The Anatomy and Facets of Dynamic Policies

Information flow policies are often dynamic; the security concerns of a program will typically change during execution to reflect security-relevant events. A key challenge is how to best specify, and give proper meaning to, such dynamic policies. A large number of approaches exist that tackle that challenge, each yielding some important, but unconnected, insight. In this work we synthesise existing knowledge on dynamic policies, with an aim to establish a common terminology, best practices, and frameworks for reasoning about them. We introduce the concept of facets to illuminate subtleties in the semantics of policies, and closely examine the anatomy of policies and the expressiveness of policy specification mechanisms. We further explore the relation between dynamic policies and the concept of declassification.Comment: Technical Report of publication under the same name in Computer Security Foundations (CSF) 201

Contract enforcement, capital accumulation, and Argentina's long-run decline

Argentina has slipped from being among the ten world’s richest countries by the eve of World War I to its current position close to mid-range developing countries. Why did Argentina fall behind? We employ a structural model to investigate the extent to which the enforceability of contracts and the security of property rights, as measured by Clague et al.’s “contract intensive money” (CIM), conditioned broad capital accumulation and, subsequently, economic performance in Argentina. Our results suggest that poor contract enforcement played a significant role at the origins of Argentina’s unique experience of long-run decline.Publicad

Black, Brown, and Powerful: Freedom Dreams in Unequal Cities

In April 2018, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy convened scholars, activists, policy advocates, community residents, and nonprofit workers to share and discuss research and action pertaining to processes of inequality in Los Angeles. We sought to shed light on the entangled structures of oppression, including urban displacement, housing precarity, racialized policing, criminal justice debt, forced labor, and the mass supervision and control of youth. Through keynote talks, group dialogue, and workshops, we analyzed how in Los Angeles, and elsewhere, black and brown communities face multiple forms of banishment and exploitation ranging from the criminalization of poverty to institutionalized theft.The question of racial banishment has been an important one for the Institute since its inauguration two years ago. This year though, amidst the troubled times of Trumpism, we wanted to shift our focus from banishment to freedom. In the reports that follow, you will find many examples of what Robin D.G. Kelley, a key presence at the Institute, has famously called “freedom dreams.” Located in, and thinking from South Central Los Angeles, the event’s participants provide insight into organizing frameworks and resistance strategies that challenge exclusion and refuse subordination. From tenant organizing to debtors’ unions, from underground scholars to educational reparations, visions of freedom abound. The Institute on Inequality and Democracy is convinced that university-based research can, and must, support such freedom dreams. Such partnership – between the public university and social justice movements – requires careful attention to the difficult task of decolonizing the university. This mandate is evident throughout this collection of reports. There is no easy alliance between academic power and banished communities; there is no obvious solidarity between urban plans and freedom dreams. This event was intended to be a step towards building such alliances, especially by reconstructing the curriculum and canon of knowledge

The incentives to invest in job training : do strict labor codes influence this decision?

This paper studies the link between labor market regulations and the incentives of firms to invest in the human capital of their employees. The author's explore a firm level data set across several developing countries and comparethe supply of formal training programs for firms exposed to different degrees of de facto labor regulations. The author's findings show that a more flexible labor code tends to be associated with a smaller investment in job training. However, this effect is small and heterogeneous. Reforms that simultaneously accelerate the diffusion of temporary contracts and increase the protection of permanent workers tend to generate negative effects on the firm's investment in human capital.Labor Markets,Labor Policies,Labor Standards,Education For All,Banks&Banking Reform

Closing the Data Gap: Protecting Biometric Information Under the Biometric Information Privacy Act and the California Consumer Protection Act

(Excerpt) Between May and June of 2014, Stacy Rosenbach bought her son, Alexander, a Six Flags season pass online. She submitted Alexander’s personal information and read that Alexander would complete the sign-up process at the park. No details described what the sign-up process would entail. After showing his online receipt at Six Flags, Alexander was brought to an office to provide the customary thumb scan. Alexander’s thumb scan, along with the season pass card, was required to permit him to enter the various rides. He was not given any information about how his thumb scan would be stored or used after his season pass expired. Alexander—a fourteen-year-old boy—thought nothing of this process and voluntarily gave Six Flags his thumb scan. Mrs. Rosenbach, on the other hand, was shocked to learn of this scan when Alexander returned home. After Mrs. Rosenbach asked Alexander for the paperwork from the season pass, he told her Six Flags “did ‘it all by fingerprint now.’ ” Although Alexander never returned to Six Flags, Six Flags kept his biometric information. Curiously, Six Flags has not revealed how long it planned to keep Alexander’s thumb scan or how it planned to use it

Reforming tax systems - the World Bank record in the 1990s

The main constraint on world Bank operations in tax and customs administration is the Bank's inadequate institutional framework for accumulating knowledge from loan operations, concludes this review of the Bank's record on reform of tax systems in the 1990s. The Bank's theoretical basis for reforming tax and customs administration is still rudimentary. Recent theories stress the importance of institutions that harness voice and improve transparency and contestability, but there is little evidence that reform of these factors alone makes tax administration more effective. Improvements are needed in pre-project diagnosis and project design, especially for examining accountability, administration costs, managerial autonomy, performance incentives for staff, taxpayer equity and services, and environmental factors. Pre-project work could draw more systematically on lessons from previous experience. Institutional components of project design have been biased toward organization, manpower upgrading, and procedures related to information technology. Too little attention has been paid to improving accountability, administrative cost-effectiveness, and anticorruption institution-building. Projects have made inadequate use of different kinds of performance indicators, with little uniformity in those applied. Methods used to evaluate project outcomes could be better and more uniform. Suggestions for future Bank operations: 1) doing better background work and articulating a strategy and comprehensive framework for Bank involvement in reform of tax administration. 2) Possibly supporting and strengthening regional tax administration associations, which could serve as catalysts for change. 3) Strengthening partnering and supporting private sector consultant organizations, so they can manage major components of administrative reform. 4) Institutionalizing the accumulation of knowledge about tax administration (which might require changing staff recruitment, the mix of staff skills, and training plans). The authors provide recommendations for improving project diagnosis, design, performance indicators, and appraisal, as well as a short list of projects that serve as guides to good practice.Enterprise Development&Reform,Decentralization,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Banks&Banking Reform,National Governance,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Municipal Financial Management,Tax Policy and Administration

Scalable Security Mechanisms for the Internet

The design principle of restricting local autonomy only where necessary for global robustness has led to a scalable Internet. Unfortunately, this scalability and capacity for distributed control has not been achieved in the mechanisms for specifying and enforcing security policies. The STRONGMAN system described in this paper demonstrates three new approaches to providing efficient local policy enforcement complying with global security policies. First is the use of a compliance checker to provide great local autonomy within the constraints of a global security policy. Second is a mechanism to compose policy rules into a coherent enforceable set, e.g., at the boundaries of two locally autonomous application domains. Third is the lazy instantiation of policies to reduce the amount of state enforcement points need to maintain. We demonstrate the use of these approaches in the design, implementation and measurements of a distributed firewall

Diagnosing development bottlenecks : China and India

Although it had a a lower income level than India in 1980, China's 2006 per capita gross domestic product stands more than twice that of India's. This paper investigates the role of the business environment in explaining China's productivity advantage using recent firm-level survey data. The analysis finds that China has better infrastructure, more skilled workers, and more labor-hiring flexibility than India, but a worse access to finance and higher regulatory burden. Infrastructure appears to be a key constraint for India: it lags significantly behind China, yet it has important indirect effects for the effectiveness of labor flexibility. Labor flexibility is also likely a major constraint for India, as evident in the predominance of small firms, the importance of firm size in accounting for India's disadvantage in productivity, and the complementarity of proxies of labor flexibility with infrastructure and access to finance. Interestingly, regulatory uncertainty has adverse effects in India but not in China. The empirical analysis suggests that it is important to consider country-specific growth bottlenecks and the indirect effects of policy reforms.Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Labor Markets,Banks&Banking Reform,E-Business

Migration, Co-ordination Failures and EU Enlargement: Paper Presented at the 41st Economic Policy Panel in Luxembourg, 15/16 April 2005

European migration policies are characterised by a fundamental paradox: While the barriers for the free mobility of labour have been largely removed within the EU, the regulation of immigration from third countries remains in the domain of national policies of the individual Member States. During the last ten years, these policies have become more and more restrictive, although the public opinion has not become more hostile on migrants. In this paper we analyse whether increasing migration restrictions can be traced back to co-ordination failures. Simulations on basis of a general equilibrium model suggest that the economic benefits from international migration are, at a GDP gain of 0.2-0.3% at a migration of 1% of the labour force, high. However, assuming (partially) rigid wages and persisting unemployment in both the sending the receiving countries, natives in the receiving countries can lose from migration. Moreover, our results show that even under pessimistic assumptions on the unemployment rates of migrants the joint GDP of the sending and receiving countries tends to increase with unemployment benefits. However, the losses of the receiving country increase with the replacement rate. While the principles of the free movement and equal treatment enable the Community to realise the economic gains from intra-EU migration, co-ordination failures both between the receiving and the sending countries and among the receiving countries hinder international migration between the EU and its neighbouring regions. The latter is proved at the example of the Eastern Enlargement episode, where national decision-making has led to a 'race-to-the-top' with regard to transitional restrictions. While a co-ordination of migration policies between receiving and sending countries is hampered by conflicting interests, a co-ordination among receiving countries at the EU-level can reduce migration restrictions and improve welfare in Europe.