Blockchain Papers

Cynthia Dwork, Larry Stockmeyer

The zero knowledge properties of interactive proof systems (IPSs) are studied in the case that the verifier is a 2-way probabilistic finite state automaton (2pfa). The following results are proved: A new definition of zero knowledge is introduced. This definition captures a concept of “zero knowledge” for IPSs that are used for language recognition.

Cynthia Dwork, Larry Stockmeyer

An investigation of interactive proof systems (IPSs) where the verifier is a 2-way probabilistic finite state automaton (2pfa) is initiated. In this model, it is shown: Additional results concern two other classes of verifiers: 2pfa's that halt in polynomial expected time, and 2-way probabilistic pushdown automata that halt in polynomial time. In particular, IPSs with verifiers in the latter class are as powerful as IPSs where verifiers are polynomial-time probabilistic Turing machines. In a companion paper [7], zero knowledge IPSs with 2pfa verifiers are investigated.

Monica Dall’Asta, Alessandra Chiarini

Women's interest in found footage and compilation has been extraordinarily intense from the very beginning.1 Even the origins of this peculiar mode of film production are tied to a woman's name, that of Esfir Shub, the great director of Soviet cinema who was the first to create an essayistic feature by putting together pieces of archival footage.2 Her seminal film of 1927, Padenie Dinastii Romanovykh (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty), depicts the collapse of the Tsarist empire from the February Revolution to the October Revolution of 1917 purely by means of a montage of preexisting footage. Followed by a handful of other films she made with the same method in subsequent years, this first experimentation in compilation film was an opportunity for Shub to demonstrate the creative power of montage, showing how even the most resistant, unyielding materials can generate an entirely new meaning from the way they are combined—as for example in the case of the numerous shots taken by the camerapeople of the Tsarist film industry, which were transformed through her editing into incontrovertible proof of the necessity of the Revolution. In a way, then, Shub's work can be considered the most advanced result of all the philosophy of the Soviet avant-garde, for her films test Lev Kuleshov's intuition about the signifying power of montage by reworking preconstituted materials that had been originally produced to respond to a completely different, and sometimes even opposite, ideological project.3Many more women after Shub have adopted compilation as their privileged approach to film production and experimentation. Once a marginal form even in the documentary field, found footage cinema is now enjoying an extremely vital phase, fostered by both the exponential growth of the audiovisual archive and the improvement of digital editing technologies that have made film images all the more usable. Up to the 1950s and through the appearance of new avant-garde movements at the end of that decade, the history of found footage cinema consists of very few names and a similarly small number of film titles. And yet, even in the first half of the twentieth century women are a notable presence in the field, not only for their sheer numbers, but also by virtue of the quality and originality of their work. In this context we need to cite at least the name of Germaine Dulac, whose archival film of 1935 anticipates many typical concerns of the contemporary debate about the historicity of the film image. Le cinéma au service de l'histoire (Cinema at the Service of History) was assembled by Dulac during a period of intensive archival research at Gaumont, where she had been employed until the previous year as coeditor of the company's newsreel, France Actualités. Her monumental film is constructed from fragments taken from Gaumont newsreels from 1905 to 1935, and presents itself as a recollection, as well as a critical assessment, of the historical experiences made by a generation, her own, that was equal in age with the cinema: the generation born during the Belle Epoque, educated in the myth of progress, and doomed to witness its ruinous dissolution in the disaster of World War I, only to find itself confronted with the advent of dictatorships and totalitarianism. Made in the political-cultural context of the Popular Front (the film was made to be screened on the occasion of the opening of an independent “all-newsreel” film venue), Cinema at the Service of History reveals a thorough confidence in the testimonial power of cinema.4 It is at once a requiem about the atrocities of war and its moral, social, political, and economic consequences, and a warning to the present about repeating the mistakes of the past.Alongside Shub and Dulac, the third female master of found footage cinema before the 1960s is no doubt Nicole Vedrès. Her innovative work on Paris 1900 (1947) combined a “classical” approach to compilation film, based on exclusive use of documentary sources, and a more definitely modern approach, which regards the products of narrative cinema as no less legitimate sources of historical knowledge than documentary materials. Vedrès's work anticipates by several decades the awareness, typical of the debate on film and history of the early 1980s, that every film, whether narrative or documentary, bears a number of specifically historical traits—or, rather, what Vedrès characterizes as a specific form of historical truth that expresses itself in a visual quality on the order of photogénie.5This early phase of the history of found footage cinema, where three women play a primary role, draws to a close at the end of the 1950s. A more critical, irreverent, and playful attitude toward archival images, and a tendency to employ the past to produce an allegory of the present, and often quite a complex one, appears in the work of diverse experimental filmmakers, including Isidore Isou, Stan VanDerBeek, Bruce Conner, and Guy Debord. Again, several women participate as well in this new moment that marks the evolution of found footage film as a major form of experimental cinema, often referred to as collage film. Though the women's names are more obscure today than the filmmakers we have just cited, their position in this shift is far from secondary in terms of their critical awareness and their innovations.Already in 1959, Jane Conger Belson Shimané's Odds and Ends offered a precocious example of a collage film that mixes outtakes of travelogues with abstract animation, both painted on the filmstrip and created with paper cutouts. Since then, the ranks of women involved in the deconstruction of the codes of contemporary culture—and often particularly of its sexist stereotypes—through the reworking of preexisting footage has not stopped growing. Filmmakers such as Anita Thacher, Chick Strand, Dara Birnbaum, Peggy Ahwesh, Michelle Citron, Abigail Child, Hito Steyerl, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Eve Heller, Vivian Ostrovsky, Nina Fonoroff, Sabine Hiebler, and Frédérique Devaux, or, among the younger ones, Lana Lin, Naomi Uman, Deborah Stratman, Caroline Avery, Cheryl Dunye, Cathy Joritz, Barbara Meter, Louise Bourque, Magda Matwiejew, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Rebecca Baron, Meike Fehre, Meryll Hardt, and Lisa Reboulleau—and those whose work is analyzed in this issue of Feminist Media Histories: Myriam Borsoutsky, Cecilia Mangini, Cécile Fontaine, Barbara Hammer, Valentina Monti, and Alina Marazzi—make us tempted to describe found footage cinema as a field where gender parity is close to being finally attained.Yet we want to resist explaining away such a proliferation of female auteurs who choose a most difficult manner of expressing their own imagination and thought—through images created by others in different places and times—with some sort of specific or “essential” female inclination toward montage, maybe even by invoking its similarity to the tailoring operations of cutting and sewing. Such essentialist comparisons can certainly be suggestive, but they hardly help us understand the reality of women's experience in the sphere of filmmaking. Even less could we endorse a thesis that would interpret women's bent for compilation films as an ability to excel exclusively in contexts characterized by a minimum creative coefficient. On the contrary, the innovative content of cases such as those we briefly recall above should demonstrate the opposite—that is, women's extraordinary creative capacity, evidenced by their ability to extract the maximum coefficient of originality from seemingly inert materials.But this would be a simplification, too, a sterile generalization based on a purely reactive attitude. A more interesting approach begins when one considers the apparent affinity between women and the practice of found footage, on the one hand, and on the other the material conditions of film production—more precisely, the difference that exists between the labor involved in editing and researching and that involved in shooting, especially in commercial cinema. All available data show that commercial cinema, which, as everyone knows, is basically a narrative and fictional type of cinema, is a field where only a few women succeed in reaching and holding directorial roles. We are then prompted to ask whether the specific difference that is responsible for found footage cinema being such a favorable field for women's initiative should not be sought at the level of what we mean by “film directing” in the first place.Cameraless cinema does not imply “directing” in the common sense of the word. Women working in found footage do not direct actors and technicians on a film set; they do not preside over complex organizational machines from the apex of the film set's hierarchical system. If they work in a group, they do so by choosing a few close collaborators, often other women. Their work more closely resembles conducting a research project, including immersive sessions in archives and philological interrogations about the materials, than directing a film set. This amounts to saying that women, in the absence of directorial opportunities within the frame of institutional cinema, may have elected the practice of found footage as a way to build an autonomous space of creativity that allows them to transform limitations into a stylistic peculiarity.6The subtitle of this issue, “Women Without a Movie Camera,” alludes in a clearly provocative way to the objective condition of limitation that women experience in their attempts to access professional opportunities for directing in the mainstream film industry, a situation that, in our interpretive hypothesis, can explain better than any tailoring metaphor the remarkable intensity of female creativity in found footage cinema.7 More than a yen for reusing archives, the breadth of female presence in the history of films derived from found footage proves women's tenacious will to make cinema at all costs, even if it means inventing their own modes of independent production under conditions of limitation and lack of means. Clear evidence of this is that even when they leave the particular sphere of found footage and take up the camera, these filmmakers usually keep working beyond the borders of mainstream narrative cinema, that is, in the fields of documentary, experimental, or animated cinema.Put another way, if an affinity between women and found footage cinema exists, most likely it is not because the process resembles “cutting and sewing,” but because cameraless cinema appears as a utopian mode of production that can be practiced in perfect autonomy, or together with a small group of trusted collaborators, in which a lack of means can be countervailed with patience and flair. It is a cinema that, as in the case of Cécile Fontaine, can even be executed at home at the kitchen sink.The remarkable number of women filmmakers who are or were active in found footage cinema could then be taken as confirmation of the famous hypothesis advanced by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own (1929), that we would now have many more female names in the history books if women had had their own rooms where they could work in peace, away from the stereotypes and performative codes of patriarchal culture. The separateness and seclusion of the editing room are more than just metaphors for Woolf's idea of the room of one's own as a space of autonomy and expressive freedom.The field at stake is obviously much larger than is possible to analyze within the limits of the present publication. Unable to cover the entire, rich spectrum of women's contributions to the history of found footage cinema, we chose a series of studies on a few individual figures who represent various different approaches.8The issue opens with a selection of articles by Esfir Shub, as yet unpublished in English, introduced and edited by Liubov Dyshlyuk. The publication of these materials drawn from Shub's autobiographical book Zhizn' moya – kinematograf (Cinema Is My Life, 1972) is a deserved homage to a figure who is regularly presented as the most influential pioneer of compilation film, but whose poetic reflections are almost completely unknown in the Western world. Dating back to the time of the making of The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), Shub's writings in this issue document her extraordinary awareness in tackling the task of assembling in a coherent montage a host of such heterogeneous materials as old newsreels, home movies, and institutional documentaries. In their rigorous as well as impassioned tone, which continuously emphasizes the political valences of filmmaking, these articles confirm the fundamental position that Shub occupies not only in the practice of, but also in reflections about, the practice of compilation cinema.Monica Dall'Asta's essay on Myriam Borsoutsky and Nicole Vedrès focuses on two French figures who are almost completely forgotten today. In the virtually perfect obscurity of Borsoutsky (better known as Myriam)—who was Sacha Guitry's editor during the 1930s, before collaborating with Vedrès on Paris 1900 and codirecting La Course de taureaux (Bullfight, 1951) alongside Pierre Braunberger—Dall'Asta finds a clue to retracing a possible female genealogy of French found footage cinema. The rediscovery, or rather the discovery, of Myriam, whose skills in editing were so outstanding as to be called “diabolical” by André Bazin, discloses a whole cultural scene that includes as many different figures as Braunberger, Henri Langlois, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Jacques Brunius, Denise Tual, Victoria Mercanton, and Yannick Bellon. Paradoxically, Myriam's obscurity becomes the crucial element that illuminates a gray area in film history, beginning with Vedrès's groundbreaking work.Better known for the documentaries she shot—which register, with the precision of an anthropologist's eye, the transformations of Italian society between the 1960s and the 1970s—Cecilia Mangini also belongs to the crowd of forgotten women filmmakers. Her films based on the technique of assemblage are examined in deep detail in Dalila Missero's essay. Mangini's work in the archives began with the making of All'armi siam fascisti! (To Arms! We're Fascists!, 1961–62), the film she made with her husband, Lino Del Fra, and the socialist film critic Lino Micciché, and continued with Stalin (1962–63), codirected with Lino Del Fra and the great Marxist poet Franco Fortini. As with Dulac's and Vedrès's earlier works, To Arms! We're Fascists! offers a critical reading of the historical experience of the authors' generation, born under the Fascist regime and subjected to the destructive fascinations of its ideology. To find the documentary materials for both this film and Stalin (issued in 1963 in a version reedited by the producer and disavowed by the authors), Mangini conducted research in several archives around the world, facing huge difficulties. Her interest in the meaning effects attainable through the recombination of stock footage is further documented by an intense sequence in her film of women's emancipation, Essere donne (Being Women, 1963–65), of which Missero proposes an extremely accurate analysis.Barbara Hammer's first feature, Nitrate Kisses (1992), is examined by Alessandra Chiarini as an example of a film based on the construction of a complex relationship between stock footage and original shots. In conceiving of her cinema as a means for the expression of “feeling-images,” that is, “inseparable unity of emotion and thought/idea/image and internal bodily states of excitement,” Hammer is in search of an alternative style to the linear narration of mainstream cinema.9 In the movement of thoughts and emotions that spring from the flow of images in the film, Chiarini sees a method of assemblage that is reminiscent of Maya Deren's theorizations about “vertical cinema.” In Nitrate Kisses this method is adopted to a history of the twentieth century by and footage and original shots are combined in to a critical about history that into the and of between past and present, individual and very different case is presented in essay on Cécile A French who is very of what Nicole has called a approach to found footage, the of preexisting images by way of on the film a of that in and of or of the film her on the relationship between the stylistic and and that the mode of La to the construction of The are where a with the of the film is with an to the content of the the most original of the the of footage to the that her to her from when she was a In these materials a complex whose and quite result is the of the of of film archives to create new films is the of essay. More particularly the with the complex creative and process the making of a film constructed from fragments from the of the an Italian Made by Valentina with at the editing is just the in a that has produced an a and a film, Dating from the the images as of a the of and and document the of the between and is to describe the work of and as a time with the the images, which to the women of the and at the same time the rigorous approach, no less than with which women images of women to a montage of in the with and Alina that the issue, these two of contemporary found footage cinema their experiences and their creative and professional by by film Barbara and filmmakers demonstrate a awareness in their approach to the practice of cameraless cinema. who is the of films in the political of Italian has been regularly working with the early with first feature, More with their has of interest and is the case of More with which the of who only a few after by materials from her home by her and after a time from an old her and and from the of the on a visual history of women's in that, among a host of different materials, includes fragments from films by the during the to on complex such as the of preexisting images, the of archival footage as a of and the relationship between found footage and women's cinema, and a series of very original which the of montage in the expressive of women's by the creative that exists between and the of this of also alludes to the editing room as room of one's a space where women, over the of almost a have the of Woolf's The editing room as a of separateness and autonomy is a space where women have to make of their a a of movement in the of the film If this is then we that found footage cinema should an in film We more new research will to the work of not just the filmmakers, but also so many obscure the of these

Scott Eugene Inch

Energy dissipation in systems with linear viscoelastic damping is examined. It is shown that in such viscoelastically damped systems the use of additional dissipation mechanisms (such as boundary velocity feedback or thermal coupling) may not improve the rate of energy decay. The situation where the viscoelastic stress relaxation modulus decreases to its (positive) equilibrium modulus at a subexponential rate, e.g., like (1 + t)^-x + E, where α > 0, E > 0 is examined. In this case, the nonoscillatory modes (the so-called creep modes) dominate the energy decay rate. The results are in two parts. In the first part, a linear viscoelastic wave equation with infinite memory is examined. It is shown that under appropriate conditions on the kernel and initial history, the total energy is integrable against a particular weight if the kinetic energy component of the total energy is integrable against the same weight. The proof uses energy methods in an induction argument. Precise energy decay rates have recently been obtained using boundary velocity feedback. It is shown that the same decay rates hold for history value problems with conservative boundary conditions provided that an <i>a priori</i> knowledge of the decay rate of the kinetic energy term is assumed. In the second part, a simple linear thermo-viscoelastic system, namely, a viscoelastic wave equation coupled to a heat equation, is examined. Using Laplace transform methods, an integral representation formula for <i>W(x,s</i>), the transform of the displacement <i>w(x, t)</i>, is obtained. After analyzing the location of the zeros of the appropriate characteristic equation, an asymptotic expansion for the displacement <i>w(O,t)</i> is obtained which is valid for large <i>t</i> and the specific kernel <i>g(t) = g</i>(–) + δtη-1 [over]Î (η), 0 < η < 1. With this expansion it is shown that the coupled system tends to its equilibrium at a slower rate than that of the uncoupled system.

Mike Burmester, Yvo Desmedt

No abstract is available for this record.

Robert C. Rickards, Yi Seung-Cheoul

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 16, No. 2, Fall-Winter 1992, pp. 109-140 THE NEW WORLD ORDER AND KOREAN MUNICIPAL FINANCE Robert C. Rickards and Yi Seung-Cheoul How stable are Korean municipal revenue and expenditure patterns? What accounts for observed differences across cities in the level of stability in those patterns? Over time, has the pro­ cess of democratization begun to have an impact on the stability of municipal budgetary priorities? How does the stability of Korean cities' fiscal priorities compare with that of municipali­ ties in other systems? The answers to these key questions have important implications for policymakers locally, nationally, and internationally. At present, a New World Order is replacing the Yalta sys­ tem of international arrangements. As explained below, the three processes shaping this Order are changing the socioeco­ nomic and political environment of most national and local gov­ ernments. In its efforts to maintain rapid economic growth, the Republic of Korea finds itself increasingly exposed to such change (Clifford, 1988: 80-81). Shifting budgetary priorities constitute one indicator of a government's response to environ­ mental change. That makes investigation of the level of stability in Korean cities' taxing and spending patterns especially interesting. The study undertaken here begins by describing the three processes behind the emerging New World Order. Next, it con­ siders factors affecting municipal governments' ability to 109 110 Robert C. Rickards and Yi Seung-Cheoul respond to changes caused by those processes. After discussing how municipalities formulate their budgets, the study then looks for evidence of systematic shifts in Korean cities' fiscal priorities. In analyzing the evidence discovered, it compares Korean budgetary behavior with that observed in Germany, Japan, and Switzerland. Finally, the study concludes with sever­ al policy recommendations likely to improve cities' responsive­ ness to environmental change. The recommendations apply not only to Korean cities specifically, but also to municipalities throughout the developing world in general. The New World Order Beginning with the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the system of international arrangements in place since World War II has been collapsing. Subsequent years have seen the dissolu­ tion of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. They also have witnessed: the successful campaign against Iraq undertaken by the United States, together with its European and Arab allies; a tentative settlement in the Cambodian civil war; the initiation of Middle East peace talks, and the first meet­ ings that eventually may lead to reunification of the Korean nation. In the resultant, radically transformed international environment, three powerful processes are shaping a New World Order. These processes are globalization, localization, and democratization (Suzuki, 1991:1-2; Wun'Gaeo, 1991: 3-5). In the 1950's and 1960's, many newly independent coun­ tries accepted foreign capital to finance ambitious industrializa­ tion programs. Often, social dislocation, poverty, pollution, and other unanticipated consequences resulted. Nevertheless, at least along Asia's Pacific Rim, some industrialization programs were quite successful. Accordingly, mutual economic interde­ pendence deepened, both among countries in that region and with the North American and European regions. This deep, mutual interdependence is a product of the glob­ alization process. Globalization thus involves the free flow of goods, capital, people, and information. In practical terms, it means opening domestic economies ever wider to the interna­ tional free-trade system. The New World Order and Korean Municipal Finance 111 Having moved to globalization, the Asian Pacific Rim region came under the influence of another process of environ­ mental change: localization. In earlier periods of development, almost all the region's nations relied on state control of capital formation and prices, domestic economic management by vari­ ous government agencies, and the concentration of wealth and decisionmaking in a few urban areas. State control of concen­ trated capital and production, though, led to corruption and maldevelopment. Today, many countries no longer regard state-led develop­ ment as a desirable model for economic progress. Instead, they prefer a more decentralized approach based on competition among private businessmen. Hence, governments are starting to sell off state-owned corporations, thereby separating them­ selves from capital. In addition, they are allowing more room for the interplay of market forces in managing the economy. As entrepreneurs search out economic...

Daniel J. Brown

The prospect is advanced that school districts which are introducing school-based management now may recentralize their decision-making authority later A study of five decentralized districts revealed many reasons why recentralization could occur. An important distinction between two kinds of decentralization was made: one organizational (in which decisions are delegated),the other political (in which authority is given fully to autonomous groups).Structural reasons for recentralization included lack of provision for accountability, lack of evidence of effectiveness, and the advent of retrenchment. Political reasons for recentralization included the unwillingness of central office staff to share power and the hostility of unions. Such realities suggest that unless districts proceed with decentralization thoughtfully and with commitment, they may abandon the innovation.

Shafi Goldwasser, Rafail Ostrovsky

The standard definition of digital signatures allows a document to have many valid signatures. In this paper, we consider a subclass of digital signatures, called invariant signatures, in which all legal signatures of a document must be identical according to some polynomialtime computable function (of a signature) which is hard to predict given an unsigned document. We formalize this notion and show its equivalence to non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. Appeared in Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Sciene, proceedings of CRYPTO-92, August 1992, Santa-Barbara, California. y MIT. This research was supported in part by NSF-FAW CCR-9023313, NSF-PYI CCR-865727, Darpa N0014-89-J-1988, BSF 89-00312. z International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley and University of California at Berkeley. Supported by NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship. Parts of this work were done at MIT, Bellcore and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. 1 Introduction Currently, due to the lack of proven non...

Daron G. Ferris

<h3>Objective.</h3> —To examine analytic performance by previously untrained and inexperienced subjects using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) tests developed for decentralized laboratories. Performance variability between tests assigned to the "simple" and "moderately complex" Health Care Financing Administration laboratory levels was evaluated. <h3>Design.</h3> —A nonrandomized trial of the Surecell Strep-A chorionic gonadotropin ELISA tests. Each subject processed nine unknown specimens (three negative, three weakly positive, and three strongly positive) for each ELISA test. Subjects were blinded to expected test results. <h3>Setting.</h3> —An elementary school. <h3>Subjects.</h3> —A convenience sample of 52 students enrolled in the sixth and seventh grades. This age group was chosen because of their ability to generally comprehend instructions and remain attentive to the testing task. <h3>Interventions.</h3> —Subjects were either self-trained by reading package insert directions or trained by a manufacturer's sales representative. <h3>Main Outcome Measures.</h3> —Performance was measured as the percentage of correct test results for the unknown specimens. The sensitivity and specificity for each test by operator group were calculated. <h3>Results.</h3> —Subjects demonstrated an overall sensitivity of 97.1% and specificity of 94.7% for human chorionic gonadotropin unknown specimens and a 95.9% sensitivity and 96.8% specificity for group A steptococcus unknown specimens. No significant differences between the self-trained group and the representative-trained group were observed for either group A streptococcus or human chorionic gonadotropin tests. Performance was so high with the first specimen that improvement over time (ie, a "learning curve") could not be demonstrated. <h3>Conclusion.</h3> —These ELISA test systems are able to achieve high levels of performance by subjects with no formal laboratory background, no previous method specific experience, and limited self-training. (<i>JAMA</i>. 1992;268:766-770)

Joan Boyar, Faith E. Fich, Kim S. Larsen

&lt;p&gt;Let A and B be n x n matrices the entries of which are affine combinations of the variables a_1,... ,a_m,b_1,. .. ,b_m over GF(2). Suppose that, for each i, 1&amp;lt;= i &amp;lt;= m, the term a_i b_i is an element of the product matrix C = A € B. What is the maximum value that &lt;em&gt; m &lt;/em&gt; can have as a function of &lt;em&gt; n &lt;/em&gt;? This question arises from a recent technique for improving the communication complexity of zero-knowledge proofs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The obvious upper bound of n^2 is improved to n^2 sqrt[3] 3 + O(n). Tighter bounds are obtained for smaller values of n. The bounds for n = 2, n = 3, and n = 4 are tight.&lt;/p&gt;

Mike Wright, Trevor Buck

Abstract Privatization has become an international phenomenon. Most attention has been devoted to privatization by stock market flotation or by sales to third parties. Management and employee buy‐outs present a third main possibility for transferring assets from the public to the private sector. This paper discusses the scope for privatization buy‐outs in LDCs and ‘post‐communist’ economies in the light of conceptual issues and UK experience. The positive aspects of privatization by management and employee buy‐outs concern: ownership incentives; the introduction of control mechanisms by institutional investors and various types of financing instruments; indigenous ownership, decentralized privatization; greater incentives in firms where specific skills are involved; the ability to improve trading relationships between a privatized supplier (the buy‐out) and its former parent, which remains in the public sector where the supplier is heavily dependent on its former parent; and the general contribution of buy‐outs to a redrawing of a state firm's spread of activities to create a more viable entity. The potential problems with buy‐outs concern such issues as: absence of entrepreneurial skills; the scope of their applicability; the potentially restrictive effects of debt and debt‐like finance; the need to deal with investment requirements of firms; the lack of personal wealth; the use of inside information by managers to purchase a firm at a price which is to the detriment of the public interest; and the possibility of social and political problems if individuals are perceived to enhance their personal wealth significantly as an accident of where they work. There are means by which many of these potential problems can be dealt with and the paper addresses these.

Anthony J. Culyer, Andrew Meads

The British National Health Service (NHS) has, since its inception, aimed to make health care available to all regardless of income, and it has managed to achieve this goal while keeping costs lower as a proportion of the gross domestic product than many Western countries and at the same time assuring equitable distribution of resources regionally. Until the reforms introduced by the 1989 White Paper, the NHS was characterized by centralized financing and regulation; despite some problems in the delivery and management of care, the system was a popular one. The new reforms hope to enhance efficiency in the NHS by stimulating competition and further decentralizing the management of health care. However, it is not at all certain that in practice the reforms will have the desired effect. Initial costs will be high, people may not respond to incentives as predicted, and the quality of care and access to it could well deteriorate. Nations planning to use the U.K. system as a model are advised to use caution.

J.‐Matthias Graf v. d. Schulenburg

The health care system of the Federal Republic of Germany relies on the private sector for the financing, delivery, and payment of care. However, the private sector is regulated by the government to ensure that broad societal interests are being fulfilled. The system has managed to achieve comprehensive coverage and equal access for all citizens, freedom of choice for patients, high-quality medical care, and cost containment. The reason for this success is a combination of decentralized power and decision making and the establishment of an effective negotiation system that takes place at federal, state, and local levels. The system suffers from some problems, however, which will have to be addressed: the present structuring of hospital and ambulatory care results in excessively long lengths of stay in hospital; drugs are overprescribed; the supply of health professionals does not meet the country's needs; more nursing homes are needed; and eastern Germany must be fully integrated into the system.

M. Verkama, Raimo P. H�m�l�inen, Harri Ehtamo

No abstract is available for this record.

Werner Kuich

No abstract is available for this record.

Ian King

The feasibility of the policy of perpetual debt financing, given a particular path for expenditures and taxation, has been questioned over the years. Sargent and Wallace [17] argue that such a policy is not feasible in the sense that the debt/GNP ratio will explode. McCallum [8] and Darby [2] argue that this policy will be feasible if and only if the long-run growth rate of GNP exceeds the after-tax real interest rate. This particular condition was derived under the assumption of Ricardian equivalence, where the growth rate of GNP and the interest rate are exogenously given, and are not affected by the path of debt. Miller and Sargent [9] and Weil [20] make the point that once the assumption of Ricardian equivalence is dropped, then simple comparisons of long-run growth rates and interest rates are not sufficient to determine stability. Tirole [19] and O'Connell and Zeldes [10] demonstrate in Diamond's [3] model, without Ricardian equivalence, that Ponzi games such as this are feasible if and only if the economy is dynamically inefficient without debt. All of these studies assume that the long-run growth rate of GNP is exogenously given. This assumption is particularly strong in the absence of Ricardian equivalence. In a separate literature, a new generation of equilibrium growth models has recently been developed with positive sustained growth in the long-run equilibrium. In these models, long-run growth is endogenously determined, rather than being imposed on the model as some exogenously given process [7; 11; 12; 14; 15].1 All of these models find some way of introducing increasing returns to scale into the neoclassical growth model and yet preserving the fact that it can be interpreted as a decentralized equilibrium. This paper considers the feasibility of perpetual debt financing in an economy where the growth rate of GNP is endogenously determined and is a function of debt levels. The model of endogenous growth presented here is a modified version of the one given in Prescott and Boyd [12]. This particular model is chosen for two reasons. First, agents live for finite lengths of time; so Ricardian equivalence will not hold, in general, in this model. Also, the production function is linear in the capital stock; as will become clear below, this implies that the equilibrium paths of the state variables can be characterized as first order linear difference equations.

Gregory D. Schmidt

The case study of the linkages between departmental-level and national organizations in Peru shows how linkages can play a significant role in national reform. A general overview of current articles on interorganizational linkages and decentralization pertinent to the Peruvian context of control oriented public sectors is provided. The Peruvian institutional context and the constraints faced by decentralized development agencies called departmental development corporations (CORDES) are identified. CORDES members were provincial mayors, representatives of private sector professional and economic organizations, and heads of ministerial field offices, autonomous agencies, and public enterprises. Microregional offices were established and received public funding. USAID channeled funding through the national organizations to the CORDES in the Integrated Regional Development Project (IRD) between 1979-86, and the Disaster Relief, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction (DRR) Project between 1983-87. The IRD and the DRR are described in addition to the decentralized organization support network established by the 2 projects. There is an analysis of how these interorganizational linkages contributed to conventional uses of linkages and unconventional or institutional reform. Reforms were facilitated by direct persuasion of central agencies to change their administrative regulations, policies, and operating procedures, and extensive lobbying by the support network to pass budgetary reform favoring CORDES and bureaucratic reorientation. Conclusions were reached on 1) the importance of assistance linkages for hastening implementation, building capacity, and overcoming organizational weaknesses (conventional wisdom); 2) the usefulness of vertical linkages in resolving administrative or technical weaknesses (unconventional wisdom); and 3) the usefulness of reinforcing project related units within key national level agencies which increases access to power while specific objectives maintain assistance orientations. Politically marginal agencies are not considered viable. These projects demonstrated that linkages are useful in supporting institutional reform and respecting country self-determination.

Daniel Berkowitz, Beth Mitchneck

No abstract is available for this record.

Jacques Cellier

In response to the problems faced by large, centralized organizations, many developing countries are exploring ways to decentralize the management of their road networks in order to use funds more efficiently and to reduce the size of central government. This note discusses taxonomy of administrative and financing decentralization options and proposes a framework for analysis.

Christian Harm

In Germany, small firms are financed chiefly by small banks, which are grouped into two systems: the savings banks (Sparkassen) and the credit cooperatives. The government actively supports the financing of investments in small industry - especially business start-ups. The author explains how small firms are financed in Germany. The author contends that small and meduim-size firms contribute a lot to the German economy. Small firms are not subject to the control institutions - such as supervisory board seats, proxy voting and equity holdings - that shape the relationships between large firms and large banks. The author also points out that small banks, which are part of a decentralized market structure, over come imperfections in the financial market by building institutions that supersede the market mechanism. The savings bank and credit cooperatives systems have each developed an internal capital, not unlike those within large banks operating nationwide. Only central institutions participate in the domestic money market, to place the system's excess liquidity or to raise funds to cover the systems deficits. Also, the funding programs of the government banks can be seen as a refinancing mechanism that especially helps small banks. The same is true for rediscountable trade bills.

Mike Burmester

No abstract is available for this record.

Alphonso O. Ogbuehi, Ralph A. Bellas

Discusses the effect of a decentralized approach to research and development facility location in the multinational corporation. Presents the comparative advantages of locating R&amp;D facilities in strategic locations around the world. Examines the commitment required by a corporation to have an effective and flexible international research organization. Suggests that, if a company wants truly to be a “player” in the international marketplace, one that is able to compete on both product quality and cost, a decentralized structure which allows for the establishment of autonomous R&amp;D entities is necessary. Substantial risks are involved. Presents research and actual company histories to suggest that these risks could be offset with benefits from the strategic placement of research and development centres on a worldwide basis.

Riitta‐Liisa, Kolehmainen‐Aitken

Abstract Papua New Guinea decentralized a wide range of health functions to provincial governments between 1977 and 1983. The national Department of Health (DOH) was given no role in provincial budget and staffing decisions, and the national health budget was fragmented into the health components of provincial budgets. The impact of decentralization on health workforce development was particularly severe and largely unforeseen. Many difficulties were inherent in the manner in which decentralization regulations structured power relationships. Others arose as a result of the administrative confusion and inflamed relationships that accompanied the forceful transfer of power from a very reluctant national DOH to the provinces. Even though policy formulation and planning were retained as national functions, decentralization hampered their effective execution. Human resource data bases deteriorated, responsibility for planning became confused, and the ability of the DOH to implement its planning decisions was compromised. In reality, health workforce planning was carried out by the Departments of Finance and Planning, and Personnel Management through the annual budgetary process of provincial financial limits and staff ceilings, without any attempt to assess health service needs, either in the country as a whole or between the provinces. Decentralization brought a need for new management skills, and it complicated administrative relationships between training institutions and the provinces. The Papua New Guinea experience has shown that in a decentralized health service, there is a great potential for conflict between national goals and the aspirations of individual provinces. To achieve an equitable, appropriate and effective staffing of services, standards must be formulated as the basis for planning and conflict resolution. Effective linkages between central government departments and between the national and provincial health authorities must be developed, and management and technical skills of health managers improved.

Maria Eugênia Leite Duarte, Roberta Andrade Lauria, Vinícius Schott Gameiro

No abstract is available for this record.