Despite a long history of decentralization, Sudan only truly introduced regionalization as a form of government in 1972 for the South and in 1980 for the North. Its introduction created at least three problems regarding the fiscal and financial relationship between the central government and its subordinate regional governments, viz. how to allocate funds efficiently, how to allocate taxing powers rationally and efficiently, and how to share revenue. A review of the central government's financial position reveals that it is hardly in a position to shoulder additional expenditure brought about by the creation of regional governments. On the other hand, a review of regional governments' financing also reveals their inability to raise sufficient funds locally. At present the regions depend rather heavily on the central government's meagre recurrent budget. However, the criteria for allocating funds from the centre to the regions are inefficient and inequitable, and there is no clear framework of regional planning and investment policies. The author suggests alternative criteria for the allocation of central funds to the regions. Bibliogr., notes.
At the beginning of the nineteen eighties the observers of Italian local government system were divided between those who, looking at the unexpected social and economic development of the peripheral areas, labelled the situation as ‘neolocalism’ and those who, emphasizing the total dependence of the municipalities on the central government grants, spoke of ‘neocentralism’. The difficulty in assessing the centralized or decentralized nature of the Italian system—it is suggested in this paper—depends on the inadequacy of such concepts to cope with the complexities of contemporary political systems. From a reconstruction of the local finance reforms, which is able to show the possible objectives of such a policy, the outcomes of its implementation, as well as the actors of the process, their rationales, and their interactions, it is concluded that the intergovernmental relations have not been altered in favor of the central power and that the traditional fragmentation of the Italian political administrative system has been strenghtened. Conceptualizing intergovernmental relations as policies gives a much more realistic and promising way to depict the issue than does the simplistic zero-sum assumption implied in the traditional centralization-decentralization debate.
American political culture and military necessity were at odds during the War for American Independence, as demonstrated this interpretation of Continental army administration. E. Wayne Carp shows that at every level of authority -- congressional, state, and county -- a localistic world-view, a deferential political order, and adherence to republican ideology impeded the task of supplying the army, even though independence demanded military strength. Placing military history within the context of colonial and revolutionary historiography, Carp finds that the colonial American belief that authority and political power should be decentralized deeply influenced Congress's approach to the task of supplying the army. Furthermore, most Congressmen had neither military experience nor any idea of how to administer an army, while local governments constantly thwarted the army's efforts to obtain supplies -- they blocked impressment and interfered with the movement of food and clothing. Carp shows that political leaders eventually adjusted their ideals to the imperatives of winning the war. He offers a revisionist analysis of the origins of the Nationalist movement of 1780-83 that was begun by army officers and state legislators fearing the imminent failure of the Revolution. Lacking unity and blinded by republican ideology, the Nationalists did not markedly improve the administration of the army. Instead, it was largely through the efforts of Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris, the cooperation of the French, and sheer luck that the British were ultimately defeated. Carp concludes that the Americans won the Revolution in spite of, rather than because of, their political beliefs.
This paper investigates corporate headquarters relocation in the United States for the period 1957-1980. Corporate relocations are one explanatory element in the overall spatial process of headquarters evolution within post industrial urban systems. All major corporate relocations, mergers, bankruptcies, and new incorporations that effectively transfer corporate decision making to or from any metropolitan area are recorded for the five major sectors of the economy. A series of cartograms and bargraphs provide a summary of corporate headquarters relocations for the resource, manufacturing, and service, as well as utility and financial sectors of the economy. The cartographs indicate the magnitude and direction of all headquarters relocations as well as the location of major bankruptcies and new incorporations. The bargraphs indicate the relative gains and losses through move and merger activity for all members of the urban system. The findings indicate that, in contrast to other Western economies, the dominant national center, New York, is in absolute decline as a home for corporate headquarters. This decline and decentralization is seen as a response to the general maturation of the American urban system and emergence of an entire system of urban centers rapidly acquiring large corporate headquarters status. The decentralization process is evident in all sectors of the economy except finance.
With health care a major component of the contemporary welfare state, arrangements for planning, financing, operating, and evaluating health services have become political issues throughout the industrialized western world. The range, provision, and utilization of health services are influenced by the activities of interest groups and professional associations, competition among rival ideologies, and partisan appeals for electoral support. But in the end, there remains the constant struggle to win control over decision-making. From a physician's examining room to legislative chambers, and from hospital corridors to administrative offices, questions of health care reveal the drama of human beings attempting to use
Abstract The Tunisian government has long admitted that its excessively centralized administrative and political systems have generated heavy costs in terms of inefficiency and citizen alienation. A major decentralizing reform effort was launched in the mid‐1970s, the most important parts of which dealt with changes in local taxation powers, and in the sources and size of grants and loans which Tunisian communes receive from national sources. The result to date has been a modest increase in communal revenues from the new or increased taxes, and a more significant increase in central government grants to local governments. Smaller and more rural communes are heavily dependent on grants to undertake development actions, their tax base being negligible. The revised systefn generates more revenue, and distributes resources more equitably, than the previous arrangements. In theory, it gives a greatly increased latitude to elected communal councils. Nonetheless, the local governments‐and the communes in particular‐remain severely constrained by central government authorities. The conclusion is that the decentralization reform has been partial and halting, and will in all probability continue in the same manner.
The relationship in this article was discovered by Alan Tomkins and the proof supplied by David Pitt. The original inspiration was the statistical study of gambling systems—one method of attempting to win being to increase the amount staked each time you lose. The idea of this is that when you eventually win the amount won is sufficient to more than offset the losses on the preceding string of losers and put you back into the black. The snag is that this string of losers can leave you with insufficient funds to keep increasing the stake as necessary. The question which comes to mind is: in a given number of races, on how many occasions are we to expect a run of losers of a certain length?
The property tax has perplexed and frustrated economists for decades, and for most of this century it has been denounced as an unjustifiable relic of the Middle Ages, which has unaccountably survived into modern times. The property tax is in fact the oldest tax in any modern system of public finance, and because of its age it has been associated with both modern and premodern tax philosophies. This essay explores the political context of the property tax in its medieval and modern settings--i.e., before and after the seventeenth-century revolution in political philosophy that gave birth to liberalism and "political economy." That revolution altered our understanding of the purpose of the state, bringing corresponding changes to our understanding of public finance. The modern property tax is a legacy of that revolution. But the modern property tax is mostly a legal facade, concealing a very different tax behind it. The de facto property tax, made possible by decentralized administration and by informal and illegal assessment procedures, carries forward into modern times much of the tax in its premodern form. When Seligman and other economists denounced the property tax as "medieval," therefore, they were more right than they knew. It is argued here that many of the problems associated with contemporary property taxation are traceable to this confusion between the "legal" and the "real" property taxes, and that the public might be better served by a tax openly based on premodern principles.
Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch, Michael S. Paterson
The consensus problem involves an asynchronous system of processes, some of which may be unreliable. The problem is for the reliable processes to agree on a binary value. In this paper, it is shown that every protocol for this problem has the possibility of nontermination, even with only one faulty process. By way of contrast, solutions are known for the synchronous case, the “Byzantine Generals” problem.
Abstract: This paper focuses on the degree of financial independence of local governments in the province of Quebec. The author shows that even if the Municipal Finance Reform (Bill 57) succeeded in achieving its goals, the level of financial dependence of local governments in Quebec remains among the highest in North America. Scenarios for further decentralization of financing and spending powers in Quebec are then briefly investigated. Sommaire. Cet essai discute de l'autonomie financière des localités québécoises. L'auteur souligne que mm̌ si la réforme de la fiscalitë municipale (Loi 57) a atteint ses objectifs, le degré d'autonomie financière des localités au Qukbec demeure un des plus faibles en Amérique du Nord. Plusieurs scénarios sont présentés dans l'optique d'une plus grande décentralisation des pouvoirs de financement et de dépense au Québec. “… N'est‐ce pas une chose véritablement stupéfiante de voir une nation, plusieurs nations, toute l'humanité bientôt, dire à ses sages, à ses sorciers:” Je vous aime‐rai et je vous ferai grands, si vous me persuadez que nous progressons sans le vouloir, inévitablement ‐ en dormant; débarrassez‐vous de la responsabilité, voilez pour nous l'humiliation des comparaisons, sophistiquez l'histoire, et vous pourrez vous appeler les sages des sages 1 .“
This paper presents an algorithm by which a process in a distributed system determines a global state of the system during a computation. Many problems in distributed systems can be cast in terms of the problem of detecting global states. For instance, the global state detection algorithm helps to solve an important class of problems: stable property detection. A stable property is one that persists: once a stable property becomes true it remains true thereafter. Examples of stable properties are “computation has terminated,” “ the system is deadlocked” and “all tokens in a token ring have disappeared.” The stable property detection problem is that of devising algorithms to detect a given stable property. Global state detection can also be used for checkpointing.
ABSTRACT Nearly every OECD country has faced a scissors crisis in public finance since the worldwide depression of the mid-1970s; in slow growth economies public spending has been rising faster than tax revenues. In response, a great variety of methods have been employed to control public spending. Governments have sought to: impose global ceilings on spending; modify indexation rules; decentralize decremental decisions among government agencies; improve cash flow management; devise balanced packages; introduce new constitutional rules; provide incentives for retrenchment; and privatize public sector activities. Efforts to impose cuts in spending have been directed at the bureaucracy; transfer payments; subsidies; local and regional government; and quangos. The conclusion emphasizes that retrenchment policy presupposes a shift in the balance of power between guardians and spenders.
India's urban population will double in the 20 years between 1981 and 2001 and could then be as high as 350 million. The 12 cities already having over one million population are growing the fastest and the trends indicate that by the turn of the century there will be 5 megalopolitan areas of over ten million, 20 cities with more than one million and over 600 cities with over 100,000 people. Public transit is expected to handle about 75 percent of the travel in these cities. Like most developing countries, the urban form in India and road networks are not suited for modern traffic. It is concluded that: (1) Decongestion of core areas must be achieved while planned growth and provision of transport be part of urban planning; (2) Transport supply must be augmented while travel demand is reduced; (3) The predominance of low-income population makes public transport of utmost importance; (4) Pedestrians and cyclists must be considered as significant and inalienable traffic units; (5) Area development must include optimization of existing traffic facilities; (6) Transport mode planning must be part of an overall plan to achieve complementary road-rail coordination; (7) Operations research must be applied to every phase of public transit operations and planning; (8) Long-term financing must be established for long-term transit projects; (9) Planning of transport facilities must be geared to overall urban policy of scientific decentralization.
Recent U.S. economic instability has had a significant but unanticipated policy consequence for education. Unusually high rates of inflation in the late 1970s and a subsequent recession did not lead to serious erosion nationally in resources allocated for education. The decentralized manner in which education is financed in the United States and enrollment declines buffered schools and colleges more than most other social service sectors. By 1985 both K–12 grade school systems and postsecondary institutions had generally recouped financial support. However, persistent economic uncertainty fueled by continuing conditions such as high federal deficits, nagging unemployment, foreign trade imbalances, and growing overseas borrowings has evoked intensified public faith in education as a means for regaining U.S. economic vitality. Current reform efforts intended to make education more rigorous and productive are one of the outcomes.
Democratic and Republican efforts at party renewal have differed in approach, but both can be recognized as intergovernmental phenomena having significant implications for American federalism. The Democratic Party's national charter and delegate selection rules, for instance, have federalized the governing structure of the party. The national Republican Party organization has developed such a large base of financial resources andcampaign services that state Republican parties and candidate committees have begun to accept national party authority along with its money. Moreover, as national, state, and local parties and candidates increasingly coordinate their delegate selection, finance, and other campaigh activities, they may transform the decentralized party system that has been a protector of state and local influence within the federal government. National ideological constituencies within both party organizations may rival territorial and functional constituencies for the attention of federal elected officials.