systems in England and in Victoria, Australia, as demonstrations that site-based funding does work. Chapter six lays out steps that a state could take to structure a site-based school financing system. They are: 1) identify what will be district-level responsibilities and what will be handled at the site; 2) divide the district budget into two parts: the central office and the sites; 3) design an allocation formula to distribute the site budget to the individual schools, taking into account special student needs, etc.; 4) determine what kind of documentation schools will do; e.g., linking their budget to their school improvement plans. The recommendation is that a state would pass legislation requiring districts to do site-based budgeting and then hold individual schools accountable for student achievement results. This book is directed more at policy experts than practitioners, but chapters seven and eight should be of interest to secondary school administrators. Chapter seven, Reallocating Education Dollars' to Improve Results, cites research on individual schools that have adopted reform models, and within existing resource levels, have reallocated and restructured in order to improve student outcomes. Characteristics of these high performance schools include a) curriculum based on high standards b) whole-school reform; c) students grouped differently for instruction; d) teacher involvement in decision-making; and e) emphasis on professional development (pp. 168-169). For example, the New American Schools (NAS) project (www.naschools.org) has tested seven different reform models. Even though each of the models requires money for new people or materials, Odden and Busch show that with reallocation, a school that has resources equal to the national average could not only afford to implement any of the NAS models, but also have money left over. …
ForewordR. Scott Fosler and Shinyasu Hoshino Globalization and Decentralization: An OverviewJong S. Jun and Deil S. Wright Part I: Institutional Contexts Introduction 1. From Dual to Coercive Federalism in American Intergovernmental RelationsJohn Kincaid 2. Intergovernmental Relations in Japan: Historical and Legal Patterns of Power DistributionFukashi Horie 3. Innovative Policies and Administrative Strategies for Intergovernmental Change in JapanHiromi Muto 4. Remapping Federalism: The Rediscovery of Civic Governance in the United StatesDeWitt John, Alex Halley, and R. Scott Fosler 5. Emerging Regional Organizational and Institutional Forms: Strategies and Prospects for Transcending Localism in the United StatesJohn Kirlin 6. Understanding Regional Administration in Japan: Dynamism in Stability and Continuity in ChangeTakashi Nishio Part II: Public Policy Issues Introduction 7. The Roles of Central Government and Local Government in Japan's Regional Development PoliciesNaohisa Nagata 8. Public Infrastructure, Capital Investment, and Economic Development in the United StatesBruce McDowell 9. The Tokyo and the Development of Urban Issues in JapanAkira Nakamura 10. Metropolitan Growth and Development in the United States: Human Problems and ProspectsRalph Widner 11. Service Integration Revisited and Reinvented: The Strategic Role of Schools in Human ServicesAstrid Merget and William Colman 12. Social Welfare Issues in Japan: Meeting the Needs of an Aging SocietyAkira Morita 13. Perspectives on Intergovernmental Relations in Japan: The Problem of Solid Waste ManagementKatsumi Yorimoto 14. The Interstate Transport of Solid Waste: Intergovernmental Tensions and the Conflict Between Law and PolicyRosemary O'Leary and Paul Weiland 15. Fiscal Disparities in the United States: Concepts, Trends, and PoliciesRobert Rafuse 16. The Politics of Local Government Finance in JapanYoshio Kobayashi Part III: Internationalization and Globalization Introduction 17. State and Local Boundary-Spanning Strategies in the United States: Political, Economic, and Social Transgovernmental InteractionsJohn M. Kline 18. Technology Transfer from Iowa to Japan: Internationalization and the Quality of Life in Rural AreasKazunori Ishiguro 19. Japanese Local Government in an Era of Global Economic InterdependencyShinyasu Hoshino 20. The Domestic Consequences of Internationalization: Emerging Conflicts Enid Beaumont
We present efficient zero-knowledge proof systems for quasi-safe prime products and other related languages. Quasi-safe primes are a relaxation of safe primes, a class of prime numbers useful in many cryptographic applications. Our proof systems achieve higher security and better efficiency than all previously known ones. In particular, all our proof systems are perfect or statistical zero-knowledge, meaning that even a computationally unbounded adversary cannot extract any information from the proofs. Moreover, our proof systems are extremely efficient because they do not use general reductions to NP-complete problems, can be easily parallelized preserving zero-knowledge, and are non-interactive for computationally unbounded provers. The prover can also be efficiently implemented given some trapdoor information and using very little interaction. We demonstrate the applicability of quasi-safe primes by showing how they can be effectively used in the context of RSA based undeniable signatures to enforce the use of "good" public keys, i.e., keys such that if a signer can convince a recipient of the validity of a signature, then he won't be able to subsequently deny the same signature in case of a dispute.
This title presents an authoritative collection of the most significant papers on fiscal federalism and local finance. In addition to some classic papers, it offers clear and insightful presentations of conventional wisdom in the field as well as recent papers which illuminate important issues and point the way to ongoing research. Topics covered include federal tax structure and the division of fiscal functions among levels of government, the effect of local taxes on economic growth, the systems of governmental grants, income redistribution, the theory and practice of local finance and fiscal decentralization in developing countries and transitional economies.
This two-part paper provides a theoretical framework for appraising trade-offs between alternative methods of delegating authority over the delivery of public services, on the targeting and cost-effectiveness of public spending programs in developing countries. Authority over these programs has to be delegated owing to absence of information at the central level concerning local needs and costs of specific communities. In a top-down centralized system, this authority is delegated to bureaucrats by a central government that has limited ability to monitor their performance with respect to either service delivery or cost control. In a decentralized system, it is allocated instead to elected local governments or client groups, which may be subject to capture by local elites. Both systems are thus prone to local corruption and lack of accountability. Part 1 of the paper studies the relevant tradeoffs in the context of a poverty alleviation program, whose aim is to deliver a private merit good available on competitive markets to the poor. Decentralization generally dominates with respect to inter-community targeting as well as cost-effectiveness. However, the ranking of intracommunity targeting under the two systems is ambiguous, and depends on the relative degree of capture that local and national governments are prone to, besides the nature of uncertainty and preferences of the good by the nonpoor. Part 2 of the paper considers an infrastructure service provided by a public enterprise which has a natural monopoly. In this context it is shown that decentralization dominates if the following four conditions are satisfied: (i) local governments are not vulnerable to capture; (ii) local governments have access to adequate local financing sources; (iii) there are no interjurisdictional externalities in service provision; and (iv) local governments have all the bargaining power and access to relevant cost information vis-a-vis public enterprise managers. Absent any one of these institutional conditions, however, decentralization may perform worse than centralization. The Appendix develops a model of electoral competition (adapted from Grossman-Helpman (1996)) where parties are prone to capture by special interest groups, which helps identify some of the institutional determinants of the degree of capture of local and central governments.
Journalists and journalism educators worldwide are indebted to Pierre Salinger, the former ABC-TV reporter and press secretary under President John F. Kennedy. Salinger unintentionally issued a wake-up call when, based on apparently fictitious information on a home page on the World Wide Web, he alleged in November 1996 that a U.S. Navy missile downed TWA Flight 800 in July, killing the 230 people aboard (Associated Press, Nov. 8, 1996). accusations sounded the alarm that traveling on the so-called Information Superhighway is fraught with danger (Coates, 1996). They also reinforced the importance of teaching students how to critically evaluate the credibility and to ensure the accuracy of information. The U.S. government was quick to rebut accusations, which he said were based on an assessment by French intelligence (Anderson,1996: Dine,1996). Salinger said he had received a tip via an electronic mail message and checked it out on a Web page (Coates,1996). Ironically, it was credentials as a journalist that made the story credible to the main- stream press (Achenbach, 1996; Turner, 1996). The rumor had been circulating months among discussion groups on the Internet, whose members had better tools to evaluate it and had largely rejected it. One source interviewed a story in Newsweek (Turner, 1996) put it this way: Well, Pierre, if you'd get a little Net-savvy, you'd figure it out. Learn to surf, Dude. Initially, the press appeared to consider Salinger the target of a cruel hoax and thus appeared to feel some sympathy him. Journalists also recognized the ability of Salinger and the Internet to mislead and increase public confusion (Dickey and Hosenball, Nov. 25, 1996). But the press' treatment of Salinger changed in March 1997 when he went on the attack again, this time contending that a blip detected on radar was proof of his friendly fire theory (Goodman,1997; Rashbaum,1997). The FBI said the blip was an unarmed Navy reconnaissance plane (Associated Press, March, 21, 1997). For example, the San Francisco Examiner's editorial called the allegations Salinger's Sad Obsession (March 16, 1997). The Rocky Mountain News (March 5,1997)proclaimedSalinger's recklessness and lamented that although this explanation of the crash doesn't begin to make sense, it do untold damage. But the opinion section article that offered perhaps the insight into how this episode affected journalism and how it illustrated the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet as a information source appeared in the Arizona Republic on Nov. 18, 1996, with the headline A Tangled Web. The article noted for all its potential being an extraordinary, enriching opportunity unlimited access and delivery of information, the Web as a source of news is a place rife with pitfalls. Pointing out Salinger was snagged by some phony information, some official-looking trash, the article emphasized most anybody, anywhere and at any time create an item on the Internet and make it look credible. Importantly, the article said online information doesn't follow standards and can be disseminated with a high degree of anonymity. Noting the information had attached itself in a circuitous way to a famous newsman's reputation, the commentary concluded by pointing out the Internet's dangerous potential of gaining unearned respect and credibility from millions of people. Tackling the Web If a veteran reporter like Salinger be easily snared by misinformation on the Web, what about a student reporter? Should journalism schools teach students the skills needed to assess the credibility of information on the Web? What about the accuracy of that information? Should colleges and universities graduate students who critically assess information and verify its accuracy? As the Salinger episode indicates, the credibility of the profession, which a recent Pew Research Center survey indicates has fallen sharply in the past 10 years (Nelson, 1997), is also at stake. …
We propose a two factor endogenous growth model in which the government intervenes in the economy by financing research and/or education. We allow technology in public production to be different from technology in private production, so that public spending has a direct effect on the rental prices of factors. We characterize both the unique balanced growth path and the transitional dynamics of the model showing the steady state equilibrium to be a saddle point. We also show that while income taxation is distortive, in general, a Pareto optimal outcome can be reached by means of a consumption tax in the decentralized setting.
Municipalities have an important role in enacting alcohol policy in Norway. The task of the local authorities is to implement the national goals and form a locally adapted practice, mainly by controlling the availability of alcohol to the public. The local politicians experience this as an issue where they are exposed to a cross-pressure between sociopolitical concerns on the one hand and business interests on the other hand. This paper focuses on alcohol policies in municipalities which give priority to business development, especially tourism. It is based on case studies of two Norwegian municipalities. The paper first looks at the actual changes in the alcohol policy in the two municipalities, and secondly, at the decision-making process leading up to these changes. Four approaches for studying decision-making processes, inspired by a model by Jo-han P. Olsen, are used: rationality, legitimacy, power and necessity. The study found a liberalization with regard to the availability of alcoholic beverages in the two municipalities. This can be explained by changes in external conditions, changes in influential positions between different actors, and changes in public attitudes towards alcohol and interpretations of the local authorities’ ability to control the consumption of alcohol in the population. At the same time the local authorities have strengthened efforts to control licensees. This can be seen as a result of demands from the national authorities, and of the fact that this activity can be financed by a tax on the licensees. The combination of the liberalization of the license policy and the strengthening of the control of the licensees can also be seen as a compromise between different political attitudes, but where the business interests are more important than the sociopolitical concerns. The local politicians also underlined the importance of information activity aiming at influencing attitudes towards alcohol. This last mean is characterized by a legitimating function and almost restricted to rhetorics. It seems that this is more a symbolic politics. Generally the study emphasizes mechanisms indicating that the consequence of a decentralization of power to local authorities will be a more uniform liberal politics rather than more locally based differences.
Public responsibility for health care can be justified by ambitious egalitarian objectives, as it is commonly believed that the private sector generates greater disparities than the public sector. Government institutions can be designed to achieve equality in provision of health services. The article addresses the geographical distribution of primary care physicians in Norway, where primary physician services are the responsibility of local governments, primarily financed by general taxation. The authors analyze the allocation of physicians using a local government demand model, a synthesis of consumers' demand and local government resource allocation. Analyses were performed on a panel data set of all Norwegian municipalities covering the period 1986-1992. The results are encouraging. A decentralized system of primary physician services does seem to be fairly effective in securing equity in access to these services for the municipal population. In particular, local governments seem to respond well to the health care needs of their populations. Distribution of physicians is only to a very small extent dependent on the wealth of the municipality.