Suchergebnisse

The collection of taxes, in any economic system, clearly requires the use of resources. In modern democratic states tax legislation is almost always controversial, and subject to extensive lobbying. In developing counties the wealthy often successfully avoid payment of taxes and the burden has to be borne by relatively impoverished rural classes, who are themselves not easy to tax directly because of poor record -keeping and difficulty of communications. In earlier times kings and princes often lacked the necessary means of direct taxation and were forced to rely on decentralized institutions such as feudalism. To convince the skeptical reader that the issue of tax-collection costs is neither trivial nor obvious, we pose the following question. What is the effect of greater efficiency in tax collection on the welfare of the tax-paying public? If the government is benign, taxing only to defray socially necessary public expenditure, a reduction in the costs of collecting these minimal taxes would clearly be a 'good thing'. What, however, if the state is inherently "predatory" in nature, as argued by Brennan and Buchanan (1980) and a number of others? In this case the state taxes not only to pay for public services but also to raise revenue for its own, possibly nefarious, purposes. Would an increase in the efficiency if tax-collection be undesirable under this alternative scenario?

Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Book outline -- 1 Organising and Delivering Welfare -- The means and ends of social welfare -- The organisation of the post-war welfare state -- Bureaucratic forms of organisation -- Public service professionalism -- The New Right and organisational reform -- 2 Labour, Modernisation and the Third Way -- The vision -- A modernised public sector -- Looking to the future by learning from the past -- A new organisational framework -- Inclusion not equality -- Work glorious work -- Active but managed citizens? -- Socially responsible behaviour -- Capacity building -- Joined-up thinking -- Leadership development -- 3 A Mixed Economy of Welfare: A Plurality of Providers and a Diversity of Service User Relationships -- A mixed economy or private market place? -- The place of the state -- Labour's restructuring of state and market -- The strength of public provision -- The blurring of boundaries -- The satisfaction of welfare needs -- Democratic debate -- 4 The Changing Role of the Non-Profit Sector -- Defining the sector -- Key trends -- The impact on the sector -- Service delivery -- Working in partnership -- Professionalisation -- Unresolved issues -- 5 Managing, Leading or Learning? -- From public administration to management -- Managerialism -- New Labour and managerialism -- The emergent focus on leadership -- Leadership and followership -- Organisational learning -- 6 Producing Quality Services -- What is this thing called 'quality'? -- Quality, choice and market influences -- Labour and quality provision -- Audit and performance management -- A new professionalism -- 7 Working Collaboratively, Working in Partnership -- The context -- Collaborative concepts in use -- The seductiveness of collaboration -- Dilemmas and challenges -- 8 The Engagement of Service Users.

This provocative report examines the trend toward competitive contracting of government functions. By focusing on four jurisdictions that hired private firms to handle welfare-to-work services, The Welfare Marketplace reveals the ways in which increased contracting with the private and nonprofit sectors is changing the role and capacity of government, threatening accountability and responsiveness to groups with special needs. Encouraging improved performance through market mechanisms creates particular challenges for the nonprofits who must balance their missions with the bottom line. The organization of service delivery to welfare clients has undergone significant restructuring as a result of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which encouraged states to contract with outside companies and for the first time allowed them to determine eligibility for welfare benefits. Seeking to assess the impact of this development, M. Bryna Sanger studied the competitive contract environment in San Diego, Milwaukee, New York, and Houston. Interviewing contracters, public officials, opinion leaders, and researchers revealed the comparative advantages of a variety of key players in the multi-sector service industry. Sanger's conclusions paint a complex picture of how competitive contracting arrangements have changed the ways vendors and government agencies serve their clients. While performance and innovation have improved in some cases, all the players are finding that adequate accountability and contract monitoring are more difficult and expensive than anticipated. Both for profits and nonprofits are quickly draining talent and capacity as they compete for experienced executives from government and from each other. Sanger argues that competitive contracting is here to stay, but it will require more—not less—government management and oversight. She urges scholars and

Confronts the critical position that multiculturalist policies -- any policies that officially recognize & accommodate racial/ethnic diversity -- make it difficult to sustain a robust welfare state. Cross-national data are drawn on to investigate how well those countries adopting a strong multiculturalist policy regime have fared with respect to welfare provision relative to nations that have not adopted such regimes. Three main arguments against multiculturalist policies are addressed: (1) crowding out effect, (2) corroding effect, & (3) misdiagnosis effect. It is contended that none of these arguments is self-evident. Western democracies are classified as "strong," "modest," or "weak" in their enactment of multiculturalist policies, & then the strong states are compared to the modest & weak in terms of their welfare state performance. No evidence of a consistent relationship between the adoption of multiculturalist policies & the erosion of the welfare state is found. J. Zendejas

Government size has become the most important policy difference between the left and right in postwar politics but the formation of the government's funding base has not been explored. Junko Kato finds that the differentiation of tax revenue structure is path dependent upon the shift to regressive taxation