Auditing government revenues in Iraq

This article looks at the sources of government revenue in Iraq. It shows the level of the country's dependency on oil revenues and highlights the consequent need to diversify government revenue sources and move to a more stable situation, which is appropriate for a developing country. The study comments on the role of auditing to secure the revenue streams and minimize opportunities for corruption.     

Enabling Continuous and Discontinuous Innovation: Learning From the Private Sector

Much of the research on innovation to date has been on the private sector (and, within that, biased towards manufacturing) but the processes involved are equally relevant to the public as well as the private sector. This article looks at how innovation is organized and managed, at the routines needed to accomplish the task and at challenges posed by different types of innovation under 'steady-state' and 'discontinuous' conditions. It argues that there is a strong case for learning across public and private sectors, not just in terms of transferring well-proven lessons (adaptive learning), but also for 'generative learning'—building on shared experimentation and comparison of experiences around discontinuous innovation.     

A Model of the Confidence Channel of Fiscal Policy

This article presents a simple macroeconomic model where government spending affects aggregate demand directly and indirectly, through an expectational channel. Prices are fully flexible and the model is static, so intertemporal issues play no role. There are three important elements in the model: (i) fixed adjustment costs for investment, which create an inaction zone; (ii) noisy idiosyncratic information about the aggregate economy; and (iii) imperfect substitution among private goods and goods provided by the government. An increase in government spending raises demand for private goods and may prevent a coordination failure. The optimal level of government expenditure is high when the desired level of investment is low, which we interpret as a time of low economic activity.     

Management, Politics and Non-Departmental Public Bodies

This article addresses the 'quango' problem facing an incoming government. It explores the difficulties for embarking on policy innovation faced by modern British governments, and then looks at the problems of defining and charting Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs), before analysing the effects of managerial and structural reform and the issue of politicization. Finally, the article discusses the benefits that an incoming government will reap from many of the reforms of the last decade.     

Learning through Partnership: Private Finance and Managementin the Delivery of Services for London

This article looks at the attractiveness of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) to the private sector. One of the authors works for Jarvis plc—the company has been a major participant in PFI projects and, more recently, in various PPPs in London and across the UK. The article aims to identify a realistic model of the role of the private sector in PPPs. The authors use three case studies from London to recommend ways of improving the partnership element of PPPs in order to reach a 'win-win' situation, rather than the traditional adversarial approach between private and public sectors.     

Revolutionary change in our worldview?

Fritjof Capra has become internationally known through two pioneering books, both best sellers, titled The Tao of Physics and The Turning Point. His third book, Green Politics which he wrote with Charlene Spretnak, was published in May 1984. The central theme which runs through all his work is the paradigmatic change in the Western view of the world. This article is taken from several conversations which Bart van Steenbergen had with Fritjof Capra. It begins with some background information and then looks at Fritjof Capra's work over the past 15 years.     

农技推广投资不足分析及对策建议

农技推广投资中政府投资和民营资本投入都是不足的。论文从总量、人均数量和基层农技推广机构获得的财政支持三个方面分析了政府投资不足的现状,民营资本投入不足主要表现为民营投资主体经营规模偏小和融资困难。在此基础上,提出了相应的政策建议。     

Ultimate confusion: The economics of Julian Simon

This article argues that there are profound mistakes and exaggerations in Simon's influential and popular ideas. It discusses Simon's denial of resource finitude and his views that neither ecology nor entropy exists. Finally it looks at Simon's The Resourceful Earth as an attack on Global 2000.     

The state of future in international relations

This paper elaborates the state of Future in International Relations from a comparative theoretical perspective with regard to the selected methodological tools of Futures Studies. It, first, looks into the development of International Relations and Futures Studies to point out, how their contextual, conceptual and epistemological similarities and dissimilarities emerged in due course. It, then, analyses to what extent the methodological differences between selected Futures Studies techniques (e.g. forecasting, trend analysis, Delphi, backcasting, causal layered analysis and integral futures approach) intersect with the conceptual and normative differences between contemporary theories of International Relations stemming from Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, Post-structuralism, Normative Theory and Critical Theory. The paper characterizes the relevant futures techniques with reference to the theories of International Relations, and scrutinizes selected futuristic narratives of International Relations from a methodological perspective. It, then, elaborates how Futures Studies and International Relations can benefit from each other’s strengths in terms of their methodologies and assumptions. The article finally explores to what extent the promises of Futures Studies techniques conjure up a convergence between different theories of International Relations.     

Think tanks—Who needs them?: Advising a government in a democratic society

In democratic societies the government may be advised on policy problems by bodies of individuals not part of the government. These bodies are called external advisory bodies and are composed of either individuals representing a group in society or individuals representing themselves. For example, the Netherlands Social Economic Council (SER) is composed of representatives from the labour unions and the employer organizations and of crown appointees. This article looks at the contribution these bodies can make to the functioning of a democratic society. It focuses on the role of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy.     

Why government banks underperform: A political interference view

This study proposes a political interference hypothesis to explain how political considerations depress the performance of government banks. We define political interference as a situation in which government bank executives are replaced within 12 months after the country’s major elections (presidential or parliamentary elections). We classify political and non-political government banks as those that experience or do not experience political interference, respectively. The hypothesis firstly suggests that once government banks undertake political interference, their financial performance deteriorates. That is, political banks display the worst performance, followed by non-political banks and private banks have the best performance. Next, we posit that the impact of political interference is greater in developing countries than in developed countries. Finally, we hypothesize that the underperformance of government banks will be reduced if we remove political interference. By employing bank data from 65 countries from the period of 2003–2007, our hypothesis effectively explains why government banks in developed countries escape relatively unscathed, while those in developing countries suffer significantly.     

Why Has Poland Avoided the Price Liberalization Trap? The Case of the Hog-Pork Sector

Price liberalization in the agrifood economy in the transitioneconomies is likely to slip into a trap: food prices rocketup, consumption declines, but food supply does not catch upand even contracts. However, during the transition period followingthe 1989 price liberalization, the Polish hog-pork sector succeededin avoiding this trap. By conducting market structure and econometricanalysis, this article looks for the reasons for this success. In the Polish hog-pork sector the restructuring of state-ownedenterprises and the emergence of private firms introduced aneffective price transmission mechanism between the processing-retailingand farm levels. This mechanism allowed farm supply to respondto changed demand and to take advantage of increased retailprices. Such a relatively efficient marketing system was madepossible by a relatively stable macroeconomic environment andlimited government intervention.     

Forecasting Medical Net Discount Rates

Determining the present value of future medical costs is an important issue for a variety of public and private entities. This article examines the time‐series properties of medical net discount rates and considers the implications for forecasting. The article provides evidence that the standard autoregressive moving average forecasting model may be improved by modeling the time‐varying volatility characteristics of the medical net discount rates.     

Exchange rates,innovations and forecasting

In this paper an ex-post forecasting experiment is performed on the basis of a version of the ‘news’ model of exchange rate determination. For several exchange rates the ‘news’ formulation of monetary exchange rate models leads to relatively accurate ex-post exchange rate forecasts at a number of forecasting horizons. For a majority of the exchange rates studied, however, the results do not compare favorably with those obtained from the naive random walk forecasting rule. Thus, the findings in this article provide mixed evidence with regard to a suggestion in the literature that the finding by Meese and Rogoff that structural models do not even outperform the random walk in an ex-post forecasting experiment, may be due to the fact that these models were not properly tested in a ‘news’ framework.     

对民营企业融资问题的思考

资金短缺是民营企业发展面临的最大难题，我们应从政府部门、银行及企业自身等方面综合、系统、地考虑这一问题。本文系统的分析了目前民营企业的融资现状及融资困难的原因，并从政府、银行和企业三方面提出了解决民营企业融资障碍的措施，力求为民营企业提供有效的发展建议。     

Longevity Bonds: Financial Engineering, Valuation, and Hedging

This article examines the main characteristics of longevity bonds (LBs) and shows that they can take a large variety of forms which can vary enormously in their sensitivities to longevity shocks. We examine different ways of financially engineering LBs and consider problems arising from the dearth of ultra‐long government bonds and the choice of the reference population index. The article also looks at valuation issues in an incomplete markets context and finishes with an examination of how LBs can be used as a risk management tool for hedging longevity risks.     

The Political Economy of Government-Issued Longevity Bonds

This article explores the trade‐offs associated with government issuance of longevity bonds as a way of stimulating private annuity supply in the presence of aggregate mortality risk. We provide new calculations suggesting a 5 percent chance that aggregate mortality risk could ex post raise annuity costs for private insurers by as much as 5–10 percentage points, with the most likely effect based on historical patterns toward the lower end of that range. While we suspect that aggregate mortality risk does exert some upward pressure on annuity prices, evidence from private market pricing suggests that, to the extent that private insurers are accurately pricing this risk, the effect is less than 5 percentage points. We discuss ways that the private market can spread this risk, while emphasizing that the government has the unique ability to spread aggregate risk across generations. We note factors that might hamper such an efficient allocation of risk, including potential political incentives for the government to shift more than the optimal amount of risk onto future generations, and the possibility that government fiscal policy might allocate risk less efficiently within each generation than would private markets. We also discuss how large‐scale longevity bond issuance might affect government borrowing costs, as well as political economy aspects of how the proceeds from such a bond issuance might be used.     

Does the economy matter? Tough times,good times,and public service motivation

This paper describes a pilot study which explored the effects of different economic conditions on the public service motivation (PSM) levels of a small group of government and private sector employees in Malaysia. It address three questions: are the PSM levels of government employees significantly higher than those of private sector employees; are the PSM levels of employees significantly influenced by their perceptions of the external economic environment; and is the relationship between the economy and PSM affected by the sector of employment? Government employees’ PSM levels were found to be higher than those of the private sector employees, and were sensitive to perceptions of different economic conditions.     

Der Umfang des Ruhens der Leistungspflicht des Versicherers in der privaten Krankenversicherung

In this essay the author looks at the figure of the rest of the insurer’s duty of performance in German private health insurance as it is regulated in section 193 p. 6 VVG. After describing the basic rules, she analyses which kinds of performance rest and which the insurer despite the rest of his duty has to fulfill. In this case the author, too, looks at the opinion formulated in literature that the rest means a restriction to the level of the basic tariff. She concludes that the purpose of the figure intended by the legislator, having a sanction for non-paying policyholders, is not achieved.     

Volatility forecasts,proxies and loss functions

The main problem in volatility forecasting is that the variable of interest is unobservable, which complicates not only the construction of forecasts but also their comparison. This article challenges the common practice of using only proxy-robust loss functions, which have the nice property that they lead to the same ranking of forecasts regardless whether the unobservable true volatility is used or some unbiased proxy. It is shown that two proxy-robust loss functions need not necessarily produce similar rankings but may even produce completely contradictory rankings. Two likelihood-based loss functions are proposed instead, which are not exactly proxy-robust but are still robust in the classical sense. The first is based on a t-distribution and is meant for daily data. The second is based on an F-distribution and is meant for high-frequency data. In the latter case, the squared error loss function may also be used when a logarithmic transformation is applied to the realized variances in order to achieve approximate normality. An alternative transformation is proposed which allows the adaptation to the degree of non-normality. The forecasting procedures that are compared by the different loss functions include GARCH, HAR, HARQ, and MIDAS models as well as nonparametric techniques. Finally, the economic relevance of choosing the right forecast is illustrated with the problem of establishing the intertemporal risk–return tradeoff. All theoretical arguments are backed up with empirical evidence obtained from daily data as well as from high-frequency data.