Public goods and the paying public

This paper proposes a way to undercut anarchist objections to taxation without endorsing an authoritarian justification of government coercion. The argument involves public goods, as understood by economists and others. But I do not analyse options of autonomous prisoners and the like; for, however useful otherwise, these abstractions underestimate the real-world task of sorting out the prerogatives of and limits on ownership. Proceeding more contextually, I come to recommend a shareholder addendum to the doctrine of public goods. This recommendation involves modifying the public goods argument for government coercion to include a contributor-specific compensation provisio, thinking of contributors as investors, and including among the latter those whose investment is in the form not of a market transaction strictly speaking but of sacrifice. To reach this recommendation I constrain the market liberal's limited endorsement of taxation by drawing on the (idealized) postcommunist privatizer's continuing commitment to populism.Edmund F. Byrne is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University in Indianapolis. His research interests center on policy and practices regarding technology, community, and social welfare. His most recent book isWork, Inc. (Temple University Press, 1990); and he is now writing another tentatively subtitledDemocracy, Civil Society, and Benevolence.     

On the measurement of imported inflation in developing countries

Zusammenfassung Zur Messung der importierten Inflation in Entwicklungsl?ndern. — W?hrend die Inflationsraten in allen Entwicklungsl?ndern in letzter Zeit stark angestiegen sind, war der Anstieg in den einzelnen L?ndern sehr unterschiedlich. Dies erh?hte das Interesse daran, den Teil der Preissteigerung festzustellen, der auf ?u\ere Einflüsse zurückzuführen ist. Hier wird die Ansicht vertreten, da\ die relative Bedeutung der importierten Inflation leicht überbetont werden kann, wenn man bei Entwicklungsl?ndern mit Annahmen arbeitet, die üblicherweise für Industriel?nder angewandt werden. Insbesondere dürften in Entwicklungsl?ndern Abweichungen der Produktion vom Trend aus verschiedenen Gründen ein schlechtes Ma\ für einen Nachfrageüberschu\ sein. Es trifft auch nicht notwendigerweise zu, da\ Entwicklungsl?nder ausl?ndische Reserveflüsse nicht neutralisieren k?nnen. Unter diesen Umst?nden dürfte — wie am Beispiel der Philippinen gezeigt wird — eine Geldmengen-Preis-Gleichung weit erfolgreicher sein, zwischen Importpreisen und inl?ndischem Nachfragesog als Ursache der Inflation zu unterscheiden.

---

Résumé Sur le mesurage d’inflation importée dans des pays en voie de développement. — Pendant que les taux d’inflation ont fortement accéléré dans des pays développants récemment, les accroissements ont varié considérablement dans les pays augmentant l’intérêt d’identifier cette partie d’inflation là qui est due aux causes externes. Ici nous arguons que l’application des suppositions aux pays développants utilisées communément pour des pays développés peut facilement exagérer l’importance relative de l’inflation importée. Particulièrement, pour les pays développants, les déviations de la tendance de production seront une bonne mesure de la demande d’excès pour des nombreuses raisons. Il n’est pas aussi nécessairement vrai que les pays en voie de développement ne peuvent pas stériliser les afflux des changes. Sous ces circonstances, nous démonstrons pour les Philippines qu’une quantité d’équation de prix d’argent peut avoir beaucoup plus de succès de distinguer entre les prix d’importation et les pressions de démande locale comme sources d’inflation.

---

Resumen Sobre la medición de la inflaci⤵ importada en países en desarrollo. — Mientras las tasas de inflaci⤵ recientemente se han acelerado en forma acentuada en los países en desarrollo, los aumentos han variado considerablemente a traves de países, elevando el interés por identificar la parte de la inflación debida a causas externas. Aquí se argumenta que la aplicación de supuestos comunmente utilizados para países desarrollados en paises en desarrollo pueden exagerar fácilmente la importancia relativa de la inflación importada. En particular, para países en desarrollo, desviaciones de la trayectoria de productión serán por varias razones una medida poco satisfactoria para el exceso de demanda. Tampoco es necesariamente cierto que los países en desarrollo no pueden esterilizar los flujos de moneda extranjera. Bajo estas circunstancias, como se muestra para las Filipinas, una ecuación preciocantidad de dinero puede ser mucho más exitosa para la distributión entre precios de importatión y presiones de demanda doméstica como fuentes de inflación.

     

Market Integration Without Policy Integration: A Comparison of the Shortcomings of Mercosur and the Eurozone

ABSTRACT

The major problem of Mercosur has been the lack of any policy coordination, which has resulted in periodic crises among member countries. It was thought that the Eurozone parts of the European Union represented a more mature institution, because member countries were willing to waive sovereignty over a major policy instrument (monetary policy), while maintaining independence over fiscal policy. The result of this, however, has led to even greater distortions than had there been no macroeconomic coordination at all.     

Post-privatization performance and organizational changes: Case studies from Ghana

A significant number of less developed countries (LDCs), including Ghana, have embraced the World Bank/IMF led economic reforms. Ghana has been implementing these reforms since the early 1980. One of the conditions of the reforms is the privatization of former state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Such privatization activities have however generated debates among academics, practitioners, and policy makers. Research findings so far have been mixed. This paper analyzes the performance of two large privatized companies in Ghana. Both companies have been paraded by the Ghanaian authorities and the international financial community as success stories of privatization. Our objective is to examine how and why these firms have been claimed to be successful. Drawing on the dimensions of the balanced scorecard, we examine the performance of the firms from five main perspectives—financial, customers, internal business process, learning and growth, and the community. The analysis is based on data gathered from diverse sources, namely, semi-structured interviews and discussions with managers of the selected companies and with personnel from key government departments, and analysis of internal and external documents. We conclude that, overall the performance of both organizations improved after privatization under all the performance dimensions examined. These improvements were also accompanied by certain organizational changes, including changes in the accounting and control systems. However we are not claiming that all privatization programs in Ghana have been successful. In fact there are stories in the Ghanaian media of several other privatization failures in the country. Instead what we have demonstrated is the need to explain the performance of privatized firms beyond the myopic macro-level and financial analysis which has been widely adopted by the international financial community and policy makers and we encourage other researchers to adopt such multidimensional approaches.     

Making Drones to Kill Civilians: Is it Ethical?

A drone industry has emerged in the US, initially funded almost exclusively for military applications. There are now also other uses both governmental and commercial (in the US and abroad). Many military drones are still being made, however, especially for surveillance and targeted killings. Regarding the latter, this essay calls into question their legality and morality. It recognizes that the issues are complex and controversial, but less so as to the killing of non-combatant civilians. The government using drones for targeted killings maintains secrecy and appeals to non-traditional justifications. Most scholars who assess these killer drone practices support citizen immunity, either by favoring a modified just war theory that prioritizes civilians’ right to life or by challenging official deviations from applicable laws. They accordingly declare such killing immoral if not a war crime. The manufacturers of these killer drones are not themselves the killers, but they are abetters, i.e., sine qua non facilitators. So, I argue that any company concerned about its corporate social responsibility should cease manufacturing them.     

Rent seeking and the value of time

This paper focuses on the question of how rivals’ rent-seeking expenditures and investment expenditures are affected by the temporal dimension of those cash flows as well as the timing of the cash flow of monopoly rents. The paper applies methods from statistical reliability theory to derive five propositions establishing the conditions that must be satisfied if the rivals apportion their rent seeking and investment expenditures to maximize their certainty equivalents of the monopoly rent. The propositions explicate the responses of the rivals to changes in economic parameters characterizing the rent-seeking contest such as a change in the duration of the monopoly rent cash flow or a change in the number of rivals.     

Using artificial neural network and multivariate analysis techniques to evaluate road operating conditions

Regional paved roads are low volume roads with a prevalence of heavy traffic. In the world, these roads concern about 80% of the total road network; however, the traffic that affects these roads is about 20%. Since regional roads are characterized by weak demand, budget for their management/maintenance is very low. This produces considerable difficulties in the choice of strategies for maintenance planning and scheduling. For this reason, the recurring topics of research in this field deal with typical roads issues and aim to develop low cost tools and methods. The study proposes a decision support system to evaluate regional paved roads operating condition in relation to the hydrogeological situation. In particular, the system allows to evaluate in a quick and easy manner, the operating conditions of the road, through low-cost tools (i.e. using low economic resources). This is very useful in the case of LVRs because administrations for these roads have a limited budget. The procedure is developed on a regional paved roads network based on more than 80 roads located in Southern Italy. Data is collected by direct surveys in the field and is integrated with cartography and information available in road agency records. From data analysis, obtained using two different techniques, an easy and quick use procedure is made. In particular, Model 1 is built through multivariate analysis and Model 2 using the artificial neural network (ANN) technique. The results show the validity of the two models in Regional paved roads operating conditions estimation in relation to hydrogeological situations of sites. Both models show good reliability. In particular, the first model (Model 1) is characterized by a high level of significance (p < 0.01) and by a coefficient of determination equal to 0.82. Comparative tests between the second model (Model 2) on which standard tests cannot be performed for obvious reasons, and the first model (Model 1). The results show that the ANN model (model 2), characterized by lower residual, simulates more accurately than the second (Model 1).