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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Working Paper
    The Federal Treasury as a Common Pool Resource and the Development of a Predatory Bureaucracy
    (1979) Fort, Rodney D.; Baden, John
    "Pessimism over the prospect of reducing the size and scope of government is pervasive. As Ralph Winter recently noted in Regulation, part of the basis for this pessimism is that elections become less and less relevant to outcomes as government grows. In this immobilizing ambiance government grows a pace with anti-government sentiment. The general purpose of this paper is to provide an important reason for this paradox of big government in such a hostile milieu. We contend that elections fail to control government size and growth due to specific failures in the representative system. One major failure has been the concentrated focus of political activities within bureaucracies. This shifted focus away from the representative arena is a result of placing increased responsibility for administering the 'transfer society' in the hands of the bureaucracy. At both the level of individual interaction with agencies and the level of inter-agency interaction the pervasive result of government growth, as distinguished from absolute government size, are manifest. It is time to suggest plausible modifications."
  • Working Paper
    Cornell Workshop on Agricultural and Rural Development in the People's Republic of China
    (1979) Barker, Randolph; Sinha, Radha
    "It is no surprise that the normalization of the relationship between the U.S. and the People's Republic of China and as a result her growing accessibility has generated a spate of information, some hard, some soft and opinionated. While on one hand an American newspaper commentator recently suggested that China was bringing back capitalism, some leading Marxists in the West feel disillusioned and are suggesting that China has gone 'revisionist'. At least one of them found the recent changes in China so much to his dislike that he refused an official invitation to go to China and see for himself."
  • Working Paper
    Bureaucracy and the Unmanaged Forest Commons in Costa Rica (Or Why Development Does not Grow on Trees)
    (1979) Guess, George M.
    "Due to the continuing manifested lack of viable planning for forestation by most governments, there are analysts who firmly believe that the responsibility for long-range planning and implementation and control of plans will increasingly fall upon large domestic and multi- national corporations. If governments are truly concerned about the probably increasing dominance of the world economy by multinational corporations (both privately and/or publicly owned), the most apparent alternative to sheer volatile legislative control is to improve national planning modes substantially, including the control of the implementation of long-range and related short-range plans. Government sponsored control systems must always remain relatively ineffective unless tied inextricably to major viable objectives (long-range aims) and appropriate, viable strategies for their long-range implementation. Similarly, they must be integrally related to viable short-range goals (aims) and operational plans."
  • Working Paper
    Political Economy Approach to the Analysis of Institutional Behavior and Consequences
    (1979) Kiser, Larry L.; Ostrom, Elinor
    From p. 1: "Undertaking a synthesis of work in political economy for a Handbook of Political Behavior is a massive task. The potential literature for such a review is far too extensive for the limitations of a single chapter. Moreover, the term political economy is used to characterize such a wide variety of academic work that no single chapter could provide a coherent synthesis of all the different perspectives. A chapter-length discussion must be more selective. "This chapter focuses entirely on the political economy literature which starts with the individual as a basic unit of analysis and which conceptualizes collectives of individuals as artifacts crafted to increase individuals access to available outcomes. Literature examining the effects of different institutional arrangements on the conduct and behavior of individuals and literature evaluation consequences is emphasized."