ATP’s impact on accelerating development and commercialization of advanced technology

One of ATP’s legislated mandates is to accelerate industry’s development and commercialization of new technologies. This survey of 28 projects funded in 1991 found that ATP helped cut technology development cycle time by 50% in most cases. Slightly more than half of the interviewees provided quantitative estimates of the economic value of reducing cycle time by a single year. Most interviewees expected the positive impact on cycle time experienced in the applied-research stage to flow through to later stages in the technology development cycle allowing them to enter the marketplace more quickly. Cycle-time improvements in other technology development projects were attributed by the companies to their ATP project. Two types of acceleration were implied: (1) overcoming delays in starting technology development projects, and (2) speeding up performance of research once it is under way. This paper is based on work performed by the author when she was serving as an industry consultant to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The author acknowledges the contributions of Rosalie Ruegg, Richard Spivack, Ernesto Robles, and Gregory Tassey, all of NIST, to the study. In addition, she expresses appreciation to the 28 company representatives who participated in the project interviews.     

Moral Agency and Moral Responsibility in Humanitarian Intervention

This paper sets out a preliminary taxonomy of potential collective moral agents in humanitarian intervention, based on six recent cases involving international organisations. The settings for the cases are Northern Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haiti, Rwanda, and Kosovo. Attributing moral responsibility to a group actor requires first discovering whether its characteristics are enough like an individual moral agent's to support an analogy. Groups in humanitarian intervention that appear to choose between one course of action and another, and have a clear structure of leadership and a capacity to control their collective activities, meet criteria that characterise individual moral agents. If they can also distinguish between policies using the language of morality we can call them collective moral agents, and hence subject to some moral responsibilities.     

Reviews

John N. Hazard, Managing Change in the USSR: The Political‐Legal Role of the Soviet Jurist, Cambridge: CUP, 1983, ix + 182 pp. £17.50.

Martin McCauley (ed.). The Soviet Union after Brezhnev, London: Heinemann, 1983 and New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983, xii + 160 pp. hardback £14.50, paperback £5.50.

Jonathan Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy 1930–33: The Impact of the Depression, London: Macmillan, 1983, xii + 172 pp. £25.00.

Gavriel D. Ra'anan, International Policy Formation in the USSR: Factional ‘Debates’ during the Zhdanovshchina, foreword by Robert Conquest. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1983. Distributed by Leicester UP, xi + 248 pp. £20.00.

Ivan Szelenyi, Urban Inequalities under State Socialism, Oxford: OUP, 1983, x + 158 pp. hardback £15.00, paperback £5.95.

Arvo Tuominen, The Bells of the Kremlin: An Experience in Communism, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1983, xvi + 333 pp. $27.00.

Gregory Guroff and Fred V. Carstensen (eds.), Entrepreneur ship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983, 372 pp. hardback £34.50, paperback £11.30.

Robert C. Horn, Soviet‐Indian Relations: Issues and Influence, New York, Praeger, 1982, xviii+231 pp. hardback $24.95, paperback $8.95.

Stephen R. Sacks, Self‐Management and Efficiency: Large Corporations in Yugoslavia, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983, xi + 163 pp. £15.00.

C. K. Chase‐Dunn (ed.), Socialist States in the World System. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1982, 304 pp. hardback $28.00, paperback $14.00.

David Kideckel (ed.), Political Rituals and Symbolism in Socialist Eastern Europe. Special issue of Anthropological Quarterly, April 1983, vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 52–104. Anthropological Quarterly, 620 Michigan Avenue N.E., Washington D.C. 20064. $5.00.     

Piling On: Multilevel Government and the Fiscal Common‐Pool

This article discusses the common‐pool problems that arise when multiple territorially overlapping governments share the authority to provide services and levy taxes in a common geographic area. Contrary to the traditional Tiebout model in which increasing the number of competing governments improves efficiency, I argue that increasing the number of overlapping governments results in “overfishing” from the shared tax base. I test the model empirically using data from U.S. counties and find a strong positive relationship between the number of overlapping jurisdictions and the size of the local public sector. Substantively, the “overlap effect” amounts to roughly 10% of local revenue.