Infrastructure and Development: A Critical Appraisal of the Macro-level Literature

This survey reviews the existing macro-level empirical literature on the link between infrastructure and development in a critical light. After providing a general framework that casts the problem in the context of an aggregate production function, it signals what are the relevant empirical questions to be addressed. This guides the systematic review of a number of empirical studies and the discussion of the main econometric challenges to the identification of the effect of infrastructure on output and productivity. Finally, building on related research, in particular in contract theory and political economy, the article spells out several promising research avenues.     

Book reviews

Susan Eisenhower (ed.), NATO at Fifty: Perspectives on the Future of the Atlantic Alliance. Washington, DC: Center for Political and Strategic Studies, 1999. Pp.242, endnotes, no index. $22. ISBN 0–9670233–0‐0.

W. R. Smyser, From Yalta to Berlin: The Cold War Struggle over Germany. New York: St Martin's Press, 1999. Pp.496, 6pp. illus., index. $29.95. ISBN 0–3120–6605–8.

Jean Yves Carlen, Steve Duchêne and Joël Ehrhart, Ibrahim Rugova: Le frêle colosse du Kosovo [Ibrahim Rugova: The Frail Colossus of Kosovo]. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1999. Pp.149, no index. FF78. ISBN 2–220–04392–4.

Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Pp.424, notes, bibliog., index. $29.95. ISBN 0–300–07792–0.     

Government Reform,Political Ideology,and Administrative Burden: The Case of Performance Management in the Bush Administration

This article examines how ideological differences between political officials and agencies may have affected the implementation of an ostensibly nonpartisan, government‐wide administrative initiative: the George W. Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) review of federal programs. The analysis reveals that managers in agencies associated with liberal programs and employees (“liberal agencies”) agreed to a greater extent than those in agencies associated with conservative programs and employees (“conservative agencies”) that PART required significant agency time and effort and that it imposed a burden on management resources. Further analysis reveals that differences in reported agency effort can be explained partly by objective differences in the demands that PART placed on agencies—liberal agencies were required to evaluate more programs and implement more improvement plans relative to their organizational capacity—and partly by the ideological beliefs of employees—on average, liberal managers reported more agency effort, even after accounting for objective measures of administrative burden.     

“Governing Wildlife Resources”? L'organisation de la chasse en Suisse comme exemple de régimes institutionnels de gestion d'une ressource naturelle

L'application des 8 principes d'Ostrom définissant les conditions d'un régime auto‐organisé de gestion des ressources naturelles historiquement robuste et écologiquement durable à un exemple de ressource naturelle de type, non pas physique (comme l'eau ou les pâturages), mais biologique (ici des espèces animales), semble montrer, comme dans le cas d'une ressource comme la faune, que ceux‐ci sont plus difficilement applicables dans ce second cas de figure. Ainsi, le rôle relativement important joué par l'Etat dans l'organisation des différents régimes de chasse (chasse interdite, à permis et d'affermage) ne s'explique probablement pas seulement par l'histoire de la gestion politique de la faune en Suisse, mais également, et probablement avant tout, par certaines des caractéristiques de la ressource et de ses usages ainsi que par la logique biologique de son interdépendance avec son environnement écosystémique.     

Les partis de gouvernement les administrations publiques: un champ d'interactions mal connu

Sommaire. Cet article vise àévaluer les effets sur les systèmes politiques des interactions entre les partis de gouvernement élus et les administrations publiques, deux types très differents d'organisations complexes. Cette demarche trouve son intéirêt dans le fait que nous réalisons de plus en plus l'importance de l'aspect politique de l'activite administrative. Dans un premier temps, l'auteur expose comment des facteurs exteieurs a l'organisation de l'Etat ont favoris^ le pouvoir bureaucratique et affaibli le contr61e partisan. Par la suite, il pr6sente les conditions stratégiques d'action des divers acteurs gouverne-mentaux afin de d6gager les atouts et les handicaps respectifs du parti minist^-riel et des fonctionnaires. L'auteur conclut que le pouvoir bureaucratique recouvre bien autre chose que la seule superiority technique a laquelle on le resume trop souvent. II observe également une relation intime entre les limites de l'expansion bureaucratique et la capacity programmatique des partis de gouvernement. Abstract. This paper seeks to evaluate the effects on political systems of the interface between elected government parties and public administrations, two very different kinds of complex organization. This study is of interest in as far as we are increasingly aware of the importance of the political aspects of administrative activity. The manner in which factors external to state organizations have favoured bureaucratic power and weakened partisan control is discussed first. The author then presents the conditions for strategic action available to the various government players, with a view to discovering the respective assets and liabilities of the ministerial party and of the public servants. He concludes that bureaucratic power is far more than the mere technical superiority to which it is too frequently reduced. Finally, he notes the interrelation between the limits to bureaucratic expansion and the programming scope of the government parties.     

Institutions and contracts: Franchising

This paper investigates a new dataset of franchise networks in nine countries in order to assess whether and to what extent do institutions influence the practice of franchising. Our regressions relate the structure of franchise networks (the rate of franchised units as opposed to corporate units) to individual parameters supposed to reflect the extent of moral hazards on the franchisor's and franchisee's sides and, more specifically, to various institutional parameters of the franchisor's country, namely, the legal tradition, the level of procedural formalism, the constraints imposed by labour regulation and the effectiveness of trademark protection. While agency theory parameters seem to perform rather badly in this international setting, institutions such as trademark protection and labour regulation have more explanatory power: greater trademark protection encourages franchising and the impact of labour regulation is mostly positive, depending on the type of labour regulation that is being considered. The effect of legal tradition and formalism seems negligible once these parameters are taken in. JEL Classification D23 · F23 · K12     

The development of an automatic recognition system for earmark and earprint comparisons

The value of earmarks as an efficient means of personal identification is still subject to debate. It has been argued that the field is lacking a firm systematic and structured data basis to help practitioners to form their conclusions. Typically, there is a paucity of research guiding as to the selectivity of the features used in the comparison process between an earmark and reference earprints taken from an individual. This study proposes a system for the automatic comparison of earprints and earmarks, operating without any manual extraction of key-points or manual annotations. For each donor, a model is created using multiple reference prints, hence capturing the donor within source variability. For each comparison between a mark and a model, images are automatically aligned and a proximity score, based on a normalized 2D correlation coefficient, is calculated. Appropriate use of this score allows deriving a likelihood ratio that can be explored under known state of affairs (both in cases where it is known that the mark has been left by the donor that gave the model and conversely in cases when it is established that the mark originates from a different source). To assess the system performance, a first dataset containing 1229 donors elaborated during the FearID research project was used. Based on these data, for mark-to-print comparisons, the system performed with an equal error rate (EER) of 2.3% and about 88% of marks are found in the first 3 positions of a hitlist. When performing print-to-print transactions, results show an equal error rate of 0.5%. The system was then tested using real-case data obtained from police forces.     

False homozygosities at various loci revealed by discrepancies between commercial kits: implications for genetic databases

Routine control of 2055 consecutive genotypes revealed discrepancies between the profiles established with the SGM plus and/or Profiler plus kits on one hand, and the profiles established with the Powerplex16 kit on the other hand. Furthermore, five discrepancies for vWA, three for D8S1179, two for FGA and three for D18S51 loci were found. In 10 cases (loci vWA, FGA, D18S51, D8S1179), the SGM plus and/or Profiler plus profiles showed homozygosity and the Powerplex16 genotype revealed heterozygosities which were confirmed to be true, both by typing with individual primer pairs and DNA sequencing. In four cases (two discrepancies at locus FGA, one at D18S51 and an abnormal paternity pattern for D5S818), the Powerplex16 kit showed apparent homozygosity and the SGM plus and/or Profiler plus kits showed heterozygosity. Mutation analysis could be performed for some of these individuals and evidenced variants, presumably leading to an annealing failure of one primer; the identified mutations are reported. It is suggested that databases should include information about the kits used to determine the profiles while ensuring that the primer sequences are made available.