Macroeconomic Adjustment and the Poor: Analytical Issues and Cross‐Country Evidence

Abstract.  This paper studies the links between macroeconomic adjustment and poverty. The first part summarizes some of the recent evidence on poverty in the developing world. The second reviews the various channels through which macroeconomic policies affect the poor, whereas the third is devoted to the specific role of the labor market. It presents an analytical framework that captures some of the main features of the urban labor market in developing countries and studies the effects of fiscal adjustment on wages, employment, and poverty. The fourth part presents cross‐country regressions linking various macroeconomic and structural variables to poverty. Higher levels and growth rates of per capita income, higher rates of real exchange rate depreciation, better health conditions, and a greater degree of commercial openness lower poverty, whereas inflation, greater income inequality, and macroeconomic volatility tend to increase it. Moreover, the impact of growth on poverty appears to be asymmetric; it seems to result from a significant relationship between episodes of increasing poverty and negative growth rates.     

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY: POLICY AND MEASUREMENT PARADIGMS

Abstract Equality of opportunity is a widely accepted principle of distributive justice and it is the leading idea of most political platforms in several countries. According to this principle, a society might institute policies that secure an equal distribution of the means to reach a valuable outcome among its members. Once the set of opportunities have been equalized, which particular opportunity, the individual chooses from those open to her, is outside the scope of justice. Ex ante inequalities, and only those inequalities, should be eliminated or compensated for by public intervention. The recent literature on the opportunity egalitarianism often merges these questions introducing two different economic issues. On one side the design of a public policy intended to implement the equality of opportunity view and on the other side the problem of measuring the degree of opportunity inequality in a society. We describe the basic setting and assumptions of some different approaches derived by Roemer’s algorithm for public policy and then we discuss some theoretical and empirical studies to separate and test alternative paradigms on the measurement of inequality of opportunity. Accordingly, an extended critique on the causality issue on policies and measurements is taken into account.     

英国住房保障政策的体系、进展与反思

英国是世界上最早实施政府干预住房市场的国家,早在1919年颁布的《住房和城镇规划法》中就明确规定居民住房问题为公共事务,政府对此负有义务。经过不断的摸索和改进,英国的住房保障政策从起初的政府直接供给公共住房,逐渐向政府以财政、金融等手段鼓励扶持社会化公共住房的建造与运营转变。本文对英国20世纪90年代以来的住房保障体系演变与发展现状做了介绍,并重点对扶持政策、资助项目、主管机构、融资方式等方面进行了详细阐述,以期对今后我国住房保障相关政策的研究制定有所启示。     

THE EFFECTS OF DISCRETIONARY FISCAL POLICY ON MACROECONOMIC AGGREGATES: A REAPPRAISAL

Abstract Fiscal stimuli to recover? A cascade of academic and layman articles debate the effectiveness of fiscal policy in stimulating the economy backed up by different economic models and empirical support. This paper surveys the theoretical predictions and recent empirical vector autoregression evidence on the short‐run effects of discretionary fiscal policy on macroeconomic aggregates.     

Public-private partnerships in health care services: Do they outperform public hospitals regarding quality and access? Evidence from Portugal

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are widely spread long-term arrangements between governments and strategic private partner(s). One of their objectives is to reduce the financial pressure on the public treasury with regard to new investments. PPPs have been employed within the health care sector which, in turn, carries a huge social burden. In Portugal, for instance, PPPs in health care concern bundling hospital infrastructure and clinical services management. Notwithstanding the need to ensure sustainability and efficient use of hospital resources, it is clearly compulsory to guarantee that patients receive appropriate and timely care, with maximum security, and equitable manner. Still, little or even no attention has been paid in the literature to the clinical response capacity of PPP hospitals and to the populism arguing that these entities have a lower social performance than typical public hospitals. This study uses robust benchmarking methodologies alongside recent data about Portuguese hospitals (FY2012-FY2017) to demystify this idea and to demonstrate that, actually, PPP hospitals can deliver health care services with social performance levels at least as good as public hospitals.     

基于公共政策导向的区域规划研究——兼论中国区域规划的改革方向

文章剖析了公共政策与区域规划的涵义,指出区域规划是一种公共政策,并建立了两者之间的关系.文章分析了我国区域规划缺乏公共政策属性的有关方面,在解析、借鉴国外区域规划的基础上,探讨了对我国区域规划基于公共政策导向的改革建议.     

Public Policy Issues as a Route to Statistical Awareness

There appears to be a paradox in the fact that as more and more quantitative information becomes routinely available in a world perceived to be ever more complex, there is less and less direct appreciation of the role and power of statistical thinking. It is suggested that the profession should exploit very real public concerns regarding risk aspects of public policy as a possible pedagogic route to raising statistical awareness.     

Issues in New Political Economy: An Overview

A brief overview of the historical background, nature, and rapid growth in volume and scope of new political economy since the early 1980s is provided. the paper continues with some general reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the new political economy approach, illustrated by the other contributions to this special issue of the Journal of Economic Surveys . The final Section summarises these contributions.     

Learning, monetary policy rules, and macroeconomic stability

Several papers have documented a regime switch in US monetary policy from ‘passive’ and destabilizing in the pre-1979 period to ‘active’ and stabilizing afterwards. These studies typically work with DSGE models with rational expectations.This paper relaxes the assumption of rational expectations and allows for learning instead. Economic agents form expectations from simple models and update the parameters through constant-gain learning. In this setting, the paper aims to test whether monetary policy may have been a source of macroeconomic instability in the 1970s by inducing unstable learning dynamics.The model is estimated by Bayesian methods. The constant-gain coefficient is jointly estimated with the structural and policy parameters in the system.The results show that monetary policy was respecting the Taylor principle also in the pre-1979 period and, therefore, did not trigger macroeconomic instability.     

Managing challenges in social care service triads – Exploring public procurement practices of Dutch municipalities

Buying services in a triad constellation is associated with challenges related to quality control, performance monitoring, and a deteriorating information position for the buyer. There is growing attention for service triads in Supply Chain Management (SCM) literature. However, these studies are mainly theoretical. The studies suggest to manage the identified challenges by monitoring supplier performance, maintaining a strong position in the service triad, developing collaborative trusting relationships, using outcome-based contracts, and aligning incentives between buyer and suppliers. Empirical studies on service triads and management mechanisms are rare, especially in a public procurement context. We study the application of management mechanisms in a public procurement context where 393 Dutch municipalities each had to contract social care service providers at the same time. This context allows us to study which of the management mechanisms proposed in literature are actually employed in a public procurement context, and whether other mechanisms are applied that are not addressed in the literature. We find municipalities deviate from traditional bureaucratic procurement procedures and apply a relational approach to the procurement procedure, including establishing social contracts, to cope with buyer challenges in service triads. Furthermore we identify municipalities apply ex post competition to drive up service quality through tendering framework agreements and allowing clients to choose their care provider of choice. This mechanism of ex post competition through the use of framework agreements has not been suggested in service triad literature before, and may be an effective mechanism in other service triads to address service quality and customer needs fulfilment issues.     

公共政策受益者满意度评价

本文结合公共政策评价工作的特点,着重阐述了将“受益者满意度”评价的概念与方法引入公共政策的评价工作中,实施公共政策受益者满意度评价的意义和基本思路。同时从受益者社会体验和个体体验两个方面出发,介绍了公共政策受益者满意度指标评价体系的主要内容。