The effects of decentralization on special interest groups

Public Choice - It is well established in the literature that the number of interest group organizations varies across countries and states, with economic freedom and other institutional factors...     

Penal reform: a history of failure

The private investigation industry in the United Kingdom has been challenged by dubious work practices arising from the activities of a number of private investigators undertaking work for The News of the World. The allegations of private investigators acting as a conduit for improper behaviour are not new; in Australia this assessment was borne out in the 1992 New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) inquiry which found that investigators acted as the go-betweens in a ‘massive illicit trade’ in confidential information (Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), 1992). The last study on private investigator's in Australia was undertaken by Prenzler (2001). In terms of public awareness the image of the private investigator remains a person of dubious character spying on domestic couples. Since the last study the private investigation industry has undergone significant changes in terms of licensing training, regulation and investigative services. These developments have not received much attention in the public media. This lack of media attention is somewhat surprising as developments pose challenges to the justice system.     

Responses to Emery

Richard Neely, Take Back Your Neighborhood New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1990, 224pp.     

Rentier fiscal crisis and regime stability: Business-state relations in the Gulf

Are sectorally dependent states destined to regime instability as a result of chornic fiscal crisis? Literature emphasizing the importance of a country’s sectoral endowment suggests that oil exporters in particular should exhibit similar policy stagnation and regime decay as a result of fiscal crisis. The cases of Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrate that fiscal crisis outcomes are not uniform. This article develops the critique that structuralist assumptions about what drives business-state relations during crisis are flawed. Abstract logics typing exogenous price sifts to the character of business-state interaction neglect the historical and instituional grounding of those relations. It is variation in the historical and institutional crafting of business-state relations that best explains how these relations shape reform under crisis and how regime stability is affected.     

Underinvestment in Public Good Technologies

Although underinvestment phenomena are the rationale for government subsidization of research and development (R&D), the concept is poorly defined and its impact is seldom quantified. Conceptually, underinvestment in industrial R&D can take the form of either a wrong amount or a suboptimal composition of R&D investment. In both cases, R&D policy has not adequately modeled the relevant economic phenomena and thus is unable to characterize, explain, and measure the underinvestment. Four factors can cause systematic underinvestment in R&D-intensive industries: complexity, timing, existence of economies of scale and scope, and spillovers. The impacts of these factors vary in intensity over the typical technology life cycle, so government policy responses must be managed dynamically. In addition to understanding the causes of underinvestment in R&D, the magnitude of the deficiency relative to some “optimum” must be estimated to enable a ranking of technology areas with respect to expected net economic benefits from a government subsidy. Project selection criteria must therefore be based on quantitative and qualitative indicators that represent the nature and the magnitude of identified market failures. The major requirement for management of R&D policy therefore is a methodology that regularly assesses long-term expected benefits and risks from current and proposed R&D portfolios. To this end, a three-stage process is proposed to effectively carry out R&D policy analysis. The three stages are (1) identify and explain the causes of the underinvestment, (2) characterize and assess the investment trends and their impacts, and (3) estimate the magnitude of the underinvestment relative to a perceived optimum in terms of its cost to the economy. Only after all three stages of analysis have been completed can the underinvestment pattern be matched with the appropriate policy response.