This book explores the delegation of authority over American social programs to private actors. In the development of the American welfare state, policy-makers have often avoided direct governmental ...provision of benefits and services, turning instead to private actors for the governance of social programs. More recent versions of delegated governance seek also to create social welfare marketplaces in which consumers can choose from an array of private providers. This book examines both the reasons behind this persistent delegation of authority and the consequences. Focusing on the case study of Medicare—and, in particular, the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act—the book argues that fundamental contradictions in American public opinion help explain the prevalence of delegated governance. Americans want both social programs and small government, leaving policy-makers in a bind. To square the circle, policy-makers have contracted out public programs to non-state actors, including voluntary organizations and for-profit entities, as a way to mask the role of the state. Such arrangements also pull in interest group allies—the providers of these programs—who can help pass policies in a political landscape that is fraught with obstacles. Although delegated governance has been politically expedient, it has frequently come at the cost of effective administration and created problems of fraud and abuse. Social welfare marketplaces also suffer from the difficulties individuals have in making choices about the benefits they need. In probing both the causes and consequences of delegated governance, this book offers a novel interpretation of both American social welfare politics and the nature of the American state.
This wide-ranging, original account of the politics and economics of the giant military supply project in the North reconstructs an important but little-known part of Civil War history. Drawing on ...new and extensive research in army and business archives, Mark R. Wilson offers a fresh view of the wartime North and the ways in which its economy worked when the Lincoln administration, with unprecedented military effort, moved to suppress the rebellion.
This task of equipping and sustaining Union forces fell to career army procurement officers. Largely free from political partisanship or any formal free-market ideology, they created a mixed military economy with a complex contracting system that they pieced together to meet the experience of civil war. Wilson argues that the North owed its victory to these professional military men and their finely tuned relationships with contractors, public officials, and war workers.
Wilson also examines the obstacles military bureaucrats faced, many of which illuminated basic problems of modern political economy: the balance between efficiency and equity, the promotion of competition, and the protection of workers' welfare. The struggle over these problems determined the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars; it also redirected American political and economic development by forcing citizens to grapple with difficult questions about the proper relationships among government, business, and labor.
Students of the American Civil War will welcome this fresh study of military-industrial production and procurement on the home front—long an obscure topic.
Why government outsourcing of public powers is making us less free Many governmental functions today—from the management of prisons and welfare offices to warfare and financial regulation—are ...outsourced to private entities. Education and health care are funded in part through private philanthropy rather than taxation. Can a privatized government rule legitimately? The Privatized State argues that it cannot.In this boldly provocative book, Chiara Cordelli argues that privatization constitutes a regression to a precivil condition—what philosophers centuries ago called "a state of nature." Developing a compelling case for the democratic state and its administrative apparatus, she shows how privatization reproduces the very same defects that Enlightenment thinkers attributed to the precivil condition, and which only properly constituted political institutions can overcome—defects such as provisional justice, undue dependence, and unfreedom. Cordelli advocates for constitutional limits on privatization and a more democratic system of public administration, and lays out the central responsibilities of private actors in contexts where governance is already extensively privatized. Charting a way forward, she presents a new conceptual account of political representation and novel philosophical theories of democratic authority and legitimate lawmaking. The Privatized State shows how privatization undermines the very reason political institutions exist in the first place, and advocates for a new way of administering public affairs that is more democratic and just.
Global production sharing is determined by international cost differences and frictions related to the costs of unbundling stages spatially. The interaction between these forces depends on ...engineering details of the production process with two extremes being ‘snakes’ and ‘spiders’. Snakes are processes whose sequencing is dictated by engineering; spiders involve the assembly of parts in no particular order. This paper studies spatial unbundling as frictions fall, showing that outcomes are very different for snakes and spiders, even if they share some features. Both snakes and spiders have in common a property that lower frictions produce discontinuous location changes and ‘overshooting’. Parts may move against their comparative costs because of proximity benefits, and further reductions in frictions lead these parts to be ‘reshored’. Predictions for trade volumes and the number of fragmented stages are quite different in the two cases. For spiders, a part crosses borders at most twice; the value of trade increases monotonically as frictions fall, except when the assembler relocates and the direction of parts trade is reversed. For snakes the volume of trade and number of endogenously determined stages is bounded only by the fragmentation of the underlying engineering process, and lower frictions monotonically increase trade volumes.
•Off-shoring depends on interaction of comparative costs and co-location benefits.•Co-location benefits depend on technology and are different for spiders vs snakes.•Off-shoring may be neither continuous nor monotonic in unbundling costs.•Off-shoring may overshoot and be followed by re-shoring.•The equilibrium may support an inefficiently low level of off-shoring.
Abstract
In times of crisis, policy makers call upon entrepreneurship as a remedy to an economic downturn. Yet, at these times new firms face intensified selection and survival hinges on ...heterogeneous capabilities. We examine how the founding innovative capabilities of new ventures created in the Netherlands in 2001–2006 affected their survival likelihood before, during and after the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. We estimate a piecewise exponential model linking survival times, from 2001 to 2015, to longitudinal innovation data from the Community Innovation Survey. New firms innovating within 2 years from their founding enjoy a long-term adaptive survival premium during and after the crisis. This premium and its duration over the stages of the crisis are contingent to the form of innovation: technological innovations entail a more effective and enduring premium, as compared with nontechnological innovations, which can be even detrimental for survival.
This article surveys some of the recent literature on technology markets, and summarizes its main issues and insights. We structure our analysis in three parts: the supply and demand of technology; ...the factors that condition the formation and growth of technology markets; industry structure and dynamic issues. In addition, we summarize some of the studies that have tried to document the size and growth of these markets. We find that the literature has focused mainly on the supply of technology, but several other aspects of these markets remain under-studied, including the demand for external technology, the role of uncertainty in technology markets, and the dynamic interaction between industry structure and the market for technology. Understanding these will illuminate whether markets for technology will continue to grow or remained confined to pockets of the economy.
The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the occupational task profile using rich individual-level panel data. Our main results suggest that, when only considering ...within-industry changes in offshoring, we identify a moderate wage reduction due to offshoring for low-skilled workers, though wage effects in relation to the task profile of occupations are not estimated with sufficient precision. However, when allowing for cross-industry effects of offshoring, i.e. allowing for labor mobility across industries, negative wage effects of offshoring are quite substantial and depend strongly on the task profile of workers' occupations. A higher degree of interactivity and, in particular, non-routine content effectively shields workers against the negative wage impact of offshoring.
• We investigate the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the nature of occu-pational tasks.• Within skill groups, the wage effects of offsshoring depend on the job's degree of interactivity and non-routine content.• Within-industry changes in offsshoring have modest wage effects.• However, wage effects become substantial if cross-industry spillovers are allowed for.
Managers across the world are beating a path to India because it is the global leader for offshore IT-enabled services. Many corporate leaders seek to reduce their costs, other wish to improve ...service quality, but not many understand India on their first visit and some are confused by clashes of culture. This book aims to introduce India, the major players in the Indian service industry, the reasons why you should utilise India as an offshore outsourcing destination and the steps you need to take to find and work with a local partner. The second edition has been completely revised with up-to-date information on the latest industry developments. Several chapters have been entirely restructured and two completely new chapters deal with the risks of outsourcing to India and the future prospects for the industry.
Over the past three decades, market reforms have transformed public services such as education, health, and care of the elderly. Whereas previous studies present markets as having similar and largely ...non-political effects, this book shows that political parties structure markets in diverse ways to achieve distinct political aims. Left-wing attempts to sustain the legitimacy of the welfare state are compared with right-wing wishes to limit the state and empower the private sector. Examining a broad range of countries, time periods, and policy areas, Jane R. Gingrich helps readers make sense of the complexity of market reforms in the industrialized world. The use of innovative multi-case studies and in-depth interviews with senior European policymakers enriches the debate and brings clarity to this multifaceted topic. Scholars and students working on the policymaking process in this central area will be interested in this new conceptualization of market reform.
Bureaucracy is a much-maligned feature of contemporary government. And yet the aftermath of September 11 has opened the door to a reassessment of the role of a skilled civil service in the survival ...and viability of democratic society. Here, Ezra Suleiman offers a timely and powerful corrective to the widespread view that bureaucracy is the source of democracy's ills. This is a book as much about good governance as it is about bureaucratic organizations. Suleiman asks: Is democratic governance hindered without an effective instrument in the hands of the legitimately elected political leadership? Is a professional bureaucracy required for developing but not for maintaining a democratic state? Why has a reform movement arisen in recent years championing the gradual dismantling of bureaucracy, and what are the consequences?
Suleiman undertakes a comparative analysis of the drive toward a civil service grounded in the New Public Management. He argues that "government reinvention" has limited bureaucracy's capacity to adequately serve the public good. All bureaucracies have been under political pressure in recent years to reduce not only their size but also their effectiveness, and all have experienced growing deprofessionalism and politicization. He compares the impact of this evolution in both democratic societies and societies struggling to consolidate democratic institutions.Dismantling Democratic Statescautions that our failure to acknowledge the role of an effective bureaucracy in building and preserving democratic political systems threatens the survival of democracy itself.
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