Public housing,health, and health behaviors: Is there a connection?

This paper explores the relationship between public housing, health outcomes, and health behaviors among low-income housing residents. While public housing can be a dangerous and unhealthy environment in which to live, the subsidized rent may free up resources for nutritious food and health care. In addition, public housing may be of higher quality than the available alternatives, it may provide easier access to health clinics willing to serve the poor, and it may link residents to social support networks, which can improve mental health and the ability to access higher-quality grocery stores. To test whether there is a "back-door" health benefit to the public housing program, we analyze data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. We minimize the effects of selection into public housing with controls and instrumental variables estimation and find that the results are somewhat sensitive to the instrumental variable used, and thus, we conclude that we are unable to detect a robust health benefit from public housing for our measures of health. However, we do find some evidence that public housing residency has mixed effects on domestic violence, increases obesity, and worsens mothers' overall health status.     

The seventh plan—the demise of French planning?

Many critics claim that the Seventh Plan marks the demise of economic planning at the national level in France. Looking at the content and the preparation process of this ‘non‐democratic non‐plan’,¹ this paper shows that this Plan is simply a ‘strategic framework’ (=a party platform) with, as a central core, a limited number of public investment programmes which stand a reasonable chance of being implemented. With regards to its preparation, ‘consensus‐building’ has become little more than a dead letter. Nor does the future of planning look very hopeful, whatever the complexion of the Government in power.     

Is Leviathan Manageable?

Books reviewed:
Peri E. Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning, 1905–1996.     

Is governance democratic?

This paper argues that governance can engender undemocratic inequality, exclusion and populism. It does so by analysing the concept of governance, and unearthing three theoretical justifications for it: one libertarian, one radical and one republican. These justifications are in turn refuted by showing how they respectively undermine a process-view of democracy, neglect structural avenues for accountability and encourage elites to wield power.     

What Is Governance?

This commentary points to the poor state of empirical measures of the quality of states, that is, executive branches and their bureaucracies. Much of the problem is conceptual, as there is very little agreement on what constitutes high‐quality government. The commentary suggests four approaches: (1) procedural measures, such as the Weberian criteria of bureaucratic modernity; (2) capacity measures, which include both resources and degree of professionalization; (3) output measures; and (4) measures of bureaucratic autonomy. It rejects output measures and suggests a two‐dimensional framework of using capacity and autonomy as a measure of executive branch quality. This framework explains the conundrum of why low‐income countries are advised to reduce bureaucratic autonomy while high‐income ones seek to increase it.