Road traffic injuries are a major cause of death and disability globally, with a disproportionate number occurring in developing countries. Road traffic injuries are currently ranked ninth globally among the leading causes of disability adjusted life years lost, and the ranking is projected to rise to third by 2020. In 1998, developing countries accounted for more than 85% of all deaths due to road traffic crashes globally and for 96% of all children killed. Moreover, about 90% of the disability adjusted life years lost worldwide due to road traffic injuries occur in developing countries. The problem is increasing at a fast rate in developing countries due to rapid motorisation and other factors. However, public policy responses to this epidemic have been muted at national and international levels. Policy makers need to recognise this growing problem as a public health crisis and design appropriate policy responses.
523_road_traffic.pdfSome argue that sovereign debt incurred without the consent of the people and not for their benefit, such as that of apartheid South Africa, should be considered odious and not transferable to successor governments. We argue that an institution that truthfully announced whether regimes are odious could create an equilibrium in which successor governments suffer no reputational loss from failure to repay odious debt and hence creditors curtail odious lending. Equilibria with odious lending could be eliminated by amending creditor country laws to prevent seizure of assets for failure to repay odious debt and restricting foreign assistance to countries not repaying odious debt. Shutting down the borrowing capacity of illegitimate regimes can be viewed as a form of economic sanction and has two advantages over most sanctions: it helps rather than hurts the population, and it does not create incentives for evasion by third parties. However, an institution empowered to assess regimes might falsely term debt odious if it favored debtors, and if creditors anticipate this, they would not make loans to legitimate governments. An institution empowered only to declare future lending to a particular government odious would have greater incentives to judge truthfully. A similar approach could be used to reduce moral hazard associated with World Bank and IMF loans.
American scholars and policy makers concerned with legal development in the People's Republic of China share a deep faith in the value of China developing a legal profession that operates as we would like to think our own does. Indeed, this idea is so deeply ingrained that it is rarely broken out for critical examination, but instead is treated as an obvious good, the attainment of which is essentially a matter of time. Virtually all such observers seem to assume that lawyers, whether out of idealism or self–interest or some blend thereof, will prove to be a principal force leading the PRC toward the rule of law and a market economy, while some go so far as to treat the development of an indigenous legal profession as crucial to the promotion in China of a more liberal polity.
The hidden assumptions regarding the Chinese legal profession found in both US academic writing and policy papers warrant a scrutiny they have yet to receive here or abroad. Lurking not too far underneath the surface of such portrayals are further assumptions about the inexorability of convergence along a common path, remarkably (surprise) similar to our own. Unexamined, such assumptions run the risk of leaving us with an impoverished understanding not only of the role that the emerging legal profession is playing in China, but also of both the complexity of legal development there more broadly and the limits of the ideology of professionalism in law. This, in turn, may generate unwarranted expectations on our part as to the manner in which change may come in China while reinforcing the inflated sense that far too many of us in the American legal world have of our own profession's historic importance.
This essay consists of three parts. After a brief discussion of the manner in which the PRC?s legal profession has been portrayed, Part One endeavors to depict, in more balanced terms, its growth over the past twenty years and its current situation, drawing in part on a series of interviews I conducted among Chinese practitioners between 1993 and 2000, as well as more conventional research sources. Part Two then seeks to explain why scholars and policy makers, particularly in the United States, have so misunderstood the development of the Chinese legal profession, suggesting that the problem may have as much to do with their appreciation of their own legal profession as with the difficulties of comprehending China's. The final part of the paper offers further thoughts regarding the challenges that we need to confront in thinking about the place of lawyers and legal development in the PRC.
When taking monetary policy decisions, central banks face considerable uncertainty about the transmission mechanism of monetary policy to the price level. In particular, the role played by monetary developments in the transmission mechanism is not well understood. Two paradigms exist: one assigns monetary developments an entirely passive role; the other gives money an active role, beyond that of an indicator variable. Taking such uncertainty as a starting point for analysis, this paper evaluates a number of monetary policy rules for short–term interest rate decisions in the face of paradigm uncertainty. It describes what constitutes an efficient rule in this context and discusses procedures leading to the adoption of such rules.
Is there a noticeable difference among political parties in a country in their trade policy positions? Do left parties advocate different trade policies than right parties? In the advanced industrial countries where labor tends to be scarce, are left parties more protectionist than right ones, which represent capital owners? Political institutions within these democratic countries may affect the role of partisanship. We also investigate whether increasing globalization has led to more or less partisan polarization over trade policy. We examine 25 developed countries from 1945–98 to see how their parties have competed over trade policy. Controlling for various factors, partisanship matters. In terms of position taking, right parties consistently take more free trade stances than do left ones. Globalization and other international forces have also shaped both the nature and the extent of the debate domestically over exposure to international trade.
Prepared for delivery at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 29–September 1, 2002, Boston, Panel 11–25.
What is a "perfect dictatorship"? Such a regime provokes little societal resistance at installation. Its leaders act jointly to consolidate the regime and to broaden the support coalition by agreeing upon succession rules to rotate the presidency within the authoritarian regime. They delegate policy– making authority to civilians in areas of their competence. They emphasize consultation, not open contestation, prefer cooptation to repression, eschew ideological appeals, compel social actors into regime– licensed organizations, and deactivate civil society. South Korea under Park Chung Hee is compared on these dimensions to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, all at a time when authoritarian regimes governed them.
The future of dollarization will be determined by political economy considerations. Existing scholarship on the political economy of fixed exchange rates indicates factors of potential importance at both the domestic and international levels. At the domestic level the role of stabilizing currencies to encourage trade, and devaluing for competitive purposes, dominates the politics of these decisions. Greater commercial and financial integration with the United States increase the likelihood of dollarization. Internationally-oriented economic agents (financial institutions, borrowers, international firms) are more likely to want dollarization; tradables producers, especially import competers, are more likely to oppose it.
At the international level, dollarization will implicate regional integration agreements. Countries party to such agreements (such as Mercosur) are more likely to dollarize together than separately. Where such agreements are with the United States, or where they increase the level of commercial and financial integration with the United States, they will also tend to increase the likelihood of dollarization. On the other hand, dollarization is likely to put pressure on countries to harmonize financial regulation with the United States, and to require the implicit or explicit approval of American monetary and financial authorities.
The paper provides a political economy theory of the Kuznets curve. When development leads to increasing inequality, this can induce political instability and force democratization on political elites. Democratization leads to institutional changes which encourage redistribution and reduce inequality. Nevertheless, development does not necessarily induce a Kuznets curve, and it is shown that development may be associated with two types of nondemocratic paths: an "autocratic disaster," with high inequality and low output, and an "East Asian Miracle," with low inequality and high output. These arise either because inequality does not increase with development, or because the degree of political mobilization is low.
Scholars, activists, and policy makers have argued that the route to economic growth in Africa runs through political reform. In particular, they prescribe electoral accountability as a step toward economic reform, seeing it as inducing the choice of publicly beneficial as opposed to privately profitable economic policies. To assess the validity of such arguments, we first characterize a set of political institutions that render political elites accountable and derive their expected impact on the policy choices of governments. Using ratings of macro–economic policy produced by the World Bank and ratings of corrupt practices produced for private investors, we explore the relationship between institutional forms and policy choices on both an African and global sample. While key elements of the model find empirical support, the central argument receives mixed support in the data. Political institutions have a stronger influence on policy making in Africa than elsewhere and variation in African institutions and in the structure of African economies account for differences between policy choices in Africa and those made in the rest of the world. Political accountability however does not influence the choice of macro–economic policies in the manner suggested by reformist arguments; although it does appear to lead to less political predation.
WCFIA Working Paper 02–05, September 2002.
When social scientists talk about the adoption of new governance arrangements in a given policy area, their questions are most often functional: What will those new arrangements do better than the previous way of making policy? Yet politicians do not always, or even usually, pick policy solutions because they offer the best functional answer to a policy problem. Instead, they adopt solutions at a given time that advance their electoral or partisan interests as well as responding to a perceived policy problem (cf. Kingdon 1984). Thus, they not only want to do things (provide child care, increase economic development), but to do things that are politically useful (fortify their local political machine, distribute benefits to political supporters).
It in this light that I evaluate in this paper two of the most significant innovations in collaborative governance arrangements in Europe in the 1990s. The first is the 1993 French reform that created regional–level multi–partite institutions to develop proposals for regional education and training initiatives that aimed to spur private investment in human capital. The second is the institution of territorial pacts as the cornerstone of Italian development policy in the 1990s. The development pacts were to sponsor the participation of local secondary associations and politicians in proposing territorial development plans, with the goal of promoting ongoing cooperation among these actors at the territorial level. These reforms are especially significant because they took place in two unitary states with weak regional governments and weak traditions of corporatist policy–making. They were innovative, at least in form, because they attempted to build institutions of public/private collaboration to provide collective goods at a local level. As such, they simultaneously marked an attempt to break radically with the nature of past policy and with the institutions through which those policies had been designed. These were not equivalent to sectoral neocorporatist policies practiced especially widely in northern Europe (Lehmbruch 1984) both by virtue of the scope of private actors involved and of the delegation of policy autonomy to these actors. In terms of scope, they attempted to involve a wide range of local stakeholders, rather than monopolistic employers and unions. And in terms of policy autonomy, these new instances were empowered not merely to implement policies decided at the center, but to develop their own analyses of local problems and proposed responses to them. They were not merely bodies of decentralized implementation, but of decentralized policy design, with the institutions for designing policy moved away from national politicians and to local actors (among which politicians were just one, if still the primus inter pares).
The actual institutions have, so far, shown themselves to be quite heterogeneous. In this paper, I first summarize their experiences?both their political origins and their successes and failures in fulfilling the institutional mandate delegated to them. After reviewing the major developments in each institutional experiment, I draw parallels between the two ongoing experiments, focusing in particular on the organizational prerequisites for their success and the dilemmas they pose for public actors who would attempt to expand collaborative governance arrangements.
Three main questions were raised at the IUHPE conference in June 2002 on "new dimensions in promoting health," with a particular focus on the process of policy change:
? How should people with an interest in promoting health across sectors approach the policy change process?
? What skills are needed to engage in the policy change process?
? How do we build collaborations across the policy arenas?
In short,the answer to all three of these questions is "politics." First, the policy change process needs to be approached through politics. Second,engagement in policy change requires political skills. And third, collaboration across policy arenas requires management of the political process.
A decade ago, in his election campaign for President of the United States, Bill Clinton made famous the slogan, "It?s the economy, stupid!" He plastered those words on the wall of his campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas, to remind him and his supporters that winning the election required a focus on economic promises.
But the policy change process is driven itself by politics. Indeed, more attention by Bill and Hillary Clinton to the politics of health care — from "it?s the economy, stupid," to "it ?s the politics, stupid!" — might have improved their chances of passing health reform in the United States in 1994.
The failure of the Clinton reform plan highlights the importance of the political process for promoting policy change, and the risks of underestimating political challenges. This article first reviews three political themes about the policy reform process, and then presents a systematic approach to the development of political strategies for reform, using examples of health policy.
Public policies such as regulation, antitrust, and international trade are the result of public politics – a competition over who gets what with government the arbiter of that competition. Policies are also chosen by private parties without the command or sanction of government. Private policies often result from pressure from interest groups that can be independent of government. Such activity and the responses to it represent private politics – a competition over who gets what that takes place outside the arenas of government. This paper provides a theory of private politics focusing on an activist that generates a boycott to induce a firm to change its policies. The mode consists of two games. In the first members of the public decide when and how must to boycott the firm based on information they receive. A person?s action reveals information, which represents a public good, and that person has an incentive to act early so as to lead others to act. In the second game the activist and the firm bargain to settle the boycott, and the settlement represents a private policy. The equilibrium of the games provides an industrial organization of activist groups, their targets, and the issues that attract boycotts.
Nearly all of Sub–Saharan Africa is extremely poor. While a few countries in Asia, Latin America and Oceania are comparably poor, no other region has as many poor people and undeveloped countries. Not surprisingly, in no part of the world is the penetration of telecommunications technology so low. Thus, Africa would not seem to be an area where substantial improvements in telephone service would be likely until more fundamental economic problems are solved. Yet, beginning in 1995, a few African countries began to reform the telecommunications industry, leading to seemingly miraculous results. The purpose of this paper is to explore how and why these changes took place.
The paper documents the path of reform, its political sources, and its consequences for six African countries: Cote D?Ivoire, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda. These countries are diverse in institutional structure, political stability, cultural heritage, and the nature and success of their reform, although all have improved, especially in radio telephony.
This essay is based on detailed case studies undertaken by a team of economists that were assembled by the World Bank, and is intended to fill a gap between analytic narratives of a specific case and regression analyses that seek to explain performance or reform (few seek to explain both simultaneously) across a large sample of countries based on relatively crude measures of the institutional environment. Our approach, also an analytic narrative, is complementary to the others in that it allows cross–country comparisons while emphasizing the nuances of the political and institutional factors surrounding reform.
[Third Annual IMF Research Conference, Washington, DC, November 7?8, 2002.]
What do we mean by institutions? The generality of the word cries out for a definition. I am not going to attempt it. A narrow interpretation would consist of only specific legal bodies or procedural mechanisms. Examples include regulatory agencies (e.g., Securities and Exchange Commissions), standards–setting bodies (e.g., for accounting), and what are sometimes called "commitment devices" (currency boards, guarantees of central bank independence, balanced budget amendments, the Stability and Growth Pact, etc.). A broad definition would include everything about a society that is more detailed than the basic theoretical model in a graduate economics textbook: from the existence of efficiency wages and a six–month gold futures market, to culture. The notion of institutional quality that has become common in the growth literature lies at an intermediate level of generality, and pertains to Property rights and Rule of Law. I am happy to accept that usage. But, before I turn to it, I want to flag the wide variety of issues that could be termed institutional, and to observe that they may not necessarily all be correlated. For example, democracy is on many people?s list. But the commitment devices I named (currency boards, independent CBs, Stability Pact), are distinctive for being institutions that prevent macroeconomic policy from being determined in "too democratic" a manner.
The debate over monetary standards and exchange rate regimes for developing countries is as wide open as ever. On the one hand, the big selling points of floating exchange rates—monetary independence and accommodation of terms of trade shocks—have not lived up to their promise. On the other hand, proposals for credible institutional monetary commitments to nominal anchors have each run aground on their own peculiar shoals. Rigid pegs to the dollar, for example, are dangerous when the dollar appreciates relative to other export markets.
This study explores a new proposal: that countries specialized in the export of a particular commodity should peg their currency to that commodity. When the dollar price of the commodity on world markets falls, the dollar exchange rate of the local currency would fall in tandem. The country would thus reap the best of both worlds: the advantage of a nominal anchor for monetary policy, together with the automatic accommodation to terms of trade shocks that floating rates claim to deliver. The paper conducts a set of counter-factual experiments. For each of a list of countries specialized in particular mineral or agricultural commodities, what would have happened, over the last 30 years, if it had pegged its currency to that commodity, as compared to pegging to the dollar, yen, or mark, or as compared to whatever exchange rate policy it actually followed historically? We compute under these scenarios the price of the commodity in local terms, and we then simulate the implications for exports. Illustrative of the results is that some victims of financial difficulties in the late 1990s might have achieved a stimulus to exports precisely when it was most needed, without having to go through wrenching currency collapses, if they had been on regimes of pegging to their export commodity: South Africa to gold or platinum, Nigeria and Indonesia to oil, Chile to copper, Argentina to wheat, Colombia to coffee, and so on.
Not all countries will benefit from a peg to their export commodity, and none will benefit in all time periods. Nonetheless, the results suggest that the proposal that some countries peg their currency to their principle export commodity deserves to take its place alongside pegs to major currencies and the other monetary regimes that countries consider.
WCFIA Working Paper 02-07, September 2002.
Late in 2001 the new Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Anne Krueger, boldly suggested that under certain conditions international debt repayments by a sovereign borrower (= government) should be temporarily suspended while negotiations take place on restructuring its debt. Thus the IMF officially endorsed one of the more radical suggestions for improvements in the international financial architecture that have been made since the Mexican financial crisis of 1995 and the several Asian crises of 1997. This article provides analytical and historical background to evaluate this and other proposals for reform.
As the cataclysmic events of September 11 have receded farther into the past, U.S. policymakers and the public should have been able to think more clearly about the causes of those events. But that has not happened.
Just after the attacks, the initial wave of nationalistic feeling was understandable (similar sentiments held the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941). And the Bush administration's military action against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was equally understandable and justified, if not completely successful. After civilians were slaughtered so heinously on U.S. soil, the American people — recognizing the right to self–defense — would have been willing to incur a significant number of military casualties in Afghanistan to round up and kill or capture al Qaeda fighters. Yet on two separate occasions, despite its bellicose rhetoric, the Bush administration — fearing casualties, much as the Clinton administration had — allowed al Qaeda fighters to get away by timidly relying on Northern Alliance and Pakistani allies to pursue them rather than putting enough U.S. boots on the ground. What was needed then and what will be needed in the future is a robust, narrowly focused military response against terrorist groups that focus their attacks on U.S. targets. Unfortunately, a wider, less effective U.S. policy of military and covert action is being pursued by the Bush administration and supported by the American people. In fact, that indiscriminate U.S. military interventionism is a major cause of terrorism against the United States in the first place. For example, unnecessary U.S. military interventions in Georgia, the Philippines and Iraq will most likely cause more additional terrorist attacks on U.S. targets than they will prevent.
The central purpose of American power is to provide security for the United States in a dangerous world. Before September 11, other states, especially other great powers, were perceived to be the main threat to the United States. To maximize its security, American policymakers worked assiduously to ensure that the United States held a favorable position in the global balance of power.
This template for thinking about American security policy has been altered somewhat by September 11. The United States still has to be deeply concerned with great power politics, particularly with the rise of China. But now it also has to confront Al–Qaeda, which has the United States in its gunsight and is determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
President Bush has not yet devised a clear strategy for combating terrorism. Nevertheless, he has been under intense pressure to view September 11 as a transformative moment that calls for the United States to become much more actively involved around the world. Indeed, some conservatives argue that it is time to create an American empire, where the United States dominates the entire globe and shapes it according to its own interests. Presumably, this ambitious strategy would keep great power rivals at bay as well as eliminate the terrorist threat.
When Mohammed Atta boarded the airline on September 11, 2001 that soon thereafter slammed into the World Trade Center towers, he left behind a manual of instruction. Apparently prepared by his colleagues in the al Qaeda network, it instructed him and his fellow activists how to behave and what to do in preparation for their fateful act. What is interesting about this document is not only the text, but the subtext. Lying beneath the pious rhetoric of the manual and its eerie ties to the World Trade Center tragedy are hints about the perplexing issue of the role of religion in the contemporary world, and answers to the persistent question, how could religion be related to such vicious acts of political violence?
The common sense way of putting this question about the September 11 attack and all of the other recent acts of religious terrorism is "what's religion got to do with it?" The common sense answers to this question are varied, and they are contradictory. On the one hand some political leaders–along with many scholars of comparative religion–have assured us that religion has had nothing to do with these vicious acts, and that religion's innocent images have been used in perverse ways by evil and essentially irreligious political actors. On the other hand there are the radio talk show hosts and even a few social scientists who affirm that religion, especially Islam, has had everything to do with it–and not just ordinary religion, but a perverse strain of fundamentalism that has infected normal religion and caused it to go bad.
A reading of the Atta manuscript shows both answers to be incorrect. In an analysis of this manual undertaken by a scholar of comparative religion, Bruce Lincoln, he leaves us with no doubt that Mohammed Atta and his eighteen accomplices on that dark morning of September 11 were filled with a religious zeal and undertook their hideous assignment in a ritualistic act of self–sacrifice following traditional tenets. Moreover, although the ideology of their mentors was influenced by a certain strain of Islamic political thought characterized by the writings of Mawdudi, al Banna and Faraj, to which only a minority of Muslims subscribe, the religious practices and rituals were themselves not deviant. The actions prescribed for the nineteen on the morning of September 11 were well within the norm not only for Islamic belief and practice, but also for many other religious traditions. Skewed though their political views may have been, one could say on the basis of this text that Atta and his colleagues died as good Muslims. Had they been Christians or Hindus they would have died as good adherents of those faiths as well.
