Regulation and poverty: an empirical examination of the relationship between the incidence of federal regulation and the occurrence of poverty across the US states

Public Choice - We estimate the impact of federal regulations on poverty rates in the 50 US states using the recently created Federal Regulation and State Enterprise (FRASE) index, which is an...     

Voter participation and the redistributive state

The redistributive theory of the state implies that voter participation rates should be highest among those who have the most to gain or lose or a V-shaped relationship between income and voting participation should exist. We use a data set that contains nearly 21,000 observations on individual survey responses about voting behavior in the U.S. between 1972 and 1993 to show that the participation rate generally rises monotonically with income, perhaps except at very high income levels. It does report other findings consistent with an economic theory of voting based on returns to association and with the hypothesis that public employees vote more.     

An examination of the causal relationship between government spending and revenue: A cointegration analysis

This paper tests the validity of the proposition that there is a causal relationship between government expenditure and government revenue for Greece over the period 1957–1993. The empirical analysis employs tests of cointegration as pre-tests for Granger tests of causality. The empirical evidence suggests that there is a long-run relationship between government spending and government revenue and expenditures cause revenues.     

心理学与高校德育工作关系探析

高校德育工作是一项极其复杂的系统工程,是进行思想道德教育的主渠道、主阵地和主课堂。在市场经济与多元文化影响下,高校德育工作从外在视角对人施加影响的传统教育方式受到冲击,导致高校德育工作显得苍白无力,实效不佳。因此将心理学原理和方法与高校德育工作相结合成为时代背景下新的探索方向。     

The war on poverty: between economics and politics

A wealth of solutions to poverty have been proposed, with little understanding of the forces required to turn a sound idea into an implementable program. A system approach is suggested to overcome this deficiency. This implies analyzing the effects of antipoverty measures on other elements of a society and a polity and the feedback effects of changes in these other elements on the new programs which are being introduced. Such an approach is seen overcoming the limitations of fragmented views of the issue—such as the purely economic one—as well as the lack of systematic analysis of a progam's costs, benefits, sources of funds, and nonfinancial resources. Consequently, a challenge is also offered to those who formulate programs without taking into account dominant values (e.g., questions of consensus) and other political considerations (e.g., which groups would benefit or suffer from the program). This is seen as leading to undemocratic action or, most frequently, to inaction due to resistance. The article concludes with a brief review of the recent Nixon-Moynihan proposal in terms of the societal-system approach here advocated, and adds a cautionary note on the limits of planning.In revising this article, I benefited from comments by Daniel Bell, Carolyn O. Atkinson, and Sarajane Heidt.     

TJTC and the promise and reality of redistributive vouchering and tax credit policy

The Targeted Jobs Tax Credit (TJTC) is a representative redistributive incentive. Initially, proponents saw TJTC as an elegant program, efficiently promoting labor market behavior that would solve the employment problems of many disadvantaged job seekers. However, interest groups distorted the credit into a windfall for businesses that hire large numbers of low wage workers. The policy theories incorporated into TJTC, which emphasized continual program reform and minimized program management by public administrators, provided a setting conducive to interest group distortion. Because few representatives of the disadvantaged participated in the oversight process, special interests undermined TJTC being reformed through empirical evaluation. This experience indicates that without major changes in the policy process, narrowly targeted rzdistributive policies should be avoided.     

Likely effects of devolution on the redistributive character of policy agendas

This article assesses two competing views of the effects federal devolution may have on the future of health, education and welfare programs in the United States. One school of thought argues that devolution of social policy to the state and local level will have negative consequences for the less affluent. A contrasting view maintains that devolution will spur innovations at the state and local level, which in turn will lead to more effective and efficient social programs. Dileo analyzes presidential and gubernatorial speeches over a period of 5 years to assess the state of U.S. social policy. He concludes that the federal government is generally more supportive of redistributive policies than are the states.     

Good governance and multidimensional poverty: A comparative analysis of 71 countries

In 2015, the international community committed to “reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions.” According to international development agencies, good governance is crucial to achieving this. We examine the relationship between good governance and multidimensional poverty using hierarchical models and survey data for 71 countries. Our results suggest there is a direct effect of good governance on multidimensional poverty and that good governance is associated with reduced horizontal inequalities. However, we find evidence of a beneficial effect of good governance for middle‐income countries but not for low‐income countries. Thus, while our results suggest that good governance can play a role in reducing multidimensional poverty, they also suggest that governance reforms alone might not yield the desired effect for all countries.     

Poverty spending and the poverty gap

This paper examines two questions basic to welfare policy: (1) whether the amount of poverty-related transfers is sufficient to fill the poverty gap, and (2) which families actually get benefits and how much of their income deficit is filled by those benefits. Transfers are sufficient: the post-Social Security poverty gap is $74 billion while poverty-related programs total $198 billion. Further, 86% of current income-conditioned benefits go to the pretransfer poor and 89% of those are used to alleviate poverty (fill the poverty gap). Thus, if a substantial fraction of total Federal and State expenditures on poverty-related programs could be targeted more toward the poor, the poverty gap can be eliminated. The current programs, however, would have to be changed substantially to achieve the necessary retargeting.     

A nonlinear principal component analysis of the relationship between budget rules and fiscal performance in the European Union

Tests of the relationship between budget rules and fiscal performance are metric sensitive and arbitrary in the evaluation of the stringency of the rules, in the aggregation of these evaluations in an index and in the imposition of a linearly specified model. We propose a nonlinear principal component analysis to solve these problems and evaluate the relative disciplinary power of each rule. A battery of panel regressions on 1980–2003 optimally transformed data relative to 12 EU countries confirms that, upon controlling for standard economic, political and institutional variables, more stringent rules reduce fiscal imbalances and budget size.     

实践与真理的关系

实践与认识是对立的统一体,实践是认识的来源和基础,又是认识的目的,人们要想不断获得新的认识,正确地认识客观事物,找到真理,必须通过实践。实践是检验认识真理的根本手段,但由于实践本身的变化性,相对性,特别是在阶级社会里,对立的双方会进行完全相反的实践,因此如何检验实践却需要一个标准。而只有真理本身是客观的,确定的,实践正确与否要由真理来判断,而真理又是具体的,相对的,指导实践的真理也是相对真理,只有在相对真理指导下进行实践才能产生新的更多的真理认识,实现相对真理到绝对真理的转化。     

Post election redistributive strategies of representatives: A partial theory of the politics of redistribution

Public Choice - Vote maximizing candidates for reelection often have an incentive to redistribute income. They target certain constituent groups as recipients for income transfers and others as...     

论政治文明与政党制度建设的关系

政治文明的实质和核心是政治民主化 ,其核心表现形式是制度文明。文明的政治制度化发展程度 ,事实上是一个事关人类政治文明发展的核心问题 ,在这个问题上 ,体现着一个国家和民族的政治智慧。笔者认为 ,随着人们价值观的变化 ,媒体的变化和政治发展的变化 ,政党体制也必然发生变化。在社会主义政治文明建设中 ,在政党制度建设问题上 ,执政党和参政党构成一个共同政治体系的两个方面 ,共产党处于多党合作的核心地位 ,起着领导作用 ,当代中国政党制度建设的关键在中国共产党     

Cross-city evidence on the relationship between immigration and crime

Public concerns about the costs of immigration and crime are high, and sometimes overlapping. This article investigates the relationship between immigration into a metropolitan area and that area's crime rate during the 1980s. Using data from the Uniform Crime Reports and the Current Population Surveys, we find, in the cross section, that cities with high crime rates tend to have large numbers of immigrants. However, controlling for the demographic characteristics of the cities, recent immigrants appear to have no effect on crime rates. In explaining changes in a city's crime rate over time, the flow of immigrants again has no effect, whether or not we control for other city-level characteristics. In a secondary analysis of individual data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that youth born abroad are statistically significantly less likely than native-born youth to be criminally active.     

多民族国家与民主关系的复杂性

多民族国家与民主之间是否相互反对,从19世纪自由主义思想家密尔提出民主与多民族不兼容命题以来成为学界所关心的问题。从上世纪苏联东欧国家巨变,民族问题愈演愈烈的条件下,近年来中国学界对此进行了热烈讨论,提出了不同的看法。本文通过对世界上诸多多民族国家的历史与现实比较发现,多民族国家与民主政治之间存在着复杂的关系,它们之间既存在着相互反对的方面,也存在着互动的方面。不同国家或地区由于历史与现实状况限制,呈现出复杂多样的情况。在对多民族国家与民主关系的认识上应该从实际出发,客观地理解它们之间的关系,从多民族国家民主建设的经验中吸取有益的成份。     

论新时期的党群关系问题

密切党群关系是党的十六大关注的一个十分重要的问题 ,它对巩固和发展党的执政地位具有重要的意义。本文首先从理论和实践上分析了新时期加强和改进党群关系的必要性 ,然后从分析影响党群关系的因素入手 ,系统阐述了建立互动合作型党群关系的措施和办法