Bad Government Research Articles

Good governance, trade and agglomeration

AbstractThis article presents a model for developing countries that investigates the factors behind agglomeration of activities in urban giants. First we show that market access to external demand tends to attract entrepreneurs. Second we find that the attractive power of the urban giant can be linked to a lack of democracy, in the sense that by reversing the cost of living effect, democracy allows the reduction in spatial inequality and then the tendency of agglomeration. Finally we analyse how the funds embezzled by a corrupt government vary according to internal and external trade liberalisation. We show that a decrease in the disadvantage of the periphery to trade with the external market can limit the funds embezzled under bad governance.ResumenEste artículo presenta un modelo para países en desarrollo que investiga los factores que rigen la aglomeración de actividades en gigantes urbanos. Primero mostramos que el acceso del mercado a la demanda externa tiende a atraer a emprendedores. A continuación encontramos que el poder de atracción de un gigante urbano puede vincularse a una falta de democracia, en el sentido en que invirtiendo el efecto del costo de la vida, la democracia permite la reducción en la desigualdad espacial y con ello la tendencia a la aglomeración. Finalmente, analizamos como varía la malversación de fondos por gobiernos corruptos dependiendo de la liberalización interna y externa del comercio. Mostramos que una disminución en la desventaja de la periferia para comerciar con el mercado externo puede limitar la malversación de fondos durante un mal gobierno.

Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History (review)

Reviewed by: Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History Katrina Gulliver Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History. By Alexander Woodside. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 142 pp. $22.00 (cloth). Alexander Woodside has entered the ongoing discussion on the definition of social modernity by examining East Asian Mandarinates and suggesting that they held traits of the "modern" long before the West. Lost Modernities is based on Woodside's lectures given in 2001 for the Edwin O. Reischauer lecture series at Harvard University. His book looks at the tradition of bureaucracy and at civil servants recruited through public examination, beginning in Tang dynasty China (618–907 c.e.) and continuing in Korea and (what is now) Vietnam after they broke away from Chinese rule. Civil service exams in some form were operating in China by the seventh century, by the eighth century in Korea, and the eleventh in Vietnam. Woodside makes the point that the less-known Korean and Vietnamese examination systems are as instructive for historians as the Chinese. (He acknowledges that he is not a Korean studies specialist and cannot speak as authoritatively there as he does on China and Vietnam.) The style of government resulting from this administration by meritocracy held many of the features of what is classified as modernity in histories of Western society. Woodside alleges that "Pascal's proposition—that meritocracy would threaten civil strife because all members of a meritocratic elite would acquire an absolute belief in their own merit—was vindicated in Korea long before it could be tested in Europe" (p. 46). In Europe, aristocratic administration lasted longer but was also bolstered by a tradition of elevating to the peerage those who had performed useful service. In East Asia, elevation by the monarch was more rare, and tended not to be hereditary. Woodside acknowledges that he is following Harold Berman's work on Western history, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). Berman challenged Marxist narratives of modernity by arguing that the modernization of the Western legal tradition occurred from the eleventh century, before capitalism or industrialization. Woodside aims to apply the same challenge to definitions of modernity in Asia. He defines as "modern" the characteristic of pursuing transparency and incorruptibility in civil service exams. Recalling that the examination sites "became spectacles in themselves" (p. 2), he describes how in Jiangnan in the 1700s the examination venue held 17,000 students. By the 1400s, for example, applicants' answers in the Korean civil service examinations passed through the hands of collection officers, [End Page 526] registration officers, recording officials, collating officers, and readers, whose tasks were to see to it that candidates' names were concealed from their examiners; that their answers were recopied in other people's handwriting before examiners saw them; and that many examiners, not one, evaluated the candidate's performances. Not even the examinations at contemporary Western universities take so many transparency-enhancing precautions. (p. 2) The problem with this analogy of course is that university examinations are largely a private enterprise; they are not a governmental activity with a claim to transparency for the general public. This kind of comparison demonstrates some of the limits of reaching for cross-cultural and temporal analogues. Woodside also sees the welfare strategies of these states foreshadowing European twentieth-century welfare bureaucracies. This he attributes to the idea, derived from Mencius, that the poor were the result of bad government (p. 59), and thus that it was the responsibility of good governance to alleviate poverty. This idea can be taken as overestimating the power (both for good and bad) of a bureaucracy, and underestimating the effects of natural disaster and other factors in creating shortage. As with the idea that meritocratic reward leads to overestimation of one's value, the Mandarinacy overestimated its omnipotence. A system of open opportunity also had other flaws: the examination system led to a backlog where successful candidates could wait years to actually be placed in a government post. The evidence presented here suggests that stability and bureaucratization led to apathy toward government on the part of the average...

The Great Tradition: I. Law and Power

various types of government have rested on two conceptual pillars: law and power. The differences between the various forms of government depended on the distribution of power, whether one single man or the most distinguished citizens or the people possessed the power to rule. The good or bad nature of each of these was judged according to the role played by law in the exercise of power: lawful government was good and lawless bad. The criterion of law, however, as a yardstick for good or bad government was very early replaced, already in Aristotle's political philosophy, by the altogether different notion of interest, with the result that bad government became the exercise of power in the interest of the rulers, and good government the use of power in the interest of the ruled. The types of government, enumerated according to the power principle, did not change in either case: there were always the three basic forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy and the corresponding three basic perversions of tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy (mob-rule). Still, modern political thought is liable to over-emphasize and misconstrue Aristotle's conception of interest: dzen Vai eudzen is not yet the rule that commands the king (as Cardinal Rohan put it much later), but designates the different concerns of the rich and the poor with which the laws ought to deal according to the principle of suum cuique. Rule in the interest of all, therefore, is not much more than a particular interpretation of rule in accordance with just laws.

Peasant Politics and Class Consciousness: The Norfolk Rebellions of 1381 and 1549 Compared

The county of Norfolk was heavily involved in England's two largest peasant rebellions, in 1381 and 1549. There is no question that each revolt commanded widespread popular support, and as is argued below, the rebels were drawn from a cross-section of the rural population. Whether or not these were peasant rebellions is partly a question of whether one regards the rural population of Norfolk as peasants, an issue discussed elsewhere.2 However, they were also peasant rebellions in another sense. Other large popular revolts of this period, such as the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, or the Western Rebellion of 1549 involved alliances between gentlemen and the commons or ordinary rebels. They were provoked partly by discontent over religion, taxation and bad government, which united members of these two social classes.3 By contrast, the rebellions in Norfolk in 1381 and 1549 were centrally concerned with the nature of the manorial system and terms of tenure, issues that split lords and tenants into two competing groups. Conceived in Marxist terms, as Rodney Hilton put it, these rebellions were manifestations of conflict between the two main classes in late medieval England, lords and peasants.4

Social movements and state power: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador

Preface Introduction 1 Bad Government, Good Governance: Civil Society versus Social Movements 2 From Popular Rebellion to 'Normal Capitalism' in Argentina 3 Lula and the Dynamics of a Neoliberal Regime 4 Social Movements and State Power in Ecuador 5 The Politics of Adjustment, Reform and Revolution in Bolivia 6 Political Power Dynamics in Latin America Bibliography Index.

Ukraine Economy and Finance in the Reform Process and the European Partnership: A Focus on Aerospace Industry

In spite of economic stabilization and the growth rate uprise since 2003, Ukraine has received less than EUR 5 billion in foreign direct investment over the last five years (from 2000 to 2004). This is less than other less FDI-attractive countries got, notwithstanding the fact that Ukraine has a steel industry of international significance, great agriculture potential, and an automotive industry which accounts for almost 6% of the value added generated by the industrial sector. The new government of Ukraine has declared the foreign investment flows into Ukraine among its top priorities. Unfair competition as a result of past bad government policies was the reason for the low FDI inflow. The former Ukrainian government promoted private interests of a limited group of businessmen. Unfair privatization sales with a limited access of other investors, as well as violent ownership takeovers, took place. The new government has committed to stop this practice. The role of independent courts will grow in dealing with conflicts, including the revision of unfair privatization sales. The determination to be integrated with the EU represents an ultimate goal. Such a step is expected to facilitate Ukraine's movement towards European standards in all spheres. I also present a brief inside evaluation on the aerospace industry, for both the civil and military sectors, starting from a sketch of the defense industry in 2000. The situation of civil and military aviation in Russia and Ukraine has many points in common and it could not be different after such a prolonged common history in the same military-industrial complex. Ukrainian industrial capacity is more or less completely secluded from international partners and markets. EU and NATO should not miss the opportunity to take into account the human capital and the technology achievement already accumulated by Ukrainian industries, research centres, academies, laboratories. The Ukraine aviation industry has suffered a serious decline over the last 15 years. Only recently new programs and major developments in the sector, which is undergoing a major restructuring, have reopened the perspectives of new projects in both civil and military aviation, as well as in space projects. The components sectors will be affected positively if the developments will be confirmed by concrete international partnerships and investments, first of all with the EU and the United States. Mergers and restructuring of the existent production plants are a real need. As experience shows in Europe and in the global market, no national way or revival of past alliances could help Ukraine to maintain a role in the aerospace sector.

The 2004 Philippine Elections: Political Change in an Illiberal Democracy

This article, based on an analysis of the 2004 elections, argues that illiberal democracy in the Philippines rests on strong foundations. On one hand, bad government, armed men, and the mainstreaming of military activism and People Power have deepened the illiberal strain of political culture since the ouster of strongman Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. On the other hand, the reassertion of democratic nationalism by prominent institutions and public opinion, and new technologies and types of representation, have reinforced a democracy that rests on relatively solid footing even though it may often appear on the brink of collapse. Public religion illustrates the complexity of these issues. If one defines as seeking to change the status quo, the Catholic Church has become one of the country's most liberal institutions because it has challenged a frequently abusive and kleptocratic state for secure elections and basic rights.

Tiranía: variaciones sobre un tema entre historia y teoría

The author studies the concept of tyranny from a historic and interdisciplinary point of view, which includes theology, laws, economy, philosophy, logics, moral and sociology. This paper has three parts: theoretical, practical and historical. Bearing in mind the wide number of reflections about the Bad Government made by political thought theroreticians along centuries, it is clear that terminology took a decisive role in the variations of the concept «tyranny» when translating from a language to another or from a civilization to another. Besides, this provides the differentiation of tyranny from other forms of iniquotous government, allowing a better understanding of every term: despotism, oligarchy, ochlocracy, dictatorship, auto cracy, caesarism, authoritarianism, etc.

Who Gets on Top in Democracy? Elections as Filters

Economic models of politics usually assume that all politicians maximize their narrow self-interest, so the constitution and other laws should be designed to constrain the worst people. In contrast, I assume that different politicians have different traits of character, so the constitution and other laws should be designed to promote the best and demote the worst. Successful filtering of politicians partly determines whether a country enjoys good or bad government. In my model, each election serves as a filter, so, up to a point, more elections filter better. Countries that suffer bad government do so partly because politicians face too few elections for the citizens to identify the worst characters and remove them from office. These countries, however, should not necessarily shorten the term of office in order to have more frequent elections. Rather, these countries should reduce the depth of administration and create a federal structure with more elected governments. Similarly, these countries should ti...

Does Civil Society Stop the Downward Spiral of Bad Government or Speed It Up?

This article examines the nonprofit sector’s impact on good government. Through a brief synthesis of several literatures, the author constructs two competing hypotheses. In the first, nonprofit activity acts as a self-correcting force for the public sector; in the second, the third sector accelerates bad government’s downward spiral.The authors hows that the key element in deciding between these hypotheses is the relationship between confidence in government and participation in civil society.

The health of immigrants. 1943.

MISS ADDAMS HAS GIVEN… fully the history of Hull-House, of the birth of an idea and of its fulfillment. … As one reads her earlier writings one sees that she was moved not only by the greater inequalities and injustices of society but perhaps even more by less evident, more intangible and rarely voiced evils from which men and women suffer but which sociologists often miss. She knew, because she understood people, that political equality meant little in comparison with social equality; she knew that the social exclusiveness of the well-to-do, the social ostra-cism of the “Dago,” “Polack,” “Hunky,” “Greaser,” Negro, was harder to bear than political corruption and rotten city government. Bad government led to wretched conditions, but it did not degrade the poor man in his eyes; on the contrary, the clever political boss flattered the voter's self-respect, made him feel himself of importance. Contempt, she said, is the greatest crime against one's fellow man.

New Economy…Same Irrational Economy

What can we say about the assertion that there is a "New Economy"? That depends on what we mean by this term. It is nonsense to claim, and few do any more, that the business cycle has been eliminated or that the contradictions of capitalism have been resolved. In 2000 we witnessed a massacre of technology and Internet stocks ending what many considered the country's biggest financial mania of the past hundred years. The NASDAQ lost over half of its value, a paper loss of 3.33 trillion dollars, the equivalent of a third of the houses in the United States sliding into the ocean, as one Wall Street wag tells us. While only a few months ago, all we heard about was the magic of the market and that crises are the result of bad government policies, whether "crony" capitalism or simply failure to make information available to markets in a full and timely fashion, and that the new information technology now makes markets even more efficient; all of this talk is now shown to be the usual exaggeration we find in the up stage of most long expansions. As in the past it disappears as the economy weakens. Indeed as inventories pile up the nature of capitalism becomes clear to even the financial press and the politicians.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Why American Poverty Rates Stopped Falling in the '70s, and Why a Better Story Was Not Told About It

ABSTRACT Against welfare dependence models, this paper argues that in the '70s Americans flooded the labor market, helping to suppress wages and make more people poor. It also argues that capitalist markets normally generate unemployment, which sustains poverty; capitalist nations in Europe with less poverty don't have better free markets but their governments pay needy people more. These facts were invisible in the U.S. because the right framed the poverty debate. Because of the weakness of democratic socialism and because liberalism was not very radical, there was little opposition. American conservatives fixed people's attention on bad poor people and bad government rather than a failing economy and stingy government policies.

Missions Impossible: Pomponne de Bellièvre and the Policies of Henry III

For more than four centuries the reign of Henry III, king of France (1574-89), was characterized by historians as one of bad government. Recently several students of the king and his reign have claimed that Henry was unjustly maligned and blamed for misfortunes attributable not to his failings as ruler but to the condition of France, which was torn asunder by the Wars of Religion. We argue that Henry lacked the requisites for effective political leadership. This can be demonstrated by analysing an aspect of his reign not hitherto studied in detail, namely the diplomatic missions undertaken by Henry’s emissary Pomponne de Bellièvre. In the conduct of these missions, which the king personally directed, Henry and Bellièvre exchanged scores of letters. Examination of Henry’s instructions and follow-up directives to his minister, and of Bellièvrexs’s replies and his comments to his colleagues allow one to see how Henry made policy. Analysis of four of the best-documented examples refutes the sunnier conclusions of recent revisionist historians who concur with the diarist L’Estolle’s opinion that Henry III would have been a good prince in a better century. Whether dealing through Bellièvre with Jean Casimir of the Palatinate (1575-76), Henry of Navarre (1583-84), Elizabeth of England (1586-87), or Henry, duke of Guise (1588), the king made serious errors of political judgement. Bellièvre, a sensitive and skilled negotiator, was acutely aware of his royal master’s shortcomings. Their exchange of correspondence shows how Bellièvre strove to persuade Henry to modify his bargaining position so as to offer some possibility of a negotiated solution to the problem at hand. Henry III is revealed as a ruler whose fundamental grasp of political reality was shaky at best, and whose policy decisions constrained Bellièvre to conduct what were truly Missions Impossible.

Three forms of social coordination

Modernization brings with it a rapid process of differentiation which increases the dynamism of society but also aggravates the phenomena of disintegration and fragmentation. These opposing sides of the process give rise to uncertainty and a sense of defence-lessness. The protective aura of the State fades away, while at the same time the very notion of society becomes empty and unsubstantial. There is a general feeling of uneasiness, in which all evils tend to be blamed on “bad government” and the imperfections of social life are seen as the direct consequence of political ineptitude. However, the natural concern to tackle the (very obvious) problems of governance may prevent us from seeing the real underlying conditions.

Constraints on the Success of Structural Adjustment Programmes in Africa (review)

Reviewed by: Constraints on the Success of Structural Adjustment Programmes in Africa Eme Essien Constraints on the Success of Structural Adjustment Programmes in Africa. Edited by Charles Harvey. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 248 pp. $75.00/Cloth. Reviewed by Eme Essien, M.A. candidate, SAIS. As economic crises gripped sub-Saharan Africa in the years after independence, African leaders begrudgingly accepted the ‘tough pill’ of adjustment programs designed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. African policy-makers, who often viewed these austerity programs as a threat to political stability, were at odds with their western counterparts, who claimed that bad government policies made adjustment necessary. While the programs have unquestionably failed to bring about wide reaching changes, there is little consensus amongst politicians, political scientists and economists on the reasons for the disappointing performance. Only in the past several years, after evidence has been collected and trends clearly identified, have others substantively joined in the debate. Constraints on the Success of Structural Adjustment Programmes in Africa offers empirical evidence which supports the now widely accepted perspective that structural adjustment is necessary but not sufficient to jump-start economic growth in Africa. In contrast to many other recent analyses which focus solely on the macroeconomic consequences of adjustment in Africa, Constraints on the Success of Structural Adjustment Programmes in Africa explores the effects of structural adjustment on particular economic sectors in various African countries. The frequent use of terse economic models considerably narrows the book’s audience to students and practitioners of development economics and African political economy. Nonetheless, it offers compelling evidence on the various structural impediments to economic reform through, among others, fieldwork analysis on labor markets, the manufacturing sector and the civil service. Charles Harvey, the editor and an academic engaged in research on the African banking sector, persuasively defends the scope and methodology of the study. Sectoral analyses, he argues, must be viewed within a framework that addresses the severe macroeconomic distortions that have characterized African economies. Adjustment programs have traditionally been comprised of two components: stabilization programs which address balance of payments deficits and structural adjustment which seeks to create efficiency in [End Page 196] resource allocation through institutional reform. In his chapter on the effect of the real exchange rate on the Zimbabwean manufacturing sector, Joseph Muzulu discusses the use of devaluations as the main instrument of stabilization and the cornerstone of adjustment policy. Economic theory asserts that a real depreciation of the exchange rate should cause the price of tradable goods to rise relative to the price of non-tradables thereby improving the competitiveness of export producers. For African countries with severe balance of payments deficits, the result should theoretically lead to an increase in foreign exchange earnings resulting from an increase in exports and decrease in imports. Muzulu argues that the high import content of the manufacturing process in Zimbabwe prevented producers from reacting to the new price incentives. Similarly, in his discussion of the availability of pharmaceutical products in Kenya, Pius Owino attributes the low supply response of producers, in part, to the increased costs of production as a result of the rise in the price of imported inputs. While the results of these studies are not surprising given Africa’s long-standing and perilous reliance on imported goods, Owino suggests that the role of expectations may provide another explanation. Many producers in his survey expected the policies to be reversed and were therefore reluctant to switch resources in response to the new price incentives in exportable goods. Although the author gives only cursory treatment to this phenomenon, it is clear that lack of confidence in the sustainability of adjustment programs can potentially jeopardize the entire economic reform process. As some of the contributors illustrate, the reluctance of African governments to implement adjustment programs stemmed in large part from the negative short-term repercussions on employment. Addressing a balance of payments deficit necessarily meant a reduction in the public sector for many African countries with a bloated civil service. Increased unemployment in an environment of economic crises, exacerbated by IMF austerity programs, caused political instability for what were often illegitimate governments with weak institutional capacity. Not...

Who's afraid of the big bad government?

In 1965 it was 35 per cent. By 1994, it had risen to 67 per cent. Why do most Americans think government is the biggest threat facing their country?

Siena Icon of the Common Good: Lorenzetti and Lonergan

Inside the Palazzo Pubblico, the dignified Town Hall of Siena, is Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s cycle of frescoes of the Allegories and the Effects of Good and Bad Government painted between 1337 and 1339. The frescoes were commissioned by the Council of the Nine, a régime which retained power in Siena until 1355, after having preserved its peace and prosperity for some sixty years. A wise old man symbolizes the Common Good while a patchwork of neat fields, tame boar and busy hoers suggests order and prosperity. Bad Government is a desolate place, razed to the ground by a diabolical tyrant, the Sienese wolf at his feet. Lorenzetti’s civic masterpiece, Siena’s icon of the Common Good, documents the Catholic social tradition which recent papal teachings reaffirm in their critique of both Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism. Lorenzetti’s frescoes are not only decorative and celebratory, but they are also didactic; for this was the primary object of all medieval painting. The frescoes, a distillation of Augustinian and Thomist thought, are designed for the eyes of Siena’s ruling 61ite, for few, outside of that charmed group, ever penetrated to the innermost rooms of the Palazzo Pubblico. It is clearly the Nine who are addressed by the words which appear above the head of Justice in the fresco: “Love Justice, you who rule the earth.” The frescoes state the obligations of the governor to the governed, rather than the obligations of the governed to the governing.

Counsel and strategy in Middle English romance (review)

Reviews Barnes, Geraldine, Counsel and strategy in Middle English romance, Cambridge, D . S. Brewer, 1993; cloth; pp. xii, 163; R.R.P.£29.50/US$65.00. Medieval literary criticism in the last thirty years has seen a growing rehabilitation of Middle English romance, for too long under the shadow of Continental French romance and regarded as its disadvantaged and backward cousin. Yet in more recent discussions of the ways in which English romance charts the moral development of its heroes, the paradigm for this growth to maturity tends still to be taken from Frenchtexts,notably those of Chretien de Troyes, where the hero learns through hisrelationshipwith women and his experience of 'courtly' and passionate love. Middle English romances are awkwardly assimilated to this pattern. Some do notfitit at all. Geraldine Barnes's book provides a new andrefreshingangle on a large group of them, suggesting that then heroes develop, not through love and marriage, but through a growing ability to listen to good advice and to practise 'strategy"4 , in other words, to 'achieve then objectives by devious and ingenious means'. This welcome and often Uluminating change of perspective is supported by a detailed survey of the historical and political background to these thirteenth- and fourteenth-centurytexts.Then putative audience emerges as one far more likely to be interested in misuses of royal authority and issues of good and bad government such as whether a king was wiUing to consult, or to ignore, the opinion of his subjects, than in a ruler's emotional education. While in many respects this point is made convincingly, it cannot be applied merely to Middle English romances. Then predecessors, the AngloNorman romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, provide not only then plots but also many of the details adduced by Barnes as characteristic of Middle English romance's concern with 'counsel' and 'strategy' (or gyn). In other words, these are concerns which were not original to the Middle Englishtextsbut which pre-existed them. The corollary follows, perhaps, that the Anglo-Norman audience was in certain ways similar to the Middle English one. Barnes's point seems to be irrefutable whenever she discusses texts for which there is no previous Anglo-Norman source or analogue. Thus the 112 Reviews examination of Gamelyn, Arthour and Merlin, Richard Coeur de Lyon, and The Seven Sages is excellent. It is the more welcome since most of these are seldom treated critically. N e w light is also cast on Sir Orfeo, a text more congenial to, and popular with, critics. The discussion of Floris and Blancheflour is also convincing, since here Barnes makes a close and iUuminating comparison of the poem with its Continental French source. But in the case offiveromances, then Anglo-Norman predecessors have already treated the themes which Barnes discerns. Sometimes they did so, interestingly, with a more positive and less misogynistic attitude to then heroines. Barnes remarks that the increasing readiness to accept good counsel in the eponymous hero of Havelok is indicative of the good judgement marking his maturation. In the Lai d'Haveloc, the judgement of his wife Argentine is good from the start, with theresultthat she, not he, is sent the dream about his future. And she can interpret itrightiy,as he cannot. She is still advising and manipulating him later in the plot, when she counsels a successful military ruse. Josiane in Beves of Hampton, rightiy characterized by Barnes as 'one of the most enterprising women in Middle English romance', is already enterprising in the Anglo-Norman Boeve, where her gyn, or resourcefulness and talents, is even greater, where she rather than Boeve is given good advice by Bonefey, and where she in turn counsels the hero. As another reviewer has already remarked, the counsel given to Guy of Warwick figures no less prominently in Gui de Warewic, where the scribe of M S . C even made his own additions on the subject (see A. Ewert, Gui de Warewic [Paris, 1933], notes to 1. 1444). The Folie Tristan d Oxford hinges entirely on the subject of Tristan's cunning and deception, which Barnes discerns as the focus of the English Sir Tristrem. Indeed, the multiplicity of terms connoting the...

COMPARISON OF THE COSTS OF ACUTE TREATMENT FOR GUNSHOT AND STAB WOUNDS

Gun control is proposed primarily to decrease the incidence of injury and death from gunshot wounds (GSWs). We hypothesize that decreasing the number of GSWs will also produce significant economic savings, even if personal violence were to continue at the same rate, maintaining the same overall incidence of penetrating trauma. We analyzed charges and reimbursements for the treatment for all patients with GSWs (n = 1116) and stab wounds (SWs) (n = 1529) admitted to a level I trauma center from 1986 through 1992. Mean and median charges were higher for GSWs ($14,541; $7,541) than for SWs ($6,446; $4,249) (p < 0.05). There was a 12% per year increase in the annual number of GSWs (p = 0.001), leading to a disproportionate increase in the annual total charges for GSWs (p = 0.013), compared with SWs. Public expenditures, including bad debt and government reimbursement, increased for GSWs (p = 0.019) but not SWs. Thus, if all patients with GSWs instead suffered SWs, there would be an annual savings of $1,290,000 overall and of $981,000 of public funds from this institution alone. Treatment costs for GSWs are higher than those for SWs and are rising more rapidly, with an increasing amount of public funds going to meet these costs. Considerable savings to society would accrue from any effort that decreased firearm injuries, even if the same level of violence persisted using other weapons.