Suchergebnisse

One of the most intriguing and indeed progressive features of the Labour government is its willingness to have itself judged against a wide range of targets, as set out in the Public Service Agreements (PSAs) which accompanied the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in 1998.The second Comprehensive Spending Review due in summer 2000 will be accompanied by a revised set of PSAs negotiated between the Treasury and individual departments. This second round of PSAs will rightly concentrate on the key policy outcomes which departments are aiming to deliver. The several hundred targets which assess the managerial effectiveness of the government machine will be covered by a separate series of Service Delivery Agreements. However, ironically the remarks by the Prime Minister on health service funding appear to undermine the whole CSR process, and threaten to turn the debate back to a focus on how much money gets spent on the public services, rather than the welcome focus on outcomes implied by the PSAs.The PSAs in effect set out in detail the government's strategy, which immediately raises the question of whether they should signal more clearly the government's priorities across the many different policy outcomes. Several of the articles in this issue of New Economy focus on the key areas of policy which should be central to the agenda of a centre‐left government: restoring full employment, eliminating child poverty and putting sustainable development at the heart of government strategy rather than at its margins. Matthew Taylor leads off by discussing the tensions which lie at the heart of the PSA process. Performance targets can have perverse outcomes if they are not designed carefully. The PSA process is highly centralising and may sti?Ÿe local initiative. It is not clear that modern government is best delivered by the Treasury telling everyone what to do.In an act of modest self‐indulgence the editor contributes an article to this issue which argues that a commitment to the attainment of full employment alongside a commitment to eliminating child poverty would represent a really powerful and radical agenda for the Government. Less weight should be given to closing the productivity gap, which is less of a problem than usually thought. Lisa Harker takes up the issues raised by the government's anti‐poverty strategy noting the absence of any debate about which of the poverty indicators the government intends to track should be given priority. She also notes that adopting a clear measure of income poverty brings challenges for government, raising the question of how far it should explicitly address poverty through higher bene?žts to provide 'security for those who cannot work'.The urgency of tackling child poverty is given weight by the chilling conclusion set out by John Micklewright and Kitty Stewart that on three key measures of child well‐being – child poverty, children in workless households and the teenage birth rate – the UK's performance is the worst in the EU. It is this 'child poverty gap' with our European partners which should make us ashamed not the productivity gap. Fran Bennett and Chris Roche argue for genuinely participatory approaches to the development of indicators of poverty and social exclusion which focus not just on what is measured, but also on who decides which indicators are important. This approach features heavily in debates in the developing world, but the OECD countries could learn from this experience. Chris Hewett and Matthew Rayment note discouragingly that seven major government departments made no reference to sustainable development in their aims and objectives as set out in the PSAs in 1998. By and large, the key environmental issues are still seen as only a priority for the DETR and no one else. It is not clear that any relationship between the PSAs and the government's sustainable development strategy is evidence of joined up government or merely coincidental overlapping government.The original PSAs made little or no reference to the goal of securing greater racial equality and Sarah Spencer takes up this omission by looking at a range of areas of public policy where a focus on outcome based measures relating to racial equality are needed. The achievement of race equality objectives necessitates a contribution from each of the key Whitehall departments responsible for domestic policy, and from all departments in relation to their own employment practices. Damian Tambini discusses the 'Ulysees Effect' by which the announcing of targets amid great fanfare forces the government to nail its colours to the mast. In the area of electronic service delivery, targets have so far been quite successful in jolting government agencies into taking action. If potential problems relating to data protection and social exclusion do not emerge, targets in this area will be seen as a useful tool of radical modernisation. However, if the negative effects of electronic service delivery do become more severe, then the government will have to face some difficult choices: abandon the targets, fudge the ?žgures, or push them through despite the negative consequences. Andrea Westall discusses four recently published IPPR reports relating to business or industrial policy. A common theme is that government has a role as a market maker and catalyst by bringing players together to encourage the formation of innovative solutions rather than intervening in a broad and possibly blunt way. This role requires an element of risk and 'letting go' rather than devising programmes with clearly de?žned outcomes and targets – somewhat anathema to the Treasury with its emphasis on performance targets as set out in the PSAs. Rebecca Harding looks at the establishment of regional venture capital funds, arguing that in the north of England the main problem may be the lack of demand for venture capital, so that it may not be the correct tool for supporting innovative small businesses in all regions. Robert Atkinson explodes some of the myths held about the emerging 'new economy'. This includes the notion that technological change is destroying employment (preposterous when viewed against the tremendous jobs growth in the US economy) or that economic change calls into question the continued viability of large corporations or the role of the state.Finally David Osmon offers a different model from the government's proposed public private partnership for achieving a more efficient London Underground. The combined infrastructure and operations of some underground lines could be leased to the private sector which could then compete with the publicly operated lines. If the private companies achieved efficiency savings they could then bid for further franchises and in the meantime those lines still in public ownership would be subject to competitive pressures to increase their efficiency. With all the uncertainty surrounding the current PPP this idea is worthy of consideration.

The Labour government is formally committed to tackling poverty, unemployment and social exclusion and sees a major role for area‐based policies in dealing with some of these problems. The government's flagship New Deals are primarily aimed at groups of individuals with high rates of joblessness. However, the New Deal for Communities is aimed at areas suffering from high concentrations of poverty and unemployment. In addition different government departments have launched their own zone initiatives in often‐overlapping local areas.Much political discussion has focussed on the problem of coordinating all of this activity. However, behind these initiatives lies a decades‐long debate over how effective area‐based polices can actually be and it is this debate which is reflected in this issue of New Economy.We also look at the argument that the big hole in the Government's armoury is the lack of any policies to actually create jobs in areas of the country with high unemployment.When at the Treasury, Daniel Hulls helped design the New Deal for Communities, which makes him well placed to explain the analytical basis for the government's area‐based policies as well as to explore where those policies might go next. Their underlying rationale is that concentrationsof deprivation give rise to problems greater than the sum of its parts. So individuals with characteristics likely to put them at high risk of social exclusion are further disadvantaged if they live in neighbourhoods where there is a high concentration of people with similar characteristics. Mark Kleinman takes issue precisely with this justification, arguing that the empirical evidence suggests that family and individual characteristics are more important than neighbourhood effects and that families and individuals should therefore be the primary target of policy intervention. There may still be a case for locally‐based service delivery and for area based programmes to supplement mainstream resources for the most hard‐pressed areas. Soit is not a case of targeting either individuals or areas – rather it is the balance between these two approaches which is under discussion.In practice the area regeneration budget, at ??1.35 billion in 1999‐00, is only a fraction of the resources spent on families and individuals through social transfers and other mainstream public spending. Moreover, spending on regeneration at the end of this Parliament will be 11 per cent less in real terms than the Conservatives were spending in 1993‐94.The Government, or more accurately the Treasury, points to the vacancy statistics to 'prove' that there is no shortage of employment opportunity anywhere in the UK. Few people living in the real world would agree with this view. David Webster presents the directly opposite argument that the New Deals cannot work unless more jobs are directly created in narrowly‐defined areas, especially in the cities, which have witnessed a significant loss of blue collar jobs.While agreeing that the Treasury line is unsustainable, Ian Gordon agues that narrowly‐targeted job creation programmes will not work. Fundamentally, the case for such policies is that labour market imperfections prevent aggregate demand and employment in the economy as a whole growing fast enough without generating serious inflationary pressures. The problems of demand‐deficiency within 'northern' urban areas are essentially issues of regional policy, not urban regeneration, while the reduction of concentrations of high unemployment in London and most other 'southern' urban areas relies on sustaining employment growth at the national level. Peter Tyler asks whether the policy recommendations of the Urban Task Force chaired by Lord Rogers ?žt with the perceived needs of urban regeneration. The general answer is yes, though we need to be wary of who really benefits from tax incentives. However, if all that Rogers aspires to is to be achieved it will require far more resources than have currently been planned for. Stephen Hall and John Mawson trace the evolution of regeneration policies and ask critical questions about how joined up the Government's policies really are. It is only at the local level that programmes can really be made cohesive and they point to the importance of the New Commitment to Regeneration directly involving local authorities and other local partners.Housing policy plays an important role in generating concentrations of deprivation. Sue Regan argues that it is increasingly difficult to generalise about social housing, with abandoned estates in the 'North' set alongside some well‐run, popular estates with vibrant tenant participation. There is a growing consensus about the benefits of mixed communities, which sits uneasily with the current composition of social housing.The IPPR indicators section points out that the funds which have come from HM Treasury to promote regional policy are very unfairly skewed, with Scotland and Wales doing much better than equivalent English regions. The North East really does have something to complain about. With some irony the funds that have emanated from Brussels are much more evenly distributed according to need. There is precious little correlation between how a local authorityscores on the Index of Local Deprivation and GDP per head. According to the data used by the EU, 14 out of the 20 most deprived local authorities in England have GDP per head at or above the EU average. This might suggest that GDP per head is a poor measure to use for targeting resources at anything below regional level. Andrea Westall and Marc Cowling question whether the proposed model for the Small Business Service will be appropriate and argue that the 'one‐stop shop' approach to offering business advice fails to recognise the differences between small ?žrms, especially across sectors.The article by Brendan Walsh is entitled 'The Irish Economic Miracle'. Whether intended or not the irony of the title is that miracles defy rational explanation. The problem is timing: all the factors put forward to explain the recent excellent performance of the Irish economy have been around for many years and sometimes even decades. Why were these factors for so long associated with lacklustre economic performance, with the Irish economy only taking off in the early 1990s? Graham Bird and Ramkishen Rajan revisit proposals for a Tobin tax in the light of the international financial crises of the late 1990s. They suggest that such a tax on currency transactions would work best in preventing crises from occurring by countering excessive inflows of capital in the first place. They also suggest that even if the tax had limited effects in this respect it could still raise a lot of revenue which could perhaps be used to finance a new international lender of last resort or to augment the resources of the IMF. Eamon O'Shea questions the emphasis on education as the route to material well‐being and argues for a less narrow conception of human welfare. Education can play an important role in developing social as well as human capital and in so‐doing help underpin the micro‐institutional foundations upon which macroeconomic success is based. Peter Robinson Editor