The purpose of this paper is to compare the performance of some instruments of environmental policy, using data for a coal-fired power plant. Each decentralized scheme coverages towards the social optimum, chosen by a regulator. We look at the performance of a changing tax rate on emission, of an announcement of the tax formula, of an announcement of the tax formula with a tax refund possibility, and of a tax-cum subsidy scheme. Our emphasis is on full information concerning the tax and subsidy formulas and on the opportunity for the firm to optimize intertemporally. We also test two performance schemes which combine social optimal pricing with optimal abatement decisions. Our interest is to compare the speed of convergence of the schemes, the monetary side payments (subsidy, bonus) required, and to look for self-financing schemes.
Since 1978, China's economic reforms and her pursuit of modern technology have significantly opened the scope of her hospital services and financing. While the decentralization and higher incomes have given Chinese hospitals new freedoms, they have also raised the specter of new limitations on access to healthcare. The authors review these changes and consider what the future holds for the Chinese hospital system.
Exemplary approanes to school-based budgeting are examined in this paper. Interviews were conducted with district staff involved in implementing school-based budget reforms in five school districts--Chicago, Dade County (Florida), Detroit, Los Angeles, and Edmonton (Canada)--and with state-level staff in California, Florida, Kentucky, and England. The first section offers a review of literature, with a focus on key school finance issues. The second and third sections analyze the design and organization of different approaches to school-based budgeting and highlight the various ways in which local districts and states encourage school-based budgeting. The fourth section proposes a set of initiatives for state and local policymakers to enhance implementation while maintaining fiscal accountability. The recommendation is made for creation of a partnership between staLes and districts for implementing school-based management, with responsibility varying according to states' different political cultures. Specifically, the partPership would be responsible for specifying the ends of the educational system and school sites would have authority over the means. Four tar)les are Included. (16 references) (LMI) ***************************/!******************************************* Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * from the original document. *********************************************************************** SCHOOL-BASED MANAGEMENT IN BIG CITY DISTRICTS: ARE DOLLARS DECENTRALIZED TOO? By Priscilla Wohlstetter and Thomas Buffett Center for Research in Education Finance (CREF) School of Education University of Southern California
Redemocratization in the Southern Cone has contended with a fiscally weakened state and ideologically divided groups. Years of free-market military rule have scaled back the welfare state and deteriorated public health care. Draconian cutbacks in public spending have forced private voluntary organizations (PVOs) to provide care for the urban poor. Shantytown health care and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have surfaced to fill the gap created by a shrinking public sector under military rule in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. This paper overcomes some shortcomings of Weberian and Marxian analyses of bureaucratic behavior and empowered social groups through the study of shantytown health care as a new social movement. A comparative review of medical-care policy in Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Montevideo reveals that only Santiago and Montevideo hold promise for decentralization. Neighborhood-based activities in shantytowns remove primary care from the marketplace by decommodifying it. Success of shantytown health care under democratic rule depends on its ability to remain autonomous. In doing so, it would avoid cooptation by political parties and the stigmatized public health system.
Selecting a Communication Service Organization : the Ministry of Finance Determining what type of organization to select is a very central question for a communication service and the success of its activities. Based on an initial assessment, what communication strategy should be adopted, which type of organization should be selected, how can central and decentralized structures be connected ?
Decentralized Communication at the Ministry of Finance With a view to decentralization, the regional information centers have formed an original regional communication tool whose objective has been to make contact with citizens in the field. How have these developed from 1977 to 1988 ? With what problems and difficulties have they been confronted ? An assessment of 11 years of decentralized communication at the Ministry of Finance.
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 level’s 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 government’s 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...