Human Capital and Administrative Burden: The Role of Cognitive Resources in Citizen-State Interactions

One means by which the state reinforces inequality is by imposing administrative burdens that loom larger for citizens with lower levels of human capital. Integrating insights from various disciplines, this article focuses on one aspect of human capital: cognitive resources. The authors outline a model that explains how burdens and cognitive resources, especially executive functioning, interrelate. The article then presents illustrative examples, highlighting three common life factors—scarcity, health problems, and age-related cognitive decline. These factors create a human capital catch-22, increasing people's likelihood of needing state assistance while simultaneously undermining the cognitive resources required to negotiate the burdens they encounter while seeking such assistance. The result is to reduce access to state benefits and increase inequality. The article concludes by calling for scholars of behavioral public administration and public administration more generally to incorporate more attention to human capital into their research.     

Critique of Schuker “J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations”

In “J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations,” Parts I and II, published in Diplomacy and Statecraft (2014), the American historian Stephen Schuker claims that Keynes’ scientific arguments against the policy of reparations were distorted by both political passion and his emotional attachment to the German banker, Dr. Carl Melchior. He provides no evidence for this argument, and Keynes’ analytic positions emerges without reference to either.     

The Most Recent Input-Output Table: A Milestone in Soviet Statistics

The paper reproduces the 18 × 18 sector Soviet input-output table for 1988 which became available in the West in April 1990, but has not been published in the USSR. The layout (quadrants) and selected elements of the table are described and briefly analyzed. Because the hitherto unavailable statistics facilitate the analysts of a variety of critical issues such as the price reform, defense expenditures, and private incomes and taxation, the input-output table is regarded as an important contribution as well as a milestone in the gradual process of releasing economic data in accordance with the policies of glasnost'. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 027, 052, 222.