Economists and policy makers have always argued that the patent system is necessary for a growing economy despite the fact that temporary monopoly rights to innovators imply a distortion of the price system. However, economists have not yet come up with a unified theory to determine the optimal duration of patents. In this paper, we develop a simple dynamic model which identifies two important welfare effects of the patent system, the effect on the incentive to innovate and that of the price distortion caused by the monopoly rights of patent holders. Using this framework, we analyze the factors which determine the optimal duration of patents awarded to new product developers. We argue that the possibility of a finite optimal patent life does not arise in the literature on product development since it considers only a constant returns to scale technology for developing new products. We first confirm the optimality of an infinite patent life for this technology and then show that if the cost of developing new products is increasing with the rate of instantaneous product development then the optimal patent life for economies with a population growth rate less than the interest rate is finite. In addition, we show that for economies with population growth rate exceeding the interest rate, the optimal patent life may also be finite provided that the degree of product substitution is sufficiently high. The patent system can be viewed as a method of assigning property rights to innovators in order to encourage research and development. Theoretically, the optimal R&D level can be tackled using a standard public goods analysis (such as the problem of financing a new bridge) yielding a result that optimal allocations can be achieved at the cost of a significant amount of government intervention. Perhaps for this reason most decentralized societies have chosen a different way to motivate people to engage in R&D, and this is done by assigning temporary monopoly rights to innovators.
PREFACE 1. Introduction 2. A Perfect-Administration Interpretation of the Soviet-type Economy Actors, Sectoring, Administration, and Markets in the Classic CPE What Is Administration or Management? Functions of Management Is Perfect Administration Possible? Soviet-type Economic Bureaucracies A Possible Model of Perfect Administration 3. Resource Allocation in the Classic CPE Short-run Balancing Control-Evaluating Performance and Passing Out Rewards Investment Decisions Research, Development, and Innovation 4. Market-mediated Relationships Market-mediated Relations in the Administrative-Command Economy Relations with Households Agriculture Foeign Trade 5. Financial and Macrophenomena in the Administered Economy Allocation, Efficiency, and Value under Perfect Administration Linear Programming Fundamentals Finance and Money under Perfect Administration Behavior of the Actual System: Microeconomics Behavior of the Actual System: Macroeconomics Implications for Reform 6. Growth Strategy and Growth Performance in the Socialist World Soviet Development Strategy Growth Performance Productivity Conclusions on Soviet Growth Growth in Eastern Europe The Chinese Variant 7. The Semi-reformed Economy and Its Characteristic Problems The Semi-reformed Economy Addition of New Sectors and Markets Difficulties of Coherent Decentralization through Regulators Monetary Institutions and Policy Fiscal Instruments and Fiscal Policy The Problem of Monopoly Power What Remains to Be Done 8. The Foreign Sector in the Semi-reformed Economy Tasks of the Transition Compromises and Halfway Houses in Foreign Trade 9. Property, Ownership, Privatization Theoretical Considerations Creation of New Property Institutions in the Reforms 10. The Problem of Transition and the Future of Reform Issues of the End Point Issues in the Transition Is Transformation Possible? SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTHER READING INDEX
Among the heresies attribured to Jan Hus, which were solemnly read in the Cathedral of Constance on the 6th July 1415, before being condemned to the stake, there was a most serious trinitarian-christologie error ascribed to him by a nameless soctor in theologia (probatur per unum doctorem in theologia, said the official reader). On hearing being attributed to him such error, about which no question had been raised during the trial, Hua demanded with an angry voice: Nominetur doctor, but his request was not granted, and consequently the doctor ille remained in perfect anonymity (I). In the present study, the author proposes the identification of the doctor ille with a Spanish franciscan friar and master in theology, Diego Moxena, on the grounds of three types of proofs: firstly, on the 28th November 1414, inmediately after the imprisonment of Hus, Diego, being entrusted by the cardinals of the council with the task of probing the opinion of the accused, presented himself in the prison as a simple friar without declaring his proper identity and, among other thing, inquired of Hus what he thought about the Trinity and the Incarnation (II); secondly, on the 27th March 1415, the King og Aragon Ferdinand I, instigated by Diego, his orator at Constance, weote a very strong letter to King Sigismund, lord of the councel, asking him insistently to grant permission, notwithstanding the safe-conduct already given by him, that Hus be immediately condemned because he was defending horrible heresies: however, the only one of which explicit mention is made is precisely the trinitarian-christologic heresy (III); thirdly, the same error is attributed to Hus and attacked in four cantilenae or anonymous Latin rythms, which can be demonstrated as having been composed by the same Diego at Constance (IV). In an Appendix are published the four cantilenae.
In 1980 Ronald Reagan swept into the presidency on a wave of antigovernment sentiment after promising deregulation, decentralization, and restoration of individual responsibility and opportunity. This pro-competitive, antiregulatory temperament was captured in legislative proposals to stimulate competition in the financing and delivery of health services.1 In the 96th and 97th Congresses from 1979 to 1983, several bills were introduced to create financial incentives to expand consumer choice in purchasing health services, induce greater price competition among health care professionals and institutions, improve efficiency in the organization and delivery of services, and ultimately lower the costs of health care. The moment appeared ripe for an earnest attempt at structural reform of the health care system: national health care expenditures continued to increase at a pace well above the costs of other consumer goods and services, with ho-spital expenditures leading the way. The highly regulatory hospital cost containment program offered by President Jimmy Carter had gone down to defeat in 1979.
reason and factual subjects, and reality-the latter two terms now taking on a specifically modernist charge. Put otherwise, the trend leading from symbolism to modernism was to confer upon highly particularized signifiers ever more limited access to transcendental signifieds; modernism, in parallel with something like Benjamin's notion of allegory, turns into a thematic difficulty that very access to latent meanings which symbolism took for granted. But This content downloaded from 157.55.39.176 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 07:10:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 76 Poetics Today 12:1 postmodernism deranges the entire symbolist-modernist economy. In complicity with a work like Derrida's Of Grammatology, postmodernism ascribes a sort of transcendental energy to the play of signifiers themselves. And if, for modernism, utopian hopes are spawned by the conflict between word and thing, postmodernism bases the idea of Utopia on a strange new materiality resident in words themselves. The foregoing may seem to contradict my own earlier remarks relating modernism to Habermassian (noncoercive) consensus and postmodernism to Lyotardian (antiterroristic) dissent. But I believe this objection to be superficial. If the modernist project, in order to avoid an empty or idea of Utopia, preserves an Enlightenment separation between words and things, this does not diminish but rather increases the importance of consensus. Consensus, after all, provides a corrective to empty or, worse, terroristic ideas: the larger the community of language users that agrees on a certain way of relating representations to the world, the more likely, at least for that particular community, that other relations between words and things will prove subjective or empty or terroristic. The gap between reference and referent, in fact, drives the dynamic by which consensus forms, then breaks apart, then forms again in seriatim, as evidence against a given representational scheme (local representations it cannot account for) begins to outweigh evidence for that scheme (local representations it can account for). Likewise, if postmodernism, as opposed to modernism, abolishes the gap between reference and referent, and instead invests itself with a sort of material density that is the stuff of Utopia, this in no way implies that dissent is impossible or unimportant. To the contrary, dissent becomes at once present reality and anticipation of the future. Since the postmodernist can no longer appeal to material referents in arbitrating competing representations, such arbitration of competing views itself provides the only grounds for knowledge and for hope. The alternative to dissent is in fact inertia, and death. The materiality that postmodernism confers upon our views themselves suggests that, unless we continually examine and reshape those views, hope will be dissipated in that same hall of mirrors in which reality as such gives way to an infinite montage of simulacra. In the space remaining, I cannot hope to confirm this general model for understanding modernism and postmodernism. This would require nothing less than an extended survey of a significant percentage of the literature grouped under both these categories. Such an undertaking clearly would amount to a book-length study, at the least. However, I believe that I have succeeded in adumbrating broader cultural or conceptual linkages and connections that help account for the undecidability of the modernism/postmodernism debate-as it is This content downloaded from 157.55.39.176 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 07:10:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Herman Modernism/Postmodernism currently waged. This debate is undecidable precisely because, despite the deceptive appearance of common assumptions, the debaters define in different ways such crucial terms as representation and progress. Supporters of cultural modernism, given their presuppositions about words and things, cannot help but base their utopian aspirations on consensus. Conversely, supporters of postmodernism, given their assumptions about the materiality of representations, cannot help but invest sheer disagreement with a sort of exhilarating, even transcendental, energy. We cannot hope to bring to a peaceable end a discussion in which the participants think they share a single vocabulary, but actually do not. We can merely stake out the grounds for conflict. In what follows, I shall focus on Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Herr's Dispatches (1978) in order to make, in the context of literature itself, some first, rough indications of the subtle shifts in vocabulary that I have described in the context of theory. I do not mean to suggest that these indications amount to proof for my overall argument; I offer them merely to make that argument seem perhaps slightly less abstract.
To measure subnational governments, only external money flows are counted, excluding intra-level transactions in measuring a level of government and all intergovernmental transactions in measuring general government. Control, finance, and administration should be distinguished in measuring centralization and each levelâs share of general government, administered expenditures being net of grants given to other governments and financed expenditures net of grants received. Disparate decentralization of finance, control, and administration brings vertical imbalance, measured by the portion of a governmentâs expenditures not covered by its own resources and by the ratio of intergovernmental grants to total government expenditures.
A perfect zero-knowledge interactive protocol allows a prover to convince a verifier of the validity of a statement in a way that does not give the verifier any additional information [GMR,GMW]. Such protocols take place by the exchange of messages back and forth between the prover and the verifier. An important measure of efficiency for these protocols is the number of rounds in the interaction. In previously known perfect zero-knowledge protocols for statements concerning NP--complete problems [BCC], at least k rounds were necessary in order to prevent one party from having a probability of undetected cheating greater than 2 \\Gammak . In this paper, we give the first perfect zero-knowledge protocol that offers arbitrarily high security for any statement in NP with a constant number of rounds. The protocol is computationally convincing (rather than statistically convincing as would have been an interactive proof--system in the sense of Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff) because the ver...
The notion of non-malleable cryptography, an extension of semantically secure cryptography, is defined. Informally, the additional requirement is that given the ciphertext it is impossible to generate a different ciphertext so that the respective plaintexts are related. The same concept makes sense in the contexts of string commitment and zero-knowledge proofs of possession of knowledge. Non-malleable schemes for each of these three problems are presented. The schemes do not assume a trusted center; a user need not know anything about the number or identity of other system users. Keywords: cryptography, cryptanalysis, randomized algorithms, nonmalleability AMS subject classifications: 68M10, 68Q20, 68Q22, 68R05, 68R10 A preliminary version of this work appeared in STOC '91 Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel y IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120. E-mail: dwork@almaden.ibm.com. z Incumbent of the Morris and Rose Goldman Career Devel...
School results for children of poverty â those forced by that poverty to live in innerâcity neighbourhoods âgenerally indicate educational failure at a much higher rate than is seen for students nurtured by wealthier school districts. This failure in school severely limits chances of social and economic upward mobility, which translates into a waste of human capital for the nation's businessâindustrialâpolitical complex, and dashed hopes, dreams and selfâesteem for the individual. Parents and concerned citizens from across socioâeconomic strata, long aware of the general inadequacy of schools in poor communities, have demanded improvement, often seeking it through legal and political means. Important strategies among the various federal, state and local school reform efforts to make schooling a meaningful process for all students, and particularly the minority poor, are decentralization and citizen/parent empowerment, the focus of this chapter. The movement to decentralize school governance â an effort to place control into the hands of the people being served â has gained momentum and exists in some form in most largeâcity school districts today. An extension of administrative decentralization, citizen/parent empowerment is seen as one of several factors, including teacher and administrator preparation, curriculum renewal, school financing, and school restructuring, vital in the improvement of schools. A look at the meaning and scope of decentralization, operationalized through citizen/parent empowerment, and its probable effectiveness in improving school outcomes indicates that, alone, it is insufficient to ensure positive academic and social performance in school.
The main purpose of this paper is to analyze problems of financing an old-age insurance when birth rates are low and population declines or fertility fluctuates with time. A government then searches for optimal policies to cope with such problems. A first criterion could be seen in the Pareto principle. But we all know that there is no way out of PAYG unless at least one generation has to pay for the transition. Therefore an optimal policy is concerned with intergenerational redistribution and optimal growth. In the absence of public pensions the economy will in the long run converge to a steady state which is not optimal in the sense of a golden rule. This dynamic "in"-efficiency results from the decentralized decision making by the consumers and the firms. If the PAYG system influences the savings ratio of the economy, public pensions can be seen as an instrument to implement a modified golden rule.
Portability is defined as the capacity of an educational software item to be used differently from the way, the objectives, or the environment in which it was originally conceived. There are obvious economic strategies for increasing the portability of educational software. Computer software has high fixed costs and extremely low variable costs. In principle, portability would lead to greater utilization, reducing unit costs and increasing quality, thus leading to higher cost effectiveness. However, the nature and behavior of both centralized and decentralized education systems set limits to the exercise of pure economic rationality. The paper discusses both the limits of educational software markets and the potential effects of government policies to increase the portability of educational software. Three major findings derived from empirical observation and economic analysis are discussed. First, high fixed costs associated with very low variable costs make higher usage, and hence portability, particularly attractive. Second, given the peculiarities of educational markets, the way governments finance schools are relatively more important than the price of software: Teachers are more likely to buy, adapt, or develop programs according to the logic of local financing policies rather than cost considerations. Third, both markets and governments influence portability and the willingness of producers to develop portable computer-education software. Government policies that can be particularly effective to improve portability are financing and incentive systems, licensing, copyright agreements, and regulatory policies concerning systems compatibility. The provision of support functions through clearinghouses for exchange of information, training, research and development, and feedback to producers can also help correct for market imperfections.
Sifra's Theology of Revelation The reader may now wonder whether I have entered a circular argument. When I accounted for Sifra's authorship's critique of the Mishnah's utilization of taxonomic logic for the proof of propositions, I claimed that at stake was not merely omission of proof texts but a (to our authorship) flawed use of a valid logic. Yet I further stressed that the correct utilization of that logic can be shown to occur not only in Sifra but, by Sifra's authorship's own standard, in the Mishnah. I further stipulated that Scripture can have been, and probably was, the source of that appearance in the Mishnah of the kind of polythetic classification of which Sifra's authorship will have approved, if not explicitly, then at least implicitly in the Mishnah's introduction of the same polythetic taxonomy. Therefore, does it not all come down to the presence, or absence, of citations of verses of Scripture? And if all that separates Sifra from Tosefta and the two Talmuds is that the latter suffice with the inclusion of proof texts while the former insists upon rewriting the whole of Scripture in line with the Mishnah, then does not the effort invested in Sifra seem a bit excessive. The result, after all, can have been, and was, accomplished in a much simpler way by the authorships of the successor documents to the Mishnah. Why then the reversion to Scripture in Sifra's rewriting of Scripture, that is, its writing with Scripture?
Lives of Noisy Desperation: A Year's Work in Collection Development, 1989 development literature of 1989 shows how well the profession is coping with declining budgets, spiraling costs, and new technologies. A selective number of articles and books on the following topics are reviewed: general works on development; financing; serials; new technology; evaluation and measurement; automation; cooperative arrangements; selection and review; preservation, storage and size; vendors and acquisitions; and education and training. literature suggests that librarians in charge of development must continue to deal with financial burdens and an expanding list of demands for new materials in all formats. The mass of men, wrote Henry Thoreau, lives of quiet desperation.[1] For those involved in development and management activities these days, there is little time for the luxury of quiet. Collection managers have fallen on desperate times, their work a reflection of a dizzying display of declining budgets, spiraling costs, and new technologies. development literature of 1989 shows how well the profession is coping with these trends after the whiplash of 1987 and 1988. Included in this literature review are a selective number of articles and books produced during 1989, listed under a dozen topics of general concern to the manager. Two topics, preservation and matters relating to acquisitions as an adjunct to development, are touched on only briefly. A number of substantial works appeared this year, including full-length texts and a reprise of important pieces published years before. range of publications shows the growth of this sector of librarianship and the positive responses to the problems facing our collections. General Works Two important texts appeared, providing comprehensive overviews of the work of management. Wortman's Collection Management: Background and Principles treats all aspects of management in a way that is beneficial to both the student and the practitioner. Shoemaker's Collection Management: Current Issues is a of in-depth essays that document the state of the art of development as we understand it today. A shorter treatment of this general area is found in the Association of College & Research Libraries' CLIP note Collection Development Policies for College Libraries, which details policies for college libraries. need to shift our focus from documents to content and from collections to individuals is the focus of Drake's article, while Schwartz provides an extensive review of the decision-making process of book selection. Atkinson puts the role of development in a historical setting to develop a systemized approach to the problems in the field, similar in some respects to the arguments posed by Buckland, who examines the scope of development and suggests that we begin regarding development much as we regard file organization with a computer system. This approach allows the development librarian to see how files are used, as opposed to looking solely at the substance of the file. Bucknall discusses the problems and promises of organizing activities in one centralized area as opposed to a coordinated but decentralized approach. often-unspoken politics of development are the theme of Bullard's editorial, in which he discusses the political overtones of writing a policy statement and engaging teaching faculty and administrators in the process. An overview of collection development in action is provided in the lead essay by Fiste from a day-long workshop at the University of Toledo. Atkinson provides a scholarly essay on referential abstraction in bibliography and the ways in which bibliography is used in library selection. âŠ
Library Collection Development and Digital Resources
ABSTRACT This paper reviews recent literature to show how foreign aid and labour remittances have transformed Central America's macroeconomy, state apparatus and class structure over the last ten years. They have lifted real exchange rates, changed the composition of investment, lowered food prices, and directly supported large numbers of people. Control over these resources is now a major focus of political activity and donors play a greater role in economic policy. Project administration has become a major function of the state. Planning and public sector personnel management have become more difficult. Foreign funds have favoured decentralization and increased participation, but they have also weakened the core capacity of the state to execute policies. Transfers have fomented new social groups including sectors supported by remittances, foreignâfinanced soldiers, public employees, nonâtraditional export producers, financial intermediaries who channel remittances and refugees.