Blockchain Papers

Dominique Foata

No abstract is available for this record.

E. De Renzi, P. Faglioni

No abstract is available for this record.

J. Prissette, E. Kochanski, D.R. Flower

No abstract is available for this record.

V.V. Bhatt

The relationships among transaction costs of lending and the size of borrower, capital market imperfections and economic development, and small enterprise financing and informal credit markets are described. Transaction costs include both administrative costs and default risk. Financial innovations reduce these costs and thus lower the costs of lending and borrowing and narrow the interest rate differential. In India, the Syndicate Bank has used financial innovations to compete with larger banks. The major feature of these innovations has been the creative adaptation of banking technology to suit local conditions, including recruitment and promotion policies, decentralized decision-making and avoidance of paper work, and innovative deposit schemes. The Syndicate Bank until 1965 was considered an unsophisticated rural bank, and the Central Bank did not like some of its innovations. However, since the 1969 nationalization of 14 major banks, the Central Bank has been induced to expand branches in rural areas. In forcing this emphasis on the widening and deepening of the geographical and functional scope of the banking system, the Syndicate Bank has been regarded by the Central Bank as a model bank. Tabular financial data are appended.

Aarav Kannan J, Susanne Caro

This paper presents a preliminary exploration of the design and deployment of solidarity primitives for Web3 social security, based on insights generated during Other Internet’s Web3 Work Forum held in July 2023. The paper proposes a modular framework to develop solidarity primitives addressing the three dimensions of security for DAO contributors: psychosocial stability, financial stability, and regulatory clarity. Additionally, it outlines a range of on-chain and off-chain mechanisms and improvement proposals specific to each dimension. Lastly, it discusses current challenges to implementation.\n

M.H. Wagner

No abstract is available for this record.

Tore Modeen

Aspects of the finnish administration. After a short historical introduction (before and after independence), the author describes the organization of central administration and decentralized units and presents some services : Finance, Education, National Defense. Reforms are under way or in the blueprint : they concern the administration of justice, deconcentration of some services, democratization of administrative life, departmental autonomy.

Frank Delmartino

The reform of decentralization in Belgium Recent developments of the Belgian territorial administration reflect the constitutional problems that have arisen in Belgium since the 1970 reform which reorganized the State by setting up three autonomous regions according to the cultural duality of the country, viz Flanders, Wallonia, and the bilingual region of Brussels. The regionalization of the State is followed up by another reform movement which aims at strengthening the local administrative level of municipalities : the association and federation of communes. There are hence at present five administrative levels : State, region, province, association-federation of communes, commune. This reform, which is still provisional, allows for a complex administrative organization, at times rather incoherent, comprising too many levels of decision-making with often rather vague or ill-defined terms of reference. This has brought about a trend towards simplification of institutions leading some critics to advocate an increase in powers, according to relevant matters, either at the central (State or region) or at the local level. Without contesting the good reasons for such a criticism, the author is neverthe-less reluctant to endorse such a position which would imply that the existence of the intermediary administrative level (the traditional provinces) would be open to question, whereas he feels that it has a role to play in that this is the adequate level to handle a number of managerial tasks.

Robert P. Inman

In 1971 the California Supreme Court opened the door to a major reform movement to restructure the present system of decentralized school finance. With the exception of Hawaii, elementary and secondary education in the United States is supported primarily by local property taxation supplemented in part by state funded grants-in-aid. The California Supreme Court, in the now famous Serrano rulings, declared the California system in violation of the state constitution's equal protection clause. Similar rulings have also been handed down by the New Jersey Supreme Court (Robinson vs. Cahill) and the Superior Court of Hartford, Connecticut (Horton vs. Meskill). In addition, ten states have recently enacted major reform bills, and legislation is under consideration in several others. The pressure for reform is strong and continuing. As a review of the recent reform proposals indicates, the legislative search for new means of financing local schools is not simply an incremental tinkering with existing laws.' Major changes, often court required, are at issue. Long-run outcomes are uncertain; each proposal has new winners and new losers. When planning a major reform of local school finance, therefore, past experience from incremental policymaking may not be an adequate guide to choice. Long-run general equilibrium predictive models and a clearly specified evaluation rule will be needed. It is the purpose of this paper to develop such a policy framework and to apply the analysis to one region currently in the midst of school reform, the New York metropolitan area. Six alternative reform proposals are considered: foundation aid, two district power equalization plans, property tax credits, expanded Title I assistance under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and centralized financing and spending controls. Preferred reforms are selected under utilitarian (promiddle class), Rawlsian (pro-poor), and equal school spending (Serrano) criteria.

Rudolf Bayer, Robert M. Graham, G. Seegmüller

No abstract is available for this record.

Jerome H. Saltzer

A currently popular systems research project is to explore the possibilities and problems for computer system organization that arise from the rapidly falling cost of computing hardware. Interconnecting fleets of mini- or micro-computers and putting intelligence in terminals and concentrators to produce so-called "distributed systems " has recently been a booming development activity. While these efforts range from ingenious to misguided, many seem to miss a most important aspect of the revolution in hardware costs: that more than any other factor, the en_ ~ cost of acquiring and operating a free-standing, complete computer system has dropped and continues to drop rapidly. Where a decade ago the capital outlay required to install a computer system ranged from $150,000 up into the millions, today the low end of that range is below $15,000 and dropping. The consequence of this particular observation for system structure comes from the next level of analysis. In most organizations, decisions to make capital acquisitions tend to be more centralized for larger capita] amounts,

Teh Chung Ho, Morton M. Denn

No abstract is available for this record.

Fredrick L. Golladay, Caio K. Koch-Weser

Abstract Rural development activities are frequently more important than isolated health care interventions in maximizing improvements in rural health status. In addition, integrated socio-economic development of rural areas ensures availability of local resources to finance health schemes, encourages community involvement in development and reforms and strengthens management capacity for health programme implementation and development. Public health services provide in turn an entry point for directly productive development activities. In designing, implementing and operating health components of rural development projects in developing countries, the most serious obstacles are almost invariably the following: (i) how to strengthen the managerial capacity of the health administration from the national to the local level and how to execute integrated programmes through decentralized and uncoordinated agencies; (ii) how to ensure adequate recurrent cost financing and contribution of beneficiaries to operating cost; and (iii) how to achieve active involvement of rural communities in decision-making and services delivery when projects are large and planned and executed by government authorities. In discussing these issues the paper will cite the World Bank’s experiences in a number of African, Asian and Latin American countries.

D.V. Boger

No abstract is available for this record.

Dexter Kozen

No abstract is available for this record.

Clifford C. Leznoff, Wolodymyr Sywanyk

We study the following two related questions:\n- What are the minimal computational resources required for general secure multiparty computation in the presence of an honest majority?\n- What are the minimal resources required for two-party primitives such as zero-knowledge proofs and general secure two-party computation?\nWe obtain a nearly tight answer to the first question by presenting a perfectly secure protocol which allows n players to evaluate an arithmetic circuit of size s by performing a total of O(s log s log2 n) arithmetic operations, plus an additive term which depends (polynomially) on n and the circuit depth, but only logarithmically on s. Thus, for typical large-scale computations whose circuit width is much bigger than their depth and the number of players, the amortized overhead is just polylogarithmic in n and s. The protocol provides perfect security with guaranteed output delivery in the presence of an active, adaptive adversary corrupting a (1/3 ¿ ") fraction of the players, for an arbitrary constant ¿ > 0 and succiently large n. The best previous protocols in this setting could only offer computational security with a computational overhead of poly(k; log n; log s), where k is a computational security parameter, or perfect security with a computational overhead of O(n log n). We then apply the above result towards making progress on the second question. Concretely, under standard cryptographic assumptions, we obtain zero-knowledge proofs for circuit satisfiability with 2 -k soundness error in which the amortized computational overhead per gate is only polylogarithmic in k, improving over the ¿(k) overhead of the best previous protocols. Under stronger cryptographic assumptions, we obtain similar results for general secure two-party computation.

Marshall W. Meyer, M. Craig Brown

Formalization of personnel procedures in 229 city, country, and state finance agencies is a function of era of origin and subsequent effects of the environment. Whereas origins and the environment account for the extent of formal personnel procedures, formalization in turn gives rise to multitier hierarchies and hierarchy to decentralized decision making. The effects of origins are due to greater openness to environmental pressures at the time of formation than later on.

WILLIAM J. LEDGER

No abstract is available for this record.

Guy J. Photopulos, Roger W. Jones, Leslie A. Walton, Wesley C. Fowler

No abstract is available for this record.

CHARLES B. GASSNER, WILLIAM J. LEDGER

No abstract is available for this record.

Malcolm Warner, Riccardo Peccei

In this paper, we argue that discussion of worker participation in decision‐making is very limited in its usefulness unless the analysis looks at the structure of decision‐making, particularly in terms of centralization, in the organization concerned. The issues of worker participation are not instructive per se . If there is decentralization, it may assist the effectiveness of participation structures at lower levels, but the problem remains of the degree to which the costs of some decentralization are traded‐off by the ‘dominant‐coalition’ in the corporation against the benefits of centralization of decision‐making in the areas of finance and senior personnel.

WILLIAM J. LEDGER

No abstract is available for this record.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

No abstract is available for this record.

G V Sidoroff

DETAILS ARE GIVEN OF THE CLASSIFICATION OF ROADS, FINANCING (ESSENTIALLY DECENTRALIZED) OF THE CONSTRUCTION WORK. FIGURES ARE GIVEN, WHICH CHARACTERIZE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROAD NETWORK IN THE 15 REPUBLICS OF THE USSR. THESE FIGURES READ IN CONNECTION WITH THE DEMOGRAPHIC RATE OF GROWTH AND REGIONAL PLANNING SHOW THAT IN 30 YEARS THE PERCENTAGE OF SURFACED OR METALLED ROADS HAS GONE FROM 10 TO 40% OF THE NETWORK RECORDED, WHICH IS APPROXIMATELY 1,5 MILLION KM. AFTER GIVING A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE STRUCTURE OF THE ORGANIZATIONS AND SERVICES OF BRIDGES AND HIGHWAYS IN THE USSR, THE AUTHOR OUTLINES THE ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION, RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT. FUTURE TRENDS IN ROAD POLICY ARE BRIEFLY MENTIONED.