Interpreting Polak: Monetary analysis in ‘dependent’ economies

The Polak model is ordinarily considered to be a quantity theory view of the world, in which the level of income is determined by changes in the stock of money. This interpretation is not warranted by close examination of the model, which can equally well be interpreted as a purely Keynesian framework for income determination, modified to reflect the particular characteristics of an open, developing economy. And because of these modifications, the Polak model leads to policy conclusions quite distinct from either of the standard macro theories.     

Science and technology in the nuclear regulatory process: the case of Canadian uranium miners

Abstract. The article examines the role of science and technology in the nuclear regulatory process by focusing on Canadian efforts over the past two decades to regulate the health of Canadian uranium miners. While analysed in the general context of the political economy of the Canadian uranium industry, the article examines in particular a number of aspects of the role of science and technology in the nuclear regulatory process, including Hafele's concept of ‘hypotheticality’, the openness of the regulatory process, the relationships between causal knowledge and political evidence, the relationship between the regulators' research priorities and the lack of applied controls and monitoring technology, the degree of deference paid by domestic regulators to international standard-setting bodies, and finally the redistributive effects encouraged by a lack of appropriate science and technology priorities. The regulation of the health of Canadian uranium miners has not been an example of regulatory virtue. The excesses of scientific caution shown in the processes of handling causal knowledge and evidence, when combined with the regulators' split personality of being both regulator as well as quasi-promoter and manager of the nuclear and uranium industry, allowed only the most intermittent attention to be given to uranium workers.     

Local Government Tax Policy: Measuring the Efficiency of New York City's Tax Mix, FYs 1984-1998

This article applies the Markowitz portfolio model to New York City's tax mix to determine whether it is 'mix-efficient,' in the sense that the portfolio minimizes volatility for given levels of growth. The results indicate that New York City's tax-revenue portfolio is very close to being mix-efficient. The analysis also extends the Markowitz portfolio model to consider the impact on growth and volatility of adopting a tax-equity constraint.     

African states,bureaucratic culture and computer fixes

Our central argument in this article is that the introduction of computers in African states fails to produce the intended results. This is precisely because the trajectory of development of bureaucratic institutions in Africa has resulted in internal and external contexts that differ fundamentally from those of the Western states within which computing and information technology has been developed. This article explores the context in which computers were developed in Western industrialized societies to understand the circumstances that the technologies were designed to respond to and the bureaucratic culture that helped produce desired results. We then proceed to analyse the truncated nature of institution building in the colonial state, and how it structured the peculiar setting of the post‐colonial African state and dynamics surrounding the integration of the new information and communication technologies. We argue that the colonial state bequeathed to its post‐colonial successor three crucial characteristics that are of central importance to understanding why the introduction of computers does not produce anticipated improvements in public administration. These are the very limited technical capabilities of the bureaucracy; authoritarian decision‐making processes under the control of generalist administrators; and the predominance of patron–client relationships. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons. Ltd.     

The Deceptive Simplicity of Teaching Negotiation: Reflections on Thirty Years of the Negotiation Workshop

What is required for effective teaching depends on the goal of the effort, and our criteria for success should be much more demanding than positive ratings from participants. If the goal is to improve participants' effectiveness as negotiators, we need a proven theory and associated skills. In the absence of robust confirming empirical data, which is still mostly lacking, we can take some confidence from qualitative evaluations. But whether or not we have a proven theory, the pedagogical task is complex and challenging, calling for a variety of sophisticated techniques deployed by a skilled instructor committed to joint learning. This article tells the story of some of the instructors' pedagogical learnings in thirty years of teaching the pioneering Negotiation Workshop at Harvard Law School, many of which now have empirical support. It also suggests some areas and tools for more experimentation in future advanced courses.