Neighborhood rehabilitation and policy transfer

In the mid-1980s, Britain initiated a new neighborhood regeneration program based on a US model, Neighborhood Housing Services. Both programs are based on a partnership between residents, the private sector, and local governments. The central objective of the British government was to reorient British national housing rehabilitation policy from its traditional public-sector, grant-based programs to the private-sector, loan-based system which characterizes US policy. The British program, Neighbourhood Revitalisation Services (NRS), began as a pilot program in four cities and was expanded to twenty-five more neighborhoods. Data suggest considerable reluctance among British homeowners to tap their own savings or borrow money to make home improvements in the NRS neighborhoods. That reluctance may stem from some disincentives built into the early stages of the new program. Thus, at least in the short term, the data suggest that the transition to the US private-sector model has not been readily embraced by British homeowners. In the long term, the success or failure of the policy transfer effort is likely to hinge on whether British homeowners can be convinced that the private-sector approach is here to stay and that a change of governments will not bring a return of the long-established public-sector model with its grant-based foundation.

Community development block grants

This paper summarizes the decentralization policy effects found in an eight-year longitudinal study of the community development block grant program in the United States of America. The effects studied were categorized as programmatic, institutional, and benefits. Attention is also given to the methodological and measurement issues associated with a study of a decentralized program which has operated within a context of shifting federal policies about the appropriate level of federal oversight of the program.

Decentralization and fiscal disparities in the United States of America

This paper examines the increasingly important role of the states in the US federal system and the implications of that growing role for the allocation of intergovernmental transfers. The author argues that as intergovernmental funds become more scarce, as is occurring in the USA, the distribution of these funds needs to take more account of the relative fiscal conditions of the states and to direct a larger share of funds to the fiscally weaker states. Various approaches to altering allocation systems are presented and a specific method for adjusting for fiscal disparities among the states is offered.

Massive MIMO for interference management in heterogeneous networks

In this paper, a spatial interference coordination scheme for a typical macro/small-cell overlay scenarios is proposed which protects small-cell user equipments (UEs) from macro-cell interference and has potential applications in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) deployments. We assume the macro base stations (BSs) to be equipped with a large number of transmit antennas which are employed to reduce interference towards small-cell users by means of spatial transmit processing. Uncoordinated spatial multiplexing (SMUX) per access point (AP) is considered as a baseline, i.e. the macro BS uses zero-forcing (ZF)-based block diagonalization (BD) [1] to serve their user without taking interference towards small-cell UEs into account. The proposed method considers a joint BD/interference-alignment (IA) - approach to calculate the macro pre-coder and reduces the dimension of the interference sub-space for small-cell UEs without destroying the orthogonality of the macro BD. It results, that the the interference can be reduced even if the number of protected small-cell UEs exceeds the number of free spatial dimensions at the macro BS