Political Profit: Taxing and Spending in the Hierarchical State

A bstract . The actions of government fall into two types: taxes (the taking of property ) and expenditures (the awarding of gifts ). Politicians profit as long as the value of resources raised from taxation exceeds the cost of expenditures. From their point of view, fiscal efficiency consists in maximizing the support obtained by spending and minimizing the opposition generated by taxing. This is accomplished by spending on well-organized groups and taxing the uninformed public. This results in the "iron law of political redistribution" in which income and wealth are transferred from the latter to the former. In a hierarchical State , it is usually profitable for those at the top to centralize control over taxing and spending, if for no other reason than to make it difficult for politicians at lower levels to compete against them. This gives rise to the "law of hierarchical centralization "—in a hierarchical State, power becomes centralized over time. The greater the power of government, the faster this process takes place. In order to avoid this problem, one could design constitutions which are non-hierarchical in nature, in which each unit of government is completely autonomous from the others, as firms are in a free market.     

Future information systems for road transport: A Delphi panel-derived scenario

Modern information and microelectronic technology can be used to improve road traffic. The aim of this study is to create scenarios on how new information systems for improved road traffic can evolve. What are the driving forces? Who can act? Who can benefit? What are the social impacts?Through the use of a Delphi panel of professionals, researchers, and informed generalists, we have gathered impulses for the scenarios on how information technology, communication means, and control systems can reshape future road traffic. The issue studied is how this “Road Transport Informatics” (RTI) will evolve.     

What Contributes to Life Satisfaction in Transitional Romania?

This paper analyzes life satisfaction in Romania in 2001, 12 years after the collapse of communism and the beginning of the transition into a market economy. Using a survey of 1770 individuals, we find that our results are very similar to studies in Western Europe and the USA. Life satisfaction increases with housing standard, health status, economic situation, education, trusting other people, and living in the countryside, and decreases with rising unemployment. However, life satisfaction is lower than in Western countries with about 74% of the people in the sample being not at all satisfied or not quite satisfied with their life in general, and the remaining part being quite satisfied or very satisfied. A policy discussion concludes the paper.     

Sectoral and aggregate technology growth in Spain

In this paper we analyze technological change in the Spanish economy by constructing adjusted Solow residuals, where the adjustment attempts to correct for the bias associated with the potential presence of imperfect competition, increasing returns, variable input utilization and, especially, sectoral reallocation of inputs across sectors. We refer to this modified Solow residual as a technology index. Sectoral reallocations and variable input utilization are key determinants of the differences between the aggregate Solow residual and the technology index resulting from the aggregation of estimated sectoral technological growth. We show that starting in the mid nineties, there has been a deceleration in the aggregate growth rate of technology which is basically due to the behaviour of the manufacturing sectors. Finally, our results imply that aggregate technology growth is less volatile than aggregate productivity as measured by the Solow residual.     

The Geopolitics of Protected Areas

ABSTRACT

The conservation enterprise is embedded in ideas of the environment through which it promotes a vision of the world and the relations between the non-human and human. The papers in this forum analyse conservation from various vantage points to draw the links between geopolitics and conservation. The authors use three themes to demonstrate these links. The first theme draws on the concept of environmentality to show the mobilization of ecological rationalities and power towards the creation of protected areas. The second pays attention to networks formed across the distance, and how they influence the location and governance of protected areas. The third focuses on the strategies the conservation lobby uses to align local identities with global conservation ideals and goals. Collectively, these themes highlight features of conservation geopolitics.     

On the generic impossibility of truthful behavior: A simple approach

Summary We provide an elementary proof showing how in economies with an arbitrary number of agents an arbitrary number of public goods and utility functions quasi-linear in money, any efficient and individually rational mechanism is not strategy-proof for any economy satisfying a mild regularity requirement.The authors wish to thank William Thomson, Salvadpr Barberá, José Angel Silva and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. The remaining errors are our exclusive responsibility. Financial support from DGICYT under project PB 91-0756 and the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas is gratefully acknowledged.