Financial Control in Australian Government Budgeting

With the arrival of accrual accounting and "accrual output budgeting," there have been huge changes in the mechanism of central financial control in the budget-dependent Australian public sector. This article outlines and evaluates these changes. The new parliamentary appropriations arrangements are discussed, as is the increased role played by nonappropriated departmental "own-source" funding. The shift of emphasis from legislative to administrative financial controls is noted and analyzed. Consideration is given to the implications of this shift of emphasis, and of the increased complexity of the financial control framework, for fiscal transparency and democratic accountability.     

The Political Economy of Automobile Safety Inspections

Studies of traffic safety typically assumethat policies are adopted to further thepublic interest, thereby ignoring thepolitical motives for policy. Sincepolitical motives can influence the designor enforcement of policies, accounting forpolitical motives has relevance forevaluating policy effectiveness. Weexamine the political motives concerning afrequently-studied traffic safety policy: state-mandated vehicle safety inspection. We distinguish between public interest andspecial interest explanations for safetyinspection. Our econometric models examinethe incidence of inspection across states,and determinants of regulated inspectionfees. The evidence strongly rejects apublic interest explanation, but specialinterest hypotheses also do not proveentirely satisfactory. Since recentstudies find that inspections fail toimprove highway safety, we attribute thecontinued existence of inspection programsto political transaction costs rather thanto the demands of interest groups.     

Moving Beyond the Policy of No Policy: Emigration from Mexico and Central America

Do Caribbean Basin states influence U.S. immigration policy? Although the terrorist attacks of September 2001 eventually derailed migration talks, before that time Mexico and the United States appeared poised to negotiate a major bilateral agreement, largely on Mexico's terms. Drawing on 88 detailed interviews conducted with Mexican and other Caribbean Basin elites, this article examines sending‐state preferences for emigration and their capacity to influence policy outcomes. The informants considered migration to be the most problematic issue on the bilateral agenda, but also saw migration policy as relatively open to source‐state influence. A case study of Mexican emigration policymaking details the national and transnational changes that make migration increasingly an inter‐mestic policy issue.     

Age estimation from teeth in children and adolescents

The aim of this cross-sectional study was to evaluate the dental formulas according to age because of possible changes during the last decades. From these dental formulas, the median age of emergence for the permanent teeth was deduced. The study population corresponded to the 1 to 15 year-old children who had consulted either a pediatric dentist or orthodontist in the city of Nice (France). Data were collected from the 5,848 patients' charts that included an orthopantomography. This permitted the observation of emerged teeth and agenesis. Bar charts were used to indicate the dental formula according to age. There was no significant difference in the emergence pattern of both controlateral maxillary and mandibular teeth. Only the anterior tooth emergence significantly differed according to the maxillary. The lower central incisor was the lone tooth with a median age earlier than others; the remaining teeth had an age equivalent to those of previously estimates.     

A dissent from the many dissents from Attorney General Ashcroft's interpretation of the Controlled Substances Act

In this essay, Professor Marc Spindelman examines the states' rights arguments that have been deployed in the Oregon v. Ashcroft litigation to challenge Attorney General John Ashcroft's interpretation of the federal Controlled Substances Act. Professor Spindelman criticizes those arguments as reflecting bad politics--politics of complicity--that self-styled liberals should resist and reject.     

Constructing an index of officially recorded crime: The use of confirmatory factor analysis

Researchers using officially reported crime statistics must frequently combine rates of individual crimes into a single composite. The most popular composite is the FBI Crime Index, which is the sum of the seven Part I crimes; alternatives include forming separate indices for personal and property crimes and weighting the crime categories by their seriousness before summing them. In this paper we construct crime composites through the use of confirmatory factor analysis methods. The results suggest that the measurement assumptions of conventional crime indices are problematic and demonstrate how more satisfactory alternatives can be developed with confirmatory factor analysis techniques.     

Compliance Professionalism and Regulatory Community: The Australian Trade Practices Regime

Contemporary state governance relies increasingly on regulatory strategies encouraging self-regulation and compliance for corporate regulation. This paper examines the conditions in which such strategies might be effective by reference to the Australian trade practices regime. The paper argues that regulators will only use compliance strategies effectively when (i) a community of compliance professionals with both professional integrity and commercial 'street' credibility exists to make compliance come alive in everyday corporate activities, and (ii) regulators invest in meta-evaluation of compliance professionals' activities.     

How to Win Hearts and Minds: Corporate Compliance Policies for Sexual Harassment

Australian law provides incentives and encouragement for companies to develop their own sexual harassment policies. This paper reports on interviews with equal opportunity officers in Australia's financial services industry responsible for best practice sexual harassment policies. Their experiences evoke three scholarly critiques of corporate compliance as a regulatory strategy: (1) that corporate compliance programs are a means by which employees' lives are regimented and controlled by corporate governmentality, (2) or, even worse, that private management priorities subvert the principles of public‐regarding law while appearing to implement them, and (3) that even where law has some effect, regulatory strategies aimed at producing self‐regulatory compliance will provide insufficient deterrence to effect real change. The data however also show that the best of these best practice officers have themselves created complex strategies to resolve tensions between law and management, corporate goals, and normative pressures. In doing so, they have had to combine their personal, professional, and corporate commitments to "win hearts and minds" to antiharassment values by co‐opting management resources to compliance goals through strategic appeals to both "business case" arguments and the specter of public sanctions. This project of cooption depends on their own position and "clout" within the corporation.     

Trade and investment in Southeast Asian development

Expansion of foreign trade and investment has been a vital factor underlaying the high economic growth of the Southeast Asian economies over the last ten years. As East and Southeast Asian economies continue to deregulate and prosper, trade and investment flows are becoming increasingly interconnected within the region. The character of this regional economic integration, however, has shifted recently. The role of the Japanese has declined while that of China and the overseas Chinese has boomed. Whereas China has absorbed huge amounts of foreign investment, investment to the Southeast Asian economies appears to be weakening significantly. This weakening of investment is occurring just as many Southeast Asian countries struggle to uppgrade the technical levels of their production of goods and services to accommodate the rising wages and income levels that are fundamental to sustained and broad-based increases in standards of living throughout the region.