The role of compensation in siting hazardous facilities

Empirical evidence indicates that compensation can prove effective in gaining public acceptance for siting facilities on the benign end of the spectrum (e.g., landfills, prisons), but is subject to serious limitations when it comes to facilities that the public regards as particularly risky or of questionable legitimacy such as nuclear waste repositories. These facilities require creative mitigation measures such as independent inspections of the facility and local shutdown power. Even then they may be viewed as too risky to be acceptable with or without compensation. This article proposes a two-stage siting process which recognizes the importance of regulations and safety standards (Stage 1) while employing a voluntary process with compensation to address concerns with equity and efficiency (Stage 2).     

Firm size and regulatory compliance costs: The case of workers' compensation insurance

This paper examines the relative costs of workers' compensation insurance across firm-size groups, with particular focus on administrative scale economies (“compliance effects”) and biases in rate-setting (“enforcement effects”). Analyzing data on premiums and losses from the insurance industry, the authors find that the costs of insurance per dollar of loss are relatively high for very small firms. These higher costs reflect certain fixed administrative costs insurance companies must bear, but for extremely small firms these higher costs tend to be mitigated by an “enforcement” bias in state rate-setting outcomes. Due to imperfect experience-rating of insurance premiums, middle-sized firms—which have the highest losses—pay less per dollar of loss than either the smallest or largest firms. Indeed, it appears that large firms purchasing commercial workers' compensation insurance subsidize other size groups.     

Risk compensation and the effectiveness of safety belt use laws: a case study of New Jersey

This paper investigates the effectiveness of New Jersey's mandatory belt use law (MUL) by testing specifically for: (1) a safety effect, and (2) a risk-compensation effect that could offset (in part) any safety impact. The main findings are that injury severity declined significantly in the 22 months following implementation of the MUL; but that accident frequency increased significantly. The increase in accidents may be explained only partially by increased driving mileage. These findings suggest that the real safety effect of the law may have been diluted by risk-compensating behavior.This paper is based on a study conducted for the New Jersey Office of Highway Traffic Safety by the Rutgers University Bureau of Economic Research. We are grateful to William Ascher and two referees for useful comments.     

Talking trash about landfills: Using quantitative scoring schemes in landfill siting processes

Policymakers and the public often turn to scientific experts for help in making decisions about complex policy problems. Such decisions, however, may involve trade‐offs among desired goals and so require considerable technical and political judgment. Typically there is no objectively "best" answer, although some answers may be better than others. We use a case study of a landfill siting process in Orange County, North Carolina, to analyze how quantitative scoring schemes may best be used to facilitate site selection processes. Quantitative scoring schemes, used and interpreted properly, can help policymakers and the public focus their attention on central rather than peripheral issues, and thereby conduct a more informed political debate. For the quantitative scoring scheme to fulfill this role, however, the community must be explicit about how the scoring scheme will be used within the larger decisionmaking framework. Clarifying the power and limitations of quantitative scoring schemes shows promise for facilitating decisionmaking regarding other locally unpopular land use siting processes, as well as any public policy decision involving multiple objectives. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Workers' compensation: a background for Social Security professionals

This article provides a brief history and background of workers' compensation programs for occupationally injured and ill workers in the United States. It presents the basic principle involved in workers' compensation and briefly discusses the disability benefits to which workers are generally entitled. It also discusses why there are settlements in this disability program and the availability of information about the amounts paid in workers' compensation cases for obtaining an offset for Social Security Disability Insurance benefits paid to the worker. Finally, the article explains the rationale behind the public policy on coordination of Disability Insurance and workers' compensation in the new paradigm of disability and return to work.     

Foreign policy as a socially divisive issue: the KORUS free-trade agreement

While the Korea–United States (KORUS) free-trade agreement negotiations were concluded in 2007, and ratified in 2011, the agreement has remained deeply controversial. Labor unions, civil society groups, and opposition politicians in South Korea have criticized the agreement as being unfair, and also in the United States have voices spoken out against the agreement. The process of negotiation by South Korea was deeply flawed, and the conclusion of the agreement, that included a unilateral ratification by the ruling party in National Assembly, was forcefully opposed by many groups in South Korean society with violent demonstrations leading almost to the collapse of the Lee Myung-bak government. This article argues that it was not only the perception of potential economic damage to, in particular agricultural, domestic interest that was the main cause of the public resistance to the agreement, but that the unique nature of the relationship with the United States, and how this influenced the progress of negotiating and ratifying the agreement in South Korea, was a leading course of the divisiveness of the agreement and the massive resistance it faced. This is also why while the conservative Park Geun-hye government has expressed its willingness to re-negotiate other free-trade agreements, it has remained adamant in its refusal to even consider reopening the KORUS agreement. It is not only the apparent trade benefits that accrued to South Korea that is behind this refusal. With the ruling party having lost the April 2016 National Assembly elections and presidential elections scheduled for December 2017, the conservative elite, concerned about its electoral fate, has no interest in re-opening such a divisive issue as the KORUS free-trade agreement.     

Redistribution in a political union: The case of the EU

A key function of centralized budgets in federal and political unions is to act as an equalizing mechanism to support economic and social cohesion. This is also the case with the European Union's (EU) budget, which operates as a redistributive mechanism that counteracts the cross-national and cross-regional inequalities created by the single market. Despite the limits on cross-national redistribution imposed by a centrifugal system of representation, the net fiscal position of member states – what they pay to the EU budget minus what they receive from it – is very diverse and has changed quite remarkably over the last decades. In this paper, we investigate how and why the net fiscal position of each member state toward the rest of the EU changes over time. We develop a novel panel dataset (1979–2014) to study how key national and EU-level political and economic variables affect the EU redistributive dynamics. We find that redistribution via the EU budget primarily targets developments in inequality within EU member states, and that an increase in domestic unemployment may also improve the country's fiscal balance. Moreover, we find that voting power in the Council is unrelated to a more positive fiscal balance. However, we find that governments with a centre-right profile are in general more successful in improving their redistributive position vis-à-vis the other member states. This may create a problem of budgetary ‘rent extraction’.     

Designing a tax incentive scheme: The case of a wage tip

Governments are constantly attempting to use their tax systems for purposes other than the collection of revenue. Each such use entails difficult decisions of both design and administration. Consideration of a tax-based policy that might reduce wage inflation—a so-called TIP—serves to reveal the wide range of difficult choices that need to be made. In addition to problems of measuring the behavior of the tax payer who is to be benefited or penalized, the analyst must settle on such questions as whether the program should be permanent or temporary, whether it should emphasize rewards or punishments, and whether it should be administered by existing government agencies or by special agencies. None of these problems is insuperable. But lurking behind all of them is the question whether, is the end, the chosen policy will actually contribute to reducing wage inflation.     

Diversity as a policy goal: The case of television

Diversity in communications is most appropriately understood as a free flow of ideas. In order to implement diversity, a comprehensive model of the communication process must be used for policy research, so that the various participants in the process can be properly restrained from abridging the free flow of ideas. The setting of priorities for implementing diversity has been illustrated using available studies of broadcast and cable television.     

Electronic Service Delivery: Achieving Accuracy and Consistency in Complex Transactions

This article discusses the use of rule-base technology in the administration of legislation. It first looks at determinative processes, the management of assessments of entitlement and obligations that form much of the operational work for many government agencies. It examines existing problems that agencies experience when attempting to secure accurate and consistent primary decision-making when administering complex legislation. It also examines the way in which traditional techniques for administering legislation constrain the service delivery methods open to an agency. It suggests that rule-base systems are a peculiarly appropriate technology for improving these determinative processes. It then argues that the use of rule-base systems offers two main benefits to agencies. They can improve the quality of primary decision-making and they can provide a means for dramatically widening the range of service delivery options open to an agency. Finally, the article argues that, until agencies have applications that are capable of automating complex transactions, such as the determination of entitlements, they will not be able to achieve large-scale benefits from electronic service delivery.     

低碳经济发展中的政府责任及其实现路径

低碳经济的发展仅靠单一市场规则是无法实现的",市场失灵"的出现要求政府必须承担一定责任。发展低碳经济,首先要解决的是低碳经济市场领域的外部性问题,政府可以通过一系列制度安排来规避低碳经济领域的外部性问题。政府还需通过规制和引导等多种路径,推动消费方式改变、政策法规完善,促进低碳经济发展,努力建设资源节约型、环境友好型、气候适应型社会和低碳导向型社会。     

Making Every Vote Count: The Important Role of Managerial Capacity in Achieving Better Election Administration Outcomes

A public agency's capacity to implement policy and achieve valued public outcomes has been a long-running area of research in public administration. Many articles provide theory and empirics regarding the capacity to implement policy, but relatively few examine multiple types of agency capacity within the same analysis. This article develops a model based on the election administration literature in political science and public administration to examine the effects of managerial capacity, financial capacity, and technology on the election management outcome of the residual vote rate in North Carolina election jurisdictions. The results indicate that higher levels of management capacity and technology significantly reduce problems with voting as measured by the residual vote rate. Financial capacity shows a negative association with the residual vote rate but is not significant. The article concludes by discussing how studying election administration provides an important and uniquely good administrative context for developing administrative theory.