Tournament Approaches To Policy Reform

Download or read book Tournament Approaches to Policy Reform written by Clifford F. Zinnes and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While much foreign aid achieves commendable goals, some is ineffective. In this volume, Clifford Zinnes argues that a donor's intrinsic informational limitations on the local context as well as inability to control the progress of interventions mean that lack of success is not rooting in insufficient funding but in maladapted institution designs of interventions that don't foster local ownership. He indentifies and assesses a newly emerging class of foreign aid delivery that promises to overcome these obstacles. The approach is based on "prospective inter-jurisdictional competition" (PIJC). Beneficiary groups—often local-level governments, supported by their private sector and civil society—act as teams and compete against each other under explicit predefined rules and objectives to design and implement interventions under their own aegis to achieve the highest quantitatively measured performance, either relative to others ("tournaments") or against a preset benchmark ("certification"). Teams that cooperate internally are the likeliest to win the rewards, which, aside from the longer run benefits of the intervention itself, might include more substantive financial or technical assitance from the sponsor. Since only groups serious about reforming choose to play, Zinnes says the incentives generated by the ensuing "race-to-the-top" competitiion create local ownership, encouraging recipients to draw on their own knowledge. Moreover, since all teams that compete—and not just those who "win" donor rewards—benefit from their own reform efforts, he argues that this approach can leverage aid resources more than a conventional bilateral aid agreement. Zinnes presents a dozen recent applications of the approach, including those sponsored by the World Bank, USAID, the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, and others. He also recommends improvements and ways to scale up PIJC-based projects in applications ranging from protecting the environment and reducing red tap

Download or read book The Politics Industry written by Katherine M. Gehl and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading political innovation activist Katherine Gehl and world-renowned business strategist Michael Porter bring fresh perspective, deep scholarship, and a real and actionable solution, Final Five Voting, to the grand challenge of our broken political and democratic system. Final Five Voting has already been adopted in Alaska and is being advanced in states across the country. The truth is, the American political system is working exactly how it is designed to work, and it isn't designed or optimized today to work for us—for ordinary citizens. Most people believe that our political system is a public institution with high-minded principles and impartial rules derived from the Constitution. In reality, it has become a private industry dominated by a textbook duopoly—the Democrats and the Republicans—and plagued and perverted by unhealthy competition between the players. Tragically, it has therefore become incapable of delivering solutions to America's key economic and social challenges. In fact, there's virtually no connection between our political leaders solving problems and getting reelected. In The Politics Industry, business leader and path-breaking political innovator Katherine Gehl and world-renowned business strategist Michael Porter take a radical new approach. They ingeniously apply the tools of business analysis—and Porter's distinctive Five Forces framework—to show how the political system functions just as every other competitive industry does, and how the duopoly has led to the devastating outcomes we see today. Using this competition lens, Gehl and Porter identify the most powerful lever for change—a strategy comprised of a clear set of choices in two key areas: how our elections work and how we make our laws. Their bracing assessment and practical recommendations cut through the endless debate about various proposed fixes, such as term limits and campaign finance reform. The result: true political innovation. The Politics Industry is an original and completely nonpartisan guide that will open your eyes to the true dynamics and profound challenges of the American political system and provide real solutions for reshaping the system for the benefit of all. THE INSTITUTE FOR POLITICAL INNOVATION The authors will donate all royalties from the sale of this book to the Institute for Political Innovation.

Download or read book Reforming Infrastructure written by Ioannis Nicolaos Kessides and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.

Download or read book Public Management Reform written by Christopher Pollitt and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major new contribution to a rapidly expanding field, the authors offer an integrated analysis of the wave of management reforms which have swept through so many countries in the last twenty years. The reform trajectories of ten countries are compared, and key differences of approach discussed. Unlike some previous works, this volume affords balanced coverage to the 'New Public Management' (NPM) and the 'non-NPM' or 'reluctant NPM' countries, since it covers Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Unusually, it also includes a preliminary analysis of attempts to improve management within the European Commission.

Download or read book EC Competition Law Reform written by Barry E. Hawk and published by Juris Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2002-10-01 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1 Hardcover Volume.This volume includes selected chapters from the annual proceedings of the Fordham Corporate Law Institute. The general subject is the reform of EC competition law enforcement. This has been the subject of many Fordham conferences over the years. Indeed, EC Commission officials have stated that the modern reform proposals presently being considered had their roots at Fordham.The present volume includes seminal articles and critiques of the EC competition law regime as well as very recent discussions of the Commission's proposal for reform. Because much of the literature on EC competition law reform is scattered, the present volume should be useful in including in one place a broad selection of articles and roundtable discussions.The chapters cover not only institutional and jurisdictional issues like decentralization and sharing of powers between the Commission and the EC member states, but also substantive issues like the scope of Article 81 and the rule(s) of reason. These and other issues are examined from both an analytical and historical perspective which greatly facilitates understanding of the future implications of the reform measures presently being debated.In sum, the chapters are not merely of historical interest: problems and questions of ongoing importance are discussed.

Download or read book Golden Rule written by Thomas Ferguson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To discover who rules, follow the gold." This is the argument of Golden Rule, a provocative, pungent history of modern American politics. Although the role big money plays in defining political outcomes has long been obvious to ordinary Americans, most pundits and scholars have virtually dismissed this assumption. Even in light of skyrocketing campaign costs, the belief that major financial interests primarily determine who parties nominate and where they stand on the issues—that, in effect, Democrats and Republicans are merely the left and right wings of the "Property Party"—has been ignored by most political scientists. Offering evidence ranging from the nineteenth century to the 1994 mid-term elections, Golden Rule shows that voters are "right on the money." Thomas Ferguson breaks completely with traditional voter centered accounts of party politics. In its place he outlines an "investment approach," in which powerful investors, not unorganized voters, dominate campaigns and elections. Because businesses "invest" in political parties and their candidates, changes in industrial structures—between large firms and sectors—can alter the agenda of party politics and the shape of public policy. Golden Rule presents revised versions of widely read essays in which Ferguson advanced and tested his theory, including his seminal study of the role played by capital intensive multinationals and international financiers in the New Deal. The chapter "Studies in Money Driven Politics" brings this aspect of American politics into better focus, along with other studies of Federal Reserve policy making and campaign finance in the 1936 election. Ferguson analyzes how a changing world economy and other social developments broke up the New Deal system in our own time, through careful studies of the 1988 and 1992 elections. The essay on 1992 contains an extended analysis of the emergence of the Clinton coalition and Ross Perot's dramatic independent insurgency. A postscript on the 1994 elections demonstrates the controlling impact of money on several key campaigns. This controversial work by a theorist of money and politics in the U.S. relates to issues in campaign finance reform, PACs, policymaking, public financing, and how today's elections work.

Download or read book Competition Law Reform in Britain and Japan written by Kenji Suzuki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As market competition replaces state regulation in many economic fields, competition policy has become an area of increasing significance. Against this background, Suzuki highlights the importance of the domestic political structure for competition policy. He does this through the comparative analysis of competition law reforms in Britain and Japan. He argues - controversially - that a country's domestic political structure should be considered a major factor in causing the reform of competition law, and rejects the established view that it is necessarily a result of changes in international economic and political conditions.