Managing the MedUSA: comparing the political economy of US–Japan,US–German,and US–UK relations

Abstract

International experience tells that public services often fail to work for those in need. To make things work requires complex institutional changes that are difficult to come by, let alone sustain. This paper examines the situation of rural public service provision in China and a local attempt to revamp the service provision institution through adjusting the mix of state and the market. It reveals the dialectical process of policy evolution whereby innovation, and resistance to it, has emerged.     

‘We Are All Poor Here’: Economic Difference,Social Divisiveness and Targeting Cash Transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa

While the central thrust of Michael Lipton's work has been the crucial role of productivity gains in small farm agriculture for rural poverty reduction, in many sub-Saharan African countries this desirable outcome has stubbornly refused to materialise, and growing numbers of rural poor people are found persistently to fail to secure even minimal acceptable levels of food consumption. A social protection policy response is to target social cash transfers to the chronic extreme poor. This article focuses on the level of cash transfers relative to income differences between households in the bottom half of the income distribution, and the social tensions that arise from beneficiary selection and exclusion. It is found that cash transfers to target groups such as ‘the poorest 10 per cent’ or the ‘ultra-poor labour constrained’ must be set low, even below the welfare levels they seek to achieve, if they are to avoid socially invidious reshuffling of the income distribution. The article identifies critical trade-offs between the cost and coverage of different types of social transfer, their social acceptability and their political traction, helping to explain the reluctance of governments to adopt scaled-up poverty-targeted transfers as the preferred form of social cash transfer to those most in need in their societies.     

Gordon Tullock: His journal and his scholarship

The results presented here suggest that Public Choice is broadly cited by economists and political scientists. The journal currently ranks, approximately, in the middle of the pack with respect to various citation measures. Also, since the late seventies, the journal's ranking has improved significantly relative to both social science journals and to comparable economics journals. Some of the papers published in Public Choice are well cited and several made a significant impact on the thinking of scholars in both economics and political science. Either through his work as editor or through his articles, the thought of Gordon Tullock is well represented in the elite group of articles published in Public Choice.The analysis of citations in Section 4 shows that Tullock's ideas and writing have had considerable impact on the thinking of economists. His contributions are substantial, often multi-disciplinary, and certain to be enduring.