Economic partnering with the poor: why local governments should work with community-based development organizations to promote economic development

Much of conventional economic development ends up as a transfer of wealth from the public sector to successful firms. Instead, local governments would be better off working to support the efforts of community-based development organizations to expand the economic pie for those most in need. Suggestions are made of ways to bring about equity development programs that would help those most in need rather than merely subsidizing established businesses.     

Jurisprudential Regimes and Supreme Court Decisionmaking: The Lemon Regime and Establishment Clause Cases

In this research note, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article in American Political Science Review to the area of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. We hypothesize that Lemon v. Kurtzman represented a jurisprudential regime in the Supreme Court's decisionmaking in this area of law. Our analysis shows that the predictors of the Court's decisions in the two periods differed in ways that are very consistent with the types of changes one would expect the hypothesized regime shift to produce.     

Technology transfer to developing nations

What’s a developing nation? For that matter, what’s technology transfer? When put in the context of exporting and importing technology, the answers are moot. Transfer still turns on how much someone — developed, developing or undeveloped — is willing to pay for the technology, and whether there is an identifiable need that it can satisfy with a minimum of sophistication. The simpler — and cheaper — the better. That may very well become the theme of a new worldwide movement called “appropriate technology”, which, among several other matters, is also discussed in this paper.