Suchergebnisse

Previous scholarly analyses of national spending have shown a penchant for incre‐mentalism in interpreting changes. They have also focused almost exclusively on annual national outlays or annual expenditures. This article argues that, in many cases, budget authority figures provide a better basis for analyzing the national budget. The author gathered annual budget authority (BA) figures from fiscal years 1969 to 1993 and used this BA data for an empirical test of budget controllability. If the national budget has or has not been controlled in the recent past, then it should help us to judge whether or not it is controllable now. Five potential major budget interventions from fiscal year 1980 to 1993 were tested using an interrupted time‐series and two regression models. Different intervention results are anticipated depending upon whether one has a policy perspective that is incrementalist, international systemic, or domestic political. The analysis provides more support for the domestic political perspective than for incrementalist or international systemic views. Budget authority was found to be superior to outlays for linking budget results to policy decisions. The national budget responded appropriately to policy decisions in the recent past. In this sense, the budget was controlled and we should view it as controllable.

AbstractThe Good Bill is built up from the researches of Mr. Willoughby whose long preparation now nears fruition. The article is dated June first and the bill reprinted here is as originally introduced.

It is shown that the Dixit-Norman argument for the creation of an optimal customs union without lump sum transfers presupposes either that there exists a joint fiscal authority in the union or that lump sum transfers between national governments are possible. A necessary and sufficient condition for the decentralized implementation of the optimal union is derived. This condition is related to the old discussion of trade creation vs. trade diversion. The other contribution of the paper is to extend the Dixit-Norman argument to customs unions with factor mobility i.e. to common markets.