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Government Institutions (government + institution)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences55%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting22%

Selected Abstracts

The Rising Power of the Modern Vice Presidency

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2008
JOEL K. GOLDSTEIN
Long a pilloried office, the vice presidency has become a significant government institution especially since the service of Walter F. Mondale (1977,81). Mondale and President Jimmy Carter elevated the office to a position of ongoing significance through a carefully designed and executed effort that required the confluence of a number of factors. Mondale's service provided his successors a more robust institution with new resources, enhanced expectations, and a successful model for vice presidential service. Subsequent vice presidents have benefited from Mondale's legacy but have exercised the office in different ways depending, to some degree, on the way in which the factors that shaped Mondale's term have played out for each new incumbent. [source]

Twilight Institutions: Public Authority and Local Politics in Africa

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2006
Christian Lund
ABSTRACT Public authority does not always fall within the exclusive realm of government institutions; in some contexts, institutional competition is intense and a range of ostensibly a-political situations become actively politicized. Africa has no shortage of institutions which attempt to exercise public authority: not only are multiple layers and branches of government institutions present and active to various degrees, but so-called traditional institutions bolstered by government recognition also vie for public authority, and new emerging institutions and organizations also enter the field. The practices of these institutions make concepts such as public authority, legitimacy, belonging, citizenship and territory highly relevant. This article proposes an analytical strategy for the understanding of public authority in such contexts. It draws on research from anthropologists, geographers, political scientists and social scientists working on Africa, in an attempt to explore a set of questions related to a variety of political practices and their institutional ramifications. [source]

The Logic of African Neopatrimonialism: What Role for Donors?

DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 5 2007
Diana Cammack
Today a number of sub-Saharan African countries display the outward signs of modern, democratic states. International aid agencies often treat them as though power and decision-making reside within government institutions and that they function as designed. When they do not they are labelled dysfunctional though their action is actually quite logical when viewed through a ,neopatrimonial lens'. This article outlines a number of neopatrimonial practices observed in Africa in the past two decades and attempts to explain the ,logic' that underpins them. It provides several recommendations about the way donors should assist states where deeply rooted anti-democratic and non-developmental behaviour dominates. [source]

Private Investment and Political Institutions

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 1 2002
David Stasavage
Recent research has demonstrated a negative link between macroeconomic and political uncertainty and levels of private investment across countries. This raises the question whether certain types of government institutions might help reduce this uncertainty. North and Weingast (1989) propose that political institutions characterized by checks and balances can have beneficial effects on investment by allowing governments to credibly commit not to engage in ex post opportunism with respect to investors. In this paper I develop and test a modified version of their hypothesis, suggesting that checks and balances, on average, improve possibilities for commitment, but that they are not a necessary condition for doing so. Results of heteroskedastic regression and quantile regression estimates strongly support this proposition. [source]

Factors influencing the scope and quality of science and management decisions

FISH AND FISHERIES, Issue 1 2002
(The good, the bad, the ugly)
Abstract The lecture traces the historical path to overfishing of the world's fish and shellfish stocks, and provides an assessment of marine fish resources in the later half of the 1990s. The basis of overfishing as noted by various fishery scientists is reviewed. Four factors, including institutional paralysis, the rapidity of technological developments, uncertainty of science, and the inability to monitor and enforce regulations are identified as the major problems leading to overfishing. The failure of the world community to deal with extensive overfishing, appears to have motivated managers and scientists to promote a new fishery management paradigm that focuses on a broader set of problems resulting from fishing, and establishes a more conservative decision-making process founded on precautionary principle and uncertainty. The author feels that the evolving paradigm will result in the rebuilding of a number of stocks in the United States, but is less certain of its adoption on a global scale, and whether or not science will play a more useful role in fisheries management. It is noted that the support for fisheries science and the status of fisheries have followed opposite courses. Over the past half century marine science has boomed, diversified and become intellectually and materially enriched, while the number of overfished stocks and ecological disasters has increased. Looking ahead it is expected that fisheries management will move into a more conservative era. The focus of fisheries has moved from full use of ocean resources to establishing yields that take into account the impacts of fisheries on target and non-target species and the ecosystem in general. Although there has been wide-spread abuse in the use of the world's fishery resources and condemnation of the fishing industries, the author feels that the government institutions must bear the primary responsibility for the historical course of fishery management and its failure. [source]

Fragments of Economic Accountability and Trade Policy

FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 2 2007
RYAN KENNEDY
While there has been a prodigious amount of literature on trade policy written in the past two decades, very little of that literature has dealt with countries in economic transition or nondemocratic regimes. There has also been a lack of work dealing with state interests in trade policy beyond realpolitik discussions of national security. This article seeks to fill some of these gaps through a study of two samples: one of liberalization in 25 post-Communist countries between the years 1991 and 1999 and the other of 124 countries from around the world in 1997. The study concludes that a key element in the choice between free trade and protectionism is the level of "fragmentation of economic accountability." Such fragmentation consists of two major components: (1) the existence of a strong capitalist class that is independent of the government; and (2) the dispersion of political power among actors both inside and outside the government. Where the government is more accountable to a wide range of interests, policies are more likely to be aligned with market mechanisms, encouraging the adoption of reforms, including the liberalization of trade policy. This article builds on the conclusions of Frye and Mansfield in several ways: (1) it embeds political fragmentation into a larger theoretical framework of economic accountability of government institutions; (2) it introduces the importance of state ownership in shaping government interests; (3) it introduces an idea of social, not just institutional, accountability; and (4) it proposes a statist view of trade policy that is lacking in the present literature. [source]

Balancing the funds in the New Cooperative Medical Scheme in rural China: determinants and influencing factors in two provinces

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTH PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2010
Luying Zhang
Abstract In recent years, the central government in China has been leading the re-establishment of its rural health insurance system, but local government institutions have considerable flexibility in the specific design and management of schemes. Maintaining a reasonable balance of funds is critical to ensure that the schemes are sustainable and effective in offering financial protection to members. This paper explores the financial management of the NCMS in China through a case study of the balance of funds and the factors influencing this, in six counties in two Chinese provinces. The main data source is NCMS management data from each county from 2003 to 2005, supplemented by: a household questionnaire survey, qualitative interviews and focus group discussions with all local stakeholders and policy document analysis. The study found that five out of six counties held a large fund surplus, whilst enrolees obtained only partial financial protection. However, in one county greater risk pooling for enrolees was accompanied by relatively high utilisation levels, resulting in a fund deficit. The opportunities to sustainably increase the financial protection offered to NCMS enrolees are limited by the financial pressures on local government, specific political incentives and low technical capacities at the county level and below. Our analysis suggests that in the short term, efforts should be made to improve the management of the current NCMS design, which should be supported through capacity building for NCMS offices. However, further medium-term initiatives may be required including changes to the design of the schemes. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Liberation regimes and land reform in Africa.

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2007
Land politics transcending enmity in South Africa
Abstract Truthfulness, the norm of science, is etymologically related to trust. Both concepts are related to ,tree', as a symbol for grounded knowledge, for differentiation (the tree of knowledge), for uprightness and reliability (Searle, 1995). Truthfulness generates trust. Trust generates community. The land politics and trust project in South Africa (Askvik and Bak, 2005) investigated how trust relations intervened within and between government institutions engaged in redistribution and management of land. It enquired into trust relations between the land state and stakeholders in land. It assessed how the new ANC-controlled state intervened into the relation between market-oriented urban industry and subsistence-oriented livelihoods on communal land. Could that intervention explain the slow pace of land redistribution? The field work was done in the Northern and the Western Cape provinces. A hypothesis is that unconditional personal trust across institutional boundaries is a condition for post-colonial, post-liberation community building. In 2001, aspects of political democracy were in place. Trust relations between government institutions and to stakeholders in land varied, but were limited. Trusted mediators between the institutions, across cultures, were few and far apart. Subsistence-oriented livelihoods on communal land were there to be transformed to commercial farming. The three-step Government strategy, growth in the urban economy, commercialisation of rural subsistence production and rural welfare from the urban surplus, augmented separation, disbelief and distrust. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

The Relationship Between Agricultural Cooperatives and the State in Sweden: The Legislative Process

ANNALS OF PUBLIC AND COOPERATIVE ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2000
M. Fregidou-Malama
On the basis of interviews made with twenty seven leading personalities from cooperatives and government institutions, it is identified, that two main dimensions, the economic and the social, are emphasized by different interest groups involved in the cooperative process. It is also indicated that the relationship between state and cooperatives, in varying degrees, combines these two basic dimensions over time in the actual cooperative law and thus focuses on one dimension, neglecting the other. Relationship is meant to anchor the economic and the social values of cooperatives in the political process, and enable them to be accepted. In conclusion, it can be argued that the state can influence the character of cooperatives by selecting specific actors in specific processes. For this reason, in order to secure a sustainable autonomous development of cooperatives, it is important to synthesize and take into consideration different interests in future relations between cooperatives and the state. [source]