World Bank treatment of the social impact of adjustment programs

Since 1987 the Bank's operational guidelines have required President's Reports supporting structural adjustment loans (SALs) to pay particular attention to an analysis of the short term impact of the adjustment program on the poor and to measures proposed to alleviate negative effects. The authors review how SAL President's Reports prepared between July 1986 and December 1988 have addressed the social impact issue. The authors find that most efforts to address this issue have focused on targeted projects, including special employment programs, nutrition projects, resettlement projects, and credit, severance pay, and retraining projects for displaced workers. By contrast, there has been little analysis of the impact of the chosen policy mix on major sub-groups in poverty. Design modifications other than reallocations of social expenditures, have received relatively less attention. For example, the composition, incidence, and effectiveness of public expenditures and their implications for reducing poverty have not generally been examined. In preparing for adjustment operations, Bank staff should explore policy choices that eliminate economic distortions in a way that creates a basis for a more equitable pattern of long-term growth. To the extent that some adjustment measures may hurt the poor in the short term, this should be mitigated through appropriate modifications in SAL design and carefully designed targeted projects.Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Assessment,Health Economics&Finance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,ICT Policy and Strategies

“Corporate restructuring issues under the holding company structure – The NTT Case in Japan”

ABSTRACT This research paper focused on the corporate restructuring of Nippon Telegraph Telecommunication (NTT Group) under the pure holding company structure in 1999 and its implications. In order to understand the holding company structure, we introduced the concept of "internal capital markets" and explained its application within the framework of NTT Group. Next, we gave an account of the background events leading to NTT Group's corporate restructuring in order to understand the reason for choosing and keeping the holding company structure. Our research methodologies include interviews with NTT Group's management and data from public sources. Finally, to analyze the effect of the holding company structure to NTT Group, we conducted a hypothetical valuation analysis using the free cash flow model. Comparing the market value of NTT Group with our valuation results, it appeared that the market has undervalued NTT Group. We concluded our report with some suggestions on how NTT Group might be able to increase their market value.HOLDING COMPANY STRUCTURE, RESTRUCTURING, INTERNAL CAPITAL MARKET, VALUATION

The First Hundred Years of the Bureau of Labor Statistics

[Excerpt] This volume reports on the first century of a government agency whose founders hoped that, by publishing facts about economic conditions, the agency would help end strife between capital and labor. The Bureau\u27s early work included studies of depressions, tariffs, immigrants, and alcoholism and many assignments to investigate and mediate disputes between labor and management. Most of these functions- especially those involving formulation of policy- passed on to other agencies. The Bureau today remains one of the Nation\u27s principal economic factfinders. In writing the book, Drs. Goldberg and Moye had full freedom to interpret events in accordance with their judgments as historians, without conformance to an official view of institutional history. Given the perspective made possible by passing years, the authors offer broader evaluations of the Bureau\u27s early history than of contemporary events

Securing the Nation: Law, Politics, and Organization at the Federal Security Agency, 1939–1953

American public law is affected by two important dynamics impacting the relationship between citizens and their government: how the executive branch defines national security, and how politicians compete to secure control of the vast public organizations through which governments implement the law. This Article analyzes the intersection of these dynamics by investigating the now-forgotten history of the US Federal Security Agency (FSA) and drawing perspectives from separation of powers, organization theory, and the study of American political development. In 1939, the Roosevelt White House overcame strong political opposition to centralize vast legal responsibilities within the FSA. Soon after its creation, the agency had acquired responsibility for social security, education, drug regulation, protection of the food supply, civil defense preparedness, supplying employees to war-related industries, facilitating the relocation of Japanese-Americans, antiprostitution enforcement, and biological weapons research. By 1953, the FSA engendered one of the most important American bureaucracies of the twentieth century: the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Yet little is known about precisely how or why the White House fought to create the FSA, why the agency pervasively mixed domestic regulatory and national defense functions both before and after World War II, or what its creation wrought for the legal mandates entrusted to the agency. This Article\u27s analysis reveals how, on the eve of World War II, the White House sought to use the restructuring to achieve greater control over the agency\u27s multiple domains of legal jurisdiction by building oversight capacity in an organizational environment more congenial to the bureaus\u27 functions. It then used that control to publicly promote a broader conception of the security issue that held the prospect of more thoroughly protecting domestic programs important to the administration. And by rendering ambiguous the distinction between domestic and international security functions, the administration enlarged support for some of its signature programs at a time when the New Deal legislative coalition was eroding. In effect, the agency\u27s amalgam of legal functions epitomized the administration\u27s ambitious conception of security, which became sufficiently elastic to encompass legal responsibilities now routinely segregated into domains involving social services, economic security, health regulation, and geostrategic national defense. These dynamics illustrate limitations in prevailing theories of law and organization emphasizing deliberately engineered bureaucratic failure or purely symbolic position-taking. They also showcase the historical connection between the design of public agencies, separation of powers, and the ambiguities inherent in the definition of security as a category of government responsibility. The recent spike of interest in homeland security is furnishing similar opportunities to reshape the domestic regulatory state

Crisis Bureaucracy: Homeland Security and the Political Design of Legal Mandates

Policymakers fight over bureaucratic structure because it helps shape the legal interpretations and regulatory decisions of agencies through which modern governments operate. In this article, we update positive political theories of bureaucratic structure to encompass two new issues with important implications for lawyers and political scientists: the significance of legislative responses to a crisis, and the uncertainty surrounding major bureaucratic reorganizations. The resulting perspective affords a better understanding of how agencies interpret their legal mandates and deploy their administrative discretion. We apply the theory to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Two principal questions surrounding this creation are: (1) why the President changed from opposing the creation of a new department to supporting it and (2) why his plan for such a department was far beyond the scope of any other existing proposal. We argue that the President changed his mind in part because he did not want to be on the losing side of a major legislative battle. But more significantly, the President supported the massive new department in part to further domestic policy priorities unrelated to homeland security. By moving a large set of agencies within the department and instilling them with new homeland security responsibilities without additional budgets, the president forced these agencies to move resources out of their legacy mandates. Perversely, these goals appear to have been accomplished at the expense of homeland security. Finally, we briefly discuss more general implications of our perspective: first, previous reorganizations (such as FDR's creation of a Federal Security Agency and Carter's creation of an Energy Department) also seem to reflect presidential efforts to enhance their control of administrative functions, including some not directly related to the stated purpose of the reorganization; and, second, our analysis raises questions about some of the most often-asserted justifications for judicial deference to agency legal interpretations.

"The United States Food and Drug Administration: Its role, authority, history, harmonization activities, and cooperation with the European Union."

The purpose of this article is to provide background about the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The article will focus particularly upon the agency's authority, its place in the United States system, and its history as a domestic institution and as a participant in international activities. Finally, the article summarizes principal areas of regulatory cooperation with the European Union in the foods area and outlines future areas of cooperation. The article may be of interest to counterparts in other countries, confronted with such food safety issues - particularly the recent evidence that humans might develop a variant of a fatal neurological disease (Creutzfeld-Jakob disease) as a result of eating beef from cattle afflicted with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)

The ISCIP Analyst, Volume V, Issue 13

This repository item contains a single issue of The ISCIP Analyst, an analytical review journal published from 1996 to 2010 by the Boston University Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy

Special Libraries, November 1949

Volume 40, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1949/1008/thumbnail.jp

UA3/8/6 President\u27s Office-Meredith Committees & Task Forces

Committee and task force files created by the President\u27s Office during Thomas Meredith\u27s tenure as president of WKU