Blockchain Papers

Bill Kinsey, Hans P. Binswanger

No abstract is available for this record.

Dolores María Rufián Lizana, Rufián Llzana

The financing of a State’s sub-national levels of government, in federal and other systems alike, is an instrument of decentralization; first, each State has to decide what area of responsibility to assign to each governmental level and then it must design a suitable financing mechanism. If these sub-national governments’ degrees of fiscal and administrative autonomy are not kept in alignment, then eventually the initiative may fait as the bodies at these levels gradually lose decision-making power within their sphere of responsibility.

Pierre-Jean Lancry

No abstract is available for this record.

Barbara Liskov

No abstract is available for this record.

JL de Lima Filho, WM Ledingham

No abstract is available for this record.

Michael Rohloff

No abstract is available for this record.

Russell Krelove

No abstract is available for this record.

Juan Prawda

No abstract is available for this record.

Yingyi Qian, Chenggang Xu

China's thirteen years of economic reforms (1979-1991) have achieved an average GNP annual growth rate of 8.6%.What makes China's reforms differ from those of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is the sustained entry and expansion of the non-state sector.We argue that the organization structure of the economy matters.Unlike their unitary hierarchical structure based on functional or specialization principles (the Uform), China's hierarchical economy has been the multi-layer-multi-regional one mainly based on territorial principle (the deep M-form, or briefly, the M-form).Reforms have further decentralized the M-form economy along regional lines, which provided flexibility and opportunities for carrying out regional experiments, for the rise of nonstate enterprises, and for the emergence of markets.This is why China's non-state sector share of industrial output increased from 22% in 1978 to 47% in 1991 and its private sector's share from zero to about 10%, both being achieved without mass privatization and changes in the political system.2 Data sources in this paper are from Statistical Yearbook of China (various issues from 1985 to 1992), otherwise noted.3 Statistical Communique of the State Statistical Bureau on the 1992 National Economic and Social Development, February 18, 1992. 4 The export-GNP ratios are calculated based on the official exchange rate and are upward biased.But the dramatic increase of export share in GNP during the reform is unmistaken. 2 both before and after their radical transformations in 1989.It appears that China had no coherent reform programs, no commitment to private ownership, and no changes in the political system, and China's economy was still not fully liberalized.From both the theoretical and policy perspectives, China's different reform strategies and outstanding reform performances are particularly interesting and puzzling.The economic reforms in China formally started in 1979 following the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in December 1978.The starting time was later than that of Yugoslavia (1950) and Hungary ( 1968) and was about the same as for Poland (1980), and earlier than the Soviet Union (1986).Between 1979 and 1991, China's GNP grew at an average annual rate of 8.6%, or at 7.2% on the per capita basis. 2 In 1992, the growth of GNP reached 12.8%. 3Exports grew at a faster pace, so that China's export-GNP ratio increased from below 5% in 1978 to nearly 20% in 1991. 4 Also in this period, inflation was kept within a single-digit range except for three years (11.9% in 1985, 20.7% in 1988 and 16.3% in 1989); the household bank deposits to GNP ratio increased from 6% in 1978 to 46% in 1991; and the government budget deficit accounted for about 2-3% of GNP, about half of which was financed from bond issues (Table 1.1).Even more convincing evidence of the success of the reform is the increase in consumption and consumer durable goods by an average Chinese consumer in physical terms.For example, between 1978 and 1991, an average Chinese consumer increased his/her consumption about three times for edible vegetable oil, pork, and eggs (Table 1.2).In the rural areas, which account for about 75% of total population, the living space per person increased about 130% between 1978 and 1991 (Table 1.3).The 5 Data source for Hungary and Poland is from Table 9.1 of Kornai (1992).6 For example, Summers (1992) expressed this view when he highly praised China's reform performance.Sachs (1992) also expressed similar ideas during his interview with the Chinese Journal of Comparative Economic and Social Systems.

Joan Boyar, Carsten Lund, René Peralta

No abstract is available for this record.

Oded Goldreich, Eyal Kushilevitz

No abstract is available for this record.

Richard M. Bird

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

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

No abstract is available for this record.

BA Schuldt, KE Kendall

No abstract is available for this record.

Kouichi Sakurai

No abstract is available for this record.

R C Merkle

No abstract is available for this record.

Kouichi Sakurai

No abstract is available for this record.

Kenneth E. Kendall, Barbara A. Schuldt

No abstract is available for this record.

Richard Wallich Bird

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

E. Thomas Lawson

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

Oded Goldreich

No abstract is available for this record.

John L. Fiedler

No abstract is available for this record.

S. M. Ageev

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

Marschall W. Raffel, Norma K. Raffel

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