The rise of neoliberalism and the termination of Keynesian policies

By looking at the policy termination of state aid to ship builders in Amsterdam, this article illustrates how a major policy paradigm shift within recent history, and the change from Keynesian to neoliberal policies, can be explained. The article is informed by a multi-level governance approach to analyse policy change and is based on different types of sources. It presents an in-depth case study of the closing of the Amsterdam shipyards and analyses the role of policy change at different governance-levels (i.e. the city government, national Parliament, national government and the European Commission). In doing so, we are able to illustrate how new actors – in this case the European Commission and the Commissioner for Competition – were able to terminate long existing policies of state aid to shipbuilders, under the label of improving competition and the free market, at the start of the 1980s

Archiveringsbeleid van de gemeente Bergen (NH)

Is de archivering en verslaglegging van de gemeente Bergen doeltreffend en rechtmatig van opzet en uitvoering? Hoe is het beleid over informatiemanagement, dossiervorming en archivering opgezet en toegepast? Een toetsing van de praktijk in 4 cases

De doorwerking van lokaal rekenkameronderzoek

Doorwerking is een typisch rekenkamerthema dat in de wetenschappelijke literatuur maar weinig aandacht heeft gekregen. In mijn bijdrage wil ik aan de hand van bestuurskundige literatuur onderzoeken welke best practices voor doorwerking – gedefinieerd als het gebruik van evaluaties - zijn geïdentificeerd. Aan de hand van 20 doorwerkingsrapporten van gemeentelijke rekenkamer(commissie)s onderzocht welke factoren van gebruik genoemd werden. Hierbij is de doorwerking van 176 publicaties bekeken. In totaal werd 94% van de 1216 aanbevelingen overgenomen door de raad. Hiermee is de procedurele doorwerking hoog. Van de 731 aanbevelingen die bij 17 gemeenten waren na te gaan, werd uit opgave van de rekenkamer(commissie) 58% geheel uitgevoerd, 19% gedeeltelijk en 15% niet of anders opgepakt. Drie groepen factoren van gebruik uit de wetenschappelijke literatuur kwamen terug. Het artikel sluit uit met lessen voor de praktijk om doorwerking van rekenkamerrapporten te bevorderen

20 jaar Verantwoordingsdag: Inzicht voor Kamercommissies

The 20th Accountability Day of the Netherlands House of Representatives is a fitting occasion to research if Dutch Members of Parliament use Performance Information (PI). Performance Information use by managers and politicians is a basic assumption for managing and guiding Performance-based Budgeting. Ironically, from literature review on Performance Use we know that politicians and especially parliamentarians do not use Performance Information for decision making or scrutiny. This is specifically so when PI-reports are long. Using the framework of accountability of Bovens (2007) and by using content analysis of the questions, motions and debates of the Standing Committees on the annual reports this article shows that in all phases (informing, debating, sanctions) performance information is used by MP’s. Contradicting earlier research on parliamentarians we found that they use annual reports and reports of the Court of Audit as their main sources in the debates. This article shows that the use of PI in parliament is steadily rising. The growing importance of performance information for Accountability is further illustrated by

The European Committee as change agent:State aid, neoliberalism and the closure of Amsterdam shipyards, 1976-1986

By analysing the case of the closure of the Amsterdam shipyards in the 1980s, this article shows how the European Commission actively promoted a neoliberal turn in policies towards state support for economic sectors in Western-Europe. Besides the EC, the article also makes clear that quite early leading civil servants within the Dutch ministries of Economic Affairs and of Finance embraced neoliberal ideas as an answer to tackle the economic crisis of the 1970s. A third actor which is often neglected in explanations on the rise of neoliberalism, were management consultants – in this case from management consultancy firm McKinsey – who wrote alarming reports about the shipbuilding industry and promoted ideas that emphasised the importance of business principles and individual managers as key for improvement, thereby offering an alternative to macro-economic Keynesian models of growth

MonetDB/XQuery - Consistent & Efficient Updates on the Pre/Post Plane

Relational XQuery processors aim at leveraging mature relational DBMS query processing technology to provide scalability and efficiency. To achieve this goal, various storage schemes have been proposed to encode the tree structure of XML documents in flat relational tables. Basically, two classes can be identified: (1) encodings using fixed-length surrogates, like the preorder ranks in the pre/post encoding [5] or the equivalent pre/size/level encoding [8], and (2) encodings using variable-length surrogates, like, e.g., ORDPATH [9] or P-PBiTree [12]. Recent research [1] showed a clear advantage of the former for efficient evaluation of XPath location steps, exploiting techniques like cheap node order tests, positional lookup, and node skipping in staircase join [7]. However, once updates are involved, variable-length surrogates are often considered the better choice, mainly as a straightforward implementation of structural XML updates using fixed-length surrogates faces two performance bottlenecks: (i) high physical cost (the preorder ranks of all nodes following the update position must be modified—on average 50% of the document), and (ii) low transaction concurrency (updating the size of all ancestor nodes causes lock contention on the document root)

Benchmarking van beleid

Prestatievergelijking, ook wel benchmarking genoemd, is al jaren bezig met een opmars binnen overheden en diverse beleidsdisciplines. Ook in de media duiken regelmatig lijstjes op waarin landen met elkaar worden vergeleken, van de landen met de meest concurrerende economieën ter wereld (Global Competitiveness Index van het World Economic Forum) tot de ranglijstjes met prestaties van leerlingen per land (PISA onderzoek van de Organisatie voor Economische Samenwerking en Ontwikkeling –