Technology,culture and public policy

There exists convincing evidence to suggest that radical innovations arrive in swarms or clusters. While a great deal has been written about the economic causes of innovation clustering, relatively little has been written about their fundamental societal causes. In this article we discuss a number of characteristics of technological development and attempt to assess the degree to which they each are culturally bound. We then present two “models” of the process of technological change and discuss the place of cultural factors in them. In the final section we discuss the public policy implications of the “cultural boundedness” of innovation with particular reference to the innovation diffusion process. We conclude that public policy has an important role in certain areas in stimulating the public acceptance of new technology, and that an especially potent tool in this respect is the public information programme.     

Redundancy,values and public policy

Although the Industrial Relations Act marks the most significant break with the traditional “abstentionist” role of the law in British labour relations, it is true to say that during the last ten years the development of public policy has entailed a growing involvement of lawyers and the law in the world of work. As Professor Kahn-Freund has written:     

Green marketing,public policy and managerial strategies

Green marketing subsumes greening products as well as greening firms. In addition to manipulating the 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion) of the traditional marketing mix, it requires a careful understanding of public policy processes. This paper focuses primarily on promoting products by employing claims about their environmental attributes or about firms that manufacture and/or sell them. Secondarily, it focuses on product and pricing issues. Drawing on multiple literatures, it examines issues such as what needs to be greened (products, systems or processes), why consumers purchase/do not purchase green products and how firms should think about information disclosure strategies on environmental claims. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Heroin addiction and public policy

This paper investigates alternative approaches to the control of heroin addiction. It establishes criteria for evaluation of their relative effectiveness and derives estimates of net benefits associated with major existing heroin addiction control programs.     

SMEs and public procurement policy

In this paper, we characterize an optimal procurement policy as a mechanism design problem when an allotment of the contract is available, i.e., when a government faces both SMEs and large firms for carrying out a heterogeneously divisible project. Our model allows us to analyze all procurement policies (set-asides, favoritism, non-discriminatory rules), taking into account both efficiency and distributive arguments and derive a normative framework. We show that set-asides are not generally optimal, whatever the industrial preferences of the government are, while the optimal preferential treatments of firms implies complex non-linear rules. We prove that the optimal policy can be implemented using a modified Vickrey-type auction. We also consider that the firms can reduce their cost by a non observable effort, and exhibit the specific impact of cost reduction incentives on the optimal policies.Received: 24 September 2001, JEL Classification: D44Pierre-HenriMorand : I am grateful to the anonymous referees for comments. The usualdisclaimer applies.     

Employee benefits and public policy

The first expression of public policy regarding privately sponsored employee benefit programs occurred in 1921 when Congress authorized tax deductions and tax deferrals for employee stock bonus and profit sharing plans. Today, following numerous additional enactments, there is an annual tax expenditure for employee benefits of some $100 billion. Universal availability of privately sponsored employee benefits is clearly a goal of public policy. That goal has not been attained. It is the thesis of this article that the goal will not be attained by means of tax incentives alone; that an inequity exists between taxpayers who enjoy coverage and those who do not; that there are serious problems with our benefit system even for those who enjoy coverage; and that mandated benefits must be considered as a means of fulfilling public policy.     

Resource allocation and public commodities

This paper characterizes Pareto efficient allocations by means of prices within a public-goods economy. The underlying notion of public commodities is a generalization covering private and pure public ones as extreme cases. The model uses as measure space of agents.     

Evidence-based policy as public entrepreneurship

In the 21st century, evidence-based policy has garnered significant attention in both theory and practice. Scholars have levied various criticisms of evidence-based policy making, suggesting the need for a new analytical framework. I argue that evidence-based policy can be understood as public entrepreneurship: a systemic process in which actors exercise judgment and collaborate regarding policy change. Experts, policy entrepreneurs, and policymakers have functions in this process. Evidence is viewed as a resource that may or may not further entrepreneurial plans, and the institutional environment shapes plan revision. To illustrate, I analyse ‘Housing First’ homelessness policy in the United States.     

公共政策运行中的信息不对称及其治理

我国城市公共政策在运行过程中,普遍存在着信息不对称的问题,其形成原因主要包括政府自利性、科层制的局限性、信息传递通道不畅以及信息成本高。信息不对称对城市公共政策的制定、执行、评估、监控和终结等有着重要的消极影响,可能导致政策失效,应通过不同方式加以治理。     

Implementation and orderings of public information

We explore the relationship between public information and implementable outcomes in an environment characterized by random endowments and private information. We show that if public signals carry no information about private types, then an exact relationship holds: a more informative public signal structure, in the sense of Blackwell, induces a smaller set of ex-ante implementable social choice functions. This holds for a large set of implementation standards, including Nash implementation, and Bayesian incentive compatibility. The result extends the notion, dating to Hirshleifer (1971), that public information can have negative value to an endowment economy under uncertainty.Received: 23 September 2003, Accepted: 30 July 2004, JEL Classification: D80Colin M. Campbell: I thank two referees and seminar participants at the 2002 meetings of the Society for Economic Design, at the 2003 Winter Meetings of the Econometric Society, and at Yale University for helpful input.     

Responses to public sector reform policy

Abstract

The article compares the ways in which different public sector organizations respond to similar federal government demands for public sector reform. The empirical basis of the article is a comparison of public sector reform in three agencies managing road systems in three Australian states. There are two constants in the research; namely, the nature of the responsibilities of the agencies with respect to the road network, and the demands of federal government policy for road reform throughout Australia. Yet within the ambit of these two constants, there is a distinctive contrast in the way the agencies have approached and implemented both policy and reforms. The article uses Hood's framework for viable organizational design options for variables relating to grid and group as an explanatory model for the results obtained from the research. Furthermore, it examines the utility of Hood's four styles of public sector organizations in order to explain different change outcomes in the three agencies studied.     

Barriers to innovation and public policy in Catalonia

The present paper analyses the link between firms’ decisions to innovate and the barriers that prevent them from being innovative. The aim is twofold. First, it analyses three groups of barriers to innovation: the cost of innovation projects, lack of knowledge and market conditions. Second, it presents the main steps taken by Catalan Government to promote the creation of new firms and to reduce barriers to innovation. The data set used is based on the 2004 official innovation survey of Catalonia which was taken from the Spanish CIS4 sample. This sample includes individual information on 2,954 Catalan firms in manufacturing industries and knowledge-intensive services (KIS). The empirical analysis reveals pronounced differences regarding a firm’s propensity to innovate and its perception of barriers. Moreover, the results show that cost and knowledge barriers seem to be the most important and that there are substantial sectoral differences in the way that firms react to barriers. The results of this paper have important implications for the design of future public policy to promote entrepreneurship and innovation together.

The development of industrial clusters and public policy

This paper assesses the relationships between public policy and the development of industrial clusters. A conceptual model of the relationship between public policies and the development of industrial clusters is developed and tested using data from 43 European industrial clusters. The results indicate that most government policies have no significant impact on the growth of industrial clusters or for the development of co-operation within industrial clusters. There is limited evidence that packages of government policies that are specifically geared towards improving the local asset base are effective in overcoming obstacles to growth of industrial clusters. However, when age is used as a control variable the weak relationship between policy packages and growth of industrial clusters disappear. The results indicate that individual and packages of public policies are not strongly connected to either high levels of co-operation, or high growth in industrial clusters. Moreover, no clear evidence was found that high levels of co-operation were associated with growth in industrial districts. In the light of the failure to find clear-cut associations between public policies and the development of industrial clusters the paper outlines a research agenda to help to increase our understanding of these issues.     

基于多中心治理的公共政策产出机制研究

公共政策产出存在多种机制：政府主导的“内生型”、公众有限参与的政府“回应型”、多中心治理下的“网络型”等。多种政策产出机制在各民主制国家都是并存的,只是由于民主政治发展程度不同,三者所占比重不等而已。在治理理论成为一种政治思潮的今天,多中心的“网络型”政策产出机制受到更多欢迎和关注。这既给传统的政策产出机制带来了一系列影响,也使得该机制的不足得以暴露,如何进一步优化这一政策产出机制成为亟待解决的问题。     

Policy capacity and evidence-based policy in the public service

Governments in many jurisdictions have called for an increase in ‘evidence-based’ policy-making. However, the international evidence-based policy movement has so far shown little progress in transforming the way that public policy is formulated and implemented. Much research on evidence-based policy has focused on political interference and contextual frames of reference as barriers to the uptake of research evidence. With the support of data from a survey of over 2,000 Australian public servants, we argue that individual and organizational deficits can leave the public service structurally unprepared for an engagement with diverse forms of evidence, including academic research in particular.     

公共租赁房退出机制及其政策选择

我国正在大力发展公共租赁房,但对公共租赁房退出机制的理论研究目前仍比较缺乏。在梳理相关文献的基础上,运用博弈论和比较研究的方法,指出政府管理部门应采取的策略,并对公共租赁房不同退出机制的效果进行了分析。结合我国的实际情况,认为应采取自愿退出、强制退出和激励退出相结合的方式创新我国公共租赁房的退出机制。     

The end of public housing as we know it: public housing policy,labor regulation and the US city

In this article I argue that the US public housing policy, as codified by the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 (QHWRA), is helping to reconfigure the racial and class structure of many inner cities. By promoting the demolition of public housing projects and replacement with mixed‐income housing developments, public housing policy is producing a gentrified inner‐city landscape designed to attract middle and upper‐class people back to the inner city. The goals of public housing policy are also broadly consonant with those of welfare reform wherein the ‘workfare’ system helps to bolster and produce the emergence of contingent low‐wage urban labor markets. In a similar manner, I argue that public housing demonstration programs, such as the ‘Welfare‐to‐Work’ initiative, encourage public housing residents to join the lowwage labor market. Although the rhetoric surrounding the demolition of public housing emphasizes the economic opportunities made available by residential mobility, I argue that former public housing residents are simply being relocated into private housing within urban ghettos. Such a spatial fix to the problems of unemployment and poverty will not solve the problems of inner‐city poverty. Will it take another round of urban riots before we seriously address the legacy of racism and discrimination that has shaped the US city? Cet article démontre que la politique du logement public américaine, telle que la réglemente la Loi de 1998, Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, contribue à remodeler la structure par races et classes de nombreux quartiers déshérités des centres‐villes. En favorisant la démolition d'ensembles de logements sociaux et leur remplacement par des complexes urbanisés à loyers variés, la politique publique génère un embourgeoisement des centres‐villes destinéà y ramener les classes moyennes et supérieures. Les objectifs de la politique du logement rejoignent largement ceux de la réforme sociale où le système de ‘l'allocation conditionnelle’ facilite et nourrit la création de marchés contingents du travail à bas salaires. De même, les programmes expérimentaux de logements publics, telle l'initiative Welfare‐to‐Work (De l'aide sociale au travail) poussent les habitants des logements sociaux à rejoindre le marchéde la main d'?uvre à bas salaires. Bien que les discours autour de la démolition des logements sociaux mettent en avant les ouvertures économiques créées par la mobilité résidentielle, leurs anciens habitants sont simplement en train d'être déplacés vers des logements privés situés dans des ghettos urbains. Ce genre de solution spatiale aux problèmes du chômage et de la pauvreté ne viendra pas à bout du dénuement des quartiers déshérités du centre. Faudra‐t‐il une autre série d'émeutes urbaines pour que l'on aborde sérieusement l'héritage de racisme et de discrimination qui a façonné les villes américaines?     

Altruism and economic behavior: II--private charity and public policy

A bstract . The relative advantages of private charitable organizations as against government agencies in achieving efficient redistribution of income and supply of services are examined. Central to this discussion is the elasticity of private giving to tax concessions and the propoition of donor dollars being absorbed in overhead. Recent estimates of these magnitudes are summarized. Of parallel concern is to what extent can reliance on altruism by sellers of goods and services serve as a substitute for government regulations to enforce standards, prices or product disclosures. Finally, the ways in which government can use and encourage private charitable impulse to maximize social welfare are examined; of particular interest here is the literature surrounding Richard Titmuss' work on blood donorsbip which raises the issue of whether or not extension of markets reduces, rather than extends, individual choice. The growing technological complexities of society, it is concluded, render the altruistic virtues of trust and consideration increasingly valuable—if increasingly rare.     

Operational performance of U.S. public rail transit and implications for public policy

In today's tough economic environment, governments at all levels face significant budget shortfalls and public rail transit systems must compete with other public services for government subsidies. It is critical that public rail transit systems be concerned with their operational performance and efficient use of resources. In this paper, we develop a methodology that measures a rail transit system's performance relative to that of other rail transit systems, compares its performance to an appropriate efficient benchmark system, and identifies the sources of its inefficiency. We analyze the relationship between public subsidies and operational performance of public rail systems and show an inverse relationship between subsidization and efficiency.