Silences: Irish women and abortion.

Notably absent from the public debate on abortion in Ireland have been the voices of women who have experienced induced abortion. Interviews with six acquaintances of the author who underwent abortion identified four themes underlying women's post-abortion silence. First, women fear public condemnation and personal rejection. Second, women are concerned that any emotional ambivalence they express about the abortion experience will be misconstrued as anti-abortion sentiment. Third, women worry that speaking out about their experience would be upsetting to friends and family. Fourth, women report frustration about the lack of a suitable public forum for voicing the complexities inherent in the abortion issue. The women's perception that their experience did not fit neatly with the rhetoric of either pro- or anti-abortion groups caused them to feel alienated from a political discourse that tends to depersonalize abortion. Although none of the women regretted the abortion decision, they continued to struggle with unresolved conflicts over taking responsibility for ending some form of life. A cycle has been created in which women do not feel safe to discuss their personal experiences until a more favorable political climate exists, yet the public perception of abortion is unlikely to change until more women's voices are heard. Feminist leaders are urged to address this dilemma.     

Rent-seeking,political influence and inequality: A simple analytical example

A simple model allowing an analysis of the interaction between economic policy decisions and rent-seeking by private agents competing for political influence, is developed. Rent-seeking may be of the directly unproductive type, requiring resources that are withdrawn from productive activities, or it may manifest itself as income transfers (corruption) to political decisionmakers. In the political-economic equilibrium of the model the extent of rent-seeking, economic policy decisions, income inequality, etc. are endogenously determined.     

Heterogenous demand for public goods: Behavior in the voluntary contributions mechanism

Numerous laboratory experiments have investigated the performance of several processes for providing public goods through voluntary contributions. This research has been able to identify features of the institution or environment which are reliably likely to produce outcomes “close” to the free riding outcome or “substantially” greater than the pessimistic prediction of standard models. One such feature is the “marginal per-capita return” (MPCR) from the public good. Various authors have altered MPCR between groups or for an entire group at the same time. The experiments reported here address a different question, “What would happen if, within a group, some persons faced a ‘high’ MPCR while others faced a ‘low’ MPCR?”     

THE WELFARE COSTS OF SUPPLY RESTRICTIONS IN THE GENERAL PRACTICE LABOUR MARKET

Abstract: This paper examines policy arguments for further restricting supply to the Australian General Practice profession by immigration and medical school policies. It uses economic analysis to assess the costs and benefits of supply restrictions. The effects of Medicare and GP income-targeting on policy design are analysed. Restrictions are shown to impose net costs on the community as a whole and on government. Even with Medicare subsidies, the inefficiency costs of the current health system are minimised with liberal policies for accepting foreign- trained GPs.     

A comparative modeling of tax reform before and after the legislative process

This research modeled the extent to which the normative goals of equity and efficiency are embodied in three seminal tax reform proposals (Bradley-Gephardt, Kemp-Kasten, and the Treasury Department proposals) relative to the extant regime. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) is also modeled in the same manner. The objective of this study is to compare the equity and efficiency of the initial proposals with that of the final tax reform law. This before and after analysis is designed to ascertain the degree to which the legislative process undermined the normative goals of the tax reform movement. The National Tax Model was applied to model each regime and to measure the distributional and redistributional effects on tax burdens and wage efficiency costs associated with each system across ten income classes. The reform models, including TRA86, are shown as superior to the pre-reform system with respect to the normative criteria. The legislative process did not substantially compromise the goals as reflected in the seminal reform proposals in the development of a more politically acceptable tax reform law. This exercise demonstrates that it is possible for sound legislation to survive a political process that frequently permits the sacrificing of normative goals in favor of special interests.Financial support provided by the Arthur Young Foundation Tax Research Grant Program and The Ralph E. Kent Fund. The helpful suggestions of Jim Curtis were sincerely appreciated.     

Diversity in the American States: Updating the Sullivan Index

The index of socioeconomic and cultural diversity among theAmerican states formulated by John L. Sullivan for 1960 is recreatedfor 1980. Comparisons are made between the index for the twotime periods, and changes among the states are examined overtime. Significant differences continue to exist between northernand southern states, mainly because of cultural rather thansocioeconomic factors. The diversity index remains a relativelypowerful predictor of policy variation among the states and,as such, might be considered as a substitute for geographicregion in comparative state policy research.     

Books in review

A former editor of theAmerican Historical Review, he has written extensively on the history of modern Great Britain and more recently has published essays on the nature of the contemporary urban university.     

Cycle avoiding trajectories,strategic agendas,and the duality of memory and foresight: An informal exposition

This paper considers the notion of cycle avoiding trajectories in majority voting tournaments and shows that they underlie and guide several apparently disparate voting processes. The set of alternatives that are maximal with respect to such trajectories constitutes a new solution set of considerable significance. It may be dubbed the Banks set, in recognition of the important paper by Banks (1985) that first made use of this set. The purpose of this paper is to informally demonstrate that the Banks set is a solution set of broad relevance for understanding group decision making in both cooperative and non-cooperative settings and under both sincere and sophisticated voting. In addition, we show how sincere and sophisticated voting processes can be viewed as mirror images of one another — embodying respectively, “dmemory” and “foresight.” We also show how to develop the idea of a “sophisticated agenda,” one in which the choice of what alternatives to propose is itself a matter of strategic calculation.