Secret Public Finance: Revenues and Expenditures of the Soviet Communist Party, 1938–1965

Patterns of the Soviet Communist Party expenditures, major sources of revenue, and patterns of interregional transfers are analysed with special attention to the party's major donors: the army and large cities. Financial records for the period 1938 – 1965 allow us to study the role of the party in the Soviet institutional design and the relationships between central and regional party organisations. In addition to the selection of cadre, supervision of production, and ‘production’ of ideology, the party provided alternative channels for the redistribution of state resources. Empirical evidence suggests that the pattern of the distribution of subsidies through party channels was consistent with investing in political support by creating promotion incentives in the party system.     

Psychosocial Adjustment and Family Relationships: A Typology of Italian Families with a Late Adolescent

The importance of family relationships in human development and adjustment has always been recognized in psychological studies. The present study aims to construct a typology of families with a late adolescent and to analyze the family relationships present in each type. The typology, constructed using family satisfaction—a global index of family functioning—as the discriminate variable, took into account eight types. This study is focused on the two extreme types of the typology: Families with adequate functioning or satisfied families and Families with inadequate functioning or dissatisfied families. These two types of families were compared according to variables such as: (a) parent-child communication and its topics and (b) the family's decision-making process on topics related to the adolescent and his/her future orientation. All subjects completed a questionnaire composed of different scales. The results show substantial differences in the two family types regarding both family functioning and the role played by mothers and fathers. Satisfied families give evidence of a better communication process than the dissatisfied ones, greater sharing between parents and adolescents and, finally, a decision-making process based mostly on sharing and support. Moreover, in satisfied families the father has the role of social mediator. In this way, he succeeds in part in restoring equilibrium to the relational imbalance in favor of mothers so typical of Italian families.     

The role of tax bases and collections costs in the determination of income tax rates,seigniorage and inflation

A growing theoretical literature on optimal taxation predicts that governments will set the tax rates on money holdings and on more traditional tax bases to minimize the deadweight losses of collecting government revenue. Under the presumption that relative collection costs and tax bases have not changed significantly over time, the empirical time-series seigniorage literature has focused on the theory's tax smoothing implication, finding only weak support. We show that changes in collections costs and tax bases played an important role in the determination of tax composition and find stronger support for tax smoothing when this is taken into account.     

Boards of trustees,agency problems,and university output

The analysis and empirical evidence in this paper indicate that the structure of the boards of trustees of state universities influences the provision of higher education. The structure of the boards is important because it helps to define the constraints on the board members and on the internal agents of the universities. An implication of this study is that public universities can be made to function more like private ones by placing them under separate governing boards.These results are especially interesting when examining the trends regarding board structures. The trend over this century across the states has been toward increasing the number of universities under the jurisdiction of a single board. This analysis suggests that the trend is a response to political pressure from educators, not from taxpayers and consumers of higher education.     

State university boards of trustees: A principal-agent perspective

This paper extends the economic theory of organizations by examining the structure of boards of trustees in public university settings. A major implication of the analysis is that the structure of the board of trustees reflects the costs to politicians of allowing internal agent shirking. Empirical evidence supports this hypothesis and indicates that a system method of governing versus individual board governance of universities is linked to the influence of educators in the political process.     

Diversification of rural incomes and non-farm rural employment: Survey evidence from Russia

The results of a rural survey in two Russian regions demonstrate that agriculture is no longer the main source of income for rural families. Rural families are diversifiers, earning non-agricultural income through both non-agricultural wage employment and non-farm self-employment. The rural population is risk-averse, preferring the relative security of wage employment to individual entrepreneurship. Although all respondents would like to earn more, they are reluctant to consider the option of changing their place of work and are afraid of losing their current job. It may be difficult for new profit-oriented employers to offer equitable solutions to all segments of the rural population without properly designed government support programmes, which furthermore should be targeted to the labour force of the future, i.e., the Russian youth.     

Variability of the pattern of aging on the human skeleton: evidence from bone indicators and implications on age at death estimation

Age at death assessment of adult skeletons is one of the most difficult problems in forensic and physical anthropology. Two fundamental sources of error are described: the complex variability in the process of skeletal aging and methodological bias. Taking into account these limits, we developed a new scoring system for the auricular surface of the ilium and the pubic symphysis. In order to address a large variability, we examine reference samples from Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. Data were processed using Bayesian prediction in order to classify specimens in age range categories. Results show that combining indicators do not perform better than the auricular surface used as a single indicator. Morphological changes with aging are variable between Asian, African, and European populations, confirming the necessity to use population-specific standards. Bayesian prediction produces reliable classification and is applicable for subjects over 50 years old, a real methodological improvement.     

THE GOODS AND SERVICES DIRECTIVE: LIMITATIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES

The Goods and Services Directive adopted in December 2004 is the very first European Community instrument to implement the principle of gender equality outside the workplace. As such it has the potential to close an important gap in European Union law. This note, however, contends that the limited scope of application of the Directive, together with doubts surrounding its legal base and position within the overall gender equality framework of the Union, have significantly undermined its potential. Nevertheless, it is suggested that for the future, should these criticisms be adequately addressed, then the Directive may provide an important platform for the wider diffusion of the gender equality principle beyond the sphere of European employment law. Council Directive 2004/113/EC of 13 December 2004 implementing the principle of equal treatment between men and women in the access to and supply of goods and services OJ L373 (2004) 37