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 midâ1970s, 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 governmentsâand the communes in particularâremain 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 systemsâone 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 âByzantine Generalsâ problem.
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 âcomputation has terminated,â â the system is deadlockedâ and âall tokens in a token ring have disappeared.â 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 Kâ12 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.
n Sound as Social Structure Feld (1984) issued a compelling call for qualitative comparison in ethnomusicology. His article on the Kaluli and Roseman's (1984) on the Temiar demonstrate the complexities and internal diversity of particular musical traditions and the great difficulty of finding a comparative language that neither caricatures nor obscures those traditions. suggesting a framework for comparative sociomusicology, Feld stresses the importance of drawing extensively upon local theories of self, society, aesthetics and the natural world. How those with whom we work conceptualize and enact their lives-both musical and social-necessarily informs how we come to share in their understandings, although this recognition is often lost in the scholarly drive to move from specifics to the universal. The Kaluli and Temiar are fortunate in their chroniclers. The richness and particularity of each musical tradition are striking; we are forced, as we should be, to take them on their own terms. That the musical issues at stake are so complex should not, however, lead us to assume that questions of social characterization are any less problematic. Feld points to one of the major dangers, that of relying upon notions of objectified social structures (405). A subtler but potentially more consequential difficulty lies in the interplay between those two societies, which were represented in a recent symposium,' and the theoretical position argued by at least one of the respondents. Keil (1984) quotes Diamond: In societies the superstructure is not reducible to the economic base; that reductive process begins with the exploitative economic relations of civilization (1984:446). The Temiar and Kaluli cases are cited as proof of this argument, and they indeed demonstrate elegantly complex patterns of economic, social and esthetic integration. The danger lies in the possible assumption, suggested by the quote from Diamond, that the Temiar and Kaluli as primitive societies represent a pre-civilized egalitarianism and that subsequent types of social formation-necessarily inegalitarian-cannot encompass an analogous interpenetration of economic, social and esthetic institutions.