Dimensions Of Public Policy Research Articles

An Institutionalist Approach to Spatial Variations in Public Service Failure

Institutionalist approaches to regional development suggest that a host of regulative structures, normative expectations and cognitive identities constrain the behaviour of organizations operating in local areas. However, policymakers in England currently pay little attention to the influence of such institutions when assessing performance in the public sector. In particular, they do not consider their potential effects on poorly performing public organizations. This assumption is challenged here by analysing spatial variations in the rate of failure in English public services between 2002 and 2004. The interdependence between failure and institutional variables is modelled and explored using local authority area level data.The statistical analysis suggests that regulative, normative and cognitive institutions have a strong statistically significant impact on the prospect of public service failure, even when controlling for the effects of other important environmental constraints. These findings provide support for institutionalist approaches to understanding spatial dimensions of public policy.

The Dimensions of Public Policy in Private International law

Public policy is both a ubiquitous and fundamentally important part of private international law, defining the limits of the tolerance of difference implicit in rules on choice of law and the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. It has, however, been frequently criticised for its uncertainty and discretionary character. This article looks at the justifications for limits on public policy in private international law, and considers three principles which should constrain the application of public policy – proximity, relativity and seriousness of breach. It then analyses the practice of English courts through the perspective of these three ‘dimensions’. While the courts do not expressly acknowledge these principles, they not only explain the majority of cases involving the application of (or refusal to apply) public policy in private international law, but also provide reasons why certain decisions have been considered unsatisfactory. The argument developed in this article thus suggests an analytical framework through which the application of public policy in private international law might be made more certain, principled and justifiable.

Posterity and Embodiment

Our concern for the future and our conception of human nature have both a philosophical dimension and a public policy dimension. Which would be the better way to spend our next dollar: on life-extension or on artificial intelligence? Manned space-exploration or robotic space-exploration? Answering such public-policy questions involves confronting some deep philosophical mysteries. If you were only concerned for your own survival, would you prefer to have your brain transplanted into another body, or have your brain scanned and its information realized in the hardware of a durable, Turing-testable robot? Would it be better to live one long life without offspring, or a short life leaving generations of descendants? If personal superlongevity and normal fertility would lead to overcrowding, which should we choose? Does considering existential threats change how we should answer? This article explores the conceptual and empirical interdependencies of these seemingly disjoint questions.

Access and Quality in Canada's Parallel Public Healthcare Systems: Is the Impact of Workers' Compensation Boards a Net Positive?

Jerry Hurley and his colleagues have done a major service in casting light on a dimension of public healthcare policy in Canada that normally flies under the radar of both public and academic debate. Workers' compensation represents less than 2% of public healthcare expenditures in Canada, and the care provided is concentrated in a few categories such as orthopedics. Nonetheless, the transformation of workers' compensation boards (WCBs) from "silent payers" to increasingly sophisticated and entrepreneurial purchasers of care may have important implications and lessons for the broader healthcare system.

What's in a relationship? The case of commercial lending

This article presents a survey and an analysis of the academic literature on relationship lending to small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs). It is noted herein that relationship lending depends on soft (non-quantifiable) information, while other “lending technologies” depend on hard (quantifiable) information. Based on relative benefits and costs, relationship lending may be best suited for some types of SMEs, with alternate lending technologies better matched to others. Also discussed in this article are some interesting managerial and public policy issues. On the bank management dimension, relationship lending may create a special challenge for risk managers. On the public policy dimension, evidence suggests that relationship lending may be better delivered by smaller community banks; banking industry consolidation could, however, threaten the presence of such providers. Counter-intuitively, it is possible that banking industry competition may not be the best environment for relationship lending. Finally, this article highlights potentially interesting differences in the relative importance of relationship lending and the other lending technologies across countries with different financial architectures, and examines a potentially powerful link between relationship lending and monetary policy and other monetary shocks.

Alternative Social Security Systems and Growth

Demographic trends in most developed economies are characterized by rising longevity and decreasing birthrates. These trends endanger the sustainability of the current public pension systems. Therefore social security reform proposals are on the agenda in many countries. This paper demonstrates that the analysis of fiscal sustainability of social security must include an additional dimension of public policy, namely education funding. Indeed, the productivity growth of future workers, which depends on human capital accumulation, may outweigh the impact of the demographic problem. This fact is true under both pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and fully funded (FF) social security system. We consider an OLG economy where government, in addition to running social security, also funds education of future workers by means of taxes collected from the current ones. The education tax rates are chosen, in each period, by a majoritarian rule among the relevant constituents. We demonstrate that while the FF system results in relatively higher rates of physical capital accumulation, then under some conditions, other things equal, the PAYG social security regime leads to the choice of relatively higher respective levels of education tax rates in all generations, and thereby to higher rates of human capital accumulation.

Public–private partnerships in education: insights from the field

Despite extensive attention (positive and negative) devoted to the philosophical, public policy and political dimensions of public–private partnerships (PPPs) in education, little attention has been devoted to their managerial implications as well as the broader organizational context (strategic alliances) within which they are a special case. In this paper we seek first to identify what they are and then examine PPPs in education that have been recently created and are operating in England. It is worth noting that PPPs appear to be indistinguishable from the larger set of strategic alliances in fields other than education, and their recent arrival in education reflects its evolution towards a multi-sector, alliance-oriented field.

Allocating Scarce Resources in a Pandemic: Ethical and Public Policy Dimensions

The medical community needs to overcome the challenges of implementing the three major operational components of pandemic response in order to avoid future catastrophes like the response to Hurricane Katrina. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association.

The political bottom line: the emerging dimension to corporate responsibility for sustainable development

AbstractThis paper explores the idea that businesses are being moved to proactively manage their political activities and influence in relation to their often‐expressed responsibility for promoting sustainable development, which we define as managing the ‘political bottom line’. We argue that three key drivers account for this shift: first, the growing criticism of voluntary corporate responsibility initiatives; second, the increasing awareness and targeting of corporate political activities, and third, a realization among certain corporate executives and financiers that, without changes to public policies, an individual company's own voluntary responsibility may not deliver sufficient commercial returns. We describe several initiatives on public policy dimensions of sustainable development, which indicate that some companies are beginning to manage their political power in light of societal concerns. In conclusion, we discuss the potential and limits of a ‘political bottom line’ concept by critiquing the mainstream triple bottom line discourse.Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Representative Government and Special Interest Politics

In any society characterized by diversity and specialization, each citizen - the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker - is a special interest on some dimensions of public policy and a member of the general public on many other dimensions. Each citizen enjoys being at the receiving end of special interest handouts even at the expense of inefficiencies imposed on general public. But relative to the status quo involving inefficient redistribution on most dimensions of public policy, including many dimensions on which the citizen is a member of the general public, the vast majority of citizens would surely be better off if the government did not cater to special interests at all. With this common interest in place, why do democratic societies have such a hard time ridding themselves of special interest politics? This article argues that the driving force underlying special interest politics is an information asymmetry: each citizen has a precise idea about the special interest handouts she is receiving and a vague idea about the price she is paying, as a member of the general public, for inefficient redistribution. I explain why special interest politics are ultimately impervious to reform (though we can tame them at the margin); I examine the trade-offs inherent in reform efforts (what it costs to tame them); and I spell out why special interest politics can be a Good Thing (why we should not tame them all the way even if we could).

Telephone numbers, domain names, and ENUMbers

One of the biggest barriers to the development of public IP telephony services has been the lack of a universal addressing system. While IP-enabled devices have long been capable of originating phone and fax calls, it is difficult to call an IP device because they are hard to find. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) 2916, E.164 Number and DNS, seeks to solve this problem in a simple and perhaps unlikely way. Simple, in that the ENUM protocol converts existing telephone numbers into domain names.The designers of ENUM hope to foster a global megadirectory of communications users who can be reached in any number of ways by means of only one number. While theoretically any character space could be standardized in an attempt to create a universal addressing scheme, ENUM explicitly adopts telephone numbers, presumably to take advantage of their global user acceptance and mature infrastructure. This choice adds a significant public policy dimension to the story. Far from being benign and boring, telephone numbers can present significant communications policy issues, and are regulated both domestically and internationally. The top level of this hierarchy is defined by International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Recommendation E.164.

Ideas for the Funding of Healthcare in the Context of the Ageing of the Population

This paper draws upon a paper entitled ` Refocusing and Reinvigorating Retirement Policy'', which I presented to the Conference of Major Superannuation Funds in Australia in 1999. It approaches the topic of health funding reform from a ` retirement policy'' perspective, noting that healthcare needs, like retirement income needs, are heavily concentrated in old age. In Australia, as in many other countries, the ageing of the population implies large future rises in health costs, a large proportion of which is publicly funded out of current taxes. This poses, inter alia, intergenerational equity issues, implying a signi®cantly heavier tax burden on the next generation for the support of the present one. How can these rising future costs be met more equitably and ef®ciently? Encompassing both income and health needs in old age in a single perspective also gives a fuller view of what makes up security in retirement for individual retirees. Security in retirement has a number of distinct and important elements. For example, the situations of two retirees with the same income will be very different if one is a home-owner and the other pays a market rental. So housing status is an important factor. Another very important factor to individuals is their health status, and how well they are covered for health costs, differences in which can imply very big differences in retirees' exposure to ®nancial risk, as well as in their quality of life. Those aspects are part of the motivation for exploring the question posed above, but the main focus is on the public policy dimension: how to ensure the ®nancial viability of the health system. In Australia, providing healthcare for the elderly in the future is now a considerably bigger issue for public policy, and a bigger challenge to future public budgets, than providing taxpayer-funded old age income support, through the age pension. The age pension is noncontributory, paid for out of contemporaneous general taxation, but is subject to a tight income and assets test. The full pension for a single person is about 25 per cent of average earnings. The key reason that the future cost of the age pension no longer poses a major challenge to public budgets is that Australia has a long tradition of funded occupational pensions, called ` superannuation'', in past decades covering about 40 per cent or so of the workforce, but now covering nearly every employee. Beginning in the mid-1980s superannuation was extended to virtually the whole workforce, on a de®ned contribution model.

Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in American Religious Discourse

Sexual orientation is a topic of intense debate within America's religious traditions. Debate about sexual orientation has had a significant impact on the formation of public policy, as spokespersons who locate themselves squarely within religious traditions have articulated positions both pro and con in recent discussions concerning gays in the military, civil rights protections for gays and lesbians, gay marriage, parenting and foster parenting, and even benefits for partners of gay and lesbian employees of major corporations and institutions. This volume, which stems from a 1995 conference at Brown University, is intended to promote both academic and public understanding of the different positions that exist on sexual orientation and public policy dimensions within four major American religious traditions. In the first part of the book, writers from the Jewish community, the Roman Catholic church, Mainline Protestant churches, and African-American churches explore the history and tradition of their communities on same-sex orientation, discuss the moral stance they advocate, and consider the legal and public policy implications of that stance. For each of these traditions, two opposing views are represented, and a respondent frames the issue in a larger context. Included are papers by such distinguished writers as David Novack, Judith Plaskow, Charles E. Curran, and Margaret Farley. The book concludes with essays by Michael McConnell and Andrew Koppelman exploring how our society might find a modus vivendi in a state position of neutrality on the moral status of homosexuality.

The Miranda debate: law, justice, and policing

This cogent, well-balanced anthology contains a diverse range of key writings on the complex issues raised by the United States Supreme Court's controversial 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona. One of the most significant and influential judicial decisions on criminal procedure, Miranda remains at the forefront of today's debate about defendants' constitutional rights and crime control. The book contains four sections, each with an introduction by the volume editors that places the essays within a broader social context. The first section reviews the pre-Miranda law of confessions, Ernest Miranda's crime and his victim, the Miranda decision, and the ways in which the courts and police adjusted to the ruling. The second section explores the ethical, legal, and public policy dimensions of Miranda. Section three examines how Miranda works (or doesn't work) in the real-world setting of police interrogation and considers radically different interpretations of the empirical evidence. The book concludes with insightful discussions on the challenges and dilemmas that are likely to shape the future of Miranda.

Australian centre for population research: public seminar series

If the fertility rate stabilises at around 1.6 children per woman and net overseas migration averages at least 75,000, the public policy dimensions of Australia’s population future should be manageable. Our means tested age pension and the superannuation guarantee mean that we face very low rates of pension expenditure growth. Pressure on the public purse is more likely to come from health, but this may not be the direct result of ageing. Nor should anticipated changes to the size and age of the labour force present insurmountable problems. There would be significant economic and social implications, however, if fertility were to fall to European or Japanese levels, or if net migration, especially skilled, were allowed to decline. To help ensure a sustainable population future we need to: know more about the causes of fertility decline; continue to attract young, highly trained migrants with good English skills; and encourage older Australians to remain longer in the labour force. Copyright. Monash University and the author/s

Networks of Expertise and Policy Change in Italy

A fundamental component of the Italian transition in the 1990s is the shift in public finance that has now qualified Italy for participation in the single currency with the first wave of countries. How can this dramatic change be explained? The author argues that the conventional models employed for the study of the Italian transition must be supplemented with actor-based models. Accordingly, attention is drawn to networks of expertise. In the first part of the article, a case is made for the analysis of the communicative power of policy narratives and of the co-ordinative power of networks of expertise. In the second part, the influence of networks of expertise is examined by dint of the advocacy coalition framework. The article, being based on the preliminary results of a research project in progress, is concluded by theoretical reflections on further explorations of the cognitive dimension of public policy and Italian policy change.

Towards a postpositivist approach to policy evaluation?

The normative ideal which currently governs policy evaluation has been outdated by the changing nature of demands on the evaluation process. For the small group of social scientists reviewed here, the growing complexity of policy evaluation demands that it take into account the normative dimensions of public policy. This approach remains in its infancy and much more work needs to be done on assessing the capacity of existing evaluation strategies to include these normative dimensions. At present the brightest promise for postpositivist policy evaluation is its ability to inform a new generation of evaluators about the politically contentious nature of such evaluation. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Male violence against women: Current research and future directions.

This Psychology in the Public Forum section, authored by the American Psychological Association's Committee on Women in Psychology's Task Force on Male Violence Against Women and by Senator Joseph Biden, examines the prevalence, impact, and public policy dimensions of physical assault, sexual assault, and sexual harassment of women. This introduction reviews common themes that emerge from the articles that follow. It concludes by emphasizing that the problem of violence against women cannot be fully understood, let alone solved, by focusing exclusively on individual psychology. Only by changing the social and cultural institutions that have given rise to the problem can a lasting solution be achieved.

Urban policy in twentieth-century America

The recent riots in Los Angeles brought the urban crisis back to the center of public policy debates in Washington, D.C., and in urban areas throughout the United States. The contributors to this volume examine the major policy issues--race, housing, transportation, poverty, the changing environment, the effects of the global economy--confronting contemporary American cities.Raymond A. Mohl begins with an extended discussion of the origins, evolution, and current state of Federal involvement in urban centers. Michael B. Katz follows with an insightful look at poverty in turn-of-the-century New York and the attempts to ameliorate the desperate plight of the poor during this period of rapid economic growth. Arnold R. Hirsch, Mohl, and David R. Goldfield then pursue different facets of the racial dilemma confronting American cities. Hirsch discusses historical dimensions of residential segregation and public policy, while Mohl uses Overtown, Miami, as a case study of the social impact of the construction of interstate highways in urban communities. David Goldfield explores the political ramifications and incongruities of contemporary urban race relations.Finally, Carl Abbott and Sam Bass Warner, Jr., examine the impact of global economic developments and the environmental implications of past policy choices. Collectively, the authors show us where we have been, some of the needs that must be addressed, and the urban policy alternatives we face.

Environmental impacts of electricity generation: some public policy dimensions

Given the increased political salience of environmental constraints on the energy sector at large, and on power generation in particular, some of the principal policy issues which impinge upon the electricity supply industry (ESI) are examined. Particular emphasis is placed on the two most prominent issues: acid rain and global warming. More emphasis is given to supply-side issues rather than demand-side responses (such as least cost planning). The paper then examines the major characteristics of the UK's stock of generating plant and some of the means available for the ESI to adjust this stock in the light of both specific environmental and wider political pressures.