Fatalities in west Austrian prisons

The purpose of this study is to review 23 causes of death that have occurred in Western-Austrian prisons from 1974 to 1989. The majority of them (11 cases) were due to suicides. Among 9 cases of natural death there was a 25 years old man, who died of an unknown purulent meningoencephalitis. Two drunken prisoners had not been supervised and therefore died of alcohol poisoning. In one case the police jail physician did not recognize an epidural hematoma.     

Determinants of inflationary performance: Corporatist structures vs. central bank autonomy

Thanks go to John Aldrich, Robert Bates, William Bernhard, Richard Burdekin, Henry Chappel, Dudley Wallace and Thomas Willett for suggestions and to Ted Smith for computational assistance.     

A CRITIQUE OF PROFESSOR CHURCH'S REPORT ON THE IMPACT OF VERTICAL AND CONGLOMERATE MERGERS ON COMPETITION

We discuss Professor Jeffrey Church's report to the EuropeanCommission in 2004 on the effects of vertical restraints andmergers. Although thorough and accurate, the report could bemisinterpreted by practitioners, as it does not emphasize thatmarket power is only a necessary condition for harm to competition,and that most vertical mergers that present the possibilityof competitive harm also present economic efficiencies thatare intrinsic to the integration.     

Regime transformation from below: Decentralization,local governance,and democratic reform in Nigeria

How realistic are democratic-governance strategies that emphasize local governance as a key component? Using Nigeria’s experience in local government and primary health care in the 1980s and 1990s as a case example, the article finds there were substantial shortfalls in local participation and program performance. These were caused by problems in the local political environment and local institutional design, in the national policy environment (particularly in the funding system), and by the stresses of structural adjustment, resource shortfalls, the natural physical environment, and weak leadership. These combined to create poor and inappropriate reward structures and lack of accountability. However, even though the Nigerian case was not successful, most of the specific problems that hurt it are remediable through policy changes at the national level. Several of these were under consideration at the time of the coups of 1992 and 1993.     

Social justice as a Holy Grail: The endless quest

This paper gives the author's impressions on the following aspects of justice: desert, equity, equality, need, and intergenerational equity. The author concludes that these different aspects cannot be reconciled but instead must be compromised. An example of such a compromise is provided by a discussion of welfare reform. The author claims that rights are correlative with duties, and that asserting the former has little meaning without specifying the latter. He then discusses justice toward groups rather than individuals. He proposes that maintaining cultural variety in the presence of a homogeneous superculture is a major problem of the contemporary world. The paper concludes with a discussion of various forms of power, particularly the integrative power that people acquire over each other by virtue of ties of loyalty and identity.