South Africa: capital accumulation and violence

This article analyses the conditions of capital accumulation in South Africa, and seeks to explain the authoritarian and racially discriminatory features of the South African social structure in terms of (a) the specific historical processes of change (mercantile colonial conquest, primitive accumulation in mining and farming) and (b) the specific features of contemporary capitalism, notably the capital-intensive structure of industry. The authoritarianism embodied, for example, in the extra-economic coercion of black labour is seen as reflecting the circumstances of the struggle between capital and labour under conditions where capital-labour contradictions exist alongside the contradiction between South African capitalism and the ‘dependent’ societies it has preserved/recreated. The implications of this situation for strategies of socialist change are briefly evaluated.     

基础设施网络整合与跨区域治理——“哈大齐”工业走廊与松花江水污染案例分析

在全球化和信息化背景下,区域管理正在从传统的都市区(Metropolitan)管理过渡到巨型都市区(Megapolitan)或者城市走廊(City Corridor)的管理.从社会技术系统(Societal-techno System)视角,将区域管理作为一个涉众系统(Multi-actor System)考虑,研究物理系统与社会网络之间的交互作用,通过研究基础设施网络和跨区域治理关系,探索涉众系统情境下的政策制定模型.采用理论分析和案例研究相结合的方法,利用哈大齐工业走廊案例和松花江水污染案例进行了研究.结果发现,基础设施整合具有嵌入性特征;基础设施整合和专业化分工网络的形成,是跨区域治理的基础,所形成的城市网络,其核心功能体现在"分散的集中化"上,以保证有效的基础设施整合、分工网络的形成和提供高级生产者服务;在跨区域治理政策制定中,应该采用自上而下和自下而上组合的基于规则和过程的涉众情境下的政策制定过程,以实现社会、政府和市场之间的均衡.     

Globalization and institutional competitiveness

Only dead institutions do not change and only rarely do institutions change by themselves. To maintain performing institutions takes institutional entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks and who possess the capacity and the talent to innovate. A regulation discourse, in contrast to a marketization discourse, would not picture the relationship between globalization and institutional change as a deterministic one. Rather, it would expect that all kinds of actors play a large number of different roles in the course of ongoing institutional change. The result of such complex institutional change, at the level of welfare states, multinational businesses, public administration, and training systems, to mention just a few of the empirical areas covered in this special issue, cannot be fully understood by applying an overly rigid, static, and dualistic approach to modern capitalist economies. The concept of institutional competitiveness, on the contrary, allows for institutional entrepreneurship and institutional hybrids constituting pulsating polities.     

To fight or not to fight?

Public Choice - This paper considers the players' behaviour in an asymmetric two-player contest. When do they decide to “struggle” and when to “subjugate”? Analysing...     

ROAD GRANTS, INTERGOVERNMENTAL COMPETITION AND THE BENEFITS OF DUPLICATION

Abstract: This article argues that direct commonwealth involvement in road funding and road policy has benefited the states and local government. Although inefficiencies and friction are evident as a result of joint funding, the benefits of multiple accountability outweigh the costs. A competitive dynamic underlies the involvement of all three levels of government, producing outcomes that no single government dominates, but which reflect in part the responses of each to their respective constituencies. The commonwealth has been driven to more intrusive forms of intervention as existing controls failed to achieve the commonwealth's objectives, and to expanding its financial contributions to counter the diversion of funds by state governments. Its commitment to funding the road program is likely to be highest when its specific purpose grants can be identified closely with the provision of roads in particular regions and localities. In sum, joint funding of the road program produces a system that is responsive to competing conceptions and interests, and the commonwealth's "voluntary vacancy" from all but "national" roads is on balance likely to be detrimental to the program.     

Medicaid's Role in Moves Toward Universal Health Care

This paper considers the problems currently facing the Medical Assistance (Medicaid) program in light of the major problems confronting the American health care system. Actual and proposed Medicaid reforms are reviewed, their merits noted and their shortcomings detailed. It is argued that substantial Medicaid reform can take place only in the context of radical reform of the entire U.S. health care system. Similarly, Medicaid should be incorporated into any plan aimed at providing universal health care coverage.     

More on moral hazard in organizations: Reply

The paper by Thomas Hammond and Gary Miller is an insightful comment on the relevance of budget-breaking incentive schemes to real world organizations. They have made a valuable contribution in considering this line of research within a broader context. Nonetheless, they have not established the invalidity of my theoretical arguments. Therefore, my basic point still holds: that is, theoretically it is possible to show that a bonus-penalty incentive scheme of the sort proposed by Holmström is feasible, despite the principal's incentive to cheat. Regardless, all of this debate may beg the question, since compensation arrangements observed in the real world are rarely of the bonus-penalty type. Linear incentives are far more common, and many compensation schemes do not appear to incorporate optimal incentives. At this point we need more empirical research on the determinants of incentives in organizations. In order to make further advances in this area, a better understanding of the incentive mechanisms actually used in organizations is required.Thanks are due to Richard Frank for helpful comments. The usual caveat applies.