This paper explores some definitions of school -eased budgeting and other forms of decentralization, attempts to determine the extent of their adoption, develops some indications of aecentralization results, and provides suggestions for further research directions. The paper addresses (1) how often decentralization involving a change in resource allocation procedures is mentioned as a possible response to demand for change in educational systems; (2) the nature of the demand for changes in school system organization; (3) whether decentralization reported in the literature shifts resource allocation procedures toward the school level; and (4) whether decentralization produces improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability. The study reviews 14 articles published between 1980-83. Each article was analyzed to elicit answers to the research questions, and the results were tabulated according to sample size, attitude toward decentralization, nature of demand for organizational change, classification of the type of decentralization, and the results of the innovation adopted. Decentralization appears to be a positive innovation for addressing the demands for organizational change in school systems. Further research into the definition of decentralization and the development of a model of decentralization is required. More concrete, reportable research data are needed, in addition to more school-level studies of decentralization effects, including their impact on the budgeting process in school systems. (28 references) (MLH) * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * EFFICIENCY, EFFECTIVENESS AND THE DECENTRALIZATION OF LOCAL SCHOOL SYSTEMS George Briggs, Ridley College St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada and Stephen Lawton, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Toronto, Ontario, Canada Presented at the Annual Conference of the American Education Finance Association San Antonio, Texas March 9-11, 1989 U S DEPARTMENT OF ' ...ATIO' Deice or Fytucationsi eesesich and inn, a nom EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (010 his documar, has been rep duceo as isceiyed fro n the person or cocoa-Nation ortoinating tt 1 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction aLality 4 P0,13 01 view or opinions stated in this docu Merit do not necessarily represent officiat OEFI position or policy PERMISSION TO REPROL,CE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED eY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) EFFICIENCY. EFFECTIVENESS AND THE DECENTRALIZATION OF LOCAL SCHOOL SYSTEMS
:The development and spread of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in American urban areas is challenging established policy making structures and patterns in a variety of ways. AIDS is forcing urban policymakers to engage in unusual efforts at large and nonincremental change while possessing relatively little understanding of the ultimate nature and course of the disease. A variety of uncertainties exist, involving the future scope and development of AIDS, current and future treatment costs, legal and administrative responsibilities, workplace concerns, education efforts, financing methods, and political effects. As a consequence, those making AIDS policy must rely upon what Jones (1984) terms ambitious decisionmaking styles. Successful control of AIDS will require decentralized policymaking centered on experimental efforts in each urban area confronted with the disease. Given the wide range of uncertainties regarding the nature of AIDS and effective policy measures, it is unlikely that a truly national AIDS policy will be established in the immediate future.
The position of local and provincial elites in the Philippines has changed in character. At the beginning of the century the landed elite was relatively autonomous, keeping the state weak and using it to reinforce its position. Since the 1950s a new elite of mercantile entrepreneurs has emerged, dependent on state credit and political protection. Under the martial law regime in the 1970s the state ceased to be an extension of regional elites and acquired the features of a separate level of organization. The transition to the Aquino administration has led to some degree of decentralization. However, provincial politicians are more than ever interested in finding their slot in the central state apparatus.
Regional disparities in terms of income and employment showed marked decline under various regional policies during the Period of Rapid Economic Growth. However, the drastic changes in Japanese industries after the Oil Crises in 1970s have caused structural recessions in some regions which have been dependent on resourceand energy-intensive industries. Furthermore, the economic activities are rapidly concentrating in Tokyo Metropolitan Region under the internationalization of Japanese economy. Regional income disparities began to widen again since the early 1980s under these circumstances.This paper aims to examine the trend of industrial differences in Japanese regions in the postwar period, and to identify its current problems. Three analytical methods, namely the analysis of coefficient of variation, the rate-share analysis, and the shiftshare analysis are applied using employment data for the years 1955 to 1985.Major findings of the study are summarized as follows:(1) Manufacturing sector showed a clear decentralization of employment during the period 1960-1985, whereas the decentralization of tertiary sector was not very clear.(2) Marked decentralization was found in the high-tech machinery industry which have been rapidly concentrating in North and South Tohoku Regions. Despite the recession of manufacturing industries after the Oil Crises, these regions showed remarkable employment growth.(3) The shift-share analysis of manufacturing sector has showed low growth performance in the western part of Japan. These regions had been specialized in the heavy and petoro-chemical industries during the Period of Rapid Economic Growth, and suffered much damage in the Oil Crises.(4) Locational patterns of tertiary sector differ among industries. Finance, retail and wholesale industries have been concentrated in metropolitan regions, whereas local regions have been specialized in the service industry.(5) The shift-share analysis of tertiary sector has identified little difference of growth performance which comes from the industrial structure of each region. However, a marked difference has been found in the differential shift components between metropolitan and local regions, which indicates a clear gap of locational attractiveness among them.
Hospitals came into the twentieth century as creations of local, usually altruistic, interests and wrestled with accelerating change throughout the decades. Their success brought third-party financing, employee health plans, and government guarantees for charity care. Success seemed to breed success, and they raced ahead with capital investment in bricks, mortar, and high technology, only to find themselves in increasing trouble as 1990 approached. Writing from the precarious perch of the year 2000, the author views the worsening hospital situation and raises questions about the contradictions of federal interventions, the efforts to create "systems," the plight of small hospitals, and the love-hate role of medical staffs. Offered for consideration is a scenario of a health care crisis in the early 1990s comparable to the savings and loan crisis of 1988. However, this time the federal intervention is not simply in dollars, but, instead, brings on a "health for all" program with national financing and decentralized "district health" management. As in other nations of the world, hospitals become an integral part of the commitment to attack the root causes of ill health.
As a result of economic stagnation and international debt burdens many developing countries are encountering difficulties in financing the recurrent costs of their health services. In 1986 with support from the US Agency for International Development a study was initiated in Mali Jamaica and Costa Rica to 1) identify the nature extent and principal consequences of present and prospective recurrent budget shortages in publicly financed health care and 2) assess the feasibility and sustainability of alternative financing and resource allocation strategies to promote equity and efficiency in the provision of primary health care. The main source of health sector financing is direct payments from private households in Mali taxes in Jamaica and contributions by employers and employees in Costa Rica. Decentralization of control of local services local retention of revenue from user charges and the purchase of generic drugs by international tender represent the most feasible strategies for re-establishing poorly maintained and underutilized health facilities in Mali. In Jamaica where a fee-for-service system predominates a compulsory insurance scheme for those in regular employment is being considered but provisions must be made for the many indigent and near-indigent patients. In Costa Rica compulsory health insurance is able to make a substantial contribution to health care financing because a sizeable proportion of the population is employed; a shift to a system of paying doctors in primary care on a capitation basis seems feasible.
In 1985, Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff formulated interactive proof systems as a tool for developing cryptographic protocols. Indeed, many exciting cryptographic results followed from studying interactive proof systems and the related concept of zero-knowledge. Interactive proof systems also have an important part in complexity theory merging the well established concepts of probabilistic and nondeterministic computation. This thesis will study the complexity of various models of interactive proof systems. A perfect zero-knowledge interactive protocol convinces a verifier that a string is in a language without revealing any additional knowledge in an information theoretic sense. This thesis will show that for any language that has a perfect zero-knowledge proof system, its complement has a short interactive protocol. This result implies that there are not any perfect zero-knowledge protocols for NP-complete languages unless the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses. Thus knowledge comp...
Several resources relating to zero-knowledge protocols are considered. They are the number of envelopes used in the protocol, the number of oblivious transfer protocols executed during the protocol, and the total amount of communication required by the protocol. It is shown that after a preprocessing stage consisting of O(k) executions of oblivious transfer, any polynomial number of NP-theorems of any polysize can be proved noninteractively and in zero knowledge, on the basis of the existence of any one-way function, so that the probability of accepting a false theorem is less than 1/2/sup k/.>
This article provides a critique of decentralization of health care systems in underdeveloped countries, taking the Mexican case as an example. The formulation, implementation and interruption of integrative decentralization in the 1980s is analysed in the context of the interests served in Mexico by administrative centralization and institutional fragmentation. The short-term results of decentralization upon state-level politics, finance, planning and health service distribution and equity are analysed in their relationship to bureaucratic and political interests. Initially the most underdeveloped region of the country was selected for a special comparative study of the effects of decentralization upon health service planning and equity. One state of this region became decentralized, while the other underwent only minor changes. It was therefore possible to compare the specific effects of administrative changes in the two states. Decentralization was interrupted at the national level, with only 14 states actually undergoing administrative change. The policy was also short of its devolutionary intentions, actually becoming an attempt towards recentralizing power around a different administrative structure. Regional disparities in the distribution of health services were accentuated due to the privileges furthered by decentralization in the richer municipalities, and the fall in services in the poorer ones related to interinstitutional conflicts at the central level
In the highly centralized system of the Philippines, local funding provides the only source of flexibility to meet specific and urgent needs. The government in Manila, which pays all teacher salaries, finds it easier politically in times of fiscal belt-tightening to cut recurrent costs. Although local funds are a relatively small percentage of the education budget, they make an important contribution to covering maintenence and operating costs. The total cost of education per student also appears to lower in schools with greater local financing. Administrators and teachers have greater incentive to be cost-effective when forced to consider the effect of their behavior on the people who live and work in the local community. The policy implications of these findings for the Philippines, as well as other developing countries, are important. They strongly suggest that decentralization will increase efficiency. Without an increase in local funding, the quality of primary education will suffer.
This article contends that the German social and economic situation is conductive to the rapid diffusion of innovative medical technology. While there is public control over hospital facilities, the pluralistic health care system and decentralized government responsibilities contribute to an essentially laissez faire regulatory environment. There is perfunctory planning and regulation for major medical expenditures, but the essential constraints are financial. This is no comprehensive program for the assessment of diagnostic technologies and the effective imposition of guidelines depends on the cooperative effort of various financing organizations, professional interests, and public pressure groups.
Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
Peter H. Grinyer, Peter McKiernan, Masoud YasaiâArdekani
Abstract Hypotheses relating to market, organizational and managerial determinants of profitability and growth are developed and tested using data collected by structured interviews in 45 randomly selected companies in the electrical engineering industry. Multiple regression analysis suggests that market share and barriers to entry are the principal determinants of profit margins, but that tightness of control of working capital and aggressive management style also have an important influence. Centralization of decisionâtaking among smaller companies, too, was associated with greater profitability, whilst more extensive budgetary control and planning of acquisitions or diversification were both negatively correlated with the latter. Profitability was the single most important predictor of the rate of company growth of sales but constraints from organized labor, from sources of finance, and conservative management styles, the rate of product change, R&D intensity, and decentralization all entered significantly.
This article examines the broad spectrum of public policies and their outcomes in Western Europe and North America, in order to identify sources of success and failure, and thus determine ways of improving the effectiveness of transit subsidization. Empirical evidence suggests that decentralization of transit finance and decision making may enhance the effectiveness of subsidies. Transit subsidies are as important as government policies affecting the costs of auto ownership and use. In the United States large transit subsidies have led to negligible ridership growth and no increase in the proportion of tripmaking by mass transit. Greater decentralization of decision making and financing might be an approach to increasing its effectiveness.
To this point, our conception of the mixed economy has treated the public sector as monolithic. However, we observe a considerable degree of government decentralization in practice, and indeed, we would expect to find some such structures in a second-best organizational design for much the same reasons we argued for market decentralization of private goods earlier. Here, we will develop a model of government structure that is roughly consistent with the actual organization of the U.S. public sector. We will emphasize normative properties of this structure, drawing on earlier discussions of political decentralization and mechanism design. One possible approach to public-sector design would be to mimic closely the structure of market decentralization. That is, we could divide up responsibilities into a large collection of fully autonomous agencies, each of which would be responsible for the allocation of a narrow range of collective goods. Autonomy would be achieved by having each individual agency elicit information on preferences and assess separate taxes and/or user charges. To the extent that âtrueâ information is learned, it can be used to organize finance according to the so-called benefits principle â household payments for the collective goods and services would be directly related to benefits received. This mode of organization has many desirable features. First and foremost, it eliminates entirely the need for centralized information gathering and the associated cost of bureaucracy needed to administer and coordinate activities. Further, to the extent that the finance tax can be made a charge for services rendered, it will act like a price that will induce the relevant clientele to reveal their preferences.