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Until 1994, the year South Africa experienced her first democratic elections, the country was notorious for its ruthless apartheid policy and its violent political climate. By then, the antagonism between the recently unbanned black political parties had reached its pathetic peak. Among those who had to bear the impact of intimidation, violence and murder were the Zulu Zionists. Being part of the African Independent Churches, Zulu Zionists have always been apolitical and against any form of violence. Yet, how were they able to uphold their religious principals and ideals in a time where being impartial meant to sympathise with the political adversary? During 22 months of fieldwork, the author observed how Zulu Zionists in the township of Kwa Mashu, Durban, "walked the tightrope" in order to maintain their identity as apolitical and peace loving christians.

The paper begins with a reexamination of claims regarding the welfare-theoretical efficiency of various modes of non-hierarchical policy coordination which Charles Lindblom (1965) had subsumed under the label of Partisan Mutual Adjustment. It is argued that these claims are implausible if Lindblom's mechanisms of horizontal self-coordination are examined one at a time. They either will not assure significant welfare gains in the general case, or the attempt to raise the level of general welfare through self-coordination will encounter rapidly escalating transaction costs. As Lindblom had pointed out, however, several coordination methods will often be combined in real-world policy processes. The intuition that this might significantly increase the welfare efficiency of self-coordination is explored in a computer simulation study based on the game-theoretical reformulation of five simple coordination mechanisms. We can show that, in a given population of interdependent actors, Positive Coordination within relatively small coalitions who are required to obtain the agreement of outside actors through Negative Coordination and Bargaining, are able to achieve relatively high welfare gains while economizing on transaction costs. This pattern is by no means unusual in real-world policy processes. ; Der Aufsatz untersucht die Plausibilität von Behauptungen über die wohlfahrtstheoretische Effizienz von Methoden der nicht-hierarchischen Koordination politisch-administrativer Akteure, die Charles Lindblom (1965) unter dem Sammelbegriff des Partisan Mutual Adjustment zusammengefaßt hatte. Für jede einzelne dieser Methoden, so kann gezeigt werden, ist dieser Anspruch nicht generell zu begründen. Entweder können unter allgemeinen Bedingungen nur geringe Wohlfahrtsgewinne erzielt werden, oder die Koordination scheitert an eskalierenden Transaktionskosten. Allerdings hatte schon Lindblom darauf hingewiesen, daß in realen Politikprozessen typischerweise mehrere Koordinationsmethoden zugleich zum Zuge kommen. Die Vermutung, daß gerade dadurch die Wohlfahrts-Effizienz der horizontalen Selbstkoordination gesteigert werden könnte, wird hier in einer Computer-Simulationsstudie überprüft. Ausgehend von einer spieltheoretischen Rekonstruktion von fünf einfachen Koordinationsmechanismen kann gezeigt werden, daß insbesondere die Kombination von Positiver Koordination mit Negativer Koordination und mit Bargaining eine hohe Wohlfahrtseffizienz erreicht. Wenn die Mitglieder relativ kleiner Koalitionen sich intern positiv koordinieren, aber die Zustimmung der übrigen Mitglieder einer Population von interdependenten Akteuren durch Negativkoordination und Bargaining gewinnen müssen, dann können relativ hohe Wohlfahrtsgewinne bei moderaten Transaktionskosten erwartet werden. Eben dieses Muster läßt sich auch in realen Prozessen der Politikformulierung und Implementation wiederfinden.

In this paper, we examine the macroeconomic effects of alternative fiscal consolidation policies in the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM), a two-country open-economy model of the euro area developed at the European Central Bank (cf. Coenen et al., 2007). We model fiscal consolidation as a permanent reduction in the targeted government debt-to-output ratio and analyse both expenditure and revenue-based policies that are implemented by means of simple fiscal feedback rules. We find that fiscal consolidation has positive long-run effects on key macroeconomic aggregates such as output and consumption, notably when the resulting improvement in the budgetary position is used to lower distortionary taxes. At the same time, fiscal consolidation gives rise to noticeable short-run adjustment costs in contrast to what the literature on expansionary fiscal consolidations suggests. Moreover, depending on the fiscal instrument used, fiscal consolidation may have pronounced distributional effects.

We quantitatively assess the macroeconomic effects of country-specific supply-side reforms in the euro area by simulating EAGLE, a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model. We consider reforms in the labor and services markets of Germany (or, alternatively, Portugal) and the rest of the euro area. Our main results are as follows. First, there are benefits from implementing unilateral structural reforms. A reduction of markup by 15 percentage points in the German (Portuguese) labor and services market would induce an increase in the long-run German (Portuguese) output equal to 8.8 (7.8) percent. As reforms are implemented gradually over a period of five years, output would smoothly reach its new long-run level in seven years. Second, cross-country coordination of reforms would add extra benefits to each region in the euro area, by limiting the deterioration of relative prices and purchasing power that a country faces when implementing reforms unilaterally. This is true in particular for a small and open economy such as Portugal. Specifically, in the long run German output would increase by 9.2 percent, Portuguese output by 8.6 percent. Third, cross-country coordination would make the macroeconomic performance of the different regions belonging to the euro area more homogeneous, both in terms of price competitiveness and real activity. Overall, our results suggest that reforms implemented apart by each country in the euro area produce positive effects, cross-country coordination produces larger and more evenly distributed (positive) effects.