A Public Option for the Core

This paper is focused not on the Internet architecture – as defined by layering, the narrow waist of IP, and other core design principles – but on the Internet infrastructure, as embodied in the technologies and organizations that provide Internet service. In this paper we discuss both the challenges and the opportunities that make this an auspicious time to revisit how we might best structure the Internet’s infrastructure. Currently, the tasks of transit-between-domains and last-mile-delivery are jointly handled by a set of ISPs who interconnect through BGP. In this paper we propose cleanly separating these two tasks. For transit, we propose the creation of a “public option” for the Internet’s core backbone. This public option core, which complements rather than replaces the backbones used by large-scale ISPs, would (i) run an open market for backbone bandwidth so it could leverage links offered by third-parties, and (ii) structure its terms-of-service to enforce network neutrality so as to encourage competition and reduce the advantage of large incumbents

The Irony of Health Care’s Public Option

The idea of a public health insurance option is at least a half century old, but has not yet had its day in the limelight. This chapter explains why if that moment ever comes, health care’s public option will fall short of expectations that it will provide a differentiated, meaningful alternative to private health insurance and will spur health insurance competition. Health care’s public option bubbled up in its best-known form in California in the early 2000s and got increasing mainstream attention in the lead up to the 2010 health reform, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The idea has reemerged with vigor once again as a core tenet of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s plans to build on the ACA. When people talk about health care’s public option, they mean a public health insurance plan, typically based on Medicare that someone could select in the individual, or nongroup, health insurance market instead of a private health insurance offering. Proponents have argued that a public health insurance option could deliver better cost-control than private insurance, while also being able to offer a broad choice of providers and quality control. Health care’s public option died in the 2010 ACA legislative process, but had it been enacted, it would have faced serious obstacles to produce these results its architects hoped. The assumption that people will select the public option if it is better than other options is belied by a mounting body of empirical literature showing how we struggle, and do not do all that well, when choosing among health insurance options. Even more, political thorniness would almost certainly have prevented the public option from being a clear best alternative, which would have further impeded its ability to stand out in a crowd of options. If consumers fail to gravitate overwhelmingly to a public option, it cannot catalyze the market pressure necessary to produce lower prices or higher quality. For a public health insurance option to have transformative potential—to promote greater health equity and freedom—it needs to be more than an option among many, what Sitaraman and Alstott call a competitive public option. It must be designed in a way that does not rely on people weighing it against other options and selecting it when it is the best. This chapter examines possibilities for health care’s public option in three parts. It first explains the theory behind health care’s competitive public option, the form envisioned in the ACA and similar to early proposals by the Biden Campaign during the Democratic primaries. It then considers the challenges this competitive public option would have faced had it become policy reality. Finally, it examines more effective ways that public health insurance might be integrated into a public/private hybrid system to achieve greater health equity

Ultimate Impact: Unifying an Investment Portfolio within a Donor Advised Fund

Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) have grown in use over recent decades, serving as the core philanthropic vehicle for community and public foundations and, more recently, being offered through commercial investment firms as a philanthropic option for clients. When linked with an impact investing strategy, the DAF may serve as a unique, focused asset management vehicle for creating a unified portfolio generating financial performance with social and environmental impacts. This Issue Brief introduces the concept and structure of DAFs and explores their potential as impact investing vehicles. The DAF as a core component of a unified investment approach is explored together with discussion of why DAFs are especially suited to impact investing. The potential for DAFs to expand options for impact investors is discussed along with possible barriers to their introduction

The Open Method of Coordination and integration theory: are there lessons to be learned?

This paper seeks to contextualize the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) and enrich our understanding of it by submitting constructivist insights to its policy assessment with a focus on the Employment Strategy (EES). The most developed and longest-standing OMC policy area, employment provides fertile ground for the assessment of a rapidly expanding theoretical perspective in IR and European integration applied to a growing policy process. Normative considerations as to the essence of the EU and its future trajectory were highly influential in the process of launching the OMC. The paper provides a framework of integration theory and highlights the particular contribution that the ‘thin’ variant of constructivism has made in understanding different aspects of EU policy and politics. In the next section, the OMC is discussed and its core characteristics identified. I claim that most of the OMC’s core elements are directly linked to constructivist assumptions about policy change. The paper identifies three of those, namely policy discourse, learning and participation in policy-making. I subject those to an empirical and theoretical assessment by use of the relevant literature. Concluding that the record shows such mechanisms to be hardly present in the Employment Policy OMC, I argue that an institutionalist reading of OMC provides a credible alternative by focusing on power resources, preferences and strategies available to core OMC actors, namely member states and the Commission. The paper concludes with a twofold argument: firstly, constructivist hopes on OMC are, at least in the current context, ill-founded. Secondly, while the OMC retains a number of advantages, practical policy suggestions that will enhance its appeal to policy-makers and the public alike are due before it becomes a credible policy option

Market games and clubs

The equivalence of markets and games concerns the relationship between two sorts of structures that appear fundamentally different -- markets and games. Shapley and Shubik (1969) demonstrates that: (1) games derived from markets with concave utility functions generate totally balanced games where the players in the game are the participants in the economy and (2) every totally balanced game generates a market with concave utility functions. A particular form of such a market is one where the commodities are the participants themselves, a labor market for example. But markets are very special structures, more so when it is required that utility functions be concave. Participants may also get utility from belonging to groups, such as marriages, or clubs, or productive coalitions. It may be that participants in an economy even derive utility (or disutility) from engaging in processes that lead to the eventual exchange of commodities. The question is when are such economic structures equivalent to markets with concave utility functions. This paper summarizes research showing that a broad class of large economies generate balanced market games. The economies include, for example, economies with clubs where individuals may have memberships in multiple clubs, with indivisibile commodities, with nonconvexities and with non-monotonicities. The main assumption are: (1) that an option open to any group of players is to break into smaller groups and realize the sum of the worths of these groups, that is, essential superadditivity is satisfied and :(2) relatively small groups of participants can realize almost all gains to coalition formation. The equivalence of games with many players and markets with many participants indicates that relationships obtained for markets with concave utility functions and many participants will also hold for diverse social and economic situations with many players. These relationships include: (a) equivalence of the core and the set of competitive outcomes; (b) the Shapley value is contained in the core or approximate cores; (c) the equal treatment property holds -- that is, both market equilibrium and the core treat similar players similarly. These results can be applied to diverse economic models to obtain the equivalence of cooperative outcomes and competitive, price taking outcomes in economies with many participants and indicate that such results hold in yet more generality.Markets; games; market games; clubs; core; market-game equivalence; Shapley value; price taking equilibrium; small group effectiveness; inessentiality of large groups; per capita boundedness; competitive equilibrium; games with side payments; balanced games; totally balanced games; local public goods, core convergence; equal treatment property; equal treatment core; approximate core; strong epsilon core; weak epsilon core; cooperative game; asymptotic negligibility

Measuring Health Care Costs of Individuals with Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance in the U.S.: A Comparison of Survey and Claims Data

As the core nationally representative health expenditure survey in the United States, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) is increasingly being used by statistical agencies to track expenditures by disease. However, while MEPS provides a wealth of data, its small sample size precludes examination of spending on all but the most prevalent health conditions. To overcome this issue, statistical agencies have turned to other public data sources, such as Medicare and Medicaid claims data, when available. No comparable publicly available data exist for those with employer-sponsored insurance. While large proprietary claims databases may be an option, the relative accuracy of their spending estimates is not known. This study compared MEPS and MarketScan estimates of annual per person health care spending on individuals with employer-sponsored insurance coverage. Both total spending and the distribution of annual per person spending differed across the two data sources, with MEPS estimates 10 percent lower on average than estimates from MarketScan. These differences appeared to be a function of both underrepresentation of high expenditure cases and underestimation across the remaining distribution of spending.

Mapping the teaching of aquatic animal veterinary medicine in the European Union and European Free Trade Area

Aquatic animal production is the fastest growing food sector globally. Aquaculture and fisheries are very dynamic sectors in the EU and the number of ornamental aquarium pets is increasing. Veterinarians have a fundamental role to play by ensuring health and welfare of aquatic species, productivity and profitability of fish farming, public health and ecosystem conservation. This study investigates how the undergraduate curriculum prepares future veterinarians for such roles by analysing data from the 77 European veterinary education establishments based in EU and the European Free Trade Area. Over 95 per cent of these establishments incorporate teaching in aquatic animal veterinary medicine in their curriculum, while the great majority do so within the core curriculum. Almost half of the establishments provide teaching in aquatic animal veterinary medicine as separate subjects. Many establishments (>40 per cent) provide such training as elective option in their undergraduate curricula or as postgraduate opportunities to enhance Day One Competences. The veterinary education establishments integrating adequately aquatic animal veterinary medicine in their curriculum are evenly distributed in all regions of Europe. Veterinarians are trained and empowered by legislation to assess health of aquatic animals, to diagnose, to prescribe medicines, to notify for diseases and to ensure safe food for the consumers. Veterinary education establishments should encourage training of veterinarians to follow a career in aquatic animal veterinary medicine

Concessions to PPC?

Public private cooperation (further PPC) is frequently presented as the solution for budgetary shortages for governments at national and regional level. A PPC invests in infrastructure whereby efficient cooperation enables advantages for both public and private parties is claimed. It proves to be difficult to really interest private businesses for investments in infrastructure. Therefore, the central question, which we answer in this paper, is: 'From a theoretical perspective, is PPC an option for investments in infrastructure?' In this paper, a literature review is presented on the subject of public private cooperation for the development of infrastructure projects. The main findings are that firstly, there is a large diversity in projects that might qualify for PPC. More specific, each infrastructure project is unique, making it even more difficult to implement cooperation. Secondly, the role of the national and regional governments in financing infrastructure is changing. This changing role means that the governments withdraw themselves on core functions and that they strive for private party risk-bearing in infrastructure investments. Thirdly, the theoretical definition of PPC and the more practical definition differ. In Europe, most PPCs are worked out as a concession (and therefore not a real PPC). Fourthly, from a cost point of view it is possible that the government is more efficient in cost terms and the private party is more efficient in terms of turnover. Fifthly, there are several reasons for the government to interfere in economic living. Reasons concerning infrastructure might be the public goods characterise and the external impacts. Sixthly, the public characteristics of infrastructure are decreasing. Seventhly, in general it is unattractively for private parties to invest in infrastructure. In order to make it more attractive, profits can be offered to the private parties. However, this will increase the total costs of the project. Eighthly, process management shows that it is no simple task to turn a PPC into a success. When the participating parties are persuaded of the advantages that the cooperation between public and private parties can offer, have chosen consciously for the PPC, and are prepared to invest in cooperation for the long-term, then PPC can offer means to pursue the defined objectives. If true cooperation is aimed for, costs, risks, and profits must be shared instead of divided. The joint venture can provide insights into the process of sharing. Ninthly, the construction businesses are production ventures, whereas banking services and the government operate in the service industry. Finally, the market of the most important private parties that are involved in PPC is an oligopoly. This suggests quite some market power for the private businesses involved.

Conceptualisation and pilot study of shelled compressed earth block for sustainable housing in Nigeria

AbstractMeeting the housing needs in Nigeria is a long-standing task, yet to be realised. The economy of the country, as most developing countries, is ailing with limited resources. Energy and infrastructures are inadequate, yet the use of cement dominated the construction industry. Earth construction is a sustainable option to housing with inherent characteristics that should be desirable in the ailing economy of hot tropical environment in Africa. However, most Nigerians are skeptical of taking a low cost option with less modern effects and uncertain durability. This research explores the issues relating to this problem and aims to bridge the gap between Nigerians and earth, which exists in abundance in Africa. The emerging concept from the survey of public reaction to earth construction in Nigeria is of a shelled compressed earth block (SCEB) of an inner core of ‘earth’ with less stabilisation and an outer shell of the same earth composition but with higher ratio of cement stabilisation for adequate durability, compressed into a single piece. A mechanical kit was designed and fabricated for the production of sample shelled compressed earth block for laboratory tests. Basic preliminary tests were conducted on the model and results revealed that the concept was feasible thus paved the way for further research work in shelled compressed earth block (SCEB)

Institutions, Corruption and Tax Evasion in the Unofficial Economy

In this paper we propose a model of how institutional benefits, taxation and government regulations affect the productive activity of private enterprises. We consider an environment in which public officials enforcing tax and regulatory obligations are potentially corruptible, and markets for corruption may therefore arise that give firms the option of producing unofficially and evading taxes and regulations. By contrast to some previous studies that view corruption and bribery as forces driving firms out of official production into the underground economy, our model features the idea that the `grabbing hands' of corrupt bureaucrats may alternatively serve as `helping hands' allowing firms to exploit profitable opportunities in the unofficial sector. And contrary to a traditional view maintaining that high tax rates are intrinsically a major cause of large shadow economies, our model implies that incentives to evade taxation and produce underground depend on statutory tax rates relative to firm-specific thresholds of tax toleration. Tax toleration is determined, among other things, by firm-specific institutional benefits available to official producers and the costs of corruption required to produce unofficially. Some core predictions of the model concerning the determinants of tax toleration and the relative size of unofficial activity and tax evasion receive broad support from empirical analyses based on firm-level data from the World Business Environment Surveys sponsored by the World Bank.institutions corruption tax evasion unofficial economy underground economy