Using the state agencies that regulate wastewater discharges to surface waters, this quantitative study examined the validity of three theories about the effects of decentralization on organizational outcomes. It also used qualitative analysis to probe the internal adjustments to optimize outcomes. Theoretical advantages to decentralized organizations can be summarized as greater effectiveness or greater efficiency. Effectiveness here is the rate of compliance with legal and permit requirements for dischargers adjusted for enforcement actions. The model used consists of decentralization independent variables, exogenous independent variables (e.g., population, funding), efficiency dependent variables, and compliance (or effectiveness) dependent variables. Model calibration applied principal component analysis and multiple regression analysis to questionnaire and other data for FY93 from 39 states. Key intervening variables -- information costs, innovation, and strategic planning -- characteristic of the theoretical effects of decentralization received special attention. Case studies based on interviews and document studies in five states illustrate key points. The large survey sample (78%) of the 50 states reduced threats to external validity. A significant relationship to decentralization was found for major permit processing time and percentage of expired permits. When controlled for exogenous variables, no compliance common factor related to decentralization, but medium-term compliance unit-cost did. Time is essential to all compliance common factors. Innovation, information cost, and strategic planning were not found to be intervening variables. Highly decentralized states were found to be trending towards increased centralization, and vice versa. All states make internal adjustments to optimize their programs, and some adjustments are powerful enough to make highly dissimilar organizations converge; strong basin planning is one such adjustment. Neither decentralization nor centralization is automatically the best way to organize a complex system. Devolution, where transfer of functions goes with significant delegation of authority to autonomous local units, would probably give superior environmental, economic, and administrative outcomes over a uniform approach.
Abstract Renewed interest by the Indonesian government in decentralization and cost‐recovery practices has led to both real and illusory reforms, though the distinction between the two is often not clear. This is particularly true with respect to infrastructure planning and finance. Recently, the allocation criteria for capital grants to local governments have been substantially revised, nearly every year, to reflect long lasting concerns regarding differences in interregional development needs and resources. In addition, the level of funding for local government investment has risen dramatically to support increased local responsibility in planning. Most development spending does not pass through local budgets, however. In either case, the project planning process has remained firmly under the direction of the central government's technical ministries. Infrastructure investment thus tends to be segmented, not only by sector, but also by funding source. The rate at which these two factors balance off in current practice does not indicate a strong commitment to effective decentralization. The article suggests that greater regional government participation in the national planning process would be beneficial. To deal with the fragmented nature of sectoral planning is more problematic, as a more integrated approach would in the long term require either a new layer of bureaucracy or a substantial reorganization of the technical ministries. In the shorter term, a gradual shift toward general purpose grants would also generate regional development plans more consistent with the goals of decentralization while maintaining substantial central control and oversight.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.>
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. …
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.
Organizational Leadership and Management Strategies
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. […]