This project provides an evaluation and analysis of the Education Financing and Management Reform Project. Among the few larger-scope reform projects designed for more expansive changes in the education system of Armenia, Education Financing and Management Reform Project is the most Important, in terms of both its financial aspects and the scale of targeted changes. The project provides an evaluation and analysis of the Education Financing Management Reform Project from two points of view: the choice of textbook and publication/provision and achieving successful decentralization of schools. It will also try to find out to what extent the proposed changes match the general development of the country, thus evaluating the chances of success also from this aspect. With a rather pessimistic attitude regarding the effectiveness of the project, the two project questions will be put in the negative: (i) why is this project irrelevant for achieving improvement of the quality of the general education system in Armenia? and (ii) why this project cannot achieve its concrete goals - improved textbook publication and provision and successful school decentralization? The project comprises of two chapters, each of which covers one of the two questions stated above. The first chapter provides an analysis of the textbook and decentralization components as tools for quality improvement in the general education system. The second chapter analyzes the actual chances of the project to achieve its concrete objectives - successful textbook publication and provision, and school decentralization. For avoiding complication and setting a logical line of analysis, each of the chapters is divided into several sections (some of these having also subsections).
William N. Goetzmann, Jonathan E. Ingersoll, Matthew I. Spiegel, Ivo Welch
Over the years numerous portfolio performance measures have been proposed. In general they are designed to capture some particular enhancement that might result from active management. However, if a principal uses a measure to judge an agent, then the agent has an incentive to game the measure. Our paper shows that such gaming can have a substantial impact on a number of popular measures even in the presence of extremely high transactions costs. The question then arises as to whether or not there exists a measure that cannot be gamed? As this paper shows there are conditions under which such a measure exists and fully characterizes it. This manipulation-proof measure looks like the average of a power utility function, calculated over the return history. The case for using our alternative ranking metric is particularly compelling in the hedge fund industry, in which the use of derivatives is unconstrained and manager compensation itself induces a non-linear payoff and thus encourages gaming.
Limited observability is the assumption that economic agents can only observe a finite amount of information. Given this constraint, contracts among agents are necessarily finite and incomplete in comparison to the ideal complete contract that we model as infinite in detail. We consider the extent to which finite contracts can approximate the idealized complete contracts. The objectives of the paper are: (i) to identify properties of agents' preferences that determine whether or not finiteness of contracts causes significant inefficiency: (ii) to evaluate the performance of finite contracts against the ideal optimal contracts in principal-agent and bilateral bargaining models.
When circumstances surrounding the contract change, a party might consider breach a more attractive option than performance. Threatening breach, this party may induce the other party to modify the original agreement. The contract law doctrine of modification determines whether and when these modifications are enforceable. To promote social welfare as well as the interests of the threatened party, the law should enforce modifications if and only if the modification demand is backed by a credible threat to breach. This paper argues that credibility is not a function of pecuniary interests alone. A decision to breach can be motivated also by sentiments towards the fairness of the division of the surplus between the parties. A party whose share in the surplus is reduced in an unexpected fashion might have a credible threat to breach, even if his absolute payoff from performance is still positive and greater than his payoff from breach. The paper explores the patterns by which such fairness concerns arise. Recognizing the prevalence of these concerns suggests that modifications should be enforced in a larger set of circumstances than previously perceived. Lastly, the paper offers a fresh perspective on some of the landmark cases in the law of modification and duress.
This article shows that the concept of decentralization used in the New Public Management (NPM) discussion is neither applicable to the concept of state decentralization, nor can it be transferred to developing countries. The concept of state decentralization presented here is based on the devolution of competencies, resources and capacities to subnational governments, which supposes a simultaneous, coordinated and interdependent decentralization in the fields of politics, administration and finance in order to develop an efficient decentralization process. In the case of Nicaragua the proposed goal of the NPM strategy, to increase the state's legitimacy through its reduction and rationalization, serves to justify privatization and budget consolidation. The municipalities have far too few resources and capacities at their disposal to successfully carry out their legal competencies. NPM decentralization in Nicaragua has not yet made a decisive contribution to poverty reduction.
This paper investigates a model where a decentralized manager gathers private information about the profitability of an investment project that must be financed internally. The choice of information acquisition effort depends on a tradeoff between her expected marginal information rent and the associated private effort cost. Expected information rents are higher if asymmetric information arises endogenously rather than being exogenous. Therefore, the manager puts in too much information-gathering effort and headquarters reacts with a sharp rationing of capital. Monitoring the manager's information acquisition mitigates underinvestment but even increases the manager's information gathering activity. Finally, efficiency unambiguously rises if headquarters can commit to an investment budget before the manager gathers the information.
We show how to efficiently transform any public coin honest verifier zero knowledge proof system into a proof system that is concurrent zero-knowledge with respect to any (possibly cheating) verifier via black box simulation. By efficient we mean that our transformation incurs only an additive overhead (both in terms of the number of rounds and the computational and communication complexity of each round), and the additive term is close to optimal (for black box simulation): only ω(log n) additional rounds, and ω(log n) additional public key operations for each round of the original protocol, where n is a security parameter, and ω(log n) can be any superlogarithmic function of n independent of the complexity of the original protocol. The transformation preserves (up to negligible additive terms) the soundness and completeness error probabilities, and the new proof system is proved secure based on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption, in the standard model of computation, i.e., no random oracles, shared random strings, or public key infrastructure is assumed. We prove our main result...
The purpose of this paper is to find a better intergovernmental fiscal transfer system in Korea in a rapidly changing world. In doing so. this paper analyzed the current status of the intergovernmental fiscal transfer system in Korea in various ways. In the pursuit of the reform of the intergovernmental fiscal transfer system the following four factors are particularly considered: (1)the current problems and limitations of the intergovernmental fiscal transfer system, (2)strengthening fiscal decentralization, (3)globalization. and (4)the unification of the Korean peninsula. Perhaps the key goals for reform in the fiscal system will be to provide local public services efficiently and effectively while, at the same time, maintaining macroeconomic stability. With regard to this, this paper comes up with some policy suggestions, particularly. focused on the changes in the intergovernmental fiscal transfer system in Korea. Most of all, the optimal level of fiscal decentralization in Korea must be determined. Seeking council of many. Based on the consensus build-up, there needs to be a policy shift from the current grants-oriented policy to the policy of considering both the grants and the tax assignment. It is desirable in the future that the intergovernmental fiscal transfer system be consolidated into two types. that is. the general grant and the specific grant. In addition, this change must be embodied by Changes in the structure, distribution formula, distinction of the current financing and capital financing, and etc. Furthermore, the implementation of the horizontal fiscal transfer system and the preparation of the fiscal transfer mechanism between the regions of South and North Korea must be considered seriously in terms of the prospective unification of the Korean peninsula.
Based on Harn抯 digital signature scheme and zero-knowledge proof, an authentication access control scheme for information protection system is presented in this paper. The scheme is safer than previously proposed one. In the scheme, two-way authentication may be done between a user and the system without exposing their secret information, and their sharing secret is used for authenticating the requesting user not to illegitimatimately access the protected file. The scheme can perform the access operation in dynamic environments, such as change access privileges and insert /delete users or files without implicating any user抯 secret key.
A new multiple secrets sharing scheme, based on the intractability of the discrete logarithm (DL) and the RSA encryption algorithm is presented, in which the participants' shadows remain secret and can be reused, even if all subshadows are made public. Meanwhile, by using a zero-knowledge proof protocol, the validity verification of shadow and subshadow is also provided to prevent both dealer cheating and other participant cheating, and any freely given secrets without pre-computation by dealer can be reconstructed. The scheme can be applied to many areas such as conference key distribution, secure multi-part-computation, threshold signature etc.
In this paper we examine the role of Identification Protocols in the field of Cryptography. Firstly, the rationale behind the need for Identification Protocols is discussed. Secondly, we examine, in detail, challenge-response protocols, based upon zero-knowledge proofs, that form a subset of Identification Protocols in general. Thirdly, the mathematical tools necessary for the understanding of how these protocols work is given. Finally, we discuss four main Identification Protocols: Fiat-Shamir, Feige-Fiat-Shamir, Schnorr and Guillou- Quisquater. This discussion includes the theory, practical examples and the security aspects of each protocol.
T he National Education Program states that creating distance between private and public education is not its intention, nevertheless, the scheme it has adopted, inherited from previous governments, discriminates private higher education and has monopolized education surveillance through the Secretariat of Public Education. Such task must be in the hands of the civil society and in its capacity to accredit self-financed higher education institutions, with the same autonomy and scope as those of public universities, the relationship between the civil society and the government will remain unchanged in the Program. It will still perceive the public university as a decentralized entity created, financed and ruled by a Hegelian State and, at the same time, it will still see the private university as if it had a governmental concession to render a public service to be academically controlled by the State. This posture inhibits the undertaking of actions by universities because the Program has chosen not to analyze the prevailing behavior.
In this paper we analyze the optimal degree of centralization for the supply of public goods. We identify the reliance on an exclusion mechanism as a central feature of the decentralized provision of public goods. An exclusion mechanism induces a contest between users of the public goods who want to free ride and the providers who want to exclude free riding. This contest explains the costs of decentralization. A centralized contribution does not rely on an exclusion mechanism to finance the public goods but on taxation which induces different types of transaction costs. A comparison of the relevant distortions explains the optimal degree of centralization of the supply of public goods.
Vanesa Daza, Javier Herranz, Carles Padró, Germán Sáez
In [16], Naor, Pinkas and Reingold introduced schemes in which some groups of servers distribute keys among a set of users in a distributed way. They gave some specic proposals both in the unconditional and in the computational security framework. Their computationally secure scheme is based on the Decisional DiÆe-Hellman Assumption. This model assumes secure communication between users and servers. Furthermore it requires users to do some expensive computations in order to obtain a key. In this paper we modify the model introduced in [16], requiring au-thenticated channels instead of assuming the existence of secure channels. Our model makes the user's computations easier, because most compu-tations of the protocol are carried out by servers, keeping to a more re-alistic situation. We propose a basic scheme, that makes use of ElGamal cryptosystem, and that ts in with this model in the case of a passive ad-versary. We then add zero-knowledge proofs and veriable secret sharing to prevent from the action of an active adversary. We consider general structures (not only the threshold ones) for those subsets of servers that can provide a key to a user and for those tolerated subsets of servers that can be corrupted by the adversary. We nd necessary combinatorial conditions on these structures in order to provide security to our scheme. 1
Abstract. Artin’s braid groups currently provide a promising background for cryptographical applications, since the first cryptosystems using braids were introduced in [2, 3, 18] (see also [22]). A variety of key agreement protocols based on braids have been described, but few authentication or signature schemes have been proposed so far. We introduce three authentication schemes based on braids, two of them being zero-knowledge interactive proofs of knowledge. Then we discuss their possible implementations, involving normal forms or an alternative braid algorithm, called handle reduction, which can achieve good efficiency under specific requirements. 1.
By way of concluding the section of Lolita dedicated to her supposed “precursor” (9), narrator Humbert Humbert informs his reader, “I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (15). In his own account of his primal scene of arrested sexual development, Humbert thus makes available yet another layer of the novel's thoroughgoing critique of Freudian psycho-sexuality. For by offering a childhood “precursor” and the consequent need to replace the object of thwarted desire, Nabokov's novel so perfectly conforms to a Freudian explanation for Humbert's adult perversion as to render the reductiveness of that model inescapable.1 Yet, the incarnation of a substitute object of desire suggests both the utopian possibility of the cinematic adaptation of a novel and its greatest danger. For the cinematic incarnation may substitute for the original object of desire but only at the cost of “breaking the spell” of that which it replaces. The controversy surrounding the recent film version of Lolita directed by Adrian Lyne reveals the anxiety attendant to cinematic adaptation as the danger, to use Humbert's terms, of “eclipsing” a fictional “prototype” (40). Moreover, as it mirrors the language of erotic attachment dramatized in Nabokov's novel, the popular discourse addressing Lyne's film offers an alternative model of cinematic adaptation premised on perversion, here understood as the conflation of the aesthetic with the erotic in the articulation of desire. In this way, popular discourse returns to the scholarly conversation about cinematic “fidelity” to a literary “precursor” which it has routinely repressed: the implicit eroticism of its model. What is being described in ekphrasis is both a miracle and a mirage: a miracle because a sequence of actions filled with befores and afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen into an instant's vision, but a mirage because only the illusion of such an impossible picture can be suggested by the poem's words, (xvi-xvii) Miracle and mirage, ekphrasis is an “instant's vision,” an ideal wherein words create a verbal equivalent of the visual image. In the adaptation of novel into film, on the other hand, the word has temporal and conceptual priority, as the word “adaptation” itself confirms. Yet if the adaptation of a novel into film requires precisely the opposite movement of ekphrasis, it is, too, a “miracle and a mirage.” For to follow Krieger, in the cinematic adaptation, images aspire precisely to the “time-ridden and paradox-ridden character of texts” that ekphrasis struggles against (xv), and the miracle of re-incarnating the fictional precursor “in another” is the celluloid mirage promulgated under the aegis of “fidelity.” Perhaps because of the ways it thus reverses traditions of image-word translation, scholarship on the cinematic adaptation of literature tends to concentrate more on the distinctiveness of the two genres than on the relationship between them.2 Writers hone in on the problems of point of view and description as the key sites of conflict in film adaptations of novels. Similarly, they pinpoint the problem that emerges when the novel is itself about language, as is clearly the case with Nabokov's Lolita. The popular appraisals of the cinematic adaptations of Nabokov's novel reflect these sentiments, affirming that what is “lost” in the translation to screen is specific to verbal artistry. More pointedly, however, the popular discourse echoes the language of fidelity used by scholarship to characterize the relationship between a literary “precursor” and its cinematic incarnation. Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a simple, correct ‘meaning’ which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some cases violated or tampered with…. That is, the critic who quibbles at failures of fidelity is really saying no more than: ‘This reading of the original does not tally with mine and in these and these ways.‘ (8-9) The dangers of fidelity criticism, McFarlane implies here, lie in its tendencies to naturalize an interpretation and to sacralize the novelistic text.3 And yet, while the “near fixation on the issue of fidelity” has certainly “inhibited and blurred” the study of adaptation (McFarlane 194), it has also remained an under-examined trope. For embedded in the conversation about faithfulness lies a more complex theory of adaptation belied in the terms of the fidelity argument itself. As foregrounded in the controversy surrounding the latest cinematic incarnation of Lolita, contemporary popular culture regards the relationship between the novel and its cinematic adaptation, between word and image, as an essentially erotic one, subject to the same scandals and ambiguous redemptions of movie-star romance. The pages of Louis Giannetti's popular Introduction to Film textbook make manifest the latent scandal of filmic adaptation as it is articulated in its full complexity in the popular press. Here, the film student comes across three types of relationships between novels and films: the loose, the faithful, and the literal (387). Although adaptations of plays come closest, Giannetti tells his students, the “literal” is largely impossible. “In each case,” he writes, “The cinematic form inevitably affects the content of the literary original” (389). Dismissing the “literal” as unceremoniously as does Giannetti, popular media locates its controversies in distinguishing the “loose” from the “faithful.” In those controversies, the words “loose” and “faithful” recover the cultural connotations that Giannetti's film text suppresses. Like the “loose woman,” the loose film is a scandal, a violation or exploitation of the object of desire. Provocatively, what the debate surrounding Lyne's adaptation of Nabokov's novel makes visible is the stark differentiation popular culture draws between the exploitations of the “loose” and the desires that define the “perverse.” In the popular discourse, perversion is the mark of the faithful adaptation, while the scandal of the loose is identified in its pretensions to literally incarnate the precursor. Effectively, the false literal claim signals that erotic desires have distinguished themselves from aesthetic ones, and that they have taken priority over them. Nabokov's Lolita is, of course, no stranger to scandal. As the account of pedophile Humbert Humbert, Lolita has been called pornographic and censured as morally corrupt. Yet, for each of the charges against Lolita, there are equally emphatic defenses, both for its artistic and moral integrity. Much of the academic debate swirls around whether Humbert suffers a “moral development” in his story or not, around the seductive language of the novel, and around the confusion of ethics and aesthetics the novel presents to its readers.4 On the other hand, the cover of the most recent paperback version of Lolita still carries Vanity Fair's comment that the novel is “the only convincing love story of our century.” On the other side of the text of the novel, it includes Nabokov's anti-apologia for the novel. In it he playfully toes the decadent line, asserting that his novel should not to be mistaken for the “Literature of Ideas” but valued strictly for its attempt to achieve “aesthetic bliss” (314-315). Before the first page and after the last, then, Random House wraps the novel in the dual defense of love and art. While scholars present their elaborate analyses of Lolita's subtle morality, the marketers choose instead to let eros and art supercede questions of morality and ethical imperative. In this way, the packaging of the novel reproduces the conflation between aesthetic and erotic pleasure celebrated by Lolita's pedophiliac anti-hero. For, as one critic so aptly reminds Lolita's readers, Humbert's theory of art merges with his theory of perversion precisely in his explication of the “nymphet” (Wood 122). To identify the nymphet, one must have a particular aesthetic sensitivity. As Humbert details to his reader, “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently glowing in your subtle spine…, in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children” (17). “Artist,” “madman,” and aesthetically discerning observer, the “nympholept” confirms his perversion in the complete identification of his aesthetic with his erotic desire. Moreover, as Humbert places himself in the tradition of Dante, Virgil, Petrarch, and Poe, he implies that his perversion is not just evidence of his aesthetic sophistication but proof-perfect of his art (19). Ironically, then, insofar as Random House's paperback advertises Lolita as the fusion of eros and art, it recommends the book as an object of desire that conforms precisely to the definition of perversion provided by the pedophile in the body of the text. Echoing the marketing tactics of Random House, the pages of such journals as Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and Premiere offer a popular discourse that implicitly theorizes cinematic adaptation as the successful blurring of aesthetic and erotic desires, that is, as perversion.5 Just as Random House reproduces and naturalizes the relations within the novel as relations between director and text, these journals faithfully reproduce the scandal over the novel's content as a scandal over the adaptation of the text: Lyne is to Humbert as the novel Lolita is to the character of the same name. Just as Lolita is the object of desire in Nabokov's novel, subject to Humbert's misinterpretation, so too, the novel is the innocent, if precocious, object of desire, vulnerable to the bumbling, misinterpretation, and exploitation of the cinematic medium. Like Humbert, Lyne is portrayed as an artist seeking to achieve “aesthetic bliss,” to remain “faithful” to his object of desire, to vindicate himself through his aesthetic prowess, and all the while, to occupy the position of the renegade, the free thinker, the smasher of taboos.6 Thus, as these journals defend and/or celebrate Lyne, they do so through their insistence that he “loves” the novel he seeks to incarnate in another form, and that such love legitimates and gives license to dissident nonconformity. Adrian is not by nature a literary type, but his feeling for the novel is exquisite. Any lover of Nabokov would naturally tremble before the notion of entrusting this most splendid of novels to the man who made Flashdance, and I did, too, when I first heard about the project. But I have long since stopped trembling. Adrian Lyne turns out to be a real artist. (Stringer-Hye 7) Here, while his “feeling for the novel is exquisite,” Adrian Lyne becomes a “real artist” not in spite of his Flashdance past but because of it; the artless erotica of Flashdance becomes art when combined with the “lover's” faithfulness to the object of desire. Premiere takes the identification of Lyne with Humbert to its logical conclusion. It is only because it renders the perversions of Humbert and Lyne as such perfect analogues for one another that the article is able to equate Humbert's desire for redemption at the end of the novel with Lyne's struggle to get a distributor for his adaptation. The close of the Premiere article has Lyne paraphrasing Humbert's words as he confronts his nemesis and alter-ego Quilty near the end the novel: “'You stole my redemption,' he says ruefully, 'my chance at redemption'” (6). Just as Humbert is thwarted by Quilty, his more pornographic rival, Lyne is cheated of his redemption by the more exploitative commercial interests of the film industry. Thus, in his portrayal in the popular press, Lyne becomes a faithful artist as he is equated with Humbert and his adaptation of the novel with the art of perversion. Lyne, it turns out, agrees with the critics' first take: “Nabokov's screenplay is as bad as his novel is magnificent,” he says. “He murdered his book.” To rectify the crime, Lyne treated the novel as a holy text, searching high and low for a writer who could capture the fragile elegance of Nabokov's original prose. (Harold Pinter and David Mamet each gave it whirl, but the job ultimately went to New Yorker scribe Stephen Schiff.) He looked far and wide for the perfect actor to play Humbert, talking with everyone from Anthony Hopkins (“Too old,” he says) to Warren Beatty (“He was intrigued for about five minutes”) to Hugh Grant, who wasn't intrigued even that long: “The trouble is, that's my favorite book of all time— I didn't want anyone to make a film of it,” Grant explains. In the end Lyne chose an actor with vast experience playing dirty old men (see Irons in 1992's Damage or this summer's Stealing Beauty). That left the ultimate challenge: finding a real-life nymphet to fill Lolita's saddle shoes. Nearly 2,000 girls auditioned, though Lyne says many were “30-year-olds trying to be Lolita.” For her audition, Swain, a freshman at Malibu High, sent a video of herself reading from the novel. “One moment she looked 9 years old,” rhapsodizes Lyne. “The next you could sense her sexuality.” (1-2) The beginning of the passage portrays Lyne in the now familiar role of the faithful lover, romantically attached to his aesthetic object and protective of its treatment. At the same time he is the renegade hero. Lyne's attack on Nabokov's screenplay and Kubrick's film allows him to pose as the man against two systems at once: the system that declares Kubrick's film a classic, and the censors that declare his film unacceptable.8 Portrayed as a man with a vision and aesthetic principles, Lyne totes his project from writer to writer, actor to actor, “high and low” and “far and wide.” Ironically— or perhaps appropriately— it is with the intrusion of Hugh Grant's parenthetical self-righteousness, that Lyne shifts from Humbert the aesthetic genius and accomplished practitioner of the perverse to scandalous exploiter. Suddenly, in comparison to Grant's more absolute veneration of the text, Lyne is the violator of his own sacred scriptures. Directly after Grant's moral assertion, Lyne and his film fall into a debauchery revealed in false claims to literalness. Now, Humbert is to be played by “an actor with vast experience playing dirty old men” and Lolita by “a real-life nymphet.” Eschewing the idea that the nymphet is itself Humbert's aesthetic construction and not a phenomenon in the objective world, Lyne now fully becomes the “dirty old man” himself, “rhapsodizing” over a 15-year old girl's simulation of a 9-year old's sexuality.9 The fall from artist to exploiter, from the faithfulness of perversion to the scandal of the loose adaptation, is a short one, here in Entertainment Weekly, the slip occurring exactly where the director moves from his claims for “faithfulness” to his specious claims to a “literal” adaptation. The false literal, best represented by the search for a “real-life” nymphet, is, inevitably, a degeneration into the “loose.” As she articulates her goals in Interpreting Film, Janet Staiger describes the project of reception studies more generally. She writes, “Through the hyperbole and contradictions surrounding discussion of this film, I hope to indicate something of what is at stake in the consideration of widely divergent reactions to a moving picture and how discourse surrounding film can indicate, symptomatically and inadvertently, ideological and hegemonic notions…” (124). My study here similarly seeks to reveal “ideological and hegemonic notions” through its study of the “hyperbole and contradictions” surrounding the discussion of a film. More pointedly, however, this essay attempts to distill a theory of cinematic adaptation from a popular discourse, a theory that challenges and supplements the dominant perspectives of scholarship on the same issue. For by linking perversion with fidelity, popular discourse alters the definition of faithfulness, insisting not only on the erotic attachments implicit in fidelity but also on the aesthetic transformations necessary for the faithful adaptation. Contrary to McFarlane's complaint, the strength of the fidelity argument here ends up to be its subjective and impressionistic character, insofar as it admits the aesthetic interventions involved in the maintenance of erotic attachment. The controversy surrounding Lolita's translations from page to screen suggests that the true scandal of cinematic adaptation is not the perversion of the text, but the denial of perversion, the pretense of literally incarnating the fictional precursor in another form.
Musgravian" externalities, formulated and illustrated by Musgrave in a 1966 paper on "social goods" are seen in this paper as one form of the interactions that occur between the components of a federation.The original formal apparatus is first exposed briefly.In that context, it is then considered whether and how alternative forms of federal structures are likely to achieve efficiency.Following suggestions from the literature, three such forms are dealt with: "planned", "cooperative" and "majority rule" federalisms.Next, the relevance of non cooperative equilibria is examined, in the light of an interpretation of them as "fall back" positions when disagreement occurs among members of a federation.Finally, the question is evoked of what economics and public finance may have to say on the limits to institutional decentralization, i.e. on the choice between federal, confederal and secessional structures.
From Introduction: "The first part of this paper describes the political changes, which induced technical and institutional evolutions of the RRD water-control systems, as the organization of the operation and even the technological nature of water-control systems, were influenced by national political choices. The second section describes the management framework and the financial organization of the RRD water-control systems. In-depth studies conducted at local level allow a better understanding of the present situation. Water management in the RRD appears to be strongly organized by the State into successive nested levels, from the central level of the Ministry of Agriculture to the local level of the cooperatives. This structure was challenged by the emergence of local pumping stations and water management practices, which superimposed themselves upon the officially existing structure. It is shown how the mismatch between administrative and hydraulic units adds to the complexity of the definition of both the financing and the management of hydraulic operations. The third and last section of the paper examines the financing of the different operators, the amount and the use of the water fees paid by farmers and questions the process of water management decentralization and privatization in the RRD."
War is hell, said General William T. Sherman at the end of the American Civil War. Nevertheless, war is alive and well, an unpleasant but faithful companion of the human species. But its face has changed. Modem technology offers new ways and means to conduct war, and new actors have entered the stage and pushed the traditional war between states into the background. Most importantly, however, wars will increasingly be fought under permanent global, and very public, scrutiny. My purpose here is to discuss some characteristics of future military operations as they emerged from personal experiences during the Kosovo air campaign. Under probable prevailing circumstances, military engagement and intervention to protect human beings will increasingly be done by coalitions rather than by individual countries. For the forseeable future, only the United States possesses the military capabilities needed to project power globally. Whether Washington will muster the political resolve to act alone or with allies can only be judged in light of the geopolitics when a crisis erupts. Moreover, the palpable reluctance in all Western nations to put their citizens into harm's way suggests that the hesitation to intervene will grow unless there is a clear and present danger or the national interest is clearly at stake. Experience over the last decade, however, suggests that regional as well as unilateral interventions will be viewed as illegal by many states and observers unless they are sanctioned by the United Nations or justified as legitimate self-defense. At the same time, a human rights culture is spreading inexorably. Some countries may be inclined to intervene and feel justified in doing so if blatant violations of human rights were met with indifference or, worse, a veto in the Security Council. The Gulf War was perhaps one of the first conflicts fought within a transformed world interconnected through almost instantaneous communications. Also, the domestic politicization of war in recent decades has intensified, and the war in Kosovo in 1999 marked the latest example of how military leaders are scrutinized and publicly held accountable for their actions. The air campaign is a case in point. In technical terms, the bombing in Kosovo was remarkably successful--so far, the most precise and lowest collateral damage air campaign in history. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) aircraft flew some 38,000 sorties without the loss of a single aircrew member in a seventy-eight-day campaign. Despite an efficient air defense system in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and extremely unfavorable weather conditions more than half of the time, NATO lost only two aircraft. The Western alliance did not perform very well in its attacks against targets at the tactical level, but it achieved all strategic a nd operational objectives. The precision of the air strikes against most of the target categories at the strategic and operational level was superb. The fact that over 99 percent of all ordnance hit its target is clear proof for that claim. Nonetheless, it is highly questionable whether NATO could have successfully concluded the war if air power had been the only instrument. Yet the bombing campaign was harshly criticized by many so-called military experts--and the farther they were away from Europe, the harsher the criticism. The international family of pilots was quick to blame NATO for having forgotten the fundamentals--namely using military power decisively and relentlessly until a set political objective is achieved. One observer, retired Australian air marshal Roy Funnel, wrote, A much bolder and more concentrated use of military power was required, one that used massive force delivered from the air against targets of real significance to Milosevic, accompanied by public declaration--with associate ground forces mobilisation and deployments--that this was being done to prepare the way for a major ground offensive. …
Military and Defense Studies
European and Russian Geopolitical Military Strategies