Suchergebnisse

Local government constitutes that part of the public sector that is closest to the inhabitants and is therefore indispensable in its role of promoting their general welfare through, inter alia, undertaking various development initiatives. Furthermore, legislation imposes upon local authorities the obligation to promote the social and economic development of local communities and to participate in implementing national and provincial development programmes. The efficiency and effectiveness with which local government fulfils its developmental role will largely depend on the ability of local authorities to manage development projects. The purpose of this article is to investigate the application of a project management approach as a tool for implementing development programmes in the local government sphere. This is done by means of a comprehensive study of the relevant literature and empirical research based on a research questionnaire that was distributed among selected municipal officials in leadership posts throughout South Africa. The findings of the empirical study are utilised to make specific recommendations with respect to the application of a project management approach to service delivery and local government development initiatives. (Dev South Afr/DÜI)

Since 1986, Tanzania, like many other countries, has experienced a remarkable political and economic transition. Formerly a one-party state with a planned economy, the country is now multiparty democracy with a market-oriented economy and has undergone a series of economic reforms, including currency evaluation, tariff reduction, domestic tax reforms, and increased investments in infrastructure. The country's economic performance has improved substantially in many respects. Until now, however, little was known about the effects of the reforms on specific sectors of the Tanzanian economy and on efforts to alleviate poverty in the country. Structural Adjustment and Intersectoral Shifts in Tanzania analyzes how stabilization and structural adjustment policies have affected the country's economic growth, sectoral performance, welfare, and income distribution. It attempts to determine whether economic reforms have actually made ordinary Tanzanians better off — and if so, which of the country 's citizens and economic sectors have benefited the most and the least. It focuses in particular on how economic reforms affect the agricultural sector, comparing the effects on agricultural exporters with those on farmers who produce for the domestic market. ; PR ; IFPRI1; Public Policy and Investment

Citizens' juries are commended as a new technique for democratising health service reviews. Their usefulness is said to derive from a reliance on citizens' rational deliberation rather than on the immediate preferences of the consumer. The author questions the assertion of critical detachment and asks whether juries do in fact employ reason as a means of resolving fundamental disagreements about service provision. He shows that juries promote not so much a critically detached point of view as a particular evaluative framework suited to the bureaucratic idiom of social welfare maximisation. Reports of jury practice reveal a tendency among juries to suppress by non-rational means the everyday moral language of health care evaluation and substitute for it a system of thought in which it can be deemed permissible to deny treatment to sick people. The author concludes that juries are chiefly concerned with non-rational persuasion and because of this they are morally and democratically irrelevant. Juries are no substitute for voting when it comes to protecting the public from zealous minorities.

Urban communities continue to face formidable historic challenges to improving public health. However, reinvestment initiatives, changing demographics, and growth in urban areas are creating changes that offer new opportunities for improving health while requiring that health systems be adapted to residents' health needs. This commentary suggests that health care improvement in metropolitan areas will require setting local, state, and national agendas around 3 priorities. First, health care must reorient around powerful population dynamics, in particular, cultural diversity, growing numbers of elderly, those in welfare-workplace transition, and those unable to negotiate an increasingly complex health system. Second, communities and governments must assess the consequences of health professional shortages, safety net provider closures and conversions, and new marketplace pressures in terms of their effects on access to care for vulnerable urban populations; they must also weigh the potential value of emerging models for improving those populations' care. Finally, governments at all levels should use their influence through accreditation, standards, tobacco settlements, and other financing streams to educate and guide urban providers in directions that respond to urban communities' health care needs.

Since the 1970s, a profound shift has taken place in the roles of the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors. In the wake of fiscal crisis, ideological attacks, and privatization, the scope and capacity of governments has declined. A growing global not-for-profit sector has emerged, which has begun to fill the humanitarian vacuum left by the corporate sector and the nation-state. Changes have been profound, raising new issues about the role and future of voluntarism in a world where governments retreat from their social welfare responsibilities and where the solutions to global poverty continue to elude us. This article explores the rapid growth and internationalization of the NGO sector and addresses why the rapid growth of this sector is taking place, the structural forms this process is taking, and what future structural forms may emerge. In addition, the author analyzes issues that arise as the NGO sector globalizes, and discusses recommendations for constructive roles for policy makers and the northern international not-for-profit sector for promoting global voluntarism in the future.

Under what conditions will politicians strengthen state capabilities through bureaucratic reform? This article presents a principal–agent model of state capacity that shows that unless competition to influence policy is largely confined to a single dimension, politicians have no incentive or 'political will' to adopt bureaucratic reform. The validity of this model is tested using the experience of the Philippines in the period 1946–72. It is found that politically relevant groups in the Philippines were competing to influence policy over issues of social welfare, economic nationalism and control over public spending, and that groups' demands over these issues failed to align along a single dominant dimension. Consistent with expectations derived from the principal–agent model, there were numerous calls for and attempts to improve bureaucratic performance, but the calls went unheeded and the attempts failed miserably. The study highlights a lesson of potential use to countries currently undergoing democratization. It argues that state capacity is not a function of insulating the state from societal forces, but rather of clarifying lines of authority and accountability in the hierarchy of principal–agent relationships between society, politicians and bureaucrats.

Wetlands all over the world have been lost or are threatened in spite of various international agreements and national policies. This is caused by: (1) the public nature of many wetlands products and services; (2) user externalities imposed on other stakeholders; and (3) policy intervention failures that are due to a lack of consistency among government policies in different areas (economics, environment, nature protection, physical planning, etc.). All three causes are related to information failures which in turn can be linked to the complexity and 'invisibility' of spatial relationships among groundwater, surface water and wetland vegetation. Integrated wetland research combining social and natural sciences can help in part to solve the information failure to achieve the required consistency across various government policies. An integrated wetland research framework suggests that a combination of economic valuation, integrated modelling, stakeholder analysis, and multi-criteria evaluation can provide complementary insights into sustainable and welfare-optimising wetland management and policy. Subsequently, each of the various components of such integrated wetland research is reviewed and related to wetland management policy.

The North American Free Trade Agreement has a fourth member, the U.S.-Mexico border, with 22 million inhabitants, $300 billion in gross domestic product, $100 billion in trade, and a unique history and culture. In 1995, it witnessed some 225 million legal frontier crossings each way, mostly Mexican shoppers, who spent $22 billion in the United States, paid $ 1.7 billion in taxes, and generated 400,000 jobs but received no services. Balanced against the costs of Mexican illegals, American taxpayers made a 600 percent profit. This made Mexico the United States' second- (not third-) largest trading partner. Paso del Norte (Juárez-El Paso) is the border's capital, a binational metropolis of 2 million. Problems abound, from water, immigration, and drug trafficking to public safety, health, welfare, the environment, and infrastructure. But they are not being effectively addressed because they run east-west (from San Diego to Corpus Christi), while government authority and interests run north-south, to and from Washington, Mexico City, and nine state capitals. A binational bankable Border Authority is urgently needed.

Presents the US-Mexico border region as a separate & unanticipated fourth member of the three-nation (US, Mexico, & Canada) North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The region's unique culture, vast population, heavy migration, growing job markets, & multibillion dollar economy make it a force to be reckoned with in terms of international security & socioeconomic interest. Costs to Mexico, especially those involving the exploitation of Mexican illegal immigrants, far outweigh those for the US. The twin cities of El Paso, TX, & Juarez, Mexico, form the border's unofficial capital, where problems of immigration, drug trafficking, health hazards, & infrastructure & environmental stresses severely threaten public well-being. A binationally funded border authority is proposed as a way of correcting the North-South emphasis to a more practical East-West perspective. Adapted from the source document.

The introduction of legislation in favour of 'permanency planning', in 1980, led to a marked decline in the number of North American children entering the public care system for much of that decade. In recent years, however, the number of children in care in the USA has been steadily rising. A major cause of this reversal is the country's drug epidemic, which has also had a significant affect on the type of child most likely to enter the system. Linda Katz highlights a failure to respond to these and other changes, outlined below, and argues for a radical upheaval of what she sees as a grossly outdated and underfunded child welfare system. On the basis of fifteen years' experience leading the Permanency Planning Programme at the Lutheran Social Services, she strongly advocates a commitment to concurrent planning — defined here as 'the process of working toward family reunification while at the same time establishing an alternative plan', usually in the form of permanency with a relative or secure foster/adoption placement. Such views are supported by increasing demands for information and training on concurrent planning, both in the USA and overseas.

How much additional income does a family with four children need to attain the same welfare level as a family with two children? And how much does a single person need compared to a childless couple? These questions are important in applied micro‐economics and underlie public policy on, for example, social benefits and child allowances. In microeconomics, this is known as the problem of measuring equivalence scales. We estimate these scales using two types of subjective survey information. First, we use answers to survey questions on the income required to attain a given utility level. We compare the results for the usual linear model with semiparametric estimates, in which the functional form of the relationship between required income and family size and actual income is left unspecified. Second, we use answers to the question: how satisfied are you with actual household income? We present parametric and semiparametric estimates for ordered response models explaining this discrete variable. We find that according to the second type of information, costs of children are much larger than according to the first.

Kürzungen von Sozialleistungen stehen in den neunziger Jahren erneut auf der Agenda des bundesrepublikanischen Sozialstaats. Ihre Durchsetzbarkeit ist auch von der Akzeptanz durch die Bürger abhängig. Empirische Analysen auf der Grundlage repräsentativer Bevölkerungsumfragen kommen zu dem Ergebnis, daß Sozialleistungskürzungen allgemein nur von einer kleinen Minderheit der Bundesbürger unterstützt werden. Bei einzelnen Sozialleistungen, von denen nur kleine Bevölkerungsgruppen profitieren, ist die Zustimmung dagegen höher. Insgesamt ist in Ostdeutschland die Akzeptanz von Sozialleistungskürzungen deutlich geringer ausgeprägt als in Westdeutschland. Anstelle von Sozialleistungskürzungen unterstützen west- und ostdeutsche Bürger eher Kürzungen in nicht-sozialpolitischen Aufgabenbereichen wie der Verteidigung, der öffentlichen Verwaltung und der Europäischen Gemeinschaft. ; In the nineties cuts in social spending are once again an issue at the top of the agenda of the German welfare state. Citizens' support for social spending cuts is a central factor influencing the feasability of spending cuts policy. Based on representative surveys, empirical analyses show that only a small minority of German citizens favour cuts in social spending in general. However, more citizens favour cuts in specific social policy programs, mainly those programs from which only minorities profit. East Germans show clearly lower support for cuts in social spending than West Germans. For both, though, instead of cuts in social spending, there is widespread support for spending cuts in other policy areas such as military defence, public administration and the European Community.

David Bromham's editorial on contraceptive implants ignores the wider issues to voice concern that trial by media could limit contraceptive choice by jeopardising research into new methods. However, it is more beneficial to the public for points of conflict to be debated openly. Furthermore, the impetus for research into new contraceptive technology is driven by profit and political motives and is only marginally affected by the media. Implanted contraceptives may increase the choice of contraceptive methods, but they put control of fertility increasingly into the hands of the medical profession. Herein lies their greatest problem: their potential to increase providers' control over clients' choice. There is the danger that certain groups of women may be targeted for their use: in the United States the coercive use of Norplant for mothers receiving welfare benefit has been suggested. Long acting contraceptives are a contraceptive of choice only when they are available without pressure, as part of a wider menu; when instant removal on request is guaranteed; and when there is an open and free flow of information and opinions between users, health professionals, and special interest groups.