Public Inputs Research Articles

Budgetary changes and organizational performance: Evidence from state transportation agencies

AbstractExisting punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) literature identifies the causes of policy punctuations. However, there are a lack of theoretical and empirical studies on the effects of policy punctuations on organizational performance. This study extends PET from policy formulation to policy outcomes and explores how public agencies transfer budgetary inputs to organizational performance outcomes in the policy context of American state highway transportation infrastructure. Based on a longitudinal research design, the research employs a panel two‐way fixed effects regression model to analyze the performance consequences of budgetary changes for 50 states during an almost 20‐year period (1995–2013). The key findings indicate that state expenditure (highway maintenance) changes experience much more friction and volatility over time than performance (acceptable roads) changes. In addition, state highway transportation agencies can mitigate the impact of large budgetary cuts on organizational performance, but do not seem to capitalize on large budgetary gains to improve performance.

On regional integration, fiscal income, and GDP per capita

AbstractThis paper investigates the economic impacts of regional integration on a small, less developed jurisdiction in a dynamic fiscal competition environment. The trade‐offs between the economic benefits and the loss of policy flexibility resulting from integration are analyzed from the perspectives of fiscal revenue and GDP per capita. Our results show that the small jurisdiction's loss of flexibility in policymaking can dominate the other effects of integration. Specifically, if the small jurisdiction's efficiency in providing public inputs is originally sufficiently high (low), regional integration always reduces (improves) its net revenue, independently of the extent of efficiency improvement due to integration. However, when the small jurisdiction's efficiency is originally intermediate, the impact on net revenue crucially depends on the magnitude of the efficiency effect. Our analysis also characterizes the trade‐offs resulting from integration between policy flexibility on the one hand and capital mobility and fiscal equalization on the other.

Second-Best Source-Based Taxation of Multinational Firms

I consider a continuum of multinational enterprises (MNEs), which differ in profitability. MNEs employ capital, shift profit to tax havens and may relocate their production facilities to other countries. Source countries provide public inputs and levy taxes. I derive optimal policy choices for different government objectives (to maximize tax revenue, national income or the representative household’s utility) allowing for an unrestricted set of tax policy instruments — in contrast to most existing work on corporate taxation. With observable productivity types, source governments set type-dependent lump-sum taxes and attain the first-best allocation. With unobservable productivity types, the optimum source-based tax system consists of a small lump-sum tax (driving low-profit types out of the market) and positive marginal taxes on reported profit. Optimal marginal tax rates on capital inputs are positive if more profitable firms employ more capital. Optimal public inputs are lower than in the first best if they are of higher value to more profitable firm types. I use a sufficient statistics approach (following Saez 2001) to express optimal tax and input choices as functions of elasticities of observable choice variables. Finally, I use the model to evaluate tax policy measures, e.g. the introduction of an effective minimum tax on profits in tax havens, and to derive the welfare properties of tax competition with an unrestricted set of tax instruments.

The representation of public values in health technology assessment to inform funding decisions: the case of Australia's national funding bodies.

Over the past few years, there has been an increasing recognition of the value of public involvement in health technology assessment (HTA) to ensure the legitimacy and fairness of public funding decisions [Street J, Stafinski T, Lopes E, Menon D. Defining the role of the public in Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and HTA-informed decision-making processes. Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2020;36:87-95]. However, important challenges remain, in particular, how to reorient HTA to reflect public priorities. In a recent international survey of thirty HTA agencies conducted by the International Network of Agencies for HTA (INAHTA), public engagement in HTA was listed as one of the "Top 10" challenges for HTA agencies [O'Rourke B, Werko SS, Merlin T, Huang LY, Schuller T. The "Top 10" challenges for health technology assessment: INAHTA viewpoint. Int J Technol Assess. 2020;36:1-4].Historically, Australia has been at the forefront of the application of HTA for assessing the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of new health technologies to inform public funding decisions. However, current HTA processes in Australia lack meaningful public inputs. Using Australia as an example, we describe this important limitation and discuss the potential impact of this gap on the health system and future directions.

A driver or a placebo? The role of financial support in farmer cooperative development in China

PurposeThis paper explores the effect of financial support on farmer cooperative development in the Chinese context, aiming to evaluate the effectiveness of public inputs and draw implications for the sustainable development of cooperatives. The variance of the effect in different sectors, i.e. crop, forestry, husbandry, fishery and services, is investigated.Design/methodology/approachProvincial-level panel data from 2007 to 2017 are used for this study. A linear dynamic panel regression model is estimated using multiple estimation methods, i.e. the generalized method of moments (GMMs), fixed-effect model and ordinary least squares (OLS) are applied.FindingsThe empirical analyses indicate that the role of the government is important for the development of farmer cooperatives but limited in some specific aspects. First, the coverage of financial support is positively associated with the growth of cooperative population and membership size, but the strength of financial support, measured by the total amount of financial support divided by local agricultural gross domestic product (GDP), has no statistically significant effects on the development of cooperatives. Second, financial support does not exhibit significant influence on the revenue of cooperatives. Third, the magnitude of the effect of government support on cooperative development is heterogeneous across different sectors.Originality/valueThe research study adds to the institutional economics literature on the association between institutional environment and organization development by focusing on a particular and an important type of organization, i.e. farmer cooperatives. It is one of the attempts and a most extensive study to empirically investigate the role of financial support in the development of farmer cooperatives.

Common Language of Sustainability for Built Environment Professionals—The Quintuple Helix Model for Higher Education

One of the repeating themes around the provision of the knowledge and skills needed for delivering sustainable communities is the idea of a “common language” for all built environment professionals. This suggestion has been repeated regularly with each new political and professional review within and between different sectors responsible for the delivery of sustainable communities. There have been multiple efforts to address academic limitations, industry fragmentation and promote more interdisciplinary working and sector collaboration. This research explored the role of skills for sustainable communities, particularly within the higher education (HE) sector, and the responses to support the development of a “common language of sustainability” that can be shared between different sectors, professional disciplines and stakeholders. As an interdisciplinary group of academics and practitioners working with the HE sector in the North East of England, we evaluate the progression of sector collaboration to develop a quintuple helix model for HE. We use this as a suitable framework for systematically “mapping” out the mixed sector (academic, public, business, community and environmental organisations) inputs and influences into a representative sample of HE degree modules that are delivered from foundation and undergraduate to postgraduate levels, including examples of part-time and distance-learning modules. We developed a cascade of models which demonstrate increasing levels of collaboration and their potential positive impact on the effectiveness of education on sustainable communities. The methodological assessments of modules were followed by semi-structured group reflective analysis undertaken through a series of online workshops (recorded during the Covid19 lockdown) to set out a collective understanding of the generic skills needed for the delivery of sustainable communities. These generic skills for sustainable communities are presented as a pedagogical progression model of teaching activities and learning outcomes applied to the levels within HE. We propose sustainability education principles and progressions with the hope that they can have an impact on the design or review of current degree modules and programmes. The paper informs future sustainability research to be grounded in holism and systems thinking; better understanding of values, ethics, influencing and political impact; and procedural authenticity.

Water, Policy, and Productivity in Egyptian Agriculture

When water scarcity restricts agricultural production, expanding water resources is only one option to increase or maintain output; investments in research to raise productivity can also release constraints on growth. In this paper, we construct a model of optimal resource allocation with both public and private inputs in production—the public sector invests in research and irrigation infrastructure to supply technology and water, respectively, whereas the private sector supplies other inputs. The model is used to derive shadow values for water that suggest “crop per drop” valuations are likely to significantly overstate the marginal value of water in agriculture. We apply our model to analyze sources of growth in Egyptian agriculture, which is almost entirely dependent on publicly supplied irrigation water, over 1961–2016. We construct two indexes of total productivity: total factor productivity treats resources from a producer perspective, where water is free and resource rents accrue to land. Total resource productivity takes a social perspective, where government subsidies for irrigation are included as a cost of production, and resource rents are assigned to water withdrawals for agriculture. Our results find that technological innovations and efficiency gains contributed significantly more to agricultural growth in Egypt than expansion of irrigated area or water use. Productivity growth accelerated in the 1980s following the transition from a socialist to a market‐oriented economy. Including social costs of irrigation provision reduces the implied rate of total productivity growth only marginally. Nonetheless, the rise in total resource productivity significantly increased the value of natural resource rents in Egyptian agriculture.

The ‘Rights’ Way to Democratize the Science–Policy Interface in International Environmental Law? A Reply to Anna-Maria Hubert

Abstract Science is widely regarded as being necessary for effective international environmental decision-making and risk assessment processes. However, it is equally well recognized that uncertainties or the complexity of phenomena under study mean that science may only offer partial knowledge for environmental problems in many circumstances. ‘Democratization’ of science is often proposed as a solution to this dilemma. This may involve incorporating a wider spectrum of expert views and public inputs in risk assessments of new technologies, public participation in science through so-called ‘citizen science’ initiatives or the application of the precautionary principle. This reply reviews these approaches and contrasts them with another tantalizing possibility offered by Anna-Maria Hubert’s article; a human rights-based approach drawing on the ‘oft-neglected’ right to science. It assesses the extent to which a rights-based approach, utilizing the right to science, offers a way to bridge the gap between science and democracy in contested international environmental legal decision-making processes. While it concludes that there are important potential benefits to the application of the right to science in international environmental law, it is far from clear that it provides a panacea given the limitations on the right expressed in the international human rights instruments in which it is found, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Instead, the right to science can be seen as placing another thumb on the scales – alongside the precautionary and participatory approaches – in favour of enabling broader, more democratically accountable decision-making in cases of uncertain science and contested environmental risks.

China's regional public safety efficiency: a data envelopment analysis approach.

This study develops a comprehensive public safety efficiency index that includes the inputs and outputs of regional public safety. The DEA-BC2 model was used to measure the technical efficiency (TE), pure technical efficiency (PTE), and scale efficiency (SE) of public safety at 31 province-level administrative divisions (regions) in China from 2014 to 2018, and to analyze the effectiveness of public safety in each year. The findings indicate that the average TE, PTE, and SE of all regions from 2014 and 2018 were mostly redundant and ineffective. The average Malmquist index continued to decline, with the lack of technological progress identified as the main hindering factor. The public safety efficiency of 31 regions was affected by the technical progress change, pure technical efficiency change, and scale efficiency change at different periods. The findings suggest that all regions should improve the public safety inputs, better allocate various input elements and utilize public safety resources more effectively.

Robust security framework with bit‐flipping attack and timing attack for key derivation functions

A Key Derivation Function (KDF) derives cryptographic keys from private string and public information. The security property for the cryptographic keys is indistinguishable from the random strings of equal length. The security analysis of KDFs has received increasing attention. The practice important of KDFs is reflected in the adoption of industry standards such as NIST800-135 and PKCS5. This study proposes a robust security framework that takes into consideration the side-channel attacks. The robust security framework consists of the proposed security model and existing security models. The proposed security model is known as Adaptive Chosen All Inputs Model (CAM), which analyses the security of KDFs in terms of the bit-flipping attack and timing attack. The existing security model is the Adaptive Chosen Public Inputs Model (CPM). This research shows the implication of relationship and the non-implication relationship between CAM and CPM. The simulation of security models is according to the indistinguishable game played between a challenger and an adversary. These security models are used to evaluate existing KDFs. The result shows that none of the existing KDFs are secure in CAM for both the bit-flipping attack and timing attack. Hence, this research introduces an alternative KDF that is proven secure in CAM.

IMPACT OF PUBLIC POLICIES ON THE TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION IN THE RENEWABLE ENERGY SECTOR

The challenges posed by climate change require that the society reconsider its patterns of production and energy consumption, which is why the innovation in the renewable energy sector is fundamental. For this reason, the participation of the State through actions that promote research, development and dissemination of the technologies in this sector is essential to overcome the technical and economic barriers it faces. This research analyzes the impact of six public policy instruments implemented to promote the technological development of the renewable energy sector: economic instruments, regulatory instruments, policy support, research, information and adaptation, and voluntary approaches; differentiating both among groups of countries according to their level of income as well as among energy sources. Through the implementation of a negative binomial model in a panel data panel setting ranging from 1970 to 2012, the results corroborate the positive impact of the implementation of public policy strategies on the innovative activity of the renewable energy sector. However, the effectiveness of the instruments varies according to the level of the wealth of the country and the energy source analysed. These results can add public policy inputs to promote innovative activity in the sector.

After-School Tutoring, Household Substitution and Student Achievement: Experimental Evidence from Rural China

Worldwide children’s access to after-school learning activities is highly dependent on family backgrounds. Concern over the implications of such activities for child development and educational inequality has led to a global rise of public provision of after-school learning support. However little is known about inter-actions of public after-school activities and household investments in children’s learning. This paper contributes to the literature on the effects of public inputs on household inputs and student achievement in after-school settings. We build a model that integrates public and private inputs to produce student achievement through two competing mechanisms – diminishing returns to total inputs and complementarity between public and private inputs. When diminishing returns dominate complementarity, the model predicts the substitution away of private inputs due to increases in public inputs for all households, although the extent of crowding-out is smaller and therefore the test score gains are larger for children from disadvantaged family backgrounds facing higher costs of private inputs. We implement a randomized controlled after-school tutoring experiment in rural China where many children are left-behind by both parents and cared for by grandparents. During the program, tutees living with parents reported large and significant reductions in the amount of tutoring received at home, whereas tutees living apart from both parents reported much smaller, and often insignificant, reductions. We find that tutees’ math scores improved significantly, and more for children living without parents, although there is no evidence for improvement in tutees’ endline reading scores.

Smart Development Banks

The conventional paradigm about development banks is that these institutions exist to target well-identified market failures. However, market failures are not directly observable and can only be ascertained with a suitable learning process. Hence, the question is how do the policymakers know what activities should be promoted; how do they learn about the obstacles to the creation of new activities? Rather than assuming that the government has arrived at the right list of market failures and uses development banks to close some well-identified market gaps, we suggest that development banks can be in charge of identifying these market failures through their loan-screening and lending activities to guide their operations and provide critical inputs for the design of productive development policies. In fact, they can also identify government failures that stand in the way of development and call for needed public inputs. This intelligence role of development banks is similar to the role that modern theories of financial intermediation assign to banks as institutions with a comparative advantage in producing and processing information. However, while private banks focus on information on private returns, development banks would potentially produce and organize information about social returns.

Challenges and lessons learned in promoting adoption of standardized local public health service delivery data through the application of the Public Health Activities and Services Tracking model.

Population-level prevention activities are often publicly invisible and excluded in planning and policymaking. This creates an incomplete picture of prevention service-related inputs, particularly at the local level. We describe the process and lessons learned by the Public Health Activities and Services Tracking team in promoting adoption of standardized service delivery measures developed to assess public health inputs and guide system transformations. The 3 factors depicted in our Public Health Activities and Services Tracking model-data need and use, data access, and standardized measures-must be realized to promote collection of standard public health system data. Bureaucratic, resource, system, and policy challenges hampered our efforts toward adoption of the standardized measures we promoted. Substantial investments of time, resources, and coordination appear necessary for systems to adopt changes needed for collecting comparable service delivery data. Lessons from our process of promoting adoption of standardized measures provide recommendations to support future efforts to measure public health system contributions to the public's health.

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

Recent Status of Public Response to RDE Development & Utilization

Preliminary study on social aspect of Experimental Power Reactor (RDE) development and utilization has been conducted, focusing on the qualitative aspects of public response and developing social issues related to the planning of RDE development at South Tangerang region. The study involves assessment on focused-group discussions results, public inputs given via distributed questionnaires and interviews with relevant stakeholders at focus areas. The study is aimed to identify specific issues and opinions growing in the public prior to the launching of Government plan in building RDE at Puspiptek Complex and to identify important stakeholder groups which need to engaged during the continuation of RDE program, as part of sustainable social engineering program to increase public acceptance on RDE project and nuclear energy. Desk study, interviews and qualitative analysis were utilized as methodology of this study. The study reveals several important issues growing among the public, they are, public fear on environmental impact if accident occurs, public stigma on radiation danger, low understanding on environmental monitoring activities which leads to less confidence on environmental protection and economic benefits provided by the new reactor occurrence. The study also reveals three major importnt stakeholder groups which need to be engaged during the social engineering program implementation, they are general public living at 3 regions around Puspiptek Complex, workers at Puspiptek Complex and academic community. These results will be beneficial to the development of social engineering program and implementation of public engagement for RDE project.

Aggregating Farrell efficiencies with private and public inputs

Since the initial paper on aggregating Farrell efficiencies of entities into a group counterpart by Färe and Zelenyuk (2003), much attention has been given in the literature to the aggregation of efficiency and efficiency-related indexes and indicators for both static and dynamic settings. In this paper, we make a distinction between two types of inputs in the aggregation framework: private and public inputs. Private inputs are those used by each entity individually, while public inputs are used collectively. The obtained aggregation procedure, while remaining consistent with previous contributions, offers the advantage of considering more practical cases, and increases our understanding of aggregation techniques.

Do school inputs crowd out parents’ investments in their children?

Many countries around the world are making substantial and increasing public investments in children by providing resources for schooling from early years through to adolescence. Recent research has looked at how parents respond to children’s schooling opportunities, highlighting that public inputs can alternatively encourage or crowd out parental inputs. Most evidence finds that parents reduce their own efforts as schooling improves, dampening the efficiency of government expenditure. Policymakers may thus want to focus government provision on schooling inputs that are less easily substituted.

Public Input Provision in Asymmetric Regions with Labor Market Imperfections

Abstract This paper examines efficiency in public input provision in two large regions with labor market imperfections. Because employment and pecuniary externalities are associated with public input provision, the provision level exceeds the optimal amount under the presence of wage rigidities in the capital-exporting jurisdiction if only head taxes are used to finance government expenditures. Efficiency in public input provision will remain ambiguous in the capital-importing jurisdiction unless a specific functional form is assumed for the production technology. The constrained efficient provision with public inputs can be restored with an additional tax (subsidy) on capital that is used to strategically influence the interest rate on the common capital market and to increase employment by attracting foreign capital.

Do dictatorships redistribute more?

This paper examines the effect of political institutions on fiscal redistribution for a country-level panel from 1960–2010. Using data on Gini coefficients before and after government intervention, we apply a measure of effective fiscal redistribution that reflects the effect of taxes and transfers on income inequality. Our findings clearly indicate that non-democratic regimes demonstrate significantly greater direct fiscal redistribution. Subsequently, we employ fiscal data in an attempt to enlighten this puzzling empirical finding. We find that dictatorial regimes rely more heavily on cash transfers that exhibit a direct impact on net inequality and consequently on the difference between market and net inequality (i.e., effective fiscal redistribution), whereas democratic regimes devote a larger amount of resources to public inputs (health and education) that may influence market inequality but not the difference between market and net inequality per se. We argue that the driving force behind the observed differences within the pattern on government spending and effective fiscal redistribution is that democratic institutions lead survival-oriented leaders to care more for the private market, and thus to follow policies that enhance the productivity of the whole economy.