This short paper analyzes whether a federal transfer system can be designed to increase welfare, when state governments create political budget cycles to increase the likelihood of reelection. The results show how the federal government may announce a transfer scheme in advance for the post-election year that counteracts the welfare costs of political budget cycles. JEL Classification: D61, D72...

It is important to indicate at the outset that I do not intend to argue for more funding for soil conservation programs, but rather for more efficient use of the resources presently committed. Before we can go very far in evaluating the impacts of soil conservation spending changes, we need additional background on soil conservation programs. It is hoped that such information will tell us somet...

The science and technology (S&T) community in the Canadian federal government is responding to the same pressures as other communities in governments around the world to produce better information for taxpayers on programme achievements. At the heart of this response are a number of organisations, including the Canadian Parliament, the Auditor General, the Treasury Board, and numerous departmen...

Distributive politics models often predict that legislators will demand inefficiently large projects, with inefficiency increasing in the number of districts, and that this will translate into larger projects and higher spending. The relationship between efficiency and legislature size is often referred to as the ‘‘law of 1/n’’(Weingast, Shepsle, and Johnsen 1981). We demonstrate that the ‘‘law...

In spite of Korean governments' efforts, many emergency management practitioners wonder whether what is actually being practiced is selective or comprehensive management. Using a qualitative content analysis and experiences in practice, the article analyzes the barriers to selective emergency management and the paths to comprehensive emergency management via the same three management elements: ...

Themove from cash to accruals accounting bymany governments is viewed as an aspect of an ongoing New Public Management agenda designed to achieve a more business-like and performance-focused public sector. Proponents argue that accruals accounting provides more appropriate information for decision makers and ultimately leads to a more efficient and effective public sector. The transition from c...

"Fend-for-yourself federalism" as opposed to "new federalism" is the term now used to more precisely describe the federal government's policies that are presently impacting small local governments. It isn't that rural communities are being ignored; on the contrary, they are recognized as a vital link in carrying out national policy. A third of the nation's population lives in communities with 2...

Electoral Goals and Center-State Transfers: A Theoretical Model and Empirical Evidence from India We construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations. These considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state levels...

China has been highly successful in electrifying rural areas in the past half century. Institutional structure and its reform are important for investment and, therefore, development of rural electrification. Over time, there have been three major institutional changes initiated by the central government;When the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, it was short of capital, technology and man...

In the last three decades, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has managed to replace its welfare-based urban housing system with a market-based housing provision scheme. With such significant housing policy changes, the PRC has successfully expanded urban home ownership and impressively increased per capita housing consumption. The housing market has become one of the major pillar industries ...