公安盘查与人权保护

公安盘查是人民警察法赋予人民警察在维护社会治安秩序中的行政强制权。公安盘查权行使是否适当,直接关系到公民基本权利的保护。为了最大限度地保护宪法赋予公民的自由权利,必须严格规范盘查的适用对象、盘查的方式、盘查的程序及盘查的救济等方面内容。     

What can be done against public corruption and fraud: Expert views on strategies to protect public integrity

A number of questions dominate the debate about public corruption and fraud. First of all, of course, there is the question of the content of these phenomena. What is corruption, what is fraud and how is it related to power abuse and public waste? Some scholars stress that these questions are unanswerable if ethnocentrism is to be avoided. Others are more positive about the possibility to grasp the central meaning of the concepts. A second type of questions has to do with understanding public corruption and fraud. To define a concept is something; to understand it is something different. Understanding means knowing the causes and consequences. To be able to understand it, corruption should be given a place in the framework of knowledge about public structure, culture and behavior. This is all but a simple endeavor because it will make a difference which theoretical and methodological framework is chosen as a starting point. This article seeks to avoid this obstacle by choosing an approach which could be categorized as pragmatic and eclectic, trying to discover whether there are causes which are seen as important by a variety of experts with different academical and occupational backgrounds: is there a common core present in different approaches? Third, there is the normative debate. What are the positive and negative consequences of corruption and fraud and how can cost and benefits be compared and judged? Nowadays, most scholars and practitioners in the field stress the negative consequences of public corruption and fraud. Such a critical attitude almost automatically leads to a fourth type of debate, about the question “what to do about it?”. Which methods and strategies are thinkable and what works? This subject is the central one in this article.     

The politics of managed competition: public abuse of the private interest

The doctrine of managed competition in health care sought to achieve the social goals of access and efficiency using market incentives and consumer choice rather than governmental regulation and public administration. In retrospect, it demanded too much from both the public and the private sectors. Rather than develop choice-supporting rules and institutions, the public sector has promoted process regulation and benefit mandates. The private health insurance sector has pursued short-term profitability rather than cooperate in the development of fair competition and informed consumer choice. Purchasers have subsidized inefficient insurance designs in order to exploit tax and regulatory loopholes and to retain an image of corporate paternalism. America's health care system suffers from the public abuse of private interests and the private abuse of the public interest.     

Public bads and private firms: efficiency and sustainability with different allocations of voting rights

A number of authors have proposed that firms can internalize externalities through their shareholders. This paper investigates this proposition, focusing on public bads. Theoretically it is, indeed, possible that shareholders decide that the firm reduces its public bads at the cost of profits, thereby increasing Pareto-efficiency. One of the factors which help determine the size of the reduction is the number of shareholders with a (very) small stake in the firm. The greater this number, the greater the reduction will tend to be. It is shown that the reduction in public bads can be reversed by takeovers, but under special conditions only while takeover defences may also be used. Unfortunately, there are a number of factors which significantly limit the internalization of external effects in practice. The paper also discusses a change in the legal share-voting system whereby the direct owners of the shares (i.e., the shareholders) no longer possess, in their capacity of direct owners, the legal right to vote at the General Meetings of firm owners. Instead, these rights become the property of the beneficial owners of the shares (i.e., the people who ultimately provided the money to buy the shares), but on the condition that they delegate their voting rights to a proxy voting institution. This institutional innovation may significantly increase the internalization of external effects among other things because many beneficial owners have a tiny stake in the firm.