The Israel and Palestine land settlement problem, 1948–2005: An analytical history

This paper traces the history of the current conflict between Israel and Palestine from 1948–2005 C.E. It focuses on the frontier conflict between Israel and Palestine, a conflict that has resulted in four major wars during the post-Second World War period, and that has left Israel as the occupying power over a large swathe of territory not allocated to it by the United Nations in 1947. It outlines the nature of the refugee problem in Palestine and neighboring Arab states, and defines the political problems posed both by relative Israel-Palestine population growth, and by the `right to return’ claim by ousted Palestinian Arabs. It reviews the political problems posed by religious extremism and theocratic government both in Israel and Palestine. It concludes with a brief discussion of the unpleasant alternatives left as the road map to peace disintegrates and outlines a preferred solution from the perspective of the advanced western nations.     

American Public Administration and Impacts of International Governance

Increasingly, public administration in the United States operates in a densely interconnected international system in which local decisions and actions may trigger global repercussions—and vice versa—and the fate of communities in one region is bound to the choices of decision makers elsewhere. Administrative actors have become enmeshed in a complicated, interwoven pattern of governance in ways that shape actions, issues, and opportunities for influencing administrative agencies at national, state, and local levels. These developments call for a critical reappraisal of our inherited notions of governance, management, and accountability. Terrorist tragedy and responses to it call attention to these themes, but they apply broadly across the spectrum of governance challenges. To demonstrate this point, we analyze some implications of transnational governance for the institutions and practices of U.S. public management, with particular attention to another subject: environmental policy and management. A conclusion is that the public administration community must adjust traditional practices to facilitate the effective management of the global processes that, in turn, reshape the world.     

A Good Place to Bury Bad News? Hiding the Detail in the Geography on the Labour Party’s Website

But actually, he thought as he re–adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.     

State and standards

In this paper a new economic approach to standardization has been presented. Standardization has been regarded as a problem ofgradual choice. An individual chooses to apply more or less standards within a hierarchy of standards. With this decomposition of standards, the problem of strategic market power becomes less important than in the traditional models of standardization. It becomes possible to analyze the problems of network externalities within a framework of non-strategic behavior and to apply the tools of the traditional theory of externalities and public goods. While decentralized action may lead to too little standardization, committees may overcome this deficiency to some extent, but bureaucracies are likely to lead to overstandardization. In the empirical section of the paper it has been shown that our approach can be applied to the standard-setting process in languages, railroads, and telecommunications. In all three cases the tendency of bureaucracies to generate more standardization than committees has been corroborated.The authors are indebted for helpful comments to the participants of the Berlin Seminar on Political Economy and of the colloquium Algemene Economie, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, and to A. Roemer, Saarbrücken.