A Case Study in U.S. Government Financial Management in Cross-Disciplinary Teams

Following the example of the private sector, the public sector in the United States has been undergoing process-reengineering, most notable in the Federal Government with the National Performance Review (NPR). The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) asked its overseas missions for volunteer participation as Country Experimental Laboratories (CELs) during USAID's NPR efforts. USAID/ Senegal, in French West Africa, became a CEL in the spring of 1994. The reengineering, occurring over a two-year period, created multi-disciplinary teams centered around Strategic Objectives (SOs). This article describes the experience and lessons learned from developing and implementing financial management policies and procedures to support the SO Teams, while concurrently ensuring that accountability requirements were met. The article uses the case study format, delineating the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats faced by the Mission Controller, the trade-offs between the decentralization of program management and accountability, and the organizational relationships established to reengineer the financial management processes at USAID/Senegal.     

Rent-seeking and political tenure: First estimates

The paper shows that the “Frey–Schneider–Schultz hypothesis” – that there is a negative relation between the government's popularity and the government's incentives to engineer political business cycles – is consistent with rational, forward-looking voting provided one makes appropriate assumptions about the incumbent's preferences. The empirical part of the paper presents evidence favourable to the hypothesis using quarterly data on US money growth.     

Constitutional Dimensions of State and Local Tax Deductibility

President Reagan's proposal to eliminate the deduction of stateand local taxes for the purpose of assessing federal incometaxes will vastly enlarge the scope of the federal government,unduly burden state and local governments, and greatly harmthe federal system. The essence of the federal idea is thatthere are arenas of government that must not be invaded by othergovernments. Yet the Treasury Department would have us believethat the most fundamental activities of state and local governmentsare in some significant sense paid for by the federal governmentthrough "subsidies" provided by the federal tax code.     

Social indicators for health planning and policy analysis

The concept of health involves two dimensions: The level of function at a point in time and the probability of transition to other levels at future times. By applying measured social values to the distribution of the population among a set of levels, a Function Status Index aptly summarizes the Level-of-Well-Being of a population at a point in time. By incorporating empirically determined transition probabilities into a simple stochastic model, a Quality-Adjusted Life Expectancy can be computed that approximates a comprehensive social indicator for health. The indicators possess the statistical properties required for time series and interpopulation comparisons, for studying outcomes and quality of medical care, and for health system optimization in planning and policy analysis.     

Analogical reasoning and policymaking: Where and when is it used?

A steadily growing literature has emerged in recent years on the role of analogical reasoning in policymaking contexts. However, there has so far been little attempt to anwer the question of where and when analogical reasoning tends to be used. Using Yaacov Vertzberger's situational-motivational nexus framework as starting point, the article examines the decision of the Kennedy administration to wait it out during the substantial stock market crash of 1962. Little evidence is uncovered that the Kennedy and his advisers relied on analogical reasoning to reach this decision, a finding which is surprising given the number of situational and motivational inducements present in the case. The article concludes that a high degree of perceived risk and uncertainty – noticeably absent from the stock market case – is the key situational inducement to analogizing, but suggests that the case tells us something important about the prevalence of rule- as opposed to case-based reasoning.