Blockchain Papers

Oded Goldreich, Eyal Kushilevitz

No abstract is available for this record.

Richard M. Bird

Fiscal decentralization in many guises has become a central concern around the world. This paper discusses several aspects of this complex subject that have turned out to be important in policy work on the issue in a number of countries. First, I discuss briefly the meaning and rationale of fiscal decentralization. There is much that has to be disentangled before one can approach the issue in a particular policy setting, including distinguishing between the problems of federal finance and fiscal federalism. Second, I review the issue of the choice of local revenue sources from the perspective of establishing efficient local governments, including the roles of user charges, property taxes, and income taxes. Finally, I sketch some considerations with respect to the design of intergovernmental transfers from the same perspective, with particular emphasis on the desirability in many settings of transfers that are both conditional and equalizing.

M. Weigl, B. Siemiȧatkowska, K.A. Sikorski, A. Borkowski

No abstract is available for this record.

BA Schuldt, KE Kendall

No abstract is available for this record.

Kouichi Sakurai

No abstract is available for this record.

Kouichi Sakurai

No abstract is available for this record.

Kenneth E. Kendall, Barbara A. Schuldt

No abstract is available for this record.

Richard Wallich Bird

The decentralization of government in Eastern Europe represents a reaction both from below (to tight central political control) and from above (to privatize the economy and relieve the central government's fiscal stress). In all transitional economies, the developing structure of intergovernmental relations is intimately related to such critical policy issues as privatization, stabilization, and the social safety net. In the fiscal sphere, tax reform, deficit control, and intergovernmental finance are a tripod. Unless each leg is set up properly, the whole structure could collapse. The present strategy of devolving expenditures downward while holding back on revenue flows and transfers to balance the central budget is unlikely to succeed for more than a year or two at best. Net spending reductions at the subnational level may be difficult to achieve. From 10 to 40 percent of outlays go to the subnational sector, and in many countries local governments provide much of the social safety that makes the pain of the economic transition politically tolerable. And, most housing and many enterprises have been shifted to local ownership, with the maintenance and subsidy cost this implies. Since the revenue sources assigned to local governments cannot finance expected levels of local activity, the result of shifting spending downward is likely to be strong demands for increased, rather than decreased, transfers. Alternatively, subnational government may look to coping mechanisms such as holding on to their enterprises (which provide vital social services), developing extrabudgetary revenues, or borrowing. These coping mechanisms threaten privatization, reduce budgetary transparency, and impede stabilization policies. The authors describe the risks to privatization, to macroeconomic stability, and to an adequate social safety net that present policies toward local government may imply. Its themes are that the subnational sector needs to be more realistically factored into national plans - and that subnational expenditures be more clearly assigned and revenue needs more realistically assessed. Such assessments are likely to acknowledge a larger sphere for subnational governments and the need for access to more robust revenue sources. Giving local government a share in the personal income tax is one possible and perhaps desirable approach to meeting these revenues needs. Careful attention needs to be paid to the design and implementation of the intergovernmental fiscal transfers likely to remain prominent features of the intergovernmental landscape for years to come. Caution is also needed on borrowing by subnational government. Consolidating and integrating extrabudgetary funds at the subnational (and national) levels is crucial to enhanced budgetary transparency and macrostability.

E. Thomas Lawson

Introduction The recognition that human beings learn more than they are taught, already prefigured quite early in the Platonic literature and much later in Kant's notion of the synthetic a priori , continues to intrigue scholars concerned with cognitive matters, especially those with a stake in the possible impact of the cognitive sciences on culture theory. In fact, much to the dismay of empiricists, it has breathed new life into the rationalist tradition. Possessing more knowledge than instruction can account for obviously presents a puzzle worth solving. Among cognitive theoreticians (especially in generative linguistics and cognitive anthropology) the acquisition puzzle has given rise to a range of suggested solutions. At one end of the theoretical spectrum proponents of the autonomy of cultural systems postulate the presence and operation of very subtle and hidden cultural forces silently transmitting culturally constrained cognitive knowledge from a ‘cultural system’ to the largely ‘empty’ minds of cultural participants. At the other end of the spectrum nativists proffer innate cognitive mechanisms, replete with cognitive content, as solutions to ‘the discrepancy problem’. Even theorists in the middle seem willing to nudge the direction of research in one direction rather than the other. There can be little doubt that arguments about acquisition take place in contentious territory. The issues are by no means resolved. Proof of that lies in the continuing combat between non-nativists and nativists about the significance of, and the solutions to, the noted discrepancy between the amount of cultural knowledge by explicit tuition and the actual knowledge a person in that culture possesses as well as about the most adequate explanatory models capable of accounting for the discrepancy.

Oded Goldreich

No abstract is available for this record.

John L. Fiedler

No abstract is available for this record.

S. M. Ageev

It is shown that any free action of a zero-dimensional compact group on the -dimensional Menger compactum is -universal for free actions, and that the orbit space is -classifying. Nonexistence of equivariant mappings between and implies that the orbit space has infinite dimension, where is any compact ANR-space with free action of the group of -adic integers. Knowledge of such nonexistence would then permit proof of the Hilbert-Smith conjecture under the assumption of finite dimensionality for the orbit space.

Marschall W. Raffel, Norma K. Raffel

Before World War II, Czechoslovakia was among the most developed European countries with an excellent health care system. After the Communist coup d'etat in 1948, the country was forced to adapt its existing health care system to the Soviet model. It was planned and managed by the government, financed by general tax money, operated in a highly centralized, bureaucratic fashion, and provided service at no direct charge at the time of service. In recent years, the health care system had been deteriorating as the health of the people had also been declining. Life expectancy, infant mortality rates, and diseases of the circulatory system are higher than in Western European countries. In 1989, political changes occurred in Czechoslovakia that made health care reform possible. Now health services are being decentralized, and the ownership of hospitals is expected to be transferred to communities, municipalities, churches, charitable groups, or private entities. Almost all health leaders, including hospital directors and hospital department heads, have been replaced. Physicians will be paid according to the type and amount of work performed. Perhaps the most important reform is the establishment of an independent General Health Care Insurance Office financed directly by compulsory contributions from workers, employers, and government that will be able to negotiate with hospitals and physicians to determine payment for services.

Janet K. Wanzek, F. Larry Leistritz

In the 1980's, in the US across the board, domestic manufacturers have have faced foreign competition with an increased disadvantage with imports. Domestic businesses, including those in rural areas, have had to struggle with restructuring their businesses, decentralizing them, outsourcing, relocating overseas, go out of business altogether or to reduce their business size or workforce numbers. Economic initiatives like 'Growing North Dakota' attempted to educate North Dakota citizens to the necessity of their state increasing it's growth in manufacturing and in ways they could help these industries grow such as financing these industries at favorable terms, aiding in the transfer of technology commercialization or assisting such technologies. By aiding the manufacturing sector this was deemed as aiding in the diversification of the North Dakota economy.

Olympia Icochea

The author studies Chile's educational reforms in the eighties, and assesses their successes and failures in terms of quality of teaching. The reforms rested principally on two aspects: decentralized administration (municipal authorities assuming responsibility) and the application of market economic mechanisms for financing schools. Chile's democratic government subsequently added a number of measures that the reforms lacked, such as increasing outlay to the sector and improving educational quality in subsidized schools. However, the success of these reforms is still uncertain.

S. M. Ageev

T. It is shown that any free action of a zero-dimensional compact group G on the О·-dimensional Menger compactum Mn is О·-universal for free actions, and that the orbit space MnjG is В«-classifying. Nonexistence of equivariant mappings between Mn+m and Mn implies that the orbit space R/Ap has infinite dimension, where R is any compact ANR-space with free action of the group Ap of p-adic integers. Knowledge of such nonexistence would then permit proof of the Hilbert-Smith conjecture under the assumption of finite dimensionality for the orbit space.

Robert Wangermée

Trends of Cultural Administration in Western Europe. In the last three decades, the ways and means of public intervention in cultural affairs have been multiplied and diversified following variable patterns in different countries. There has been an evolution in the levels of public intervention, which differ according to decentralization and federalism. There has also been an evolution of the means of intervention, because governments use new financing practices. Nowadays a new actor is emerging on the scene of cultural policy : the European Community.

Dominique de Waleffe, Jean-Jacques Quisquater

No abstract is available for this record.

Phoebe S. Liebig

The frail elderly have special multidimensional housing needs beyond affordability, including shelter that is more adaptive to reduced function and offers supportive services. Suitable housing for this population comprises three policy areas—housing, health care, and social services. In a federal system, development and implementation of policies in these areas involves participation of several levels of government and the nongovernmental sector. This paper uses federalism as a conceptual framework to examine and compare these policy areas in Canada and the United States. In both countries, general national housing policies—relying heavily on the nongovernmental sector and characterized by joint federal‐provincial programs in Canada and by important local government roles and age‐specific programs in the United States‐have benefited the elderly. The effects of such policies on the frail elderly, however, have been less positive because of the general lack of essential human services and, to a lesser degree, health care that enables them to live outside institutions. This is especially true in the United States, where health care policy is fragmented and is dominated by a private insurance system, partial federal financing of health insurance for the elderly, and tense federal‐state relations in financing health care for the poor. Although Canadian policies and programs operate autonomously and more uniformly within a national health plan, neither country has a universal, comprehensive long‐term care system. Geographically diverse patterns of social services, funded by grants to states and provinces and the nonprofit sector, are common to both countries. However, the United States has inadequately funded age‐specific programs and has relied on a growing commercial service provision. Housing outcomes for frail elders are moving in the right direction in both countries; however, Canada seems to be better positioned, largely because of its health care system. As increased decentralization continues to characterize the three policy areas that affect suitable housing for frail elders, the United States can learn from Canada's negotiated federalism approach to more uniform solutions to merging housing and long‐term care.

G.E. Mailloux, Rita Noumeir, R. Lemieux

It is shown that the MART (multiplicative algebraic reconstruction technique) algorithm can be derived by POCS. This gives MART a new theoretical interpretation and a proof of convergence to a stable solution even when other convex constraints are introduced. However, MART, as a multiplicative algorithm, depends on the initial solution. It is noted that, far from being a flaw, this property can be used to introduce further a priori knowledge about the image to be reconstructed, to maximize the entropy, to keep the ratio between the regions of the original image constant, or to set to zero the area outside the reconstruction volume. MART should be preferred to MENT (a maximum entropy algorithm) for entropy maximization, for it performs as well but is much faster. ART is much less influenced by the initial solution than MART.>

Kaoru Kurosawa

No abstract is available for this record.

Larry Peterson

No abstract is available for this record.

Rafail Ostrovsky, Ramarathnam Venkatesan, Moti Yung

No abstract is available for this record.

António J. R. Cabral

The costs of the medical care needs of AIDS patients are well above the average per capita expenditure on health care in many sub-Saharan African countries. These costs may become completely unaffordable as specific anti-viral drugs come onto the market, and the burden will fall on health networks, whose present strained budgets show no real signs of increase. In addition, pilferage, mismanagement and inefficiency continue at the few existing hospitals. As the total number and percentage of hospitalized patients with AIDS increases, the hospital networks (and the health services as a whole) risk collapse. The risks are of the same magnitude for both rural and urban hospitals - the former will not be able to deliver the necessary minimum quality of clinical standards, the latter will be flooded by too many patients. Achieving reasonable standards of hospital management and decentralization of curative care are critical targets for at least avoiding the risk that donors may be unwilling to finance specific anti-HIV drugs for these poor (and high-prevalence) countries.