Blockchain Papers

Ivan Damgård, Oded Goldreich, Tatsuaki Okamoto, Avi Wigderson

No abstract is available for this record.

Linsu Kim Nugent, B Jeffrey

The authors evaluate the effectiveness of private and collective technical, marketing, and financial support systems for the Republic of Korea's small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs. Their report draws on a survey of 122 SMEs that make woven textiles (42 firms), auto parts (20 firms), electronic parts (20 firms), and factory-automation products (40 firms). Although Korea has a dense network of public technology-support institutions, Korean SMEs tend to turn to private sources of technical support (especially from buyers, suppliers, and moonlighting engineers) more often than in public institutions. Even so, some collective support was used often and valued highly, especially in technologically dynamic sectors. For technical assistance to be timely and relevant, its delivery must increasingly be decentralized - to industry-specific institutes and to geographic clusters of SMEs in the same industry. Among various collective providers of technical support for Korean SMEs, at least one was used by more than half of the SMEs surveyed. Collective marketing support was used much less than private sources and was not considered very useful - except by firms in the initial stages of exporting or in the pioneer stage of a new export industry. Generally, networks of local agents and foreign traders developed as firms gained in export experience. Financial assistance is the most critical form of support for SMEs. The Korean government has made extensive use of parastatal finance institutions, target credit, and credit guarantee schemes. Government intervention in finance was so pervasive that the line between private and collective support blurred. Most SMEs sampled used at least one collective institution of financial support, and rated them very positively.

Anthony Grafton, Suzanne Marchand

No abstract is available for this record.

Bobuin John Gemandze

Even though the concept of decentralization has received extensive treatment in the literature, (Maddick,1962; Fesler, 1965; Kaufman, 1969; Laubadere, 1973; Kochen & Deutsch, 1980; Cohen et ale ,1981; Rondinelli,1981; onyers,1983; Smith,1985; Gonidec,1985; Adamolekun et al.1990), there is as yet no consensus as to its precise meaning and content either within academic or professional circles. Rondinelli, (1981), asserts that decentralization is often discussed and proposed by government officials and staffs of international aid agencies without a concise conception of its meaning and without a real understanding of the alternative forms that decentralization can take. According to Cohen et al., (1981), there are a number of activities which parade under the banner of decentralization viz; devolution, deconcentration, delegation to autonomous agencies, delegation to parallel organizations, worker's self-management. On the other hand, Sherwood (1969), argues that devolution is not decentralization. For him, decentralization refers to an intraorganizational pattern of power relationships, whereas devolution involves an interorganizational pattern of power relationships (Sherwood,1969).

Oded Goldreich, Yair Oren

No abstract is available for this record.

Joseph L. Scarpaci, Ignacio Irarrázaval

A major issue in Latin. America is the decentralization of public finances and the autonomy of local government. This article begins with a brief review of the ongoing decentralization debate. We then discuss key features of local government finance and autonomy among unitary and federal governments in Latin America. Against that backdrop, we focus on the Chilean case, which has been a widely celebrated success story in the economic development literature. We argue that despite major gains by municipal governments over the past two decades, financial decision making powers still rest with the national government. This creates financial complacency among local governments. To remedy this, we conclude with six proposals for promoting effective decentralization.

Richard M. Bird, Caroline Freund, Christine Wallich

No abstract is available for this record.

Ivan B. Damgård, Oded Goldreich, Avi Wigderson

In Crypto93 , Damgård showed that any constant-round protocol in which the verifier sends only independent, random bits and which is zero-knowledge against the honest verifier can be transformed into a protocol (for the same problem) that is zero-knowledge in general . His transformation was based on the interactive hashing technique of Naor, Ostrovsky, Venkatesan and Yung, and thus the resulting protocol had very large round-complexity.

David Wallich Sewell

Economic decentralization emerged as an issue in Albania following the first election of a noncommunist government in Albania in 1992. It is one of many challenges in creating a fiscal system that supports reform. Decentralization has begun with the central government's transferring spending responsibilities primarily for some local infrastructure services to local governments. But, given Albania's small size, it is unclear whether"people"services such as education and health care need to be delegated to local governments. Although the destruction of local health and education facilities accompanying the demise of the old regime argues for giving communities a greater sense of ownership of these facilities, they should not be handed down without mechanisms to ensure uniform service standards. Draft laws focus on the transfer of assets (schools and clinics) to local jurisdictions but are vague about responsibilities for recurrent spending. And because local spending responsibilities are expanding, local governments need increased revenues to finance them. Providing an adequate social safety net is vital in Albania - the poorest of the economies in transition - and the government has taken steps to ensure that parts of it are locally administered, though centrally funded. The key to a well-designed intergovernmental financial system is to clearly define spending responsibilities so that a revenue system can be designed to accommodate them. Such a system would combine revenue-sharing, own-source revenues, and intergovernmental transfers. Tax-sharing of central government revenues based on district of origin cannot be the only means of local finance in Albania, as most revenues are collected in only a few districts. To meet financial needs, local governments need some authority over significant own-source revenues (such as user charges and property and vehicle taxes). Privatization revenues can also help local governments but only in the short run, as they are nonrecurrent. Matching grants with spillover effects may be appropriate. And for low-income regions incapable of meeting their spending needs alone, a transparent, equalizing transfer system should be developed. Albania's draft laws allow for this possibility, having established constituent and independent budgets for the local level.

Emmanuel Salia

Ghana has recognized the need for efficient and reliable telecommunication services. The widespread availability of these services will promote the nation's economic advancement and the decentralization of the government's activities. To achieve the objective of bringing telecommunications to all the people of Ghana, private sector participation is considered essential as a source of management skills, technology, and financing that will be required for the provision of services. In order to attract such participation, Ghana is putting in place the necessary policy, institutional, and regulatory frameworks to create an enabling environment for private sector investment in the telecommunication sector.>

W.W.S. Charters

No abstract is available for this record.

Garth Myers

The urban-planning strategy of the revolutionary government for the Ng'ambo neighborhoods of Zanzibar City was dominated by a grand vision. Ng'ambo, which literally means Other Side, was slated to become the physical embodiment of the revolution's social experiment. However, the socialist grand vision fared no better in Zanzibar than did its weaker version on the Tanzanian mainland in creating an egalitarian urbanism. Specifically, I examine the attempted reconstruction of Ng'ambo as a vast public-housing project, which was the principal urban program and most enduring legacy of the revolutionary era (1964 to 1977). I contend that this program was not so much a means of bettering Ng'ambo for its residents as it was a way for revolutionary elites to define the area in their new ideological framework of understanding. Denied participation in official planning channels, Ng'ambo residents utilized their own customs and practices to remake the area as best they could, albeit under a set of authoritarian constraints. This study of the Zanzibari socialist experiment in its urban-geographical dimension contributes to the expanding literature on the political and ideological content of cultural landscapes (Western 1985; Constantin 1987; Roweis 1988; Duncan 1990). My interpretation of the Zanzibar cityscape differs from that in several previous studies (Martin 1978; Clayton 1981; Sheriff and Ferguson 1991). The premise is that it is necessary both to understand how the state has utilized space in tactics and strategies deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organization of domains (Foucault 1980, 77) and to examine how the residents of Ng'ambo used urban space in political and cultural expression. SOCIALIST URBAN PLANNING IN ZANZIBAR A practical question is whether the program of urban development for Zanzibar between 1964 and 1977 was really socialist. A socialist development program should have five characteristics: state ownership of means of production, absence of a free market for land and real estate, a centrally planned economy, effective one-party rule, and socialist goals prominent in public and state documents (Forbes and Thrift 1987, 2). The stress on common socialist goals in urban policy should involve both a redistribution of goods and services to create egalitarian cities and a decentralization of urbanization to prevent primate-city dominance of the urban hierarchy and to promote regional, rather than specific urban, growth. Socialist goals in the city have obviously varied somewhat according to regime, but the five listed above have broad application. According to these characteristics Tanzania was a marginal example of third-world socialism, because of the steep rise in overall urbanization and the tremendous growth of Dar es Salaam, the primate city of the country. This categorization of Tanzanian socialist experimentation dovetails with other, more detailed critiques (Hill 1975; Shivji 1976; Samoff 1979, 1982; Saul 1979; Coulson 1982). Under ujamaa, the collective term for Tanzanian socialist policies, urban policy called for the establishment of eight regional-growth centers to redistribute and balance development between urban and rural areas (Freund 1989). At best ujamaa was wishful thinking, and at worst a co-optation of socialism as a strategy through which the bureaucratic party elite controlled the economy for their own benefit (Shivji 1976; Mueller 1980). However, these critiques may not be relevant to Zanzibar. The mixture of autonomously derived policies that Abeid Amani Karume, the first president of Zanzibar, adopted seemingly hewed much more closely to the mainstream of socialist planning than was the case on the mainland. Centralized planning and proclamation of socialist goals were accomplished within a year of his taking power. The first postcolonial master plan for Zanzibar City was written by a planning team from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1968; the second was produced by a team from the People's Republic of China. …

Graeme Harrison, Jill McKinnon, Sarala Panchapakesan, Mitzi Leung

Abstract This study draws on the national cultural dimensions of power distance, individualism, and Confucian dynamism to predict and explain differences in philosophies for, and approaches to organizational design and management planning and control systems in Australia and the US, representing Anglo‐American nations, and Singapore and Hong Kong, representing the ‘five dragons' of East Asia. Data were gathered by survey questionnaires mailed to senior accounting and finance executives in 800 organizations. The results were largely as predicted and, in general, provide support for the importance of national culture in influencing organizational design and management planning and control systems. In particular, the cultural values of Anglo‐American society relative to East Asian society are associated with a greater emphasis on decentralization and responsibility centres in organizational design, and a greater emphasis on quantitative and analytical techniques in planning and control. By contrast, the cultural values of East Asian society are associated with a greater emphasis on long‐term planning and on group centred decision‐making. The results are important to managers in global organizations who need to understand the cultural bases of observed differences in organizational and management planning and control practices in Anglo‐American and East Asian nations.

Joseph P. Newhouse

No abstract is available for this record.

A. A.

No abstract is available for this record.

Oded Goldreich

A proof is whatever convinces me. Shimon Even (1935–2004) The glory attached to the creativity involved in finding proofs makes us forget that it is the less glorified process of verification that gives proofs their value. Conceptually speaking, proofs are secondary to the verification process, whereas technically speaking, proof systems are defined in terms of their verification procedures. The notion of a verification procedure presumes the notion of computation and furthermore the notion of efficient computation. This implicit stipulation is made explicit in the definition of NP , where efficient computation is associated with deterministic polynomial-time algorithms. However, as argued next, we can gain a lot if we are willing to take a somewhat non-traditional step and allow probabilistic verification procedures. In this chapter, we shall study three types of probabilistic proof systems, called interactive proofs, zero-knowledge proofs , and probabilistic checkable proofs . In each of these three cases, we shall present fascinating results that cannot be obtained when considering the analogous deterministic proof systems. Summary: The association of efficient procedures with deterministic polynomial-time procedures is the basis for viewing NP-proof systems as the canonical formulation of proof systems (with efficient verification procedures). Allowing probabilistic verification procedures and, moreover, ruling by statistical evidence gives rise to various types of probabilistic proof systems. Indeed, these probabilistic proof systems carry a probability of error (which is explicitly bounded and can be reduced by successive applications of the proof system), yet they offer various advantages over the traditional (deterministic and errorless) proof systems. […]

Jayne E. Stake, Suzanna Rose

Stake, Roades, Rose, Ellis, and West (1994) reported that women's studies classes led to more feminist activism and greater personal course-related changes than nonwomen's studies classes. The present study tested the durability of the positive changes observed in women studies students 9 months following the last week of class. Comparisons between students who participated at follow-up (26.3%) and students who did not participate indicated that the follow-up participants were representative of all students who completed the courses. In the follow-up sample, class impact reported in the last week of class was sustained at follow-up. Women's studies students continued to report substantial changes in their interactions with others and willingness to adopt new roles and behaviors. Ratings of positive effects were significantly higher than ratings of negative effects ( p

William J. Coffey, Réjean Drolet

Certaines activités tertiaires ont la capacité de jouer un role de ‘moteur’économique. Ces activités du ‘tertiaire moteur,’ ou ‘services supérieurs,’ constituent une partie importante de la base économique des régions métropolitaines. Récemment, aux États‐Unis, des chercheurs ont commencéà remarquer la tendance de ces activitès à quitter leur ‘habitat naturel’ dans le centre d'affaires des grandes villes pour se relocaliser dans des ‘edge cities’ ou ‘magnet areas’ vers la périphérie de la zone métropolitaine. Le but principal de cet article est de vérifier si la région métropolitaine de Montréal se caractérise, elle aussi, par des tendances semblables de décentralisation des services supérieurs. Nous utilisons la base de données longitudinales sur les entreprises canadiennes de Statistique Canada pour examiner la question de la décentralisation de ces activités dans la région montréalaise. Nos résultats indiquent que pour 11 des 17 secteurs d'activité compris dans les services supérieurs, la période 1981–1989 a vu un transfert du poids relatif de la ville de Montréal vers les deux couronnes périphériques de la région métropolitaine. Ce transfert été plus fort dans les services financiers, d'assurances et d'affaires immobilières que dans les services aux entreprises. Certain service activities have the capacity to play the role of a ‘motor’ of economic development. These ‘hight‐order services’ now form one of the principal components of the economic base of metropolitan areas. Recently, researchers in the U.S. have begun to notice a new propensity for these activities to leave their ‘natural habitat’ in the downtown business district of large cities and to relocate in ‘edge cities’ or ‘magnet areas’ toward the periphery of the metropolitan region. The purpose of this article is to verify if the Montreal metropolitan region is characterized by similar patterns of spatial decentralization of high‐order services. Our study uses Statistic Canada's Longitudinal Database on Businesses in the Canadian Economy to examine this issue. Our results indicate that for the period 1981‐1989, 11 of 17 high‐order service sectors were marked by a relative shift from the City of Montreal towards the periphery of the metropolitan area. This shift was more pronounced for the finance, insurance, and real estate group than for the business service group.

Alfredo De Santis, Giovanni Di Crescenzo, Guiseppe Persiano

No abstract is available for this record.

Richard M. Bird, Christine Wallich

Extensive decentralization, both political and fiscal, is taking place in many of the countries newly emerging from behind the socialist veil. Decentralization represents both a reaction from below to the previously tight political control from the center and an attempt from above to further the privatization of the economy and to relieve the strained fiscal situation of the central government. Although there are of course many variations in this process from country to country, some important common elements arise from the similar institutional starting point in all countries and the common transitional problems most of them are facing. The on-going reforms of subnational finance in the transitional economies are more important than seems generally to be recognized. The design of a well-functioning intergovernmental fiscal system is key to many of the major reform goals of the transition economies—macroeconomic stability, privatization, and the social safety net.

A.V. Gerbessiotis, L.G. Valiant

No abstract is available for this record.

Jean-Marc Couveignes, Louis Granboulan

In this paper we study the topological aspects of dessins (via analytic description) with two distinct goals. Firstly we are interested in fields of definition and fields of moduli. We give a topological proof that there exist some dessins with no model defined over their field of moduli. This answers explicitly a question asked in [Har87]. Our second motivation is to collect practical and theoretical data for the explicit computation of covers given by some topological description, following ideas of Atkin [ASD71] Oesterlé and ourselves. This leads to a method for the computation of the linear space associated to a divisor on a given dessin. Introduction This paper develops some practical applications of the archimedean analytic description of coverings through Puiseux series. In the second section, we recall a classical result due to Klein concerning the classification of genus zero Galois coverings, and related to the classification of regular polytopes. In the third section we give a review of many possible definitions of what a moduli field is. We do not claim to exhaust the list of various contradictory notions denoted by these words, but simply to avoid the frequent confusion about it. The fourth section is an illustration of what knowledge can be provided by local considerations at infinity. We show that such a study leads to interesting examples of coverings with strange rationality properties, which we can state by mere combinatorial considerations.

Fred Schroyen

No abstract is available for this record.

Basu Shyamal K

This paper first identifies major proposals being considered now for restructuring rural financial institutions (RFIs). It then discusses main reasons which may have prompted these proposals. These are (1) inefficiencies of multi-agency approach, (2) dependency of RFIs, (3) autonomy of RFIs (in regard to reserve requirements, priority sector lending, loan appraisal, monitoring and recovery, and interest rates), and (4) explicit and implicit viability of RFIs. Various proposals are evaluated to find out whether they are suitable or not and if not, what alternatives are required to tackle the problems of RFIs. Based on this the paper shows that neither the upward revision in lending rates nor these restructuring proposals are required for improving viability of RFIs. An alternative proposal of restructuring RFIs is then suggested. This proposal discusses six strategic organizational principles of developing RFIs. These are (1) encouraging multiple institutions, (2) promoting appropriate forms of organization, (3) achieving vertically integrated organizational structure, (4) developing suitable density of field-offices, (5) enlarging reach or coverage of rural clients, and (6) accelerating diversified and multiple functions. Both systemic and procedural macro and micro innovations that stress the process aspect of institutional development are outlined. This restructuring proposal emphasizes the mission of decentralized institutional development of RFIs. Its vision is diversified, multiple and joint-products oriented rural banking that is autonomous but accountable. And it has a potential to make RFIs more viable and agricultural and rural growth-oriented.