Four poems

S. Lewis, B. Keating, D. Russel: Inconclusive by Design: Waste, Fraud and Abuse in Federal Environmental Research, Environmental Health Network: Harvey, LA and National Toxics Campaign Fund: Boston, MA, May 1992.

Darrow Schecter: Radical Theories: Paths Beyond Marxism and Social Democracy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Peter Freund and George Martin: The Ecology of the Automobile. New York: Black Rose Books, 1993.     

Performance measurement and financial incentives for community behavioral health services provision

This article analyzes the uses of performance measures in contracting for behavioral health services. A flexible performance measurement methodology, called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA),is used to measure cost efficiency and cost effectiveness. The use of measures in controlling costs, allocating program funds and administrating performance-based contracting is demonstated.     

The Poverty of Statistics and the Statistics of Poverty

This paper offers a critique of the picture of world growth and world inequality generally disseminated by international agencies. The positive view commonly presented depends on the widespread consensus that economic performance should be measured using ‘Purchasing Power Parity’ (PPP) statistics, instead of market exchange rates. Although originally conceived narrowly as a basis for comparing living standards, PPP indicators are now indiscriminately promoted as an unexceptionable standard for comparing and aggregating national income statistics. This article highlights the flaws in the PPP approach by accepting the claims made on their behalf at face value. It shows that, even on the basis of these claims, the wrong conclusions have been drawn. By comparing PPP and market exchange rate measures of inequality it shows that what really took place, at the end of the last century, was a systematic reduction in the prices of consumption goods in the Third World. PPP statistics have concealed this underlying and unsustainable trend, allowing it to be packaged as a stable reduction in poverty. Neither genuine growth, nor lasting poverty reduction was achieved over this period. The fall in the price of consumer goods masked a systematic failure to overcome the central problem of development—the high price of capital goods, which PPP statistics understate, and of intermediate goods, which they completely omit.     

The US presidential election of 1992 and its impact on Asia

Andrew Mack, (ed.), Asian Flashpoint: Security and the Korean Peninsula (Canberra and St. Leonards: ANU and Allen and Unwin, 1993), 175 pp.

Toh Mun Heng and Linda Low, (eds.), Regional Cooperation and Growth Triangles in ASEAN (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993), 256 pp.

Kent E. Calder, Strategic Capitalism: Private Business and Public Purpose in Japanese Industrial Finance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 373 pp.

Garry Rodan, (ed.), Singapore Changes Guard: Social, Political and Economic Directions in the 1990s (Melbourne, Australia: Longman Cheshire Pty Limited and New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1993), xxii + 209 pp.

J. Mark Ramseyer and Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Japan's Political Marketplace, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) 262 pp.

Roger Goodman and Kirsten Refsing, (ed.), Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan (Routledge: London, 1992) 243 pp.

John Bresnan, Managing Indonesia: The Modern Political Economy (New York, Columbia University Press, 1993), 375 pp.