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The isolated warrior: the impact of everyday forms of individual public servants’ resistance on new public management reforms in Sri Lanka
No full textThis paper analyses the impact of the everyday forms of resistance performed by individual public
servants following the implementation of New Public Management (NPM) reforms in Sri Lanka.
Many elements of the NPM reforms, such as productivity improvement and performance targets
affect individual public servants in a highly personalised nature. For this reason they are unable to
garner the widespread support required to prompt collective action as form of resistance. This
paper argues that this highly personalised nature of reforms pushes individual public servants to
adopt everyday forms of resistance, which eventually make a cumulative impact on the reforms.
The conceptual framework developed by James C. Scott to analyse the everyday forms of peasant
resistance is used in this paper to infer a model of the public servants’ everyday forms of
resistance. Analysing stories of individual public servants who were accused of being resisters,
this paper reveals the nature and limitations of the everyday forms of resistance that public
servants have adopted as well as their impact on the NPM reforms
Culture and corruption in the Pacific Islands: Some conceptual issues and findings from studies of national integrity systems
No full textIdeas about ‘culture' are often used to explain, or excuse, corruption. Willingness to talk, or silence, about corruption are also cultural phenomena. Social scientists often talk about corruption in different ways from policy makers and public opinion. The paper compares how 'culture' has been conceptualised in reports on 'National Integrity Systems' in 14 Pacific Island states. It identifies a number of common themes and issues in the relationship between culture and corruption including the question of gifts versus bribes, nepotism, the role of churches and the media. The paper finds differences between elite and popular opinion about corruption, and links
between suspicions of corruption and ethnic divisions. It concludes with consideration of the impact of different understandings to anti-corruption practice
An optimal surveillance measure against foot and mouth disease in the United States
No full textSurveillance programs on farms and in the local environment provide an essential protection against the importation and spread of exotic diseases. Combined with
border quarantine measures, these programs protect both consumers and producers from
major health concerns and disease incursions that can potentially destroy local
agricultural production and supporting industries, as well as generate substantial losses in trade and tourism. However, surveillance programs also impose costs in the form of expenditures on the surveillance program itself, along with the costs of disease management and eradication should an incursion occur. Taking border quarantine
expenditures as given, this paper develops a stochastic optimal control model (with a
jumpdiffusion process) to determine the optimal level of surveillance activity against a disease incursion by minimizing the present value of the major direct and indirect costs of the disease, as well as the cost of the surveillance and disease management and eradication programs. The model is applied to the case of a potential entry and spread of Foot and Mouth Disease in the United States. Results show that current surveillance expenditures are far less than optimal
Neoliberalism in Japan’s tuna fisheries? Government intervention and reform in the distant water longline industry
No full textNeoliberalism is a political economy term that refers to a public policy mix that is market oriented, pro trade liberalization and advocates minimal state intervention in the economy. Japanese governance has arguably not been based on neoliberal principles, and some see this as contributing to Japan’s long running recession. Japan’s distant water tuna longline fleet has been in economic difficulties since the early years of the recession. In 2001 Prime Minister Koizumi came to power promising neoliberal style reform. This paper presents a history of government involvement in the distant water tuna longline industry and looks for evidence that recent reforms have changed this involvement; both in terms of observable changes to governance structures, and of key stakeholders’ receptiveness to neoliberalism as visible in their representations of issues facing tuna fisheries. We find that very few neoliberal reforms have been implemented in this sector. Furthermore key stakeholders show little sympathy with neoliberal policy prescriptions, meaning they are unlikely to champion such reforms. This conclusion may be specific to fisheries since in Japan the political importance of food production and the iconic status of fish cuisine make the sector particularly susceptible to economic nationalism. In examining relations between industry and government the paper also highlights problems in Japan’s co-management of fisheries
Transaction costs and the assessment of greenhouse policies in the transport energy sector
No full textThis study, which is at data-collection stage, employs a comparative analysis of alternative policy instruments to identify institutional structures that lower transaction costs. Policy institutions are supposed to be designed to help reduce transaction costs through information generation, in the form of signals and incentives, to help markets to function efficiently and policies to be implemented successfully. However, the relative effectiveness of market-based policies and/or command-and-control policies is often assessed without consideration of the impact of transaction costs. Policy analysis incorporating transaction costs is a shift from current practice, including analysis of greenhouse policies in the transport energy sector
Transfer of choice model benefits: a case study of stream mitigation
No full textDevelopment activities place pressures on the natural environment that are very costly to avoid or remedy. In these cases, off-site mitigation may be used to address the effects of development. A choice model is applied to two different communities within a large metropolitan area to identify the values people place on stream attributes and to identify the types and scale of mitigation necessary to offset environmental damages. Tests of benefit transfer between the two communities identify significant, unexplainable differences in values for the same environmental changes. Pooled model tests were able to identify differences that could not be detected using overlapping confidence interval tests or value-difference tests with independently estimated models
Preparation of name and address data for record linkage using hidden Markov models
No full textBACKGROUND: Record linkage refers to the process of joining records that relate to the same entity
or event in one or more data collections. In the absence of a shared, unique key, record linkage
involves the comparison of ensembles of partially-identifying, non-unique data items between pairs
of records. Data items with variable formats, such as names and addresses, need to be transformed
and normalised in order to validly carry out these comparisons. Traditionally, deterministic rulebased
data processing systems have been used to carry out this pre-processing, which is commonly
referred to as "standardisation". This paper describes an alternative approach to standardisation,
using a combination of lexicon-based tokenisation and probabilistic hidden Markov models
(HMMs).
METHODS: HMMs were trained to standardise typical Australian name and address data drawn
from a range of health data collections. The accuracy of the results was compared to that produced
by rule-based systems.
RESULTS: Training of HMMs was found to be quick and did not require any specialised skills. For
addresses, HMMs produced equal or better standardisation accuracy than a widely-used rule-based
system. However, acccuracy was worse when used with simpler name data. Possible reasons for
this poorer performance are discussed.
CONCLUSION: Lexicon-based tokenisation and HMMs provide a viable and effort-effective
alternative to rule-based systems for pre-processing more complex variably formatted data such
as addresses. Further work is required to improve the performance of this approach with simpler
data such as names. Software which implements the methods described in this paper is freely
available under an open source license for other researchers to use and improve
Nationalizing environmental protection in Australia: the international dimensions
No full textA national approach to environmental protection is the most effective way for Australia to protect its own environment and to contribute to the common cause of global environmental protection.[1] The centerpiece of this approach should be a federal environmental protection authority (EPA), able to deal with the issues which arise on a transboundary basis, both nationally and internationally. However, the powers of a national agency will need to be tailored to avoid conflict within the system of cooperative federalism in Australia.
This article reviews constitutional tensions between federal and state government as they relate to several of the major international environmental conventions that bind Australia. The authors conclude that a federal authority, committed to enforcing Australia's international agreements to protect the environment, is the most effective means of addressing worldwide concern with the state of the natural world