Public financing of the arts in England

The paper describes the method, amount and composition of public financing of the arts and heritage services in England during the 1990s. This offers the background to a discussion of how far the rationale for government financing for such services can rely on arguments derived from welfare economics. The presence of ‘market failure’ has been widely accepted by successive governments and their advisers, but attempts to remove it have encountered the familiar problems of ensuring allocative and technical efficiency when production subsidies are the main policy instrument. Special attention is devoted to the policy dilemmas that are likely to arise in the years ahead in the performing arts, heritage and broadcasting.

Eulerian bias and the galaxy density field

We investigate the effects on cosmological clustering statistics of empirical biasing, where the galaxy distribution is a local transformation of the present-day Eulerian density field. The effects of the suppression of galaxy numbers in voids, and their enhancement in regions of high density, are considered, independently and in combination. We compare results from numerical simulations with the predictions of simple analytic models. We find that the bias is generally scale-dependent, so that the shape of the galaxy power spectrum differs from that of the underlying mass distribution. The degree of bias is always a monotonic function of scale, tending to an asymptotic value on scales where the density fluctuations are linear. The scale dependence is often rather weak, with many reasonable prescriptions giving a bias which is nearly independent of scale. We have investigated whether such an Eulerian bias can reconcile a range of theoretical power spectra with the twin requirements of fitting the galaxy power spectrum and reproducing the observed mass-to-light ratios in clusters. It is not possible to satisfy these constraints for any member of the family of CDM-like power spectra in an Einstein - de Sitter universe when normalised to match COBE on large scales and galaxy cluster abundances on intermediate scales. We discuss what modifications of the mass power spectrum might produce agreement with the observational data.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX (using mn.sty, epsfig), 17 Postscript figures included. Accepted for publication in MNRA

What price civil justice?

In the jurisdictions both of England and Wales and of Scotland, the civil justice system is currently the subject of intense critical appraisal. This paper considers the current status of civil justice, beginning by asking what we expect from our system of civil justice and going on to analyse the supply and demand of civil legal services in market terms. The authors conclude that there is scope in the system for substantial experimentation with procedural reform. They suggest that as much as possible should be done to encourage the development of a cafeteria-style of civil justice system with improved information flows for consumers, and provision for innovations such as cost capping and risk sharing between legal representatives and clients, so providing consumers with more freedom of choice.