Rules and Flexibility in Public Budgeting: The Case of Budget Modernisation in Australia

This paper explores the features of public budgeting that make it resistant to efforts to balance central oversight and situational flexibility. Its aim is to help explain why systemic efforts at budget modernisation in the name of ‘devolution’ may have failed to deliver expanded budget flexibility. After defining flexibility, and briefly surveying how it can be inhibited by budget practices using the example of collaboration, the paper applies a taxonomy of general ‘budget rules’ to illustrate the trade‐offs between control and flexibility. It uses an analysis of budget reform in the Australian federal government over the last 30 years to identify a key set of ‘legacy reforms’ – all intended primarily to enable budget flexibility – to show how their design and redesign were purposed as modification to the general rules, and how, ultimately, they were constrained by them.     

The Internationalization of Network Industries: A Comparative Policy Analysis of Italian Railways and Utilities

Internationalization constitutes a dominant strategy for former public enterprises, as they enter emerging markets in other countries. This article provides a firm-level analysis of the drivers of (and obstacles to) internationalization. It focuses primarily on the experience of Italian companies in the railway and utility sectors by comparing and contrasting them with major European companies as well as among themselves. The article shows the diverse degrees of internationalization of Italian companies and takes into account possible explanations, showing how the policy and regulatory environment do interact with the configurations of actors’ preferences in shaping companies’ strategies.     

Determination of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin in Postmortem Samples in Ectopic Pregnancies

Increased human chorionic gonadotropin levels (HCG) can be detected in femoral blood, bile, and vitreous humor collected during autopsy of pregnant women using a standard kit designed for living patients. In the study herein, the concentrations of HCG were measured in postmortem serum, vitreous, bile, cerebrospinal, and pericardial fluids in 4 cases of fatal ectopic pregnancy and 40 controls using a quantitative electrochemiluminescence immunoassay designed for living patients. No false‐negative cases were identified in any of the analyzed samples in any of the ectopic pregnancy cases. No correlations were found between total HCG levels in postmortem serum and the other tested specimens. The results of this study would suggest that higher HCG in bile, vitreous, pericardial, and cerebrospinal fluids may confirm the existence of ectopic pregnancy and therefore identify other situations in which this hormone is increased, although gestational age cannot be reliably estimated using these values.     

Death from Barotrauma Due to Compressed Air: A Medico‐legal Analysis

Lesions of the digestive tract due to barotrauma resulting from compressed air application are not common, are rarely lethal, and largely affect the sigmoid and descending colon. Moreover, their pathogenic mechanism is a topic of discussion because these lesions have multiple characteristics. Here, the authors describe an autoptic case of death from lesions of the ascending and transverse segments, with perforations and bleeding suffusions as well as ischemic areas covered the colonic wall that was extremely thinned, congested, and hemorrhagic, with considerable flattening leading to disappearance of the mucosal folds and with numerous petechial hemorrhages. The pathological framework of lung congestion made it possible to identify the mechanism responsible for this death as depletion of the heart's pumping function, which contributed significantly to the acute respiratory failure due to respiratory distress as well as to reduced mobility of the diaphragm due to intestinal distension. Acute heart failure played an important role in this death.     

A Country Once Great? Asylum Seekers,Historical Imagination,and the Moral Privilege of Whiteness

ABSTRACT

The current public debate on asylum seekers arriving to Australia by boat is profoundly emotional and divisive. Its emotional nature must not only be considered in the present context but also understood from a historical perspective. This article argues that often the asylum seeker debate has been structured as an emotional dispute about the morality of the Australian nation; and that one of the main functions of such a dispute is to reinstate the moral privilege of whiteness. This has weakened the ability of human rights activists to advocate for the ending of current policies, and has instead reinforced an insular, exclusionary and rhetorical understanding of Australian history. On both sides of the debate, historical amnesia and the rhetorical celebration of the past have at times worked hand in hand with allegedly pragmatic approaches to the “boat people” crisis. Yet it is only in addressing the repressed and haunting memories of the past that Australians might find critical and creative antidotes to the merciless dictates of pragmatic politics.     

Determination of vehicle speed from recorded video using the open-source software Kinovea

Video devices of different kind often record traffic accidents, including vehicle-pedestrian collisions and hit-and-run accidents. In these cases, the vehicle speed is valuable information because it can assist the investigators in an accident reconstruction. This paper examines the use of Kinovea, an open-source video annotation tool designed for sport analysis, to estimate vehicle speed in forensic videos. Kinovea does not require a complex methodology, and it can be used to make the calculation easily. A series of vehicle driving experiments using an appropriately calibrated speed radar system (so called Scout Speed) were carried out, and measurements were compared with the estimated speed. In controlled conditions, the comparison of Scout reference speed and calculated average vehicle speed by means of Kinovea found an average difference of 0.43 km/h, with a margin of error of ±0.64 km/h. In addition, further preliminary tests were carried out to check the reliability of the measurements under lower resolution conditions. Also, in these cases the calculations were in line with the ground truth. Therefore, in the tested conditions, Kinovea demonstrated to be an easy and reliable tool available for forensic video examiners. Further tests need to be conducted in order to address the applicability of the measurement technique with true CCTV/surveillance video recordings.     

The effects of biased technological changes on total factor productivity: a rejoinder and new empirical evidence

The paper by Ji and Wang (J Technol Transf, 2013) calls new attention on the analysis of the effects of the direction of technological change. The aim of this paper is to better articulate and test the theoretical arguments that the direction of technological changes has specific effects on the efficiency of the production process and to study the incentives and the processes that lead to its introduction. The decomposition of total factor productivity growth into the bias and the shift effects enables to articulate the hypothesis that the types of technological change whether more neutral or more biased reflect the variety of the innovation processes at work. The evidence of a large sample of European regions tests the hypothesis that regional innovations systems with a strong science base are better able to introduce neutral technological changes while regional innovation systems that rely more upon learning processes and tacit knowledge favor the introduction of directed technologies a form of meta-substitution that aims at exploiting the opportunities provided by the most intensive use of locally abundant factors.     

‘Tesco for Terrorists’ Reconsidered: Arms and Conflict Dynamics in Libya and in the Sahara-Sahel Region

How does arms availability affect armed conflict? What implications does increased arms availability have for the organisation of armed groups involved in war against the state? This article explores these questions by looking into the civil war in Libya and the subsequent proliferation of weapons in the broader Sahel/North Africa region. Its argument is based on secondary sources: online databases, international organisations reports and news media. First, we examine the question of firearms in Libya in order to understand how changing conditions of weapons availability affected the formation of armed groups during different phases of war hostilities (February–October 2011). We highlight that, as weapons became more readily available to fighters in the field during this period, a process of fragmentation occurred, hindering efforts to build mechanisms that would allow control of the direction of the revolutionary armed movement. Next, as security continued to be a primary challenge in the new Libya, we consider the way in which unaccountable firearms and light weapons have affected the post-war landscape in the period from October 2011 to the end of 2013. Finally, we put the regional and international dimensions under scrutiny, and consider how the proliferation of weapons to nearby insurgencies and armed groups has raised major concern among Libya’s neighbours. Short of establishing any causal relationship stricto sensu, we underscore the ways in which weapons from Libya have rekindled or altered local conflicts, creating permissive conditions for new tactical options, and accelerating splintering processes within armed movements in the Sahara-Sahel region.     

Opportunism and MPs’ chances of re-election: an analysis of political transformism in the Italian parliament

Public Choice - We identify as political transformists the Italian members of parliament (MPs) who cross the aisle and vote for legislation opposed by their own political group—i.e., MPs who...     

Returns to effort in rent-seeking games

In the traditional formulation of rent-seeking games, increasing returns to effort are characterized by an exponent r>1. However, when the value of the rent is normalized to 1, the players’ effort levels A and B will typically be less than 1. Thus, when A<1 and r>1, the value of A ^r decreases as r increases, contradicting the interpretation of r>1 as representing increasing returns to effort. This apparent defect in the mathematization of the problem seems to suggest that a different interpretation of r is required whenever A<1, upsetting the uniformity and elegance of the model. In this short note, we demonstrate that the perceived problem is illusory, and that the usual interpretation of r is satisfactory for all values of A.