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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.

Objectives:

To examine the associations of antibiotic exposures during the first 2 years of life and the development of body mass over the first 7 years of life.

Design:

Longitudinal birth cohort study.

Subjects:
A total of 11 532 children born at 2500 g in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a population-based study of children born in Avon, UK in 1991–1992.

Measurements:

Exposures to antibiotics during three different early-life time windows (

Results:

Antibiotic exposure during the earliest time window (

Conclusions:

Exposure to antibiotics during the first 6 months of life is associated with consistent increases in body mass from 10 to 38 months. Exposures later in infancy (6–14 months, 15–23 months) are not consistently associated with increased body mass. Although effects of early exposures are modest at the individual level, they could have substantial consequences for population health. Given the prevalence of antibiotic exposures in infants, and in light of the growing concerns about childhood obesity, further studies are needed to isolate effects and define life-course implications for body mass and cardiovascular risks.

This paper puts a corporate finance lens on microfinance.  Microfinance aims to democratize 

global financial markets through new contracts, organizations, and technology. We explain the 

roles that government agencies and socially-minded investors play in supporting the entry and 

expansion of private intermediaries in the sector, and we disentangle debates about competing 

social and commercial firm goals. We frame the analysis with theory that explains why 

microfinance institutions serving lower-income communities charge high interest rates, face high 

costs, monitor customers relatively intensively, and have limited ability to lever assets. The 

analysis blurs traditional dividing lines between non-profits and for-profits and places focus on 

the relationship between target market, ownership rights and access to external capital.

Is credit a human right? Muhammad Yunus, the most visible leader of a global movement to provide microcredit to world’s poor, says it should be. NYU’s John Gershman and FAI’s Jonathan Morduch disagree. In their new paper, Credit is Not a Right, they ask whether a rights-based approach to microcredit will in fact be effective in making quality, affordable credit more available to poor families – and, more importantly, whether it is a constructive step in terms of the broader goal of global poverty reduction. Jonathan Morduch argues his case in this video.

If the United States finally ratifies the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), will it improve the country's to effectively combat child poverty and thereby improve child well-being? This article addresses this and related questions in two ways. First, the authors examine how ratification of the CRC has influenced the efforts of other wealthy Anglophone countries to reduce child poverty. Second, they draw on lessons learned from these other countries' efforts to generate predictions about America's postratification future. The authors conclude that, while the CRC is a compelling, practical tool, a communications strategy and business plan are necessary complements to achieve desired results.

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.

Answering surveys is usually voluntary, yet much of our knowledge depends on the willingness of households and institutions to answer. In this study, we explore the implications of voluntary reporting on knowledge about microfinance. We show systematic biases in microfinance institutions' choices about which survey to respond to and which specific indicators to report. The analysis focuses on data for 2,072 microfinance institutions from MixMarket and the Microcredit Summit Campaign databases for the years 2004-2006. In general, we find that financial indicators are more often reported than social indicators. The patterns of reporting correlate with the institutions' region of operation, mission, and size. The patterns in turn affect analyses of key questions on trade-offs between financial and social goals in microfinance. For example, the relationship between operational self-sufficiency and the percentage of women borrowers is positive in the Microcredit Summit Campaign data but negative in the MixMarket data. The results highlight the conditional nature of our knowledge and the value of supporting social reporting.

New York City is testing a policy of ‘Conditional Cash Transfers’, pioneered in Latin America and designed to address both the reduction of income poverty and investment in children's human capital development. Lawrence Aber examines the welfare policy lessons the NYC experiment might contain for other industrialised countries

Key Messages

• Until recently researchers and policymakers paid little attention to the role of health workers in developing countries but a new generation of studies are providing a fuller understanding of these issues using more sophisticated data and research tools.
  
• Recent research highlights the value of viewing health workers as active agents in dynamic labour markets who are faced with many competing incentives and constraints.
  
• Newer studies have provided greater insights into human resource requirements in health, the motivations and behaviours of health workers, and health worker migration. We are encouraged by the progress but believe there is a need for even more, and higher quality, research on this topic.

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 urgency of reducing poverty in the developing world has been the subject of a public campaign by such unlikely policy experts as George Clooney, Alicia Keyes, Elton John, Angelina Jolie, and Bono. And yet accompanying the call for more foreign aid is an almost universal discontent with the effectiveness of the existing aid system. In Reinventing Foreign Aid, development expert William Easterly has gathered top scholars in the field to discuss how to improve foreign aid. These authors, Easterly points out, are not claiming that their ideas will (to invoke a current slogan) Make Poverty History. Rather, they take on specific problems and propose some hard-headed solutions.

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 examines how various poverty assessment modalities serve to strengthen the governance capacities necessary to target the poor. Large-scale surveys and qualitative, 'bottom-up' assessments both have shortcomings in this regard. A 'multi-level' synthesis would in theory link a unified indicator framework (such as the Millennium Development Goals) to localized situation assessments and facilitate multi-sectoral efforts to target the poor. Case studies of actual efforts to do this from Vietnam and Burma highlight the way in which the governance context of a country must be taken into account when designing such efforts.

There is little doubt that globalization, however defined, has hit the field of
professional policy education in the twenty years since APPAM’s Hiltonhead conference on the future of policy education first took stock of a largely American landscape. Despite the title of this session, the relevant development is not merely the accretion of public policy schools and programs around the world. It is the recognition of international dimensions of the policy education enterprise that, if taken seriously (and participants in this discussion argued that it must), promises to change the way we conduct business on multiple levels. This report of the lively discussion generated in the wake of Iris Geva-May and her coauthors’ stimulating conference paper1 explores why and how.

Purpose – The paper explores an emerging challenge for large public-sector bureaucracies: developing information and performance measurement systems that support anti-corruption efforts.
Design – An analytical framework linking functions and contexts of performance measurement to anti-corruption requirements is presented. The framework is used to explore a case study of the World Bank’s ongoing efforts to strengthen anti-corruption information systems in Indonesia.
Findings – A range of organizations are increasingly turning to performance measurement systems to fulfill several functions related to organizational integrity: to hold organization’s accountable for reaching publicly stated standards of fiduciary responsibility and corruption control; to identify vulnerable operational points in multi-faceted public enterprises; and to facilitate organizational learning regarding ‘what works’. Yet corruption is difficult to measure, and corruption vulnerabilities often arise from informal practices, insufficient incentives for enforcement or adherence to standards, and managerial blindspots. Enhanced information systems need to be coupled with effective and multi-directional accountability arrangements in order for performance measurement to contribute effectively to corruption control.
Practical implications – Improved information systems and a reassessment of managerial incentives and attitudes are both essential in order to reduce organizational vulnerability to corruption and to the public backlash that follows in the wake of corruption scandals.
Originality/value – Focus on an emerging area of performance management likely to gain increasing visibility as large bureaucracies attempt to institutionalize public commitments to high anti-corruption standards

Community-Driven Development (CDD) projects have motivated both large amounts of funding from international development agencies and a number of general critiques centering on the potential susceptibility of decentralized projects to local elite capture. Drawing on case analysis and surveys fielded in 250 Indonesian sub-districts, this paper subjects the design logic of a CDD project to close empirical testing. Results suggest that while CDD projects can help create spaces for a broader range of elite and non-elite community leaders to emerge, elite control of project decision-making is pervasive. However, its effects can be influenced by project-initiated accountability arrangements, such as democratic leadership selection.

International donors, long-standing supporters of decentralization reforms in developing countries, often face the challenge of aligning program assistance to the great variety of country governance settings in which many operate. This paper presents a framework for assessing the implications of governance and institutional context for a range of programming challenges, with particular reference to the challenge of decentralized programming. The framework has three conceptual steps. Country governance and institutional change environments are first described in terms of how enabling governance capacities are for decentralized programming, and how rapid and predictable the rate of institutional change is. Second, these environmental considerations are associated with overall assistance modalities of donors, in areas such as the type of partners sought and interventions selected. Third, a range of options concerning the aims, scope and extent of decentralizing programming are reviewed and linked to the diagnostic framework above. The framework is broadly derived from organizational contingency theory, which it is argued has been relatively neglected in the study of development administration due to a preponderance of analysis based on single-case studies.

The study of the health workforce has gained in prominence in recent years, as the dynamic interconnections between human resource issues and health system effectiveness have come into sharper focus. This paper reviews lessons relating to strategic management challenges emerging from the growing literature in this area. Workforce issues are strategic: they affect overall system performance as well as the feasibility and sustainability of health reforms. Viewing workforce issues strategically forces health authorities to confront the yawning gaps between policy and implementation in many developing countries.

Lessons emerge in four areas. Once concerns imbalances in workforce structure, whether from a functional specialization, geographical or facility lens. These imbalances pose a strategic challenge in that authorities must attempt to steer workforce distribution over time using a limited range of policy tools. A second group of lessons concerns the difficulties of central-level steering of the health workforce, often critically weak due to the lack of proper information systems and the complexities of public sector decentralization and service commercialization trends affecting the grassroots. A third cluster examines worker capacity and motivation, often shaped in developing countries as much by the informal norms and incentives as by formal attempts to support workers or to hold them accountable. Finally, a range of reforms centering on service contracting and improvements to human resource management are emerging. Since these have as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition some flexibility in personnel practices, recent trends towards the sharing of such functions with local authorities are promising. The paper identifies a number of current lines of productive research, focusing on the relationship between health policy reforms and the local institutional environments in which the workforce, both public and private, is deployed.

Catastrophic events are an ongoing part of life, affecting society both locally and globally. Recruitment, development, and retention of volunteers who offer their knowledge and skills in the event of a disaster are essential to ensuring a functional workforce during catastrophes. These opportunities also address the inherent need for individuals to feel necessary and useful in times of crisis. Universities are a particularly important setting for voluntary action, given that they are based in communities and have access to resources and capabilities to bring to bear on an emergency situation.

The purpose of the study was to discern how one large private organization might participate and respond in the case of a large scale disaster. Using a 2-phase random sample survey, 337 unique respondents (5.7%) out of a sample of 6000 replied to the survey. These data indicate that volunteers in a private organization are willing to assist in disasters and have skills that can be useful in disaster mitigation.

Much is to be learned related to the deployment of volunteers during disaster. These findings suggest that volunteers can and will help and that disaster preparedness drills are a logical next step for university-based volunteers.

In his essay “All Community Is Local,” political scientist William Schambra urges that researchers and activists “direct our gaze away from the failed project of national community and focus once again on the churches, voluntary associations, and grass-roots groups that are rebuilding America’s civil society one family, one block, one neighborhood at a time.” Schambra’s is a rather extreme version of a view expressed by many theorists of citizenship, as well as by political figures from both right and left: that the nation is too distant from most people’s lives (or its governing officials too impersonal or corrupt) to inspire a sense of shared purposes or civic spirit. Only intense local involvement yields rightly-constituted citizens, and small communities are the likeliest realm for realizing the public good.[1]

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.

This paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor. In particular, we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and whether household access to credit mitigates the effects of these shocks.

Using panel data from a survey in Tanzania, we find that both relationships are significant. Our results suggest that credit constraints play a role in explaining child labor and consequently that child labor is inefficient, but we also discuss alternative interpretations.

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.

This paper contributes to the literature on information systems in crisis management by providing an overview of
emerging technologies for sensing and recording sociological data about disasters. These technologies are transforming our capacity to gather data about what happens during disasters, and our ability to reconstruct the social dynamics of affected communities. Our approach takes a broad review of disaster research literature, current research efforts and new reports from recent disasters, especially Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean Tsunami. We forecast that sensor networks will revolutionize conceptual and empirical approaches to research in the social sciences, by providing unprecedented volumes of high-quality data on movements, communication and response activities by both formal and informal actors. We conclude with a set of recommendations to designers of crisis management information systems to design systems that can support social science research, and argue for the inclusion of post-disaster social research as a design consideration in such systems.

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.

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.

In a critical examination of some of the most topical and challenging issues confronting the public sector in developing counties in an era of globalization, the contributors to this book examine the potential and limits of managerial, fiscal and decentralization reforms, and highlight cases where selective use of some of the new management reforms has delivered positive results. A common thread that runs through the book is the challenges of capacity to improve public services. Looking beyond the past and the present into the future, the book provides lessons from the experience of implementing public sector reforms in developing countries.

Although decentralization and reactions against it have become increasingly important policy trends in developing countries, the study of this nearly ubiquitous phenomenon has been largely fractured across academic disciplines, geographic regions, and the academic-practitioner divide. The contributors to this edited volume begin to cross some of these constraining, artificial boundaries. Considering decentralization from an interdisciplinary, historical, and comparative perspective, they collectively explore why it has evolved in particular ways and with varied outcomes.

In addition to taking an atypically comparative perspective, the volume highlights the importance of an historical analysis of decentralization and links this to institutional and public policy outcomes. Placing decentralization in this context illustrates why it has taken dissimilar shapes and produced varying results over time in different countries. This in turn helps to clarify the types of institutions and conditions required for the development and survival of decentralization, paving the way for more creative thinking and informed policymaking. The countries covered include: Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, Peru and Brazil.

Students and scholars of economics, political science and development will find the policy and theoretical discussions enlightening. The volume will also prove useful to policymakers and development institutions confronting issues of decentralization.

Written by an international panel of distinguished global health experts, this book distills valuable lessons from a wide variety of successful health programs that have been implemented around the world. "Global Health Leadership and Management gives practical suggestions for enhancing and developing the essential skills of leadership, management, communication, and project planning for health care leaders. The book will assist health leaders to work well within their communities and effectively plan, direct, implement, and evaluate effective programs and activities. "Global Health Leadership and Management outlines and describes such core competencies as Identifying challenges and developing and managing policy Developing strategies, pathways, and solutions Creating networks and partnerships and planning for change Learning from experience to build a generation of leaders Leading and managing teams by recognizing and celebrating success

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.

The USA is deeply implicated in European dreams of a more perfect union. This chapter investigates three aspects of the European-American nexus. First, it focuses on the striking gap between politics and administration in contemporary Europe, and reflects on the implications for democracy. Second, it examines recent tensions between the USA and European governments, arguing that the source goes far deeper than the bare-knuckles diplomacy of the current Bush Administration. Finally, it examines the early history of US national unity as a model for European efforts.

More than ever, the future of East Asian countries depends on the capacity and performance of local and provincial governments, according to the World Bank report, East Asia Decentralizes.

This decentralization has also unleashed local initiative and energy, with new ways to deliver services to people. With great potential for continued improvement and innovation, finds the report, it is essential that decentralization is done right.

The report, which focuses on six countries, notes the differences in the approach to decentralizing government in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Despite encouraging progress, fundamental problems remain. Across the region, local governments lack the resources and power to fulfill their new responsibilities, and they have few incentives to improve their performance.

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 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.

This book evaluates alternatives in widening insurance and social protection provision - including sustainability and poverty effects, in thematic papers and case studies, development assessments, and policy analyses.

The results-oriented management reforms fostered by the New Public Management movement are often argued to emphasize the search for efficiency, quality and other typical market values at the expense of democratic accountability. On the other hand, challenging this view, some authors claim that results-based management reforms have the potential to enhance political accountability and representative democracy. There is however, limited empirical evidence of this relationship. This article uses some of the findings from a comparative study of public management evaluation systems in four Latin American countries to illuminate this relationship in practice. We discuss the fact that, in two of the four countries surveyed, the design features of the new systems were based on the explicit search for increased political accountability and the deepening of democracy. We also discuss the possible causes for the finding that the outcome and performance information generated is not being applied for decision-making purposes yet, as expected.

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.

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.

Poor households face many constraints in trying to save, invest, and protect their livelihoods. They take financial intermediation seriously and devote considerable effort to finding workable solutions. Most of the solutions are found in the informal sector, which, so far, offers low-income households convenience and flexibility unmatched by formal intermediaries. The microfinance movement is striving to match the convenience and flexibility of the informal sector, while adding reliability and the promise of continuity, and in some countries it is already doing this on a significant scale. Getting to this point - reaching poor people on a massive scale with popular products on a continuous basis - has involved rethinking basic assumptions along the way. One by one, the keywords of the 1980s and 1990s - women, groups, graduation, microbusinesses, and credit - are giving way to those of the new century - convenience, reliability, continuity, and a flexible range of services. We describe the elements that we feel have contributed most and that are most relevant for India.

The management of international organizations is attracting growing attention. Most of this attention is highly critical of both the UN system and International NGOs. Sometimes, this criticism lacks depth or reflects insufficient understanding of these organizations, or is based on narrow, and sometimes biased, internal political concerns of a particular country. International relations theory has insufficiently studied the type of linkages that these organizations provide between international decision-making and Northern fundraising on the one hand, and practical action in the South on the other. As a result, current theory too rarely focuses on the inner functioning of these organizations and is unable to explain the deficiencies and negative outcomes of their work. While the authors identify and describe the pathologies of international organizations in, for example, international diplomacy, fundraising, and implementation, they also stress positive elements, such as their intermediary role. The latter form the basis for more efficient and effective policies and action that, in addition to some recent political trends also described in this volume, hold hope for a stronger functioning of these organizations in the future.

Examining cutting-edge issues of international relevance in the ongoing redesign of the South African local government fiscal system, the contributors to this volume analyze the major changes that have taken place since the demise of apartheid. The 1996 Constitution and subsequent legislation dramatically redefined the public sector, mandating the development of democratic local governments empowered to provide a wide variety of key public services. However, the definition and implementation of new local functions and the supporting democratic decision-making and managerial capabilities are emerging more slowly than expected. Some difficult choices and challenges commonly faced by developing countries must be dealt with before the system can evolve to more effectively meet the substantial role envisioned for local governments.

Kenya has a rich history of local governance, both from ethnic-group traditions and the system set up during the British colonial era, when local governments were fairly independence (1963), when Kenya's economy and population growth accelerated, demands were so heavy that some local governments could not deliver key services adequately. This situation, combined with the central government's desire for political consolidation to minimize ethnic power conflicts that increased in the postcolonial era, prompted the government to weaken local authorities. Key services (health, education, major roads) were recentralized, and the local graduated personal tax (GPT) was taken over by the center. Grants were established to compensate local governments for their revenue losses, but they were gradually phased out. Control over local governments expanded, with few spending, revenue, or employment decisions permitted without scrutiny by the Ministry of Local Government (MLG).

Decentralisation is a complex and often somewhat elusive phenomenon. Many countries around the world have been attempting- for several reasons and with varying degrees of intention and success-to create or strengthen sub-national governments in recent years. Africa is no exception to either the decentralisation trend or the reality of its complexity and diversity. Drawing selectively on the large academic and practitioner literature on decentralisation and the articles in this volume, this article briefly outlines a number of typical prominent goals of decentralisation. It then reviews some key dimensions of decentralisation-fiscal, institutional and political. These are too frequently treated separately by policy analysts and policy makers although they are inherently linked. Next, a few popular myths and misconceptions about decentralisation are explored. Finally, a number of common outstanding challenges for improving decentralisation and local government reform efforts in Africa are considered.

Intergovernmental transfers are an important tool of public sector finance in both industrialized and developing countries. Critically examining selected intergovernmental transfers in three large Asian countries-India, Pakistan, and the Philippines-this study highlights lessons from these countries that those intending to reform their intergovernmental transfer systems might apply. Each country is considered in light of the accepted principles and international practices of intergovernmental transfers. A summary is provided that synthesizes the results from case studies, examining how they meet individual country objectives and how they relate to broader international experience.

Microfinance was pioneered in the developing world as the lending of small amounts of money to entrepreneurs who lacked the kinds of credentials and collateral demanded by banks. Similar practices spread from the developing to the developed world, reversing the usual direction of innovation, and today several hundred microfinance institutions are operating in the United States.

Replicating Microfinance in the United States reviews experiences in both developing and industrialized countries and extends the applications of microlending beyond enterprise to consumer finance, housing finance, and community development finance.

This book reviews experiences in both developing and industrial countries and extends the applications of microlending beyond enterprise to consumer finance, housing finance, and community development finance, concentrating especially on previously underserved households and their communities.

There is a large conceptual and empirical literature on intergovernmental fiscal transfers.1 Drawing on this work and examples from various countries, we provide in this chapter a broad overview of the theory and practice of intergovernmental transfers, with particular focus on developing countries. We begin with a review of the main objectives of intergovernmental transfers and the criteria used to evaluate them. We then consider the principal types of transfers and the mechanisms used to implement them. Given the common problem of fiscal disparities across subnational jurisdictions and the particular interest of Asian Development Bank in this topic, we also discuss the measurement of redistribution and equalization in theory and practice, one of the most difficult challenges in designing transfers. Finally, we examine the linkages between transfers and other major elements of the intergovernmental fiscal system, an important dimension of fiscal transfer design that often receives inadequate
attention. We conclude with some broad lessons about designing intergovernmental transfer systems in developing countries.

The much-noted decline of state autonomy theories owes partly to external challenges to state power, such as globalization, supranational regimes, and the like. But advanced democratic states have also long been seen as threatened from within, especially by powerful private interest groups.The extent of private-interest influence on policy making depends in important part on corporate lobbyists, a group whose activities are chronicled in this essay. Lobbyists exercise considerably more autonomy from the private clients who hire them than has previously been acknowledged. This portrait ultimately suggests that the national state and civil society may be mutually supportive rather than strictly separate spheres.

This paper considers recent thinking on and experience with decentralization and local government reform in developing countries, primarily from the perspective of national policy. The paper begins by reviewing why decentralization has re-emerged as an important development trend and considers whether this is sensible. The third section examines why recent attempts to decentralize have not been particularly successful.  The fourth section selectively summarizes a few experiences from the 1990s in which attempts were made to overcome common obstacles to decentralization. The paper closes with a few modest lessons for the design and implementation of decentralization and local government reform programs.

Compares rural development projects funded by the World Bank in the Philippines and Mexico. Impact of the World Bank on social capital; Indicators of institutional preconditions for informed public participation; Ethnic and gender dimensions of social capital.

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.

Studies the mechanisms that allows microfinance programs to successfully penetrate new segments of credit markets. Repayment rates from low-income borrowers; Microfinance in transition economies; Non-refinancing threats; Features of microfinance credit contracts.

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.

In recent years the factors influencing young people's transition to adulthood have become much more problematic. This edited collection of papers from Pennsylvania State University's fifth annual Family Symposium explores the main issues involved in this transition, such as the widening gap between rich and poor, downsizing, global competition, and technological change. These factors have made jobs scarce in many areas, especially inner cities, and have profoundly affected family formation, making cohabitation, delays in marriage and parenthood, and prolonged residence with parents, the life choices of many young adults. These and other issues are explored by scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, who focus on four main questions: alterations in the structure of opportunity, prior experiences in the family, prior experiences in the workplace, and career development and marriage formation

In recent years, developing countries under fiscal pressure have increasing recognized significant weaknesses in their intergovernmental mechanisms for financing local infrastructure. Many countries are in the process of rationalizing poorly coordinated and subjectively allocated grant systems as well as loans. Such efforts, however, are typically undertaken independently of each other, often providing conflicting incentives for local fiscal behavior. I argue that the reform of grant and loan mechanisms should be explicitly linked to improve the overall effectiveness of the infrastructure finance system. The potential complications involved in designing grant-loan linkages, however, are considerable. I illustrate some key issues by examining the water sector in Indonesia, concluding with suggestions for how to think about creating such linkages in other sectors and countries.

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.