Making Government Accountable: Lessons from a Federal Job Training Program

This article describes the evolution of a performance measurement system in a government job training program. In this program, a federal agency establishes performance measures and standards for substate agencies. The performance measurement system's evolution is at least partly explained as a process of trial and error characterized by a feedback loop: The federal agency establishes performance measures, the local managers learn how to game them, the federal agency learns about gaming and reformulates the performance measures, possibly leading to new gaming, and so on. The dynamics suggest that implementing a performance measurement system in government is not a one-time challenge but benefits from careful monitoring and perhaps frequent revision.     

The convergence of fiscal regimes and the decline of the Tiebout effect

A measure of waste from the competitive rent-seeking activity of special interest groups in federal, state and local budgets was calculated over the period 1900–88. This period in U.S. fiscal history is characterized by constitutional changes that have made for more transparency in governmental fiscal activities and for greater diffusion of taxes. The XVI Amendment to the Constitution created the progressive individual income tax (the corporate income tax was judged to be an excise tax in 1909 and passed the test of constitutionality). High marginal tax rates are a justification for a high average level of taxation. The Full Employment Act of 1946 insitutionalized government deficits as a means of meeting a political objective. As a result, opportunities for rent-seeking through budgetary reallocations rose in the United States. In the first two decades of the 20th century, waste at all levels of government represented about 10 percent of incremental national output. Today, waste is three times that amount.The transparency and diffusion of taxes are highest at the federal level and least at the local level. Rent-seeking through budgetary reallocation has followed the public purse. One explanation for the observed centralization of government in the 20th century may be that opportunities to concentrate benefits and diffuse taxes are highest at the federal level.     

Federal Aid to Local Governments in the West: An Irony of the Reagan Revolution

Despite the fact that the Reagan election was viewed as a power shift toward the West, the decade of the 1980s produced cruel disappointment. The region was generally left out of the economic recmery of the nation because of the bust in the agricultural and mineral industries. These state and local gmernments which sufferfrom high costs and low resources were particularly dependent on the national gmernment at the very time when the Reagan Administration was cutting federal aid and transferring power to the states. Unlike Nixon's New Federalism which helped the state and local governments of the West, Reagan's policies caused their relative position in federal aid flows to deteriorate. Although the Reagan revolution in cutting domestic programs was viewed as the embodiment of western rugged individualism, the region lost in terms of federal aid to small rural local governments.     

Japanese foreign policy: Inaction and reaction

Japan's tendency to simply react to international trends rather than to formulate its own policies is as prevalent today as during the Meiji period when the country was trying to catch up to the West, says Gerald Curtis, professor of political science at Columbia University. When international trends are murky, such as before World War II, this tendency can easily lead to disaster, Curtis says. Japan must break with the past and define its international role in the post‐Cold War era, Curtis argues, but the public debate required to achieve this is unlikely until Japan's domestic politics become more sharply defined.