Reforming the Public Sector

Reforming the Public Sector

Author: Giovanni Tria

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0815722885

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Many countries are still struggling to adapt to the broad and unexpected effects of modernization initiatives. As changes take shape, governments are challenged to explore new reforms. The public sector is now characterized by profound transformation across the globe, with ramifications that are yet to be interpreted. To convert this transformation into an ongoing state of improvement, policymakers and civil service leaders must learn to implement and evaluate change. This book is an important contribution to that end. Reforming the Public Sector presents comparative perspectives of government reform and innovation, discussing three decades of reform in public sector strategic management across nations. The contributors examine specific reform-related issues including the uses and abuses of public sector transparency, the "Audit Explosion," and the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction in Europe. This volume will greatly aid practitioners and policymakers to better understand the principles underpinning ongoing reforms in the public sector. Giovanni Tria, Giovanni Valotti, and their cohorts offer a scientific understanding of the main issues at stake in this arduous process. They place the approach to public administration reform in a broad international context and identify a road map for public management. Contributors include: Michael Barzelay, Nicola Bellé, Andrea Bonomi Savignon, Geert Bouckaert, Luca Brusati, Paola Cantarelli, Denita Cepiku, Francesco Cerase, Luigi Corvo, Maria Cucciniello, Isabell Egger-Peitler, Paolo Fedele, Gerhard Hammerschmid, Mario Ianniello, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, Irvine Lapsley, Peter Leisink, Mariannunziata Liguori, Renate Meyer, Greta Nasi, James L. Perry, Christopher Pollitt, Adrian Ritz, Raffaella Saporito, MariaFrancesca Sicilia, Ileana Steccolini, Bram Steijn, Wouter Vandenabeele, and Montgomery Van Wart.


Reforming Infrastructure

Reforming Infrastructure

Author: Ioannis Nicolaos Kessides

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.


The OECD Report on Regulatory Reform

The OECD Report on Regulatory Reform

Author: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

Publisher: OECD Publishing

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13:

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Report on the significance, direction, and means of reform in regulatory regimes in member countries. Contents: 1. Why reform regulations? 2. Effects of regulatory reform 3. Supporting public policy goals 4. Strategies for successful reform.


Reforming Juvenile Justice

Reforming Juvenile Justice

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2013-05-22

Total Pages: 463

ISBN-13: 0309278937

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Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.


Women, Business and the Law 2021

Women, Business and the Law 2021

Author: World Bank

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2021-04-05

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1464816530

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Women, Business and the Law 2021 is the seventh in a series of annual studies measuring the laws and regulations that affect women’s economic opportunity in 190 economies. The project presents eight indicators structured around women’s interactions with the law as they move through their lives and careers: Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension. This year’s report updates all indicators as of October 1, 2020 and builds evidence of the links between legal gender equality and women’s economic inclusion. By examining the economic decisions women make throughout their working lives, as well as the pace of reform over the past 50 years, Women, Business and the Law 2021 makes an important contribution to research and policy discussions about the state of women’s economic empowerment. Prepared during a global pandemic that threatens progress toward gender equality, this edition also includes important findings on government responses to COVID-19 and pilot research related to childcare and women’s access to justice.


Taming Regulation

Taming Regulation

Author: Robert T. Nakamura

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2003-10-27

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780815796169

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Despite three decades of vigorous efforts at deregulation across the government, regulation remains ubiquitous. It also continues to be unpopular because it forces individuals and businesses to do things—frequently costly and unpleasant things—that they don't want to do. If regulatory programs are to survive and remain effective, the challenge posed by their endemic unpopularity and political vulnerability must be met. Unlike much of the existing literature on regulation, Taming Regulation begins with the assumption that the government's capacity to utilize regulation as a policy tool is vital. The book examines the questions of how to make the inherently coercive aspects of regulation more politically acceptable in the present antiregulatory environment and how the legal and administrative challenges of reform in ongoing regulatory programs might best be approached. The authors explore these issues through a case study of administrative reform in the Superfund program. Chartered with an ambitious mission to clean up the nation's hazardous waste sites, Superfund was from its inception a uniquely aggressive and unpopular program. Yet despite the election in 1994 of a Republican Congress committed to fundamental changes in environmental regulation, the Superfund program weathered the storm and remains intact today. The authors credit this political and programmatic success to a series of artfully designed and orchestrated internal reforms that softened Superfund's implementation, thus increasing its political support while retaining its potent coercive tools. Taming Regulation provides a cautionary discussion of both the necessity and the difficulty of regulatory reform. It is essential reading for students of regulation and environmental policy, for practitioners contemplating reform of ongoing regulatory programs, and for those interested in the checkered history of Superfund.


Reforming Medicare

Reforming Medicare

Author: Henry Aaron

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2009-11-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0815701500

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Everyone agrees on the need to reform Medicare but not on how to do it. Some argue the program is too comprehensive, others that it is not comprehensive enough. Some suggest it pays too much for health care, others, too little. Meanwhile, the financial stakes continue to mount. Medicare spending exceeded $400 billion in 2007, making it more expensive than the entire health systems of most other nations, as well as the largest national public program other than Social Security and national defense. In R eforming Medicare, Henry J. Aaron and Jeanne M. Lambrew deftly guide readers through this complex debate. They identify and analyze the three leading approaches to reform. Updated social insurance would retain the current system while rationalizing coverage and reducing bureaucracy. Premium support would replace the current system with a capped, per-person payment that beneficiaries could use to buy health insurance. Consumer-directed Medicare would have beneficiaries pay for care up to a high deductible from government- supported savings accounts and offer premium-support coverage above the deductible. In addition to rating each option on its ability to promote access to health care, improve the quality of care, and control costs, the authors evaluate each reform's political strengths and weaknesses. Given the heat generated by the Medicare debate, it is unlikely that any single approach will be implemented in full. Consequently, Aaron and Lambrew describe incremental strategies that blend elements of each plan. Their analysis provides essential insight into the types of hybrid policies that Congress will consider in coming years.


After Trump

After Trump

Author: Bob Bauer

Publisher: Lawfare Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9781735480619

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In After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith provide a comprehensive roadmap for reform of the presidency in the post-Trump era. In fourteen chapters they offer more than fifty concrete proposals concerning presidential conflicts of interest, foreign influence on elections, pardon power abuse, assaults on the press, law enforcement independence, Special Counsel procedures, FBI investigations of presidents and presidential campaigns, the role of the White House Counsel, war powers, control of nuclear weapons, executive branch vacancies, domestic emergency powers, how one administration should examine possible crimes by the president of a prior administration, and more. Each set of reform proposals is preceded by rich descriptions of relevant presidential history, and relevant background law and norms, that place the proposed reforms in context. All of the proposals are prefaced by a chapter that explains how Trump--and, in some cases, his predecessors--conducted the presidency in ways that justify these reforms. After Trump will thus be essential reading for the coming debate on how to reconstruct the laws and norms that constitute and govern the world's most powerful office. It's hard to imagine two better co-authors for the task. Both served in senior executive branch positions-in the administrations of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, respectively-and have written widely on the presidency. Bob Bauer served from 2010-2011 as White House Counsel to President Barack Obama, who in 2013 named Bauer to be Co-Chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. He is a Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law, as well as the co-director of its Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic. Jack Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002-2003. He is the Learned Hand Professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of Lawfare, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Together, in this book, they set the terms for the national discussion to come about the presidency, its powers, and its limits.