Evaluating the effectiveness of policies related to drunk driving

New findings are presented on the effectiveness (in terms of fatal crash reductions) of state‐level public policies related to drunk driving. Conventional estimates of policy effects might be biased because of the endogeneity of policies; this concern is addressed by analyzing the time pattern of policy effects with respect to the date of adoption. For the 0.08 BAC law, the results suggest that a bias upward exists, but the policy is still somewhat effective. Graduated licensing programs for young drivers and the Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) organization are also evaluated for the first time in this type of analysis. The estimated time pattern of effects for graduated licensing suggest that its effects are also overstated in conventional analyses, but the policy is still effective for young drivers. The estimates for MADD do not imply an effect, but this result could be due to the crudeness of the variable used. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The effectiveness of the telecommunications regulatory regime: the case of Sri Lanka telecom

This article examines the telecommunications industry in Sri Lanka and assesses the effectiveness of regulatory arrangements associated with the liberalisation of the telecommunications industry, from a management point of view. The review focuses on the scope of services, price and the quality of services available to customers after the liberalisation. This study finds that, despite the early establishment of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) to monitor the telecommunications industry, its interventions have been only partially successful in making it conducive to service providers and customers. While liberalisation of the telecommunications industry has been favoured, the role of the regulator has been controversial with regard to its independence, impartiality, capability, transparency and accountability. We argue that the current model has failed to create favourable market conditions under the circumstances prevailing in the country, and hence a more appropriate model is yet to be developed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The feasibility of social policies

The notion that, given sufficient ingenuity and resources, any social problem can be solved, in a manner consistent with the announced policy objectives and with the accepted institutional framework, has been a major source of failures and frustrations. This paper suggests that policy analysis should concentrate on the investigation of the conditions of feasibility of public programs. Feasibility is defined in terms of all the relevant constraints: social, political, administrative, and institutional, as well as technical and economic. The emphasis on the pure logic of choice and optimal decision rules, so characteristic of normative theorizing in decision theory, management science, and welfare economics, has tended to obscure the fact that in the field of social policies, the range of feasible choices is severely limited by a variety of constraints. Most bad decisions are not just suboptimal; on closer examination, it usually turns out that they were not even feasible at the time they were made. Only by understanding the reasons why, under certain circumstances, a given goal cannot be achieved, can we hope to gain better knowledge about the working of social institutions. Just as the essence of the scientific method is the critical analysis and refutation of proposed theories, rather than the accumulation of evidence in favor of pet solutions, so the most important task of policy analysis consists in submitting plans and objectives to the most stringent tests of feasibility. Also in analytic case studies, the search for constraints that were ignored by the decisionmakers has considerable heuristic value, as I try to demonstrate with a critical discussion of some aspects of the British National Health Service.Paper presented at the Workshop on Models and Cases in Administration Decision Making, Joint Sessions of Workshops of the European Consortium for Political Research, Strasbourg, France, March 28–April 2, 1974.     

The efficiency of regulatory arbitrage

Public Choice - Classic public choice skepticism about the regulatory state, based on theories of rent-seeking, rent extraction and regulatory capture, is based on the unrealistic, and usually...     

Preventing construction deaths: The role of public policies

Are stronger direct financial incentives or regulatory enforcement effective in reducing fatalities in the construction industry? We examine two important policies—state workers' compensation (WC) programs and federal and state Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) activities—which embody those strategies. We examine their impact by looking at state-level fatality rates in the construction industry from 1992 to 2016. Setting aside highway crashes and violence, the majority of employee deaths occur in construction. We find that states which exempt small firms from the requirement to buy WC insurance have higher fatality rates. When eligibility for compensation is restricted by longer waiting periods, fatality rates are substantially higher. More frequent federal or state OSHA inspections and, especially, consultation visits are associated with lower fatality rates, but higher average penalties are not. Limited variation in these policies over our sample period, especially for WC, makes these results suggestive rather than definitively causal.     

The political economy of Australian regulatory reform

The problem of regulatory accumulation has increasingly been recognised as a policy problem in its own right. Governments have then devised and implemented regulatory reform policies that directly seek to ameliorate the burdens of regulatory accumulation (e.g. red tape reduction targets). In this paper we examine regulatory reform approaches in Australia through the lens of policy innovation. Our contributions are twofold. We first examine the evolutionary discovery process of regulatory reform policies in Australia (at the federal, intergovernmental, and state levels). This demonstrates a process of policy innovation in regulatory mechanisms and measurements. We then analyse a new measurement of regulatory burden based on text analytics, RegData: Australia. RegData: Australia uses textual analysis to count ‘restrictiveness clauses' in regulation – such as ‘must’, ‘cannot’ and ‘shall’ – thereby developing a new database (RDAU1.0). We place this ‘restrictiveness clauses’ measurement within the context of regulatory policy innovation, and examine the potential for further innovation in regulatory reform mechanisms.     

The regulatory state in developing countries: Redistribution and regulatory failure in Brazil

Following the traditional doctrine of the “regulatory state”, regulatory agencies should be given very focused mandates and stay away from the politicized realm of distributive policies and decisions. An opposing perspective would state that if regulatory agencies can contribute to economic redistribution, positive results such as network expansion, economies of scale, and fiscal efficiency will ultimately lead to lower levels of regulatory failure. This article tests whether, in countries of high socio-economic inequality, such as Brazil, the active incorporation of distributive considerations by regulatory agencies leads to lower levels of failure. Through the analysis of the activities of seven Brazilian network regulatory agencies, the article develops theory-driven expectations and tests these expectations using crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA). It concludes that not prioritizing redistribution is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for regulatory agencies' failure. In most types of failure, a lack of priority to redistribution leads to failure when combined with low regulatory capacity and low levels of competence.     

中国边疆民族政策的实证调查

边疆多民族地区的经济建设和社会发展,是政府主导型的一个社会进程,中国政府在这个过程中承担着重大的政治责任和社会责任。本文通过对中国政府在边疆多民族地区经济、社会领域若干政策的回顾,以及对边疆多民族地区社会现状的调查,指出长期以来“效率优先”的改革思想,地方政府“效率单边独追”的畸形发展方式与中央政府“民族主义”的政策导向,是造成边疆地区对中央政府政策认同度低的重要原因。     

Transparency in transnational governance: The determinants of information disclosure of voluntary sustainability programs

The rise of “new” transnational governance has intensified debates about a lack of accountability in global politics. Reviewing the mechanisms through which transparency can foster accountability beyond the state, this article explores the determinants of information disclosure in the field of transnational sustainability governance. Examining the institutional design of 113 voluntary sustainability programs, we find a positive correlation between the involvement of public actors and information disclosure. In contrast, the role of civil society is more ambiguous. There is no statistical support for arguments linking non‐governmental organization participation to increased transparency. At the same time, our analysis reveals a robust correlation between civil society‐led metagovernance and information disclosure. Moreover, we find that crowding has a negative effect on transparency, whereas normative peer pressures have no influence. At a broader level, the analysis reveals a lack of “deep transparency” among transnational sustainability governors. This limits the scope for transparency‐induced accountability in this policy domain.     

The effectiveness of weapon system acquisition reform efforts

Most Americans believe that their nation's weapon acquisition system is one of the worst-managed activities in the public or private sectors. Although the process has been the subject of many reform efforts, it is reasonable to ask whether these reform efforts had any success. This article examines the effectiveness of such reforms by reviewing the results of the acquisition process. This analysis, using measures of the extent of cost growth and schedule slippage, indicates a trend toward improvement in the acquisition process, at least up to the 1980s. Acquisition results from the decade of the 1980s suggest some stalling in this trend. However, when the process is compared to other public and private sector acquisition systems, it appears to be performing well.     

The sense and the nonsense of school effectiveness

Hanushek misinterprets the data on which he bases his conclusion and draws inappropriate policy implications from them. The goals of a school system affect how its resources are used. Educational goals are highly diverse. Accordingly, the measures of output used in Hanushek's studies are inappropriate. To develop more effective measures, the nature of the teaching and learning process must be much better understood. Fortunately, a solid beginning has already been made among specialists in education on that critical task; but more work is needed.