Intended or Unintended Consequences? Resource Erosion in New Zealand's Government Departments

Internationally, a feature of public sector reforms over the last twenty years is the characterisation of negative effects as unintended consequences, yet the reform programme continues as before (Humphrey et al., 1993 and 1998). This article reports the findings from an investigation of ostensibly unintended consequences of New Zealand's public sector financial management system: resource erosion in government departments which both escapes parliamentary scrutiny and damages departments' capability to perform even core functions (State Services Commission, 1998a; and Controller and Auditor–General, 1999). The findings suggest that these effects might not be unintended. The system's structures and processes, including designed–in resource erosion processes and a surreptitious approach, are highly consistent with those advocated to facilitate privatisation.     

均衡性转移支付、公共支出结构与经济高质量发展

本文首先从理论层面系统阐述均衡性转移支付、公共支出结构与经济增长质量三者之间的多重作用机制。其次立足“五大发展理念”构建综合指标体系对经济增长质量展开测度，本文发现我国地方经济增长质量虽然在整体上呈缓慢上升态势，但其绝对水平相对偏低，且具有较为明显的地区异质性。最后本文通过构建动态面板联立方程模型与采取三阶段最小二乘法进行实证考察，结果表明：地方政府公共支出结构与经济增长质量显著正相关，但均衡性转移支付与经济增长质量的正相关关系并不显著。标准化回归结果显示均衡性转移支付能够通过优化公共支出结构对地方经济增长质量产生间接提升效应。     

Beyond third party role: Disputes and managerial intervention

This article reviews the research findings on managerial third party intervention and the factors that affect role choice. It explores the implications of research findings and advocates using a political approach to investigate the ways that managers enter into disputes, both directly and indirectly, and through such roles as conflict orchestrators. It calls for reexamining the assumptions that underlie this research and for focusing on the process of defining conflicts, uncovering coalitions and networks of relationships, and linking third party intervention to the ideology that underlies organizational disputes.     

The Great Compression of the 1940s: The Public versus the Private Sector

Between 1940 and 1950 wage differentials narrowed substantially, a phenomenon that economic historians have called the “Great Compression.” This paper dis-aggregates the Great Compression into changes within and between the public and private sectors. We show that wage differentials declined in the public sector as well as in the private sector; had the public sector decline not taken place, the Great Compression would have been substantially smaller. In this regard, the experience of the 1940s stands in stark contrast with that of the past two decades, during which a relatively rigid public sector wage structure has dampened overall increases in wage inequality.     

基于排队论的公交站点停车位优化及实证分析

优化设计公交站点停车位数是站点建设的一步重要工作，停车位数过多或过少都会影响公交系统的运营效率和服务质量。鉴于此，此文将探讨基于排队理论的公交站点停车位数优化方法，并以武汉市街道口站为例，运用该方法进行了实证分析，以期对武汉市的公共交通建设提供理论上的参考。     

Strategic provision of local public inputs for oligopolistic firms in the presence of endogenous location choice

We develop a model in which two regional governments compete for a mobile oligopolistic firm by providing local public inputs. The central mechanism of our model is the interaction of an agglomeration advantage (partial nonrivalness of the local public inputs) and an agglomeration disadvantage (costs associated with the change of location of firms). We show that a central government of both regions induces an interregionally optimal allocation of firms by providing the optimal levels of local public inputs. The decentralized provision of local public inputs by regional governments, however, leads in most cases to a (interregionally) suboptimal allocation.     

论文化娱乐新闻的自律

文化娱乐新闻的健康有序发展离不开媒体自律的作用.有效的自律,除了新闻职业道德的培养之外,还要强化自律规范的可操作性,建立具体、细致的规章制度,建立具有执行能力的自律机构.     

Winners, Losers, and the Nuclear-Waste Dilemma

This paper explores how property-right assignment affects social efficiency when a public program has both “public good” and “public bad” components. We show that when willingness to accept a public bad exceeds the willingness to pay, the net benefit is unambiguously lower when the property right supports the status quo institutional structure. Thus, Kaldor–Hicks efficiency tests tend to favor public programs and mitigation over the status quo even when mitigation negatively affects another group. To illustrate the result, we develop social-cost estimates for moving nuclear waste from current temporary-storage facilities to a permanent central repository at Yucca Mountain, NV, USA. For a representative city with a population of 226,195, the present value of the external cost of shipping waste is $1.42 billion when those living near temporary nuclear-waste storage facilities are assigned the property right to “health and safety.” That number swells to $5.95 billion when those living near the transport route are assigned the property right. Thus, property-right assignment affects the efficient level of nuclear-waste, and thus nuclear energy, produced.     

Land acquisition and irrigation in Nigeria

With land as Nigeria's most important asset, successive local and central governments have sought to control the acquisition of land so that it may be put to optimal use by the population of 70 million. The author looks into the theory of land acquisition and its history in Nigeria, with special reference to a number of irrigation projects. He examines in depth the actions and attitudes of the developers in several cases and notes a lack of consistency and consideration on their part. The author records the resulting opposition to any irrigation project due to the injustices such schemes have engendered in the past. He suggests a set of guidelines to bring an Improvement in relations between land-owners and the authorities, so that development projects are not held back and finally implemented in an atmosphere of hostility.     

The Effects of Catholic Schooling on Civic Participation

The promotion of adult civic engagement is one of the primary goals of public schools. And the putatively negative effects of private schooling on civic engagement provide one of the most fundamental motivations for publicly provided schooling. In this study, I examine the comparative effects of Catholic and public high schools on adult voter participation and volunteering in the United States. I find that students who attended Catholic high schools are actually more likely to vote, though not volunteer, as adults. These estimated effects are robust to conditioning on a rich set of individual, family and community traits. I also present two-stage least squares estimates, which provide suggestive evidence that these results are not due to selection biases.JEL Code: I21, D72, H52