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Budgeting is a work in progress. The process is never quite settled because those who manage it are never fully satisfied. To budget is to decide on the basis of inadequate information, often without secure knowledge of how past appropriations were used or of what was accomplished, or of the results that new allocations may produce. Most people involved in budgeting have experienced the frustration of having their preferences crowded out by the built-in cost of past actions. Budgeting is a deadline-driven process, in which sub-optimal decisions often are the norm because government does not have the option of making no decisions. When one cycle ends, the next begins, usually with little respite and along the same path that was trod the year before. The routines of budgeting dull conflict, but they also are a breeding ground for frustration.
An early criticism of the Stability and Growth Pact has pointed to its asymmetric nature and the weak mechanisms to prevent politically-motivated fiscal policies: its constraints would bite in downswings but not in upswings, especially if in the latter the electoral cycle increases the temptation to run expansionary policies. We find that the experience of the initial years of EMU lends support to this criticism. Overall, unlike the experience in the run-up to EMU, fiscal policies had an expansionary bias, and a “genuine” discretionary boost took place in correspondence to political elections. Both sign and composition of such discretionary changes are in line with the predictions of the recent literature on electoral budget cycles. Closer fiscal surveillance may help detect early such behaviour, but it is unlikely to curb the incentives to run politically-motivated fiscal policies when elections approach ...
National systems of higher education became more diversified in the process of expansion. They vary substantially, however, according to the extent of diversity. Also, the major dimensions of diversification tend to play different roles: types of institutions, types of programmes, levels of programmes and degrees, and variations in reputation and prestige within formally equal institutions and programmes. Theories provide various explanations regarding the dynamics of diversification and the role the different dimensions play. Actually, some countries reduced the role of diversification according to institutional types in the 1990s, while others established new types. The "Bologna Process" underscores a growing role of levels of programmes and degrees in most European countries. It remains to be seen what impact these changes have on the stratification of the higher education systems and with respect to the encouragement or discouragement of individual institutions to develop specific profiles and thus to contribute to horizontal diversity.
Canada’s experience in creating new organisational forms for service delivery is a product of its distinct culture and its political form, federalism. In 1867, Canada adopted a federal form of government. Because the new country included diverse linguistic, cultural and regional communities, federalism was seen as a compromise between full integration of the independent colonies and the status quo. Its champions thought that it would unite different communities under a common government for common purposes while preserving and respecting their differences and diversity through the creation of separate regional governments.
In the context of English-speaking countries, the term agency is used as an umbrella concept for different forms of what is called in the Dutch context "privatisation" (i.e. devolution and delegation of power to more autonomous bodies). To assist in understanding the Dutch situation, this paper will discuss first a conceptual framework which runs as a thread through this chapter...
This paper was prepared for the OECD-IEA Climate Change Expert Group (formerly called the Annex I Expert Group) for the purpose of providing useful and timely input on specific topics relevant to international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The papers do not represent the views of the OECD, the IEA, or their member countries, rather they are Secretariat information papers intended to help inform countries as well as the UNFCCC audience on key technical issues in the international climate change negotiations.
Latin America has long had the most unequally distributed income in the world because of land ownership patterns, development and education policies and demography, which have swelled the supply of unskilled labour and demand for skilled workers, leading to widening inequality. Import substitution produced high growth but also high inequality and led to a debt crisis. But globalisation reforms in the 1990s did not reduce inequality and sometimes increased it. Now, because of poor export performance, the priority is the tricky problem of how to boost the growth rate. The aim should be to absorb as much of the region’s excess of unskilled labour as possible, especially through construction and agriculture. Growth with equity should also focus on supporting and investing in backward regions. But the long-term key is education, which will narrow skill differentials, reduce inequality and increase the growth rate ...
This paper presents empirical estimates of human-capital augmented growth equations for a panel of 21 OECD countries over the period 1971-98. It uses an improved dataset on human capital and a novel econometric technique that reconciles growth model assumptions with the needs of panel data regressions. Unlike several previous studies, our results point to a positive and significant impact of human capital accumulation to output per capita growth. The estimated long-run effect on output of one additional year of education (about 6 per cent) is also consistent with microeconomic evidence on the private returns to schooling. We also found a significant growth effect from the accumulation of physical capital and a speed of convergence to the steady state of around 15 per cent per year. Taken together these results are not consistent with the human capital augmented version of the Solow model, but rather they support an endogenous growth model à la Uzawa-Lucas, with constant returns to ...
This paper examines the robustness of explanatory variables in cross-country economic growth regressions. It employs a novel approach, Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE), which constructs estimates as a weighted average of OLS estimates for every possible combination of included variables. The weights applied to individual regressions are justified on Bayesian grounds in a way similar to the well-known Schwarz criterion. Of 32 explanatory variables we find 11 to be robustly partially correlated with long-term growth and another five variables to be marginally related. Of all the variables considered, the strongest evidence is for the initial level of real GDP per capita ...
Evidence of public concerns about globalisation is pervasive -- in the newspapers, on the Internet and more formal discussions of public policy. The business community has been attempting to position itself with respect to these concerns. Indeed, voluntary efforts to define and implement appropriate standards for business conduct constitute one of the more prominent managerial developments in recent years. These efforts have also often involved significant contributions from NGOs, governments and intergovernmental organisations.
The issuance of voluntary codes of conduct has been an important facet of these developments. Such codes are voluntary expressions of commitment made by an organisation to influence or control behaviour for the benefit of the organisation itself and for the communities in which it operates. Private companies and associations of companies have issued such codes, calling them codes of conduct, ethics statements or guidelines, in response to both internal and ...
Following the revision of the Oslo Manual (1997) and the preparation of the second Community Innovation Survey (CIS-2), a number of OECD and NESTI observer countries have carried out (or are preparing) new innovation surveys. According to national policy needs, these new national innovation surveys may or may not fully follow the Oslo Manual methodology and/or the proposed CIS-2 questionnaire prepared by EUROSTAT in co-operation with national experts and the OECD.
The following document is intended to provide the main characteristics of national innovation surveys carried out (or intended to be carried out) in 1997-99 in OECD non-CIS-2 participants and NESTI observer countries. After a summary description of all national innovation surveys (including CIS-2 participants), more detailed information is presented by country for non-CIS-2 participants. This basic information will be helpful in evaluating the extent to which internationally comparable information could be expected from ...
Corruption in customs administrations is a major problem in many African countries. Data from the period 1990-96 are used to examine several hypotheses concerning the determinants of customs fraud in Senegal and Mali. Statistical tests using product-by-product data support the widely held view that high levels of taxation lead to fraud. The findings also show that hiring a pre-shipment inspection company can be an effective tool in fighting corruption, but only if it is accompanied by internal reforms like computerisation of customs procedures. Finally, changes in determinants of corruption, such as levels of taxation, have themselves depended upon broader political changes in each of the two countries ...