The development of the Dutch national accounts as a tool for analysis and policy

Since the start of modern national accounting in the 1930s, the Netherlands has played a dominant role in the development of the national accounts. This paper discusses the origins and development of the Dutch national accounts. This includes the surprisingly slow start of political arithmetic in the Netherlands, the views of van Cleeff and Tinbergen on planning and national accounting, the role of Derksen and Oomens as fathers of the Dutch national accounts, the Dutch School of National Accounting, the interaction with national statistics and the role of the international guidelines and the European Union. The paper also takes a look into the future. The major challenges are to bridge the gap with data users and to increase relevance by, e.g. extended accounts, long-term time series on government finance and modules on education, health care and social security.     

The moral significance of gestures

The concept of the gesture is explored in relationship with its moral significance rather than, for example, its aesthetic significance. It is argued that the concept can be used in order to make clear how morality relates to the body. This is not to suggest that gestures can be neatly defined. On the contrary, they always seem to be ambivalent and somewhat nebular. However, it will be shown that some of their significance might well be related to popular concepts such as ‘transparency’, ‘authenticity’, ‘integrity’ and ‘responsibility’. In order to make this clear, the role of some particular gestures in politics and organizational life, most notably ‘apology’ and ‘trust’, will be discussed throughout the paper.     

Wars of attrition and all-pay auctions with stochastic competition

We extend the war of attrition and all-pay auction analysis of Krishna and Morgan (1997) to a stochastic competition setting. We determine the existence of equilibrium bidding strategies and discuss the potential shape of these strategies. Results for the war of attrition contrast with the characterization of the bidding equilibrium strategies in the first-price all-pay auction as well as the winner-pay auctions. Furthermore we investigate the expected revenue comparisons among the war of attrition, the all-pay auction and the winner-pay auctions and discuss the linkage principle as well. Our findings are applicable to future works on contests and charity auctions.     

Prospects for the development of intermediate size cities as part of a decentralisation programme for Southern Africa

he purpose of this paper is to assess the prospects for an intermediate size city strategy as part of the decentralisation programme of Southen Africa. Considering both spatial development and experience elsewhere in the world. South African decentralisation policy has failed to use its full potential to accomplish development objectives. Some general criticism is made of the existing industrial decentralisation programme and the challenges of the 1980s are identified. Against this background, the author advocates an intermediate size city strategy for Southern Africa, discusses some spatial considerations and gives some guidelines for the successful implementation of such a strategy.     

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