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“Best practice” in microfinance holds that interest rates should be set at profit-making levels, based on the belief that even poor customers favor access to finance over low fees. Despite this core belief, little direct evidence exists on the price elasticity of credit demand in poor communities. We examine increases in the interest rate on microfinance loans in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using unanticipated between-branch variation in prices, we estimate interest elasticities from − 0.73 to − 1.04, with our preferred estimate being at the upper end of this range. Interest income earned from most borrowers fell, but interest income earned from the largest increased, generating overall profitability at the branch level.

This paper examines the impact of multinational firm entry into local labor markets on employment, productivity, and wages. It exploits a natural experiment associated with the People's Republic of China's rapid economic reforms and assignment of cities to special economic zone status in the 1980s and 1990s. Using data on both firms and workers, it is found that these policies increased foreign direct investment, which raised average labor productivity in these labor markets. However, only modest increases in median wage rates across these cities are observed in the face of large increases in wage inequality and rising local prices, limiting the benefits to most workers in these cities. Evidence is presented that corporate profits captured most of the increase in productivity in these areas.

The concentration of economic activities in urban areas yields efficiency gains due to agglomeration economies. Matthew Drennan and Charles Brecher measure whether public transportation service can add to these benefits and make urban areas more productive.

The twenty-first century is emerging as the century of the "super-commuter," a person who works in the central county of a given metropolitan area, but lives beyond the boundaries of that metropolitan area, commuting long distance by air, rail, car, bus, or a combination of modes. The super-commuter typically travels once or twice weekly for work, and is a rapidly growing part of our workforce. The changing structure of the workplace, advances in telecommunications, and the global pattern of economic life have made the super-commuter a new force in transportation.

Many workers are not required to appear in one office five days a week; they conduct work from home, remote locations, and even while driving or flying. The international growth of broadband internet access, the development of home-based computer systems that rival those of the workplace, and the rise of mobile communications systems have contributed to the emergence of the super-commuter in the United States. Super-commuters are well-positioned to take advantage of higher salaries in one region and lower housing costs in another.

Many workers are not expected to physically appear in a single office at all: the global economy has made it possible for highly-skilled workers to be employed on a strictly virtual basis, acquiring clients anywhere and communicating via email, phone and video conference. Furthermore, the global economy has rendered the clock irrelevant, making it possible for people to work, virtually, in a different time zone than the one in which they live. Simply put, the workplace is no longer fixed in one location, but rather where the worker is situated. As a result, city labor sheds (where workers live) have expanded over the past decade to encompass not just a city's exurbs, but also distant, non-local metropolitan regions, resulting in greater economic integration between cities situated hundreds of miles apart.

NYU's Rudin Center has found that super-commuting is a growing trend in major United States regions, with growth in eight of the ten largest metropolitan areas.

Declining birth rates, increasing longevity and urbanization have created a new challenge for cities: how to respond to an ageing population. Although population ageing and urbanization are not new concerns for national governments around the world, the consequences of these trends for quality of life in cities has only recently started to receive attention from policy makers and researchers. Few comparative studies of world cities examine their health or long-term care systems; nor have comparisons of national systems for the provision of long-term care focused on cities, let alone world cities.

By extending the work of the CADENZA and World Cities Projects , this report investigates how three world cities -- Hong Kong, New York and London -- are coping with this challenge. These world cities are centers of finance, information, media, arts, education, specialized legal services and advanced business services, and contribute disproportionate shares of GDP to their national economies. But are these influential centers prepared to meet the challenge posed by the “revolution of longevity?” How will these world cities accommodate this revolutionary demographic change? Are they prepared to implement the health and social policy innovations that may be required to serve their residents, both old and young? Will they be able to identify the new opportunities that increased longevity may offer? Can they learn from one another as they seek to develop creative solutions to the myriad issues that arise? Finally, can other cities learn from the experience of these three cities as they confront this challenge?

To address these questions, we examine comparable data on the economic and health status of older persons, as well as the availability and use of health, social and long-term care across and within these cities. In the report “How Well Are Seniors in Hong Kong Doing? An International Comparison”, a first attempt was made to compare the situation in Hong Kong with five economically developed countries. This report extends this study by comparing the situation in Hong Kong with two other world cities—New York City and London, which are more comparable in terms of population size and economic characteristics.

The Obama administration's budget proposal for fiscal year 2013 (FY 2013) strengthens the national economy by investing in schools, communities and safety net programs. The FY 2013 budget also includes a number of important investments in infrastructure that will spur much needed job growth in a time of economic uncertainty for many working and low-income families. It is critical that such investments take into account the persistently high unemployment in communities of color, and target spending to increase the economic security of the communities most impacted by the "Great Recession." Additionally, the budget includes important changes to the tax code that will lay the foundation for a fairer and more equitable economy.

Objective To examine variations in health service expenditures and social services expenditures across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and assess their association with five population-level health outcomes.

Design A pooled, cross-sectional analysis using data from the 2009 release of the OECD Health Data 2009 Statistics and Indicators and OECD Social Expenditure Database.

Setting OECD countries (n=30) from 1995 to 2005.

Main outcomes Life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, low birth weight, maternal mortality and potential years of life lost.

Results Health services expenditures adjusted for gross domestic product (GDP) per capita were significantly associated with better health outcomes in only two of five health indicators; social services expenditures adjusted for GDP were significantly associated with better health outcomes in three of five indicators. The ratio of social expenditures to health expenditures was significantly associated with better outcomes in infant mortality, life expectancy and increased potential life years lost, after adjusting for the level of health expenditures and GDP.

Conclusion Attention to broader domains of social policy may be helpful in accomplishing improvements in health envisioned by advocates of healthcare reform.

Congestion pricing and land use planning have been proposed as two promising strategies to reduce the externalities associated with driving, including traffic congestion, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. However, they are often viewed by their proponents as substitutive instead of complementary to each other. Using data from a pilot mileage fee program run in Portland, OR, we explored whether congestion pricing and land use planning were mutually supportive in terms of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) reduction. We examined whether effective land use planning could reinforce the benefit of congestion pricing, and whether congestion pricing could strengthen the role of land use planning in encouraging travelers to reduce driving.

VMT data were collected over 10 months from 130 households, which were divided into two groups: those who paid a mileage charge with rates that varied by congestion level (i.e., congestion pricing) and those who paid a mileage charge with a flat structure. Using regression models to compare the two groups, we tested the effect of congestion pricing on VMT reduction across different land use patterns, and the effect of land use on VMT reduction with and without congestion pricing. With congestion pricing, the VMT reduction is greater in traditional (dense and mixed-use) neighborhoods than in suburban (single use, low-density) neighborhoods, probably because of the availability of travel alternatives in the former. Under the same land use pattern, land use attributes explain more variance of household VMT when congestion pricing is implemented, suggesting that this form of mileage fee could make land use planning a more effective mechanism to reduce VMT. In summary, land use planning and congestion pricing appear to be mutually supportive.

For policymakers considering mileage pricing, land use planning affects not only the economic viability but also the political feasibility of a pricing scheme. For urban planners, congestion pricing provides both opportunities and challenges to crafting land use policies that will reduce VMT. For example, a pricing zone that overlaps with dense, mixed-use and transit-accessible development, can reinforce the benefits of these development patterns and encourage greater behavioral changes.

The purpose of this effort has been to foster a dialogue among peers at transportation and planning agencies about their experiences with promoting public transit and, in particular, the challenges they face related to bus rapid transit (BRT) projects, as well as the solutions that they have developed in response. Agencies from dozens of large cities around the United States participated at three (3) peer-to-peer exchanges in New York City, Los Angeles, and Cleveland. The facilitated discussions were structure to address the unique barriers to BRT implementation on the streets of dense and/or highly congested large urban centers. Three major themes were the focus of the workshops: Network, Route and Street Design, Traffic Operations, and BRT as a Driver of Economic Development; Building Political, Interagency and Stakeholder Support. The results of the workshops make clear that better public transportation in general and BRT in particular can be cost-effective and useful tools for improving transportation, the environment and for restoring the livability of America‘s large cities.

BACKGROUND:

Since Mexico's joining the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1994, it has witnessed rapid industrialization. A byproduct of this industrialization is increasing population exposure to environmental pollutants, of which some have been associated with childhood disease. We therefore identified and assessed the adequacy of existing international and Mexican governance instruments and policy tools to protect children from environmental hazards.

METHODS:

We first systematically reviewed PubMed, the Mexican legal code and the websites of the United Nations, World Health Organization, NAFTA and OECD as of July 2007 to identify the relevant governance instruments, and analyzed the approach these instruments took to preventing childhood diseases of environmental origin. Secondly, we interviewed a purposive sample of high-level government officials, researchers and non-governmental organization representatives, to identify their opinions and attitudes towards children's environmental health and potential barriers to child-specific protective legislation and implementation.

RESULTS:

We identified only one policy tool describing specific measures to reduce developmental neurotoxicity and other children's health effects from lead. Other governance instruments mention children's unique vulnerability to ozone, particulate matter and carbon monoxide, but do not provide further details. Most interviewees were aware of Mexican environmental policy tools addressing children's health needs, but agreed that, with few exceptions, environmental policies do not address the specific health needs of children and pregnant women. Interviewees also cited state centralization of power, communication barriers and political resistance as reasons for the absence of a strong regulatory platform.

CONCLUSIONS:

The Mexican government has not sufficiently accounted for children's unique vulnerability to environmental contaminants. If regulation and legislation are not updated and implemented to protect children, increases in preventable exposures to toxic chemicals in the environment may ensue.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, with the amount of money emigrants sent home soaring to new highs, governments around the world began searching for ways to capitalize on emigration for economic growth, and they looked to nations that already had policies in place. Morocco and Mexico featured prominently as sources of "best practices" in this area, with tailor-made financial instruments that brought migrants into the banking system, captured remittances for national development projects, fostered partnerships with emigrants for infrastructure design and provision, hosted transnational forums for development planning, and emboldened cross-border political lobbies.

In Creative State, Natasha Iskander chronicles how these innovative policies emerged and evolved over forty years. She reveals that the Moroccan and Mexican policies emulated as models of excellence were not initially devised to link emigration to development, but rather were deployed to strengthen both governments' domestic hold on power. The process of policy design, however, was so iterative and improvisational that neither the governments nor their migrant constituencies ever predicted, much less intended, the ways the new initiatives would gradually but fundamentally redefine nationhood, development, and citizenship. Morocco's and Mexico's experiences with migration and development policy demonstrate that far from being a prosaic institution resistant to change, the state can be a remarkable site of creativity, an essential but often overlooked component of good governance.

This paper documents the rise and fall of a micro-learning region in Philadelphia. The central actors in this region are undocumented Mexican immigrants who until recently were able to draw on the intensity of their workplace interactions and their heterodox knowledge to produce new and innovative building techniques in the city's residential construction. The new knowledge they developed was primarily tacit. More significantly, the learning practices through which immigrant workers developed skill and innovated new techniques were also heavily tacit. Because these practices were never made formal and were never made explicit, they remained invisible and difficult to defend. With the housing market collapse and subsequent decline in housing renovation in south-center region of Philadelphia, this tacit knowledge and the practices that gave it shape and significance, are no longer easily accessible. We draw on this case to demonstrate the importance of access to the political and economic resources to turn learning practices into visible structured institutions that protect knowledge and skill. Whether or not the practices that support knowledge development are themselves made explicit can determine whether the knowledge they produce becomes an innovation that is recognized and adopted or whether it remains confined to a set of ephemeral practices that exist only so long as they are being enacted.

High-speed rail lines have been built and proposed in numerous countries throughout the world. The advantages of such lines are a higher quality of service than competing modes (air, bus, auto, conventional rail), potentially faster point-to-point times depending on specifiÂc locations, faster
loading and unloading times, higher safety than some modes, and lower labor costs. The disadvantage primarily lies in higher fixed costs, potentially higher energy costs than some competing modes, and higher noise externalities. Whether the net benefiÂts outweigh the net costs is an empirical question that awaits determination based on location specifiÂc factors, project costs, local demand, and network effects (depending on what else in the network exists). The optimal network design problem is hard (in the mathematical sense of hard, meaning optimal solutions are hard to fiÂnd because of the combinatorics of the possible different network configurations), so heuristics and human judgment are used to design networks.

Two landmark policy interventions to improve the lives of youth through neighborhood mobility—the Gautreaux program in Chicago and the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiments in five cities—have produced conflicting results and have created a puzzle with broad implications: Do residential moves between neighborhoods increase or decrease violence, or both? To address this question, we analyze data from a subsample of adolescents ages 9–12 years from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal study of children and their families that began in Chicago—the site of the original Gautreaux program and one of the MTO experiments. We propose a dynamic modeling strategy to separate the effects of residential moving across three waves of the study from dimensions of neighborhood change and metropolitan location. The results reveal countervailing effects of mobility on trajectories of violence; whereas neighborhood moves within Chicago lead to an increased risk of violence, moves outside the city reduce violent offending and exposure to violence. The gap in violence between movers within and outside Chicago is explained not only by the racial and economic composition of the destination neighborhoods but also by the quality of school contexts, adolescents' perceived control over their new environment, and fear. These findings highlight the need to simultaneously consider residential mobility, mechanisms of neighborhood change, and the wider geography of structural opportunity.

About forty percent of the world's people live on incomes of two dollars a day or less. If you've never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food on the table, afford a home, and educate your children? How would you handle emergencies and old age? Every day, more than a billion people around the world must answer these questions. Portfolios of the Poor is the first book to explain systematically how the poor find solutions.

The authors report on the yearlong "financial diaries" of villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money. The stories of these families are often surprising and inspiring. Most poor households do not live hand to mouth, spending what they earn in a desperate bid to keep afloat. Instead, they employ financial tools, many linked to informal networks and family ties. They push money into savings for reserves, squeeze money out of creditors whenever possible, run sophisticated savings clubs, and use microfinancing wherever available. Their experiences reveal new methods to fight poverty and ways to envision the next generation of banks for the "bottom billion."

In this paper, we examine the economic logic behind microfinance institutions and consider the movement from socially oriented nonprofit microfinance institutions to for-profit microfinance. Drawing on a large dataset that includes most of the world's leading microfinance institutions, we explore eight questions about the microfinance "industry": Who are the lenders? How widespread is profitability? Are loans in fact repaid at the high rates advertised? Who are the customers? Why are interest rates so high? Are profits high enough to attract profit-maximizing investors? How important are subsidies? The evidence suggests that investors seeking pure profits would have little interest in most of the institutions we see that are now serving poorer customers. We will suggest that the future of microfinance is unlikely to follow a single path. The recent clash between supporters of profit-driven Banco Compartamos and of the Grameen Bank with its "social business" model offers us a false choice. Commercial investment is necessary to fund the continued expansion of microfinance, but institutions with strong social missions, many taking advantage of subsidies, remain best placed to reach and serve the poorest customers, and some are doing so at a massive scale. The market is a powerful force, but it cannot fill all gaps.

This issue of the New York Transportation Journal explores the theme of change, on a number of levels and perspectives. We have just concluded an historic election cycle which has brought significant political change to the nation. Recent developments in the areas of energy, the economy and the environment all underscore the current state of flux impacting the lives of those who live and work in the New York metropolitan region. Looking forward, we foresee change in all of these areas and we also anticipate change in forecasts of how we might grow and develop as a nation and as a region. Our articles are a reflection of this change and a response to it. They explore a variety of its characteristics and options for policies and approaches within the context it sets.

Franc McArdle, who served on the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, presents his ideas on the transportation imperatives he sees for the incoming administration of President Barack Obama. Martin Robbins offers his thoughts on transportation policy and planning options to be considered in the legislative process as the current Federal legislation which authorized spending for transportation improvements nationally expires and new legislation is developed.

While John Nolon and Jennie Nolon offer their perspective on the implications of expected growth in population and travel on future land use and transportation, Suzanne Seegmuller looks at emerging travel trends related both to this growth and to the economic, energy and environmental developments that are dominating our policy discussions.

In our region, planned improvements in the Interstate 287 corridor in the lower Hudson Valley promise far reaching change in that area's transportation system. In this issue's interview by Rachel Weinberger, Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef and Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano provide their thoughts on these improvements, the changes they will bring and the outlook for growth in the northern suburbs.

With the financial support of several large foundations and the federal government, creating small schools has become a prominent high school reform strategy in many large American cities. While some research supports this strategy, little research assesses the relative costs of these smaller schools. We use data on over 200 New York City high schools, from 1996 through 2003, to estimate school cost functions relating per pupil expenditures to school size, controlling for school output and quality, student characteristics, and school organization. We find that the structure of costs differs across schools depending upon mission-comprehensive or themed. At their current levels of outputs, themed schools minimize per pupil costs at smaller enrollments than comprehensive schools, but these optimally sized themed schools also cost more per pupil than optimally sized comprehensive schools. We also find that both themed and comprehensive high schools at actual sizes are smaller than their optimal sizes.

This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual. Ill-informed individuals seem to respond systematically to their own misperceptions of pension incentives.

Although power is often conceptualized as the capacity to influence others, the current research explores whether power psychologically protects people from influence. In contrast to classic social psychological research demonstrating the strength of the situation in directing attitudes, expressions, and intentions, five experiments (using experiential primes, semantic primes, and role manipulations of power) demonstrate that the powerful (a) generate creative ideas that are less influenced by salient examples, (b) express attitudes that conform less to the expressed opinions of others, (c) are more influenced by their own social value orientation relative to the reputation of a negotiating partner, and (d) perceive greater choice in making counterattitudinal statements. This last experiment illustrates that power is not always psychologically liberating; it can create internal conflict, arousing dissonance, and thereby lead to attitude change. Across the experiments, high-power participants were immune to the typical press of situations, with intrapsychic processes having greater sway than situational or interpersonal ones on their creative and attitudinal expressions.

Yellow-dust storms (YDSs) have attracted increasing attention worldwide in the past decade. They can extensively disrupt socioeconomic activities and pose hazards to ecosystems, as well as human health.  In recent years, China has invested multi-billions of dollars to mitigate the impact of YDSs.  However, the effectiveness of such YDS-control programs has rarely been evaluated. This research develops a causal model to quantify the environmental benefits of YDS-control programs in China, and further employs regional economic models to evaluate the ensuing economic impacts. The economic benefits generated from the YDS-control programs have remained stable across the years, primarily because of the multiplier effect of the investments, while the environmental benefits tend to decline over time.  Our results suggest that YDS-control programs should consider stimulating local economic activities in addition to environmental goals in order to be cost-effective and sustainable in the long term.

The goal of this book, the first in a series, is to bring policymakers, practitioners, and scholars up to speed on the state of knowledge on various aspects of urban and regional policy. What do we know about the effectiveness of select policy approaches, reforms, or experiments on key social and economic problems facing cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas? What can we say about what works, what doesn’t, and why? And what does this knowledge and experience imply for future policy questions?

The authors take a fresh look at several different issues (e.g., economic development, education, land use) and conceptualize how each should be thought of. Once the contributors have presented the essence of what is known, as well as the likely implications, they identify the knowledge gaps that need to be filled for the successful formulation and implementation of urban and regional policy.

Written by 1506 eminent contributors, this new edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics retains many classic essays of enduring importance and contains 1,872 articles. Published in eight print volumes and for the first time in online format, this is the definitive scholarly reference work for a new generation of economists.

To analyze the prospects for expanding financial access to the poor, bank professionals assessed 1,438 households in six provinces in Indonesia to judge their creditworthiness. About 40 percent of poor households were judged creditworthy according to the criteria of Indonesia's largest microfinance bank, but fewer than 10 percent had recently borrowed from a microbank or formal lender. Possessing collateral appeared as a minor determinant of creditworthiness, in keeping with microfinance innovations. Although these households were judged able to service loans reliably, most desired small loans. Calculations show that the bank, given its current fee structure and banking practices, would lose money when lending at the scales desired. So, while innovations have helped to extend financial access, it remains difficult to lend in small amounts and cover costs.

This paper offers new empirical evidence about the prospects of lower-income, US urban neighbourhoods during the 1990s. Using the Neighborhood Change Database, which offers a balanced panel of census tracts with consistent boundaries from 1970 to 2000 for all metropolitan areas in the US, evidence is found of a significant shift in the fortunes of lower-income, urban neighbourhoods during the 1990s. There was a notable increase in the 1990s in the proportion of lower-income and poor neighbourhoods experiencing a gain in economic status. Secondly, in terms of geographical patterns, it is found that this upgrading occurred throughout the country, not just in selected regions or cities. Finally, it is found that the determinants of changes in lower-income, urban neighbourhoods shifted during the 1990s. In contrast to earlier decades, both the share of Blacks and the poverty rate were positively related to subsequent economic gain in these neighbourhoods during the 1990s.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that politicians manipulate rainy day funds for political purposes, but such claims remain untested in the literature. This article finds that lawmakers withdraw nearly three times more funds in response to a deficit shock of a given size if the shock occurs in an election year rather than a non-election year; this occurs despite the fact that the magnitude of shocks does not vary over the electoral cycle. This effect is stronger when incumbents are eligible for re-election than when they are term-limited. When it comes to preventing political manipulation, rainy day fund rules that increase the number of veto players who must approve of withdrawals seem to be more effective than rules that specify the economic conditions under which funds may be withdrawn.

General editor Haider-Markel (U. of Kansas) presents a two-volume encyclopedia intended to serve as a first-stop reference on state politics in the United States, which also includes some coverage of US overseas territories and Puerto Rico. The encyclopedia opens with four broad topical essays on the evolution and impact of state constitutions, the impact of direct democracy (voter initiatives and the like), cooperation between the states, and states as policy testing grounds. It then presents individual state profiles, about ten pages each, that are uniformly structured to allow comparison of state history, the political environment, elections and voting behavior, the legislative branch, the executive branch, the judicial branch, intergovernmental relations, state-tribal relations (where applicable), and long-term issues and policy trends. The state entries also include bibliographies; charts showing partisan distribution of presidential elections from 1988 to 2004; and data tables on political history, political environment, elections and voting behavior, the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. Also included are some 175 A-to-Z topical entries discussing general concepts related to governmental functions and procedures, government structures and bodies, political theory, and political behavior. Examples of specific topics would include gerrymandering, impeachment, public health, auditor, bicameralism, legislative leadership, common law, judicial review, and social welfare. Finally, statistical data on populations, economics, finance, the environment, government spending, voting, and campaign fundraising is presented for all 50 states, followed by a comprehensive index.

Using an 11-year panel data set containing information on revenues, expenditures, and demographics for every school district in the United States, we examine the effects of state-adopted school accountability systems on the adequacy and equity of school resources. We find little relationship between state implementation of accountability systems and changes in school finance equity, though we do find evidence that states in which courts overturned the school finance system during the decade exhibited significant equity improvements. Additionally, while implementation of accountability per se does not appear linked to changes in resource adequacy, states that implemented strong accountability systems did experience improvements.

In this paper, we consider neighborhood selection as a social process central to the reproduction of racial inequality in neighborhood attainment. We formulate a multilevel model that decomposes multiple sources of stability and change in longitudinal trajectories of achieved neighborhood income among nearly 4,000 Chicago families followed for up to seven years wherever they moved in the United States. Even after we adjust for a comprehensive set of fixed and time-varying covariates, racial inequality in neighborhood attainment is replicated by movers and stayers alike. We also study the emergent consequences of mobility pathways for neighborhood-level structure. The temporal sorting by individuals of different racial and ethnic groups combines to yield a structural pattern of flows between neighborhoods that generates virtually nonoverlapping income distributions and little exchange between minority and white areas. Selection and racially shaped hierarchies are thus mutually constituted and account for an apparent equilibrium of neighborhood inequality.

This article draws on the extensive literature on economic and social mobility in America to examine intergenerational contextual mobility, defined as the degree to which inequalities in neighborhood environments persist across generations. PSID data are analyzed to reveal remarkable continuity in neighborhood economic status from one generation to the next. The primary consequence of persistent neighborhood stratification is that the racial inequality in America's neighborhoods that existed a generation ago has been transmitted, for the most part unchanged, to the current generation. More than 70% of black children who grow up in the poorest quarter of American neighborhoods remain in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods as adults, compared to 40% of whites. The results suggest that racial inequality in neighborhood economic status is substantially underestimated with short-term measures of neighborhood income or poverty and, second, that the steps taken to end racial discrimination in the housing and lending markets have not enabled black Americans to advance out of America's poorest neighborhoods.

This background paper focuses on the greater accountability and transparency in fiscal decision making. It has been prepared to inform discussion among the participants at the first CBC agenda setting conference, scheduled for September 20, 2007. The paper is organized into three sections. The first is a definition of the problem; it defines in some detail the limited accountability and transparency that have characterized the New York State budget process in past years. The second section describes the progress made in addressing these problems during recent legislative sessions, focusing particularly on the 2007 session. The last section describes options that can be pursed in 2008 and subsequently to make even more substantial progress. The options are not all mutually exclusive, but they are relatively numerous. Conference participants are asked to review these options for discussion in the forum on September 20. The views expressed by experts attending the forum will be considered in the preparation of a final document that will summarize recommended actions for State leaders.

The President's proposal to replace the current exclusion of employer-paid health insurance premiums with a standard deduction for qualifying health insurance would level the playing field for employment-based coverage and private plans but would risk the loss of insurance for many workers, threaten existing risk- sharing pools, and unfairly favor the wealthy. This paper evaluates the President's plan, suggests changes that would improve it, and assesses alternatives that would address the plan's shortcomings and improve its likelihood of expanding coverage to many families who now lack insurance.

This paper studies the effect of state-level banking regulation on financial development and on components of state-level growth in the United States from 1900 to 1940. We use these banking laws to assess the findings of a large recent literature that has argued that financial development contributes to economic growth. We contend that the institutional mechanism leading to financial development is important in determining its consequences and that some types of financial development can even retard economic growth.

For the United States from 1900 to 1940, we argue that the financial expansion induced by expanded bank branching accelerated the mechanization of agriculture and spurred growth in manufacturing. In contrast, financial expansions induced by state deposit insurance had negative consequences for both the agricultural and manufacturing sectors.

Essentials of Cost Accounting for Health Care Organizations, Third Edition is a comprehensive text that applies the tool and techniques of cost accounting to the health services field. It is an essential tools for all professionals who need to deal with the challenges of managing health facilities in a difficult economic environment.

Is there an opening to seek a compromise on social security with the Republicans? This former Clinton administration economist thinks there may well be. It will not be to everyone's liking, he says, but it may be the best we can hope for.

Although research has clearly established that low family income has negative impacts on children's cognitive skills and social-emotional competence, less often is a family's experience of material hardship considered. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (N=21,255), this study examined dual components of family income and material hardship along with parent mediators of stress, positive parenting, and investment as predictors of 6-year-old children's cognitive skills and social-emotional competence. Support was found for a model that identified unique parent-mediated paths from income to cognitive skills and from income and material hardship to social-emotional competence. The findings have implications for future study of family income and child development and for identification of promising targets for policy intervention.

The economic impacts of potential terrorist attacks on the New Jersey electric power system are examined using a regional econometric model. The magnitude and duration of the effects vary by type of business and income measure. We assume damage is done during in the summer 2005 quarter, a peak period for energy use. The state economy recovers within a year, if we assume that economic activity is restored in the next time period. However, if the attacks prompt an absolute of loss of activity due to firm relocation, closing, and geographical changes in expansion plans, then the economy does not fully recover by the year 2010. Hence, the electrical power system's resiliency to damage is the key to the extent and duration of any economic consequences of a terrorist attack, at least in New Jersey. The policy implication is that the costs and benefits of making the electric power system more resilient to plausible attacks should be weighed and that the restorative capacity of the system should be strengthened. [Copyright 2007 Elsevier]

Microfinance promises to reduce poverty by employing profit-making banking practices in low-income communities. Many microfinance institutions have secured high loan repayment rates but, so far, relatively few earn profits. We examine why this promise remains unmet. We explore patterns of profitability, loan repayment, and cost reduction with unusually high-quality data on 124 institutions in 49 countries. The evidence shows the possibility of earning profits while serving the poor, but a trade-off emerges between profitability and serving the poorest. Raising fees to very high levels does not ensure greater profitability and the benefits of cost-cutting diminish when serving better-off customers.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as "...the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies."2 Environmental injustice has been defined as the disproportionate exposure of communities of color and poor people, or other vulnerable groups, such as children and the elderly, to environmental risks.3

In the analyses described in this article, Geographic Information Systems (GIS)4 techniques and models were used extensively to facilitate and streamline the analysis of demographic and socioeconomic data about people living in close proximity to waste transfer stations and major highways, and to determine whether a disproportionate number of people in communities of color and poor people live in proximity to these sites. The area of application for this analysis was a portion of the South Bronx, New York.

Public agencies are increasingly expected to track their performance according to established criteria--to be held accountable for the expenditure of public funds and show that funds are being used to achieve intended outcomes. This analysis of South Carolina's Family Independence welfare program examines counties' performance on five employment-related outcomes: employment rate, employment entry rate, employment retention rate. earnings gain rate, and earned income closure rate. Counties' performance is statistically analyzed, adjusting for variation in external factors (e.g., labor market conditions and caseload characteristics) that influence program performance but that are outside the control of county program staff. This analysis shows that external factors influence employment-related performance, suggesting that states may want to vary counties' goals based on external factors, rather than expecting all counties to meet the same performance level. This analysis provides an example of how agencies can apply statistical analysis to measure, track, and analyze program performance.

While the distribution of resources across school districts is well studied, relatively little attention has been paid to how resources are allocated to individual schools inside those districts. This paper explores the determinants of resource allocation across schools in large districts based on factors that reflect differential school costs or factors that may, in practice, be related to the distribution of resources. Using detailed data on school resources and student and school characteristics in New York City, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio, we find that schools with higher percentages of poor pupils often receive more money and have more teachers per pupil, but the teachers tend to be less educated and less well paid, with a particularly consistent pattern in New York City schools. We conclude with implications for policy and further research.

The vast disparities in college attendance and graduation rates between students from different class backgrounds is a growing social concern. Economic Inequality and Higher Education investigates the connection between income inequality and unequal access to higher education, and proposes solutions that the state and federal governments and schools themselves can undertake to make college accessible to students from all backgrounds.

The trend toward greater decentralization of governance activities, now accepted as commonplace in the West, has become a worldwide movement. Today s world demands flexibility, adaptability, and the autonomy to bring those qualities to bear. In this thought-provoking book, the first in a new series on Innovations in Governance, experts in government and public management trace the evolution and performance of decentralization concepts, from the transfer of authority within government to the sharing of power, authority, and responsibilities among broader governance institutions.

The contributors to Decentralizing Governance assess emerging concepts such as devolution and capacity building; they also detail factors driving the decentralization movement such as the ascendance of democracy, economic globalization, and technological progress. Their analyses range across many regions of the world and a variety of contexts, but each specific case explores the objectives of decentralization and the benefits and difficulties that will likely result.

We use unique panel data on the evolution of transparent budget procedures in the American states over the past three decades to explore the political and economic determinants of fiscal transparency. Our preliminary results suggest that more equal political competition and power sharing are associated with both greater levels of fiscal transparency and increases in fiscal transparency during the sample period. Political polarization is associated with lower transparency, and past fiscal conditions also appear to affect the level of transparency.

Each year the federal individual income tax code provides over $500 billion worth of incentives intended to encourage socially beneficial activities, such as charitable contributions, homeownership, and education. This is an enormous investment, exceeding our budget for national defense and amounting to about 4% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The design of these tax incentives is an immensely important policy matter. Yet despite their efficiency rationale, little attention has been paid to the question of what economic efficiency implies about the form these tax incentives should take.

The New York City Affairs Committee (the "Committee") of the New York City Bar Association (the "Association") conducted an extensive review of the financing by New York City ("City") of the development of the Hudson Rail Yards, a 45-block area on the far west side of Manhattan adjacent to the mid-Manhattan central business district. The Committee focused on the historical and fiscal ramifications of the financing and its incentive structures which can be fairly characterized as creative and unusual. The Association's review is intended to provoke discussion about the means of financing infrastructure in New York City.

Public authorities play a major role in delivering public services. They supplement direct government agencies in three ways:

• Provide a business-like organizational structure for public services that are financed primarily by user fees and whose capital investments are self-financed through bonds supported by user fees.
• Provide a stewardship for major capital assets and make long-run investment decisions with some isolation from pressures of the electoral cycle.
• Provide a mechanism for taking advantage of federal tax benefits for economic development and other purposes that otherwise would be treated as private activities.

Authorities are intended to strike a balance between political accountability and political independence. Unlike heads of direct government agencies, governing boards of authorities are expected to be more independent of those who appoint them, to make difficult and unpopular decisions outside the arena of elected politics, and to be accountable to the public indirectly through reporting, transparency in decision-making and long-run performance. New York State makes extensive use of public authorities.

As Baby Boomers make the transition into their 60s, they have focused policymakers and the media's attention onto how this generation will manage the retirement phase of its lifetime. This volume acknowledges that many, though not all, in this older cohort have accumulated substantial assets, so for them, the question is what will they do with what they have?

We offer a detailed exploration of how people entering retirement will deploy their accumulated assets in the near and long term, so to best meet their myriad spending, investment, and other objectives. The book offers readers an invaluable study of emerging issues regarding assets and expectations on the verge of retirement, including uncertainty regarding life expectancy and morbidity. It is composed of chapters from a distinguished set of authors including a Nobel Laureate and a wonderful mix of academics and practitioners from the legal, financial, and economic fields.

This paper analyzes proposals to remedy tax-induced distortions in health care by using new tax incentives and retaining all of the existing distortionary tax incentives. In the process of remedying some distortions, this approach magnifies others--most notably increasing the total tax preference for health care. The paper considers two examples--the Bush administration's FY 2007 budget proposal and a plan by Cogan, Hubbard and Kessler (2005)--and shows that both could result in higher health spending and reduced welfare. Finally, the paper discusses the circumstances in which tax incentives could be warranted to remedy market failures in health insurance.

On April 7-8, 2006, the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) convened a conference in Armonk, New York with the goal of identifying widely supported, high-priority measures for fiscal reform in New York State. This document highlights those measures in order to raise awareness and promote discussion of them in the coming year.

Forget immigration, global warning, Donald Rumsfeld and abortion rights.

The hot issues of today will quickly fade away if the current surge in gasoline prices and home-mortgage
rates continues unabated. And all indications are that both the price of gas and the cost of borrowing are
moving in one direction only: north.

The article reflects on the role of New York City in the 21st century which includes bringing people together with other people to generate the information and products that are then sold around the world. It also presents a brief history of the city in becoming a leading city in the global economy. It also discusses the economic and technological innovations the city had undertaken to become a leading city and the reforms it is planning to implement to maintain its status.

Although telecommunications networks are central to modern urban life, scholars and policymakers have largely ignored the relationship of sustainability to telecommunications. Telecommunications can affect sustainability as a result of the complex, indirect effects that changes in telecommunications systems have on mobility, land use, locational decisions and energy consumption. During the past quarter-century, the construction of new telecommunications networks for communications across national borders, within metropolitan neighborhoods, and inside buildings, has transformed the way in which we use information. This article explores ways in which telecommunications has allowed for great strides towards a more sustainable urban ecology by making buildings more efficient, shifting reliance from roads to fibers and transforming government, economic development, transportation and disaster preparedness.

This paper develops and tests the theory that fiscal rules limit politicians' ability to manipulate the budget for electoral gain. Using panel data from the American states, I find evidence suggesting that stringent balanced budget rules dampen the political business cycle. That is, while spending rises before and falls after elections in states that can carry deficits into the next fiscal year, this pattern does not exist in states with strict "no-carry" rules. Neither binding gubernatorial term limits nor the partisan composition of government appear to significantly affect the magnitude of the political business cycle.

Defines key lessons on financing pro-poor governance based on cases from Latin America, Asia and Africa (Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya and Uganda). The starting point for pro-poor fiscal decentralisation is that its major goals should be improved governance and performance, specifically, higher efficiency and equity in service delivery, economic development, and poverty alleviation. The enabling environment for fiscal decentralisation involves first the functions and the resources that might normally be allocated to local governments. Second, it can include alternative models and mechanisms to finance local governments, including intergovernmental transfers, markets, capital and donor financing.

Insight comes from hindsight.  By reviewing enduring problems in education finance and policy, observing what we did right and seeing when we were surprised and why, we can identify research issues that we missed, avoid similar mistakes in the future, and move forward toward work that is even more productive and useful in the field of education finance and policy.

As suggested by the title, this is a collection of essays on the economic effects of successful terrorist attacks focusing on the electrical transmission, and transportation infrastructure of the United States. Those familiar with the literature on the economic effects of natural disasters will
find the arguments and economic models quite familiar. The individual essays are by leading experts who do not necessarily agree on the most appropriate methods or policy conclusions. This provides a refreshing measure of potential controversy.

New York State has too much debt. Its obligations will require current and future taxpayers to bear a burden that creates a competitive disadvantage with the other states. Not only is the absolute amount of New York's debt high, but the burden is excessive even after the State's relatively large tax base and other relevant factors are taken into account.

The core issue is that New York has no effective legal limits on the amount of debt it can assume. Constitutional provisions intended to limit debt are outdated and are circumvented regularly. Statutory limits - passed in 2000 - are also being circumvented. Simply put, it has become too easy for State leaders to borrow. In addition, they have misused debt, which should be restricted to paying for long-term capital projects, by financing annual operating expenses.

Short-run and long-run measures are needed. In the near term, voters should reject bond referendums such as the Transportation Bond Act of 2005 until debt is brought under control. That act would authorize only $2.9 billion of an additional $13 billion in planned State borrowing, but it is the only opportunity that voters have to express their opposition to excessive borrowing. In the long-run the State must strike a balance between adequate infrastructure investment and a competitive debt burden. The State needs a new constitutional limit that does not require voter approval for every debt issuance, but does impose a binding limit that is linked to ability to pay.

This chapter is concerned with the theoretical
conceptualization of poverty in rich, developed countries and the estimation of its effects on
offspring.

Even though access to credit is central to child labor theoretically, little work has been done to assess its importance empirically. Dehejia and Gatti examine the link between access to credit and child labor at a cross-country level. The authors measure child labor as a country aggregate, and proxy credit constraints by the level of financial market development.

These two variables display a strong negative (unconditional) relationship. The authors show that even after they control for a wide range of variables-including GDP per capita, urbanization, initial child labor, schooling, fertility, legal institutions, inequality, and openness-this relationship remains strong and statistically significant. Moreover, they find that, in the absence of developed financial markets, households resort to child labor to cope with income variability.

This evidence suggests that policies aimed at increasing households'access to credit could be effective in reducing child labor.

This paper explores the tensions and opportunities surrounding Vietnam’s attempt to reach the goals of rapid economic growth while also being a Socialist “fair society.” It does so by looking at the phenomenon of inequality in the process of economic transition and development.

The ultimate goal of this paper is to inform government policy choices – to examine how the actions of the government can have an impact, in a market economy context, on the achievement of equitable, balanced development.

Small businesses are a vital component of the regional economy. In New York City, more than 200,000 firms qualify as small businesses, and together they account for fully two-thirds of the city's private sector jobs. Although small businesses by definition employ fewer than 500 employees, 96 percent of New York's small firms have fewer than 50 employees.* Northern New Jersey has roughly the same number of small firms and a similar distribution of employment. Because of their importance in creating jobs, small businesses merit close attention in the formulation of economic development policies. To identify the needs of small businesses, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Citizens
Budget Commission recently surveyed small business owners in New York City and northern New Jersey. The CEOs or presidents of these firms were queried about four issues: What factors do you consider most important to the success of your business? How do you rate your satisfaction with New York City or northern New Jersey with respect to those factors? What cities or regions would you consider for relocation, and what cost differential would you require to relocate? What types of financing do you receive, and whom do you consult for financial advice?

The results of our survey, presented below in detail, point to two major findings. First, New York City and northern New Jersey firms agree broadly on the three factors most important to the success of their businesses: 1) the overall cost of doing business, 2) proximity to markets and clients, and 3) access to a skilled labor force. Second, most of the small business leaders are relatively satisfied with the current location of their businesses with respect to two of the three success factors; however, they are dissatisfied with the overall cost of doing business at their current location. The survey also reveals that about one in seven business leaders would move for a cost savings of less than 10 percent, and about four in ten business leaders would relocate for a cost savings of greater than 20 percent. Finally, the share of firms that have obtained bank credit is notably larger in northern New Jersey than in New York City.

This chapter develops and explores the use of school-level cost functions for estimating school efficiency and differentiating between more- and less-efficient schools. Using data for elementary and middle schools in the state of Ohio, we explore a range of specifications and the resulting efficiency measures. The next section presents and overview of the literature on education cost functions. In the third section we present the theory of cost functions, and in the fourth section we describe the data. The fifth section provides estimation results, and the chapter concludes in the fifth section with implications and lessons for future research.

Although political forces have largely driven decentralization in East Asia and most countries face similar reform challenges, their decentralization
experiences are far from uniform. Countries have adopted different intergovernmental structures,
proceeded at uneven paces, and adopted a wide range of implementation strategies. This diversity is not surprising, as East Asian countries vary greatly
in geographical size, population, history, economic structure, and political and institutional dynamics, all of which influence the form that decentralization
can and should take. This chapter provides expanded context for the analysis presented in chapter 1 and lays a foundation for later chapters. After reviewing the origins of decentralization, it compares the basic intergovernmental frameworks, structures, and processes
evolving in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.1 The chapter focuses, in turn, on enabling frameworks, the governance environment, fiscal decentralization, and the management and implementation of decentralization reforms.

The State of New York faces a major challenge stemming from a 2003 ruling by the Court of Appeals, the State's highest court. It found that the more than one million children in New York City's public schools were not provided with the sound basic education guaranteed to them by the State Constitution. In the subsequent months, the plaintiffs and the State's political leaders have not agreed on a suitable remedy for students in New York City, and by extension to hundreds of thousands of additional students in other school districts around the state who also have been denied their constitutional right. One important issue to be resolved is: How much additional funding is needed?

The Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) has prepared this report to address two questions fundamental to designing a remedy:

- Where should the money come from?
- What changes other than more money are essential to improving educational
outcomes?

This paper examines public spending on children between 1997 and 2000 in five localities: Baltimore, Detroit, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Richmond. These cities participate in the Urban Health Initiative (UHI), a ten-year Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program aimed at improving health and safety for young people in these cities. The Center for Health and Public Service Research at New York University is evaluating the program. The evaluation seeks to determine whether collaborative efforts of interested organizations can develop and implement plans to change service delivery systems for children, and whether such changes result in better outcomes for children. A group of ten additional cities serves as a comparative benchmark.

Female-headed households in the United States suffer from lower levels of asset ownership than their male-headed counterparts. This gap remains after controlling for the lower incomes of female heads. What, then, produces the gender discrepancy in net worth? Using longitudinal, intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we ask whether differential patterns of inheritance, savings rates, or investment yield this female-male asset gap. Results demonstrate that differential savings rates between female- and male-headed households account for the gender gap in net worth. We speculate on the financial constraints within female-headed households that account for the savings rate differential.

The past half century has witnessed a slow, but steady thickening of the federal bureaucracy as Congress and presidents have added layer upon layer of political and career management to the hierarchy. The past six years have been no different. Despite the president's promise to bring business-like thinking to the federal government, the Bush administration has overseen, or at the very least permitted, a significant expansion in both the height and width of the federal hierarchy. There have never been more layers at the top of government, nor more occupants at each layer.

This paper helps document significant improvements in the child low-income rate as well as the significant decrease in the proportion of children who relied on public assistance in the United States during the 1990s. Many disadvantaged groups of children were less likely to live in poor or low-income families in the late 1990s than such children a decade earlier. The improvement in the child low-income rates of these disadvantaged groups was accompanied by a substantial increase in parental employment. However, parental employment appears to do less to protect children from economic hardship than it did a decade earlier. This paper shows that working families� children in many disadvantaged social groups, especially groups in medium risk ranks�children in families with parents between ages 25 to 29, with parents who only had a high-school diploma, and in father-only families�suffered the largest increase in economic hardship. Our results indicate that the increased odds of falling below low income lines among children in working families facing multiple disadvantaged characteristics and the increased proportion of these children in various subgroups of working families in the 1990s can help explain the increased economic hardship among subgroups in the medium risk ranks listed above. Finally, the paper also notes that the official measure of poverty tends to underestimate low-income rates.

The most successful economies have the best working financial markets. While causation obviously runs in both directions, current research has increasingly emphasized the role of finance in promoting growth. Here seven leading financial economists explore the links between financial development and growth. The book seeks to answer the question of the role of finance in promoting sustainable growth and in the reduction of poverty, for example via micro-financial institutions.

In a festschrift to Netzer a public finance economist well known for his research on state and local taxation, urban public services, and nonprofit organizations eight chapters apply microeconomics to problems facing urban areas and use statistical analysis to gain insight into practical solutions. The essays look at alternative methods of financing urban government, such as a land value tax and the impact of sales and income taxes on property taxation; at government expenditures, including housing subsidies; and at subsidies to nonprofit arts groups as well as the role of the nonprofit sector in providing K-12 education. Of interest to the fields of public finance, urban economics, and public administration.

Canada is the United State's strongest trading partner, exceeding trade with Mexico and with the European Union. On land, this trade flows through 22 principal border crossings between the United States and Canada, with 90% of the value and three-quarters of the tonnage and truck trips originating in or destined for locations beyond the border states. Three of the six crossings are in New York State. However, up to one-half of the trips originate in or are destined for locations beyond the border states. Thus, while they generate economic value nationally, the burdens they bring are concentrated in border states. Recognizing the significance of the border states and the need for transportation corridors throughout the country to facilitate the projected growth in trade, Congress established the Coordinated Border Infrastructure Program and the National Corridor Planning and Development Program in 1998. However, these programs have fallen short of their goals, principally as a result of under-funding and earmarking. If the current funding levels and practices of the Borders and Corridors Program continue, there is concern that freight volume at the key crossings in New York will continue to grow without the ability to effectively and efficiently service it. This study assesses the implications for New York State and for the country if New York's border and corridor needs are unmet.

Indonesia is currently facing some severe challenges, both in political affairs and in economic management. One of these challenges is the recently enacted decentralization program, now well underway, which promises to have some wide-ranging consequences. This edited volume presents original papers, written by a select group of widely recognized and distinguished scholars, that take a hard, objective look at the many effects of decentralization on economic and political issues in Indonesia. There are many questions about this program: how will it be implemented, is there capacity at the local level to implement its reforms, is there sufficient local political accountability to make it work, and how will the decentralization affect the broader program of economic growth and stabilization? Topics covered include: the historical and political dimensions of decentralization, its macroeconomic effects, its effects on poverty alleviation, the assignment of expenditure and revenue functions across levels of government, the design of transfers, the role of natural resource taxation and the effects of local government borrowing. An authoritative, comprehensive collection, Reforming Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations and the Rebuilding of Indonesia will be of interest to economists and policy makers as well as students of public finance, development, and Asian economics.

At any given moment, about 3 million American women, men, and children are homeless. And another 5 million Americans spend over 50% of their incomes on housing, meaning that one missed paycheck, one health crisis, or one unpaid utility bill can push them out the door into homelessness. Homelessness is one of the major social problems and personal and family tragedies of the contemporary world. No community, city, or nation is immune and the lack of affordable housing and a decline in secure, well-paying jobs means that the problem will only get worse. The Encyclopedia of Homelessness is the first systematic effort to organize and summarize what we know about this complex topic that impacts not only the homeless but all of society. The Encyclopedia focuses on the current situation in the United States with a comparative sampling of homelessness around the world.

International experience suggests that attempts to rapidly expand formal safety net coverage through cash transfers typically founder in low income countries, which must look to alternative mechanisms to boost social protection. This paper explores this challenge through the case of Vietnam. Despite over a decade of rapid economic growth and poverty reduction, approximately 40% of Vietnam’s population is below or just above the poverty line and is highly vulnerable to community-wide and household-specific shocks. Yet Vietnam’s social protection budget has largely financed formal entitlement programs that are failing to deliver substantial reductions in vulnerability for this broad spectrum of the rural population. This paper outlines the state of social protection in Vietnam and presents an agenda for improving effective coverage rates. It closes by assessing the political and bureaucratic feasibility of social protection reforms in other developing countries.

International donors have attempted to contribute to, and indeed influence, the overall tenor of socioeconomic and governance-related reforms in Vietnam. They have done so in a number of ways: directly supporting policy research, stablishing forums for debate of developmental issues with government counterparts, funding projects on administrative and judiciary reform and central level capacity building, and providing direct financial and sometimes indirect support for ‘indigenous’ NGOs, primarily development service organizations working as contractors for particular development projects. This paper examines another modality through which donors sought to influence administrative reform over the heady ‘development decade’ of the 1990s – donor support for rural development projects conceived as ‘policy experiments’ (Rondinelli 1983). Though diverse in sectoral focus, these projects commonly attempted to introduce local institutional arrangements promoting greater responsiveness and accountability of local governments to rural communities as a whole, or to particular sub-groups such as smallholder farmers. To do so, local organizations or grassroots groups were typically established as new ways of organizing the rural populace to demand, plan for, access or provide services underpinning rural development and poverty alleviation. “Local development groups” (LDGs) is the name I give to groups comprised of farmers and other end-users of project services (or representatives they choose) that were formed in the process of implementing particular development projects. This paper probes the experience of these development projects and LDGs over approximately the last ten years. It depicts how projects funded by a wide range of donors became an important part of the institutional landscape in many areas of Vietnam, leaving a significant mark on many sectors related to rural  development. Five sections follow this introduction. The first examines how changing donor roles interacted with institutional developments to produce an opportunity for projects to influence policy. Section two presents a theoretical framework with which to assess LDGs and the policy experiments in which they were embedded, which section three applies the framework to a sample of 15 donor projects operational over the 1990s in Vietnam. Section four presents more qualitative detail on a few of the higher-impact projects. The final section concludes with  implications for donors and the study of local institutional change in Vietnam.

Among the principal targets of criticism in recent American politics has been the alleged corruption, inequity, overall cost, and regulatory complexity of the U.S. campaign-finance system. Scholarship has not borne out any of these criticisms, and, if anything, empirical investigation suggests that the current system does a fair job in addressing�as much as this is possible under modern conditions�the problem of public ignorance in mass democracies.

Objective
To assess the contribution of primary care systems to a variety of health outcomes in 18 wealthy Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries over three decades.

Data Sources/Study Setting
Data were primarily derived from OECD Health Data 2001 and from published literature. The unit of analysis is each of 18 wealthy OECD countries from 1970 to 1998 (total n=504).

Study Design
Pooled, cross-sectional, time-series analysis of secondary data using fixed effects regression.

Data Collection/Extraction Methods
Secondary analysis of public-use datasets. Primary care system characteristics were assessed using a common set of indicators derived from secondary datasets, published literature, technical documents, and consultation with in-country experts.

Principal Findings
The strength of a country's primary care system was negatively associated with (a) all-cause mortality, (b) all-cause premature mortality, and (c) cause-specific premature mortality from asthma and bronchitis, emphysema and pneumonia, cardiovascular disease, and heart disease (p<0.05 in fixed effects, multivariate regression analyses). This relationship was significant, albeit reduced in magnitude, even while controlling for macro-level (GDP per capita, total physicians per one thousand population, percent of elderly) and micro-level (average number of ambulatory care visits, per capita income, alcohol and tobacco consumption) determinants of population health.

Conclusions
(1) Strong primary care system and practice characteristics such as geographic regulation, longitudinality, coordination, and community orientation were associated with improved population health. (2) Despite health reform efforts, few OECD countries have improved essential features of their primary care systems as assessed by the scale used here. (3) The proposed scale can also be used to monitor health reform efforts intended to improve primary care.

We should not let the prospect of filling hotel rooms and restaurants overshadow the real benefit of hosting the Republican National Convention one year from now. The true value of the convention is that it will allow the city's leaders to forge a direct relationship with the leaders of the federal government. The benefits of building such a bond over the next year could help this city for years to come, not just during the four days in August and September when the Republican Party comes to town.

In all rich countries, firms organized on a not-for-profit basis produce cultural goods and services, along with for-profit firms (including independent professional artists) and the state. This is also true in many poorer countries. Non-profit firms are defined as organizations that have a formal structure and governance, which differ greatly among countries but share the characteristics that (1) the managers of the organization do not own the enterprise or have an economic interest that can be sold to other firms or individuals and (2) any surplus of revenue over expenditure may not be appropriated by the managers of the organization, but must be reinvested in ways that further the stated purposes of the organization. Obviously, such organizations will not be formed and continue to exist unless the organizers and managers expect and realize some economic rewards, including money compensation for their own services and non-financial rewards like consumption benefits (producing cultural goods and services that they want to enjoy but which will not be produced without their efforts) and personal status.

This paper presents empirical evidence on input and output equity of expenditures, teacher resources, and performance across 840 elementary and middle schools in New York City. Historically, researchers have studied interdistrict distributions, but given the large numbers of pupils and schools within many urban districts, it is important to learn about intradistrict distributions as well. The empirical work is built on a framework of horizontal, vertical, and equal opportunity equity. The results show that the horizontal equity distributions are more disparate than what would be expected relative to results of other studies, vertical equity is lacking, especially in elementary schools, and equality of opportunity is at best neutral but more often absent. Middle schools exhibit more equity than elementary schools. The paper is one of the first to measure output equity, using levels and changes in test scores to do so.

The tension between ascribed and achieved status pervades much of sociology, sometimes as a latent theme and sometimes manifest. The articles in this issue of Sociological Forum revisit this tension through the lens of race and ethnicity. They examine contexts varying widely from adolescents in the United States to upper-caste Muslims in India. The specific issues they address are also diverse: the relationship between race, democracy, and equal opportunity; deviant behavior among teenagers of different ethnic groups; intermarriage among whites and minorities in contemporary U.S. society; the strategic commonalities between the Deaf, gay and white supremacist movements; and finally, the tension between modernization, economic development, and finally, the tension between modernization, economic development, and caste/racial identity. Yet, the articles also share a broader common theme; each concerns the paradoxes that emerge when ascribed racial or ethnic identity collides with powerful forces that represent the conditions of achieved position.

The article reports on racial inequality. The author says the while African-Americans do earn less than whites, asset gaps remain large even when black and white families at the same income levels are compared. For instance, at the lower end of the economic spectrum (incomes less than $ 15,000 per year), the median African-American family has a net worth of zero, while the equivalent white family's net worth is $10,000. Likewise, among the often-heralded new black middle class, the typical white family earning $40,000 per year enjoys a nest egg of around $80,000; its African-American counterpart has less than half that amount.

Sound budget policy requires a clear understanding of the nature of fiscal problems and creative thinking in the design of solutions. The recent public debate about how to close
New York City's unprecedented budget gap falls short on both counts. The Citizens Budget Commission - a nonprofit, nonpartisan civic organization - has prepared this document to clear up a series of common misunderstandings that hinder the debate and to focus attention on the potential for significant savings by delivering City services more efficiently. The first part of the document identifies ten "myths" about the budget and provides the facts that dispel them. The second part presents five ideas that together
would save the City more than $1 billion annually. The ideas are based on research conducted by the Commission's staff and presented in greater detail in separate reports published by the Commission.

This collection of original manuscripts-representing a cross-section of the timeliest scholarship in public personnel administration-explores the theme of "problems and prospects" in public personnel administration. The contributions are organized into four broad sections: The Setting, The Techniques, The Issues, and Reform and the Future. Section One focuses primarily on the social, political, economic, and legal trends that have served as catalysts in the transformation of public personnel administration. Section Two is composed of selections that summarize developments in the practice of HRM, with special emphasis on emerging personnel techniques and the ways that traditional approaches to the staffing function are being revised. Section Three discusses and suggests responses to some of the most troublesome or pervasive issues in modern personnel management. The final section assesses the probable trends in the field's future, and analyzes the efficacy of recent reform efforts. For human resource personnel looking to broaden their perspective in the field.

A child poverty rate of ten percent could mean that every tenth child is always poor, or that all children are in poverty for one month in every ten. Knowing where reality lies between these extremes is vital to understanding the problem facing many countries of poverty among the young. This unique study goes beyond the standard analysis of child poverty based on poverty rates at one point in time and documents how much movement into and out of poverty by children there actually is, covering a range of industrialised countries - the USA, UK, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Hungary and Russia. Five main topics are addressed: conceptual and measurement issues associated with a dynamic view of child poverty; cross-national comparisons of child poverty rates and trends; cross-national comparisons of children's movements into and out of poverty; country-specific studies of child poverty dynamics; and the policy implications of taking a dynamic perspective.

This comparative scorecard for the New York Metropolitan region - an area which stretches from Waterbury, CT to Trenton, NJ - presents 36 indicators covering eight categories of economic and social well-being. How does New York's current condition compare to that of other large metropolitan areas, and how does New York's performance in the last five years compare to that of these other areas? The 12 metropolitan areas to which New York is compared are: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

This report analyzes Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's Preliminary Financial Plan for the City of New York for fiscal years 2002 to 2005.

This comparative scorecard for New York State examines 34 indicators covering nine categories of economic and social well-being for nine of the ten largest states in the nation in terms of population, and two of New York's geographic neighbors, Massachusetts and Connecticut. In each case, the data address two questions: How does New York State's current condition compare to that of other large or neighboring states, and how does New York's change in the last five years compare to that of these similar states?

This article uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the employment patterns of workers aged 50 and above who have experienced an involuntary job loss. Hazard models for returning to work and for exiting post-displacement employment are estimated and used to examine work patterns for 10 years following a job loss. Our findings show that a job loss results in large and lasting effects on future employment probabilities. Four years after job losses at age 55, the employment rate of displaced workers remains 20 percentage points below the employment rate of similar nondisplaced workers.

Social capital has become a popular subject in the literature on determinants of health. The concept of social capital has been used in the sociological, political science, and economic development literatures, as well as in the health inequalities literature. Analysis of its use in the health inequalities literature suggests that each theoretical tradition has conceptualized social capital differently. Health researchers have employed a wide range of social capital measures, borrowing from several theoretical traditions. Given the wide variation in these measures and an apparent lack of consistent theoretical or empirical justification for their use, conclusions about the likely role of "social capital" on population health may be overstated or even misleading. Elements of a research agenda are proposed to further elucidate the potential role of factors currently subsumed under the rubric of "social capital."

This book explores the role of community in facilitating the transition to market relationships in economic development, and in controlling and sustaining local public goods such as irrigation, forests, grazing land, and fishing grounds. Previously it was customary to classify economic systems in terms of varying combinations of state and market control of resource allocation. In contrast, this book recognizes community as the third major element of economic systems. This new approach also departs from the conventional view that markets and community norms should be treated as mutually exclusive means of organizing economic activity, instead clarifying the situations in which they may become complementary. Further discussion focuses on the conditions under which management of local commons can, and should, be delegated to local communities rather than subjected to the control of central government.

The property tax is considered a most unpopular tax, among both scholars and taxpayers. Yet, recent research and analysis has proposed at least a partial rehabilitation of this tax and its role in the arena of local public finance. Based on a conference sponsored by the Lincoln Institute in January 2000, this book presents a systematic and comprehensive review of the economics of local property taxation and examines its policy implications. The ten papers and paired commentaries are written in a nontechnical form to make the findings available to a broad audience of policy makers and other noneconomists.

The culmination of a year-long lecture series cosponsored by The Century Foundation and the City University of New York Graduate Center's Center for Urban Research, 'Rethinking the Urban Agenda' takes up the challenge provided by a changing of the guard in New York City government-the election of a new mayor and city council-to outline a new conceptual and political road map for New York City's future and, in many important respects, for the future of urban America.

Estimating efficiency and productivity in education involves confronting and addressing a host of difficulties in measuring inputs and outputs, capturing environmental influences, compensating for data scarcity, and determining causality. Nevertheless, recent improvements in data quality and availability and accompanying advances in statistical methods offer the promise of improved measures of school efficiency and the prospect of identifying the determinants of efficiency across schools and school districts and over time. This chapter discusses approaches to measuring K-12 efficiency and the relative merits of each, explaining the complexities of applying these techniques in the real world, and concludes with lessons learned for practitioners.

The first Status of Women of Color Report originated out of the need to provide data and research focusing on women of color. By drawing attention to the trends seen in income, unemployment, welfare, and incarceration for women of color in New York city , this report summarizes their achievements and lack of it during the 1990's.

This report focuses on the cost-effectiveness of the policies of the New York State Department of Correctional Services, and makes four recommendations for achieving operational savings without diminishing public safety. These recommendations are: (1) to extend the reach and effectiveness of tested alternatives, such as boot camp and the CASAT program; (2) to develop new alternatives for additional inmate groups; (3) to reengineer the parole system; (4) to create an enhanced research and development unit.

This paper explores the relationship between racial segregation and racial disparities in the prevalence of low birth weight. The paper has two parallel motivations. First, the disparities between black and white mothers in birth outcomes are large and persistent. In 1996, 13 percent of infants born in the United States to black mothers weighed less than 2,500 grams (5.5 pounds, or low birth weight), compared with just 6.3 percent of all infants born to white mothers. And the consequences may be grave. Low birth weight is a major cause of infant mortality and is associated with greater childhood illness and such developmental disorders as cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, epilepsy, chronic lung disease, learning disabilities, and attention deficit disorder. 1 Given the strong connection between race and residence in this country, it seems plausible that residential location may shape these differentials.

Second, while there is a growing literature on the costs of racial segregation, it has largely focused on economic outcomes such as education and employment. This paper aims to develop a fuller understanding of the costs of racial segregation by considering birth outcomes as well as such behaviors as tobacco and alcohol use among pregnant mothers. As Glaeser emphasizes (in his paper in this volume), information, ideas, and values are often transmitted through face-to-face interaction, and thus their transmission may be blocked by segregation. This includes information related to job openings and may include information and norms related to behavior and care during pregnancy.

Adopting in large part the methodology of David Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser, the paper thus examines how levels of racial segregation affect the birth outcomes of black mothers. 2 It examines influences on both black and nonblack mothers in an attempt to identify the differential effect of segregation on black mothers.

Discusses the strategies applied to foster economic growth among cities in the United States. Measurement of the impact of economic development programs; Effectiveness of infrastructure investments to boost economic growth; Impact of tax cuts on economy; Development of sports stadiums and arenas.

The Government of Viet Nam is currently preparing a Socio-Economic Development Strategy for the years 2001-2010. At the Government’s request, the UNDP has recruited a small team of international and local consultants to provide input into for several sections of the strategy, of which one is “Rural Social Development”. This draft presents the initial analysis of the social development team. The analysis and strategies proposed are, by intention, synthetic: drawn extensively and freely from the best available work by Government agencies and donors. Social development is a broad concept. In this paper it is broken down into four thematic areas: i) poverty reduction and inequality; ii) social safety nets; iii) basic social services; and iv) rural institutions and participation. Each of these areas can be formulated as a broad question for the year 2010. Viet Nam confronts qualitatively different future scenarios depending on how it addresses these questions: a. Will society be polarized into the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’? What can Viet Nam do to accelerate poverty reduction in slow-growing regions and thus mitigate growing socioeconomic inequalities? b. Will social safety nets exist to help provide social stability amidst rapid economic transformation? The degree to which the living standards of disadvantaged are protected will help determine what type of society Viet Nam will have in the year 2010. c. Will social indicators which are high relative to Viet Nam’s economic development continue to propel economic growth and equitable social outcomes? In the absence of greater reform momentum in the social sectors in the coming ten years, Viet Nam’s social indicators will probably still be good “for a low-income country”, but increasing disparities will work against, rather than for, broadly based growth and poverty reduction – quite the opposite of the positive experience to date. d. Will institutions which are capable, democratic, and open to the participation of civil society underpin rural society? The recent democratization decree has generated much interest, both nationally and within the donor community. The question centers on strategic momentum for the process of reform and the degree to which it presages further openings to civil society.

This article uses data on young teenagers to investigate how sibling composition affects schooling outcomes in South Africa and Tanzania. The results, while not estimated very precisely, establish additional evidence of positive associations between school completion and the number of sisters a child has (controlling for the total number of siblings), but the evidence from South Africa shows that they are not general findings. The estimates are conditional on the given family structure, and of course, family structure may not be fully exogenous to schooling choices.

Presents a study on win-win proposition, a principle of good banking, by leading microfinance advocates which can alleviate poverty through microfinance institution. Logic of the win-win proposition; Advantages of financial sustainability; Limits of the proposition.

In the world today, about one billion people live on less than one dollar per day, and about two to three billion live on less than two dollars per day (World Bank 1997). Thirty years ago, the numbers looked very different. Broad-based economic growth in populous countries like China and Indonesia has substantially reduced rates of absolute poverty. In Indonesia, for example, the fraction of the population below the poverty line fell from 58 to 17 percent between 1972 and 1982, and in Brazil the fraction fell from 50 to 21 percent between 1960 and 1980 (World Bank 1993a). Similarly, China boasts a reduction in rural poverty from 31 to 7 percent between 1978 and 1995, a decrease by 185 million people. These changes have left a growing concentration of world poverty in slow-growth areas of South Asia and Africa.

Presents survey data of the household incomes of local officials in northern China and their relation to market liberalization, increases in consumer demand and the provision of local public goods. Description of the rank-and-file bureaucrats; Political status in rural China; Survey data and economic setting; Effects of political variables on income levels; Analyses; Economic reform.

Despite the rapid growth of advanced telecommunications services, there is a lack of knowledge about the geographic diffusion of these new technologies. The Internet presents an important challenge to communications researchers, as it threatens to redefine the production and delivery of vital services including finance, retailing, and education. This article seeks to address the gap in the current literature by analyzing the development of Internet backbone networks in the United States between 1997 and 1999. We focus upon the intermetropolitan links that have provided transcontinental data transport services since the demise of the federally subsidized networks deployed in the 1970s and 1980s. We find that a select group of seven highly interconnected metropolitan areas consistently dominated the geography of national data networks, despite massive investment in this infrastructure over the study period. Furthermore, while prosperous and internationally oriented American cities lead the nation in adopting and deploying Internet technologies, interior regions and economically distressed cities have failed to keep up. As information-based industries and services account for an increasing share of economic activity, this evidence suggests that the Internet may aggravate the economic disparities among regions, rather than level them. Although the capacity of the backbone system has slowly diffused throughout the metropolitan system, the geographic structure of interconnecting links has changed little. Finally, the continued persistence of the metropolis as the center for telecommunications networks illustrates the need for a more sophisticated understanding of the interaction between societies and technological innovations.

Do New York State and New York City have too much debt? This report addresses the question by presenting criteria for deciding how much state and local debt is affordable, and recommending how those criteria should be applied to decisions by New York State and New York City. This report provides a measure that can be used by states and cities throughout the nation to judge the impact that their debt will have on their ability to compete with other jurisdictions effectively.

Approximately 3.1 million State residents (one of every six New Yorkers) have no health insurance. This report describes the uninsured population in New York State and the public programs that currently finance medical care for the uninsured. It also identifies the inadequacies of these programs and makes recommendations for reform.

Without discounting the significant downsizing that has occurred, only one of the two ingredients for a leaner, more efficient government is in place. The girth of government-measured by the total number of federal employees-may be shrinking, but its height-measured by the management tiers between the top and bottom-continues to climb. Every year fewer front-line employees are reporting upward through what appears to be an ever-lengthening chain of command.

Focuses on the role of subsidies in microfinance as evidenced by the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. Difficulties in maintaining high repayment rates; Role of the bank in alleviating poverty; Recognition of the myriad benefits that have been attributed to program participation.

The article presents information about a set of financial institutions in underdeveloped countries which are striving to alleviate poverty by providing financial services to low-income households. These institutions, united under the banner of microfinance, share a commitment to serving clients that have been exclude from the formal banking sector. Almost all of the borrowers do so to finance self-employment activities, and many start by taking loans as small as $75, repaid over several months or a year. Only a few programs require borrowers to put up collateral, enabling would-be entrepreneurs with few assets to escape positions as poorly paid wage laborers or farmers. The programs point to innovations like "group-lending" contracts and new attitudes about subsidies as keys to their success. Group-lending contracts effectively make a borrower's neighbors co-signers to loans, mitigating problems created by informational asymmetries between lender and borrower. Neighbours now have incentives to monitor each other and to exclude risky borrowers from participation, promoting repayment even in the absence of collateral requirements.

Presents information on the financial crisis in East Asia. Causes of the crisis; Contrasting perspectives on East Asia's miracle and crisis; Economic impact of the financial and capital account liberalization of the 1980s to East Asia.

When capital and labor markets are imperfect, choice sets narrow, and parents must choose how to ration available funds and time between their children. One consequence is that children become rivals for household resources. In economies with pro-male bias, such rivalries can yield gains to having relatively more sisters than brothers. Using a rich household survey from Ghana, we find that on average if children had all sisters (and no brothers) they would do roughly 25-40% better on measured health indicators than if they had all brothers (and no sisters). The effects are as large as typical quantity-quality trade-offs, and they do not differ significantly by gender.

Many interesting economic hypotheses entail differences in behaviors of groups within a population, but analyses of pooled samples shed only partial light on underlying segmentations. Finite mixture models are considered as an alternative to methods based on pooling. Robustness checks using t-regressions and a Bayesian analogue to the likelihood ratio test for model evaluation are developed. The methodology is used to investigate pro-son bias in child health outcomes in Bangladesh. While regression analysis on the entire sample appears to wash out evidence of bias, the mixture models reveal systematic girl-boy differences in health outcomes.

The Budget 2000 Project recommends actions that will reduce the cost of government in New York by between $12.8 and $19.7 billion, amounts large enough not only to balance the budgets of the Two New Yorks, shift the local government costs of public assistance and Medicaid to the State, and fund salary increases for workers who assist in the restructuring, but still leave at least $9.3 billion to improve New York's competitiveness by investing in the infrastructure, enhancing services and cutting taxes.

Recent research on productivity growth has focused on public infrastructure and its impact on economic growth and productivity. We construct a model of firms' technology and behavior, taking advantage of the analytical framework provided in the cost-function-based applied production-theory literature, and apply it to state-level data for U.S. manufacturing. We find that infrastructure investment provides a significant return to manufacturing firms and augments productivity growth. The net benefits of infrastructure investment may or may not be positive, depending upon the social costs of infrastructure investment and the relative growth rates of output and infrastructure.

This report is the first in a series of studies that will examine the growth prospects of the New York City economy. This first study analyzes the financial services, legal services, and accounting and management consulting sectors, and combines original data obtained through detailed interviews with 25 firms in these industries with existing data from previously published analyses and surveys. The study concludes that while New York will continue to be a global center for these industries, the shape of these industries within the city will change, and the industries are unlikely to be the significant source of employment growth in the future that they have been in the past. The report includes 36 tables with longitudinal data examining employment and business activity in these sectors of the New York City economy, as well as the relationship between these sectors and the larger domestic and international markets.

Examines the ways in which farm households in developing countries may self-insure, with a particular emphasis on the idea that farm households may seek to smooth their consumption by altering their methods of production. Quantifying the importance of risk; Consumption smoothing and risk; Income smoothing; Simplicity and complexity in low-income economies.

In the competitive model, externalities lead to inefficiencies, and inefficiencies increase with the size of externalities. However, as argued by Coase, these problems may be mitigated in a decentralized system through voluntary coordination We show how coordination is limited by the combination of two factors: respect for individual autonomy and the existence of private information. Together they imply that efficient outcomes can only be achieved through coordination when external effects are relatively large Moreover, there are instances in which coordination cannot yield any improvement at all, despite common knowledge that social gains from agreement exist This occurs when external effects are relatively small, and this may help to explain why coordination is so seldom observed in practice. When improvements are possible, we describe how simple subsidies can be used to implement second-best solutions and explain why standard solutions, such as Pigovian taxes, cannot be used. Possible extensions to issues arising in the structure of research joint ventures, assumptions in the endogenous growth literature, and the location of environmental hazards are also described.

Analyzes whether short-term cutbacks made during a fiscal crisis become permanent once fiscal conditions improve. Economic and fiscal history of New York City from the 1970s through the 1980s; Framework for studying the long-term effects of budgetary cutbacks; Methodology for studying the long-term effects of 1976 and 1977 budgetary cutbacks; Effects on dollars, services, teacher characteristics and capital constructions.

Suggests a method of indexing local public services using community characteristics to allow the isolation of movements in prices and quantities from expenditure data. Differences in individual production functions for commodities where both private goods and community characteristics are inputs of production; Impact of government activities on community characteristics and production.

Discusses the use of grants-in-aid to reduce fiscal disparities by local governments in the United States. Method used in Massachusetts to account for differences among communities in fiscal costs and resources; Indepth look at expenditure determination in tax limitations; Estimation of local government expenditures.

It is generally thought that across-the-board tax limits, white encouraging fiscal restraint, create hardships for jurisdictions with above average and uncontrollable needs. Because of the recent imposition of most limits, the conclusion is difficult to confirm empirically. This article provides a test of the conclusion based on a study of New York State city school districts where limits long in effect were suspended between 1970 and 1978 because of unusual local behavior and legislative action. Because some, but not all, districts took advantage of legislatively granted authority to tax beyond their limit, art empirical investigation can be used to explain this behavior. The results of the analysis, which show that low ability to pay, low inter-governmental grants, and high needs account for much of the behavior of districts that exceed limits, are helpful in designing flexible tax limits.

Investigates the impact of social science research on school finance policy in the U.S. Formulation of social science research to public policy; Perspectives in evaluating the policy impact of social science research; Strengths of the perspectives.