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Now showing 1 - 10 of 42
  • Working Paper
    Fiscal Illusion as an Explanation of Institutional Choice in a Federation
    (1978) West, E. G.; Winer, Stanley L.
    "The fiscal 'illusion' hypothesis may be interpreted, following West and Winer (1978), as an assertion that utility maximizing public managers will invest resources to induce underestimation of tax-prices. They do so in order to maximize the size of government, subject to the controlling influence of the (median) voter under majority rule. Unfortunately for the voter, they will in general succeed if information about government activity is costly to acquire, and if political competition is imperfect. In this note, we use the fiscal illusion hypothesis to explain the choice of institutional arrangements in certain federations since 1945. In particular, we are interested in the growth of conditional or tied grants from federal to state or provincial governments."
  • Working Paper
    Exchange of Water Supply
    (1960) Ostrom, Vincent
    "California's water 'problem' arises from a personal preference congeries relevant to an area yielding limited water supplies. Semi-arid Mediterranean Southern California coastal regions provide climatic amenities attractive to population. These same weather conditions are expensive to water resources. By contrast, more abundantly supplied Northern California has not attracted large populations. Yet in the modern metropolis a relatively abundant water supply is essential to meet a variety of requirements. The resolution of this paradox is central to California water resource development. Marked contrasts in water yield and population distribution can be noted in comparisons of the south and north coastal areas of California. The south coastal area comprising Ventura basin and the Southern California coastal plain contains over one-half of the state's population with less than two percent of the state's natural run-off. By contrast, the north coastal area has less than three per cent of the state's population with nearly forty per cent of the state's water crop. The problem of geographic redistribution of water supplies is further complicated by extreme seasonal and cyclical variations in floods and droughts."
  • Working Paper
    Land Reform, Development, and Institutional Design
    (1972) Loveman, Brian
    "Land reform has often been viewed as a major remedy for the ills afflicting developing societies. Like the elixirs of the traveling medicine man, no one knows all of the ingredients; no one knows the side effects. But, land reform is guaranteed to cure all--or most all--diseases of developing nations. As John Montgomery has observed, land reform is an example of 'a principle which has been tested and has survived, though its effects have rarely been reported or explained'."
  • Working Paper
    Socio-economic Survey of Lower Rufiji Flood Plain: Rufiji Delta Agricultural System
    (1974) Sandberg, Audun
    "This report has been prepared by BRALUP researchers for planning officers and TANU cadres at the district and regional level, and for members of the Rufiji Basin Development Authority. It deals with the specific problem: how to implement the policy of ujamaa in the Rufiji Delta, which is the lower part of the Rufiji Flood Plain. (The upper part of the flood plain is called the Rufiji Valley.) Now that the Rufiji Flood Plain has been made a special National Development Area, there is a great need for data on natural and human resources. This report aims at providing such background data which can enable the planners to make realistic plans to further the development of peasants in the Rufiji Delta."
  • Working Paper
    Strategy and the Structure of Interdependent Decision-Making Mechanisms
    (1967) Ostrom, Elinor
    From p. 54: The paradigm presented ... begins to sketch in the type of analysis that one could undertake when examining the affect of decision-making structures on individual behavior. It is hoped that the paradigm will be of help in stimulating further theoretical and empirical work on the relation between the structure of decision-making mechanisms and the strategies of individuals employ when attempting to reach solutions to problems through the utilization of different structures."
  • 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
    Population Pressure and Fertility Changes in Costa Rica, 1906-1970
    (1976) Binger, Brian R.; Hoffman, Elizabeth; Newell, William H.
    "The demographic history of Costa Rica in the twentieth century is examined in the context of a model of dynamic adjustment to changing child survival probabilities and micro-level population pressure. Micro-level population pressure is viewed as resulting from a couple having children beyond its current optimal family size, given current prices and its income. Cantonal regression analyses for the time periods, 1927-1950, 1951-1953 to 1961-1963, and 1961-1963 to 1970 lend support to the hypothesis that the secular fertility decline in Costa Rica is a dynamic adjustment to high completed family size and increasing child survival probabilities."
  • Working Paper
    Polycentricity
    (1972) Ostrom, Vincent
    "Application of the concept of polycentricity to the organization of government in metropolitan areas is examined. A polycentric order is defined as one where many elements are capable of making mutual adjustments for ordering relationships with one another within a general system of rules where each element acts with independence of other elements. Spontaneity, in the sense that individuals will be led to organize elements in a polycentric order, initiate self-enforcing arrangements and alter basic rules, is explored as an attribute of a polycentric order. "Reliance upon polycentricity in the organization of various decision-making arenas is examined in relation to markets, judicial decision making, constitutional rule, selection of political leadership and formation of political coalitions and in the operation of a public service economy. The existence of polycentricty in each of these decision making arenas suggests that the governance of metropolitan areas can occur in a polycentric political system so long as no single set of decision makers is able to gain dominance over all decision-making structures. Polycentricity is not confined to market structures but can apply to the organization of diverse political processes and by implication can apply to the political process as a whole. A polycentric political system will be one where each actor participated in a series of simultaneous games and where each act has the potential for being a move in simultaneous games. "Implications of a theory of polycentric organization for research in the governance of metropolitan areas are considered in relation to problems of language and differences of approach as reflected in the use of different units of analysis. Advantage can be taken of these differences so long as contradictory hypotheses can be derived from different theoretical formulations and be used as political experiments if careful attention is given to difference in diagnostic assessments and to differences in the predictive inferences associated with different proposals for policy change. It is this circumstance that provides a challenging opportunity for the generation of empirical research on metropolitan governance being undertaken in the 1970s. We may be on the threshold where political science becomes a cumulative intellectual discipline grounded in analytical theory and when empirical research can be used to mobilize evidence for rejecting some of the propositions which now pass for political science. Theory can be improved only when erroneous conceptions can be abandoned and when weak conceptions can be replaced by stronger conceptions."
  • Working Paper
    Voluntary Group Response to Types of Collective Goods
    (1978) Kiser, Larry L.
    "Collective goods have been defined into three primary types distinguished by the attributes of nonsubtractibility, infeasibility of exclusion, and combination of both nonsubtractibility and nonexclusion. But these distinctions are often blurred in analysis involving collective goods. Mancur Olson's theory of groups and collective goods is an example, with the result that Olson claims unwarranted generality for his theory of small groups. The following develops the implications for voluntary provision of collective goods by focusing on the distinctions among the different types of collective goods."