Emerging issues of privatization and the public sector

Pressure to move toward privatization has mounted in the face of severe economic crises both in the developed and developing world. To date, the pace of privatization in the developing world has been slow and its impact modest. This report accordingly discusses the issue of privatization in the context of developed and developing countries. In addition, it examines certain issues that occur with privatization such as the effect competition and ownership have on performance, the tension between multiple objectives and the proper balance between the enterprise's autonomy and the government's role in regulating market power. The report concludes that if these issues are neglected and not taken into account, the long term benefits of privatization will not materialize.State Owned Enterprise Reform,Legal Institutions of the Market Economy,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management

Making voice work : the report card on Banglalore's public service

The author reports how a"report card"on public services in the Indian city of Bangalore was used by citizen groups to creategreater public awareness about the poor performance of public service providers and to challenge them to be more efficient and responsive to their customers. The report card was the result of a survey of a sample of users (both rich and poor) of the city's services and rated public agencies in terms of public satisfaction with different dimensions of their services. Public feedback was used to quantify the extent of corruption and other indirect costs of the services. The result was a citizen's assessment of public services. The survey was completed in 1993, but the follow-up activities continued for three years, with the active involvement of several concerned citizen groups and nongovernment bodies. The author discusses how the media disseminated the report card findings, how public agencies responded to it, and how agencies joined citizen groups in joint initiatives to improve services. Similar report cards have since been prepared on several other large cities in India. It is not easy to measure the impact of the report card on the quality and responsiveness of Bangalore's service providers. The author examines the problems involved and gives some intermediate indicators. There is some evidence that public awareness of the problems has increased as a result of the experiment. Civil society institutions seem to be more active and their interactions with public agencies have become better organized, more purposeful, and continuous. As a result, some public agencies in Bangalore have begun to take steps to improve their services.Enterprise Development&Reform,Decentralization,ICT Policy and Strategies,Municipal Financial Management,Corruption&Anitcorruption Law,Governance Indicators,ICT Policy and Strategies,Poverty Assessment,Municipal Financial Management,Health Economics&Finance

The conjugacy problem for automorphism groups of countable homogeneous structures

We consider the conjugacy problem for the automorphism groups of a number of countable homogeneous structures. In each case we find the precise complexity of the conjugacy relation in the sense of Borel reducibility

Non-additivity of pair interactions in charged colloids

It is general wisdom that the pair potential of charged colloids in a liquid may be closely approximated by a Yukawa interaction, as predicted by the classical Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek (DLVO) theory. We experimentally determine the effective forces in a binary mixture of like-charged particles, of species 1 and 2, with blinking optical tweezers. The measured forces are consistent with a Yukawa pair potential but the (12) cross-interaction is not equal to the geometric mean of the (11) and (22) like-interactions, as expected from DLVO. The deviation is a function of the electrostatic screening length and the size ratio, with the cross-interaction measured being consistently weaker than DLVO predictions. The corresponding non-additivity parameter is negative and grows in magnitude with increased size asymmetry.Comment: Final versio

The Effect of Pre-Primary Education on Primary School Performance

Although the theoretical case for universal pre-primary education is strong, the empirical foundation is weak. In this paper, we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre-primary education on subsequent primary school performance in Argentina. We estimate that one year of preprimary school increases average third grade test scores by 8 percent of a mean or by 23 percent of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores. We also find that preprimary school attendance positively affects student’s self-control in the third grade as measured by behaviors such as attention, effort, class participation, and discipline.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57218/1/wp838 .pd

Extractive Adversarial Networks: High-Recall Explanations for Identifying Personal Attacks in Social Media Posts

We introduce an adversarial method for producing high-recall explanations of neural text classifier decisions. Building on an existing architecture for extractive explanations via hard attention, we add an adversarial layer which scans the residual of the attention for remaining predictive signal. Motivated by the important domain of detecting personal attacks in social media comments, we additionally demonstrate the importance of manually setting a semantically appropriate `default' behavior for the model by explicitly manipulating its bias term. We develop a validation set of human-annotated personal attacks to evaluate the impact of these changes.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2018 Code and data available at https://github.com/shcarton/rcn