Concessionary nature of public-private partnerships in Russia and Kazakhstan: a critical review

This article provides a critical overview of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in Russia and Kazakhstan and examines the rationale underpinning such partnerships. The analysis discusses the reasons why governments in Russia and Kazakhstan focus principally on concessions as a form of PPP and goes on to provide a critical assessment of the key approaches and situational factors relating to concessions in these two countries. The article finds that external globalization impulses pressed Russia and Kazakhstan to align their policies and institutions with western orthodoxy and perceived international best practice. An ever-increasing emphasis on use of PPPs has been a key feature of this alignment. However, the governments of Russia and Kazakhstan have increasingly resorted to concessions as progress with the development and implementation of Western style PPP models has stalled. This article concludes that the governments of Russia and Kazakhstan have demonstrated an overly optimistic approach to PPP and as a result may have substantially understated their overall concessional risks and costs. Features of Russian and Kazakhstani PPP arrangements such as ambiguity in output specification and extensive reliance on government subsidies, combined with lack of expertise of private partners, may significantly decrease concession benefits.

The effects of strategy instruction on writing strategy use for students of different proficiency levels

Learners’ strategy use has been widely researched over the past few decades. However, studies which focus on the impact of strategy instruction on strategy use, and how far learners of different proficiency levels are able to use the strategies taught in an effective manner, are somewhat rare. The focus of this paper is the impact of writing strategy instruction on writing strategy use of a group of 12 second language learners learning to write in English for Academic Purposes classes. Stimulated recall was used to explore whether this impact differed according to the proficiency level of the students, and revealed that for both high and low proficiency learners’ strategy use developed as a result of the instruction. The implications of these findings for strategy instruction design are discussed

Globalization, Agency, and Institutional Innovation: The Rise of Public-Private Partnerships in Global Governance

Public and private actors increasingly cooperate in global governance, a realm previously reserved for states and intergovernmental organizations (IOs). This trend raises fascinating theoretical questions. What explains the rise in public-private institutions and their role in international politics? Who leads such institutional innovation and why? To address the questions, this paper develops a theory of the political demand and supply of public-private institutions and specifies the conditions under which IOs and non-state actors would cooperate, and states would support this public-private cooperation. The observable implications of the theoretical argument are evaluated against the broad trends in public-private cooperation and in a statistical analysis of the significance of demand and supply-side incentives in public-private cooperation for sustainable development. The study shows that public-private institutions do not simply fill governance gaps opened by globalization, but cluster in narrower areas of cooperation, where the strategic interests of IOs, states, and transnational actors intersect.

Commitment of the Mentally Ill in Maine: a History of Public Policy

This paper traces the historical development in the State of Maine of the procedures by which persons found to be mentally unsound can be committed to institutional care against their will. Beginning in 1820 and continuing to the present, specific changes in the statutes governing this area are noted. Both the criminal and civil commitment procedures are dealt with. Following the historical trace, pending legislation relating to the criminal commitment process is examined in detail. Finally, consideration is given to the need for a complete reexamination of the practice of involuntary commitment involving ethical and constitutional issues.

A note on policy, the composition of public expenditures and economic growth

In this article we study the growth and welfare effects of fiscal and monetary policies in economies where public investment is part of the productive process we present four different models that share the same technology with public infrastructure as a separate argument of the production function. We show that growth is maximized at positive levels of income tax and inflation. However, unless there are no transfers or public goods in the economy, maximization of growth does not imply welfare maximization we show that the optimal tax rate is greater than the rate that maximizes growth and the optimal rate of money creation is below the growth maximizing rate. With public infrastructure in the production function we no longer obtain superneutrality in the Sidrausky model.

The contagion effect of public debt on monetary policy: the brazilian experience

This paper attempts to explain why the Brazilian inter-bank interest rate is so high compared with rates practiced by other emerging economies. The interplay between the markets for bank reserves and government securities feeds into the inter-bank rate the risk premium of the Brazilian public debt.

The impact of public capital and public investment on economic growth: an empirical investigation

in this anicle we measure the impact of public sector capital and investment on economic growth. Initially, traditional growth accounting regressions are run for a cross-country data set. A simple endogenous growth model is then constructed in order to take into account the determinants of labor, private capital and public capital. In both cases, public capital is a separate argument of the production function. An additional data-set constructed with quarterly American data was used in the estimations of the growth mode!. The results indicate lhat public capital and public investment play a significant role in determining growth rates and have a significant impact on capital and labor returns. Furthermore, the impact of public investment on productivity growth was found to be positive and always significant for bolh samples. Hence. in a fully optimizing modelo we confmn previous results in the literature that lhe failure of public investment to keep pace with output growlh during the Seventies and Eighties may have played a major role in the slowdown of lhe productivity growth in the period. Anolher main outcome concems the output elasticity wilh respect to public capital. The coefficiem estimates are always positive and significant but magnitudes depend on each of lhe two data set used.

Inflationary financing of public investment and economic growth

a theoretical model is constructed in order to explain particular historical experiences in which inflation acceleration apparently helped to spur a period of economic growth. Government financed expenditures affect positively the productivity growth in this model so that the distortionary effect of inflation tax is compensated by the productive effect of public expenditures. We show that for some interval of money creation rates there is an equilibrium where money is valued and where steady state physical capital grows with inflation. It is also shown that zero inflation and growth maximization are never the optimal policies.

Three essays on education from the perspective of the economics of public setor

This work consists of three essays organized into chapters that seek to answer questions at first sight unrelated, but with one common denominator, which is the scarcity of public resources devoted to education, overall, especially in lower education. . The first chapter deals with the scarcity of resources devoted to education in a context of population aging. Two hypotheses were tested for Brazilian municipalities on the relationship between the aging of the population and educational expenditure. The first, already proven in the literature, is that there is an intergenerational conflict for resources and the increase of the share of elderly in the population reduces the educational expenditure. The second, proposed here for the first time, is that there should be reduction of competition for resources if there is a relationship of co-residence between young and old. The results indicated that an increase in the share of elderly reduces the educational expenditure per youth. But the results also illustrate that an increase in the share of elderly co-residing with youth (family arrangement more common in Latin American countries) raises the educational expenditure, which reflects a reduction of competition for resources between generations. The second chapter assesses the allocative efficiency of investments in Higher Education. Using the difference between first-year and last-year students’ scores from Enade aggregated by HEI as a product in the Stochastic Production Function, is possible to contribute with a new element in the literature aimed at estimating the production function of education. The results show that characteristics of institutions are the variables that best explain the performance of students, and that public institutions are more inefficient than the private ones. Finally, the third chapter presents evidence that the allocation of public resources in early childhood education is important for a better future school performance. In this chapter was calculated the effects of early childhood education on literacy scores of children attending the 2nd grade of elementary school. The results using OLS and propensity score matching show that students who started school at the ages to 5, 4, and 3 years had literacy scores between 12.22 and 19.54 points higher than the scores of those who began school at the ages 6 years or late. The results also suggest that the returns in terms of literacy scores diminish in relation to the number of years of early childhood education.

Applying negotiation skills in the design of public policies: analysis of the city of São Paulo’s invoice program

The author argues that by applying problem-solving negotiation skills in the design of public policies, public administrators benefit from more effective and wide-ranging outcomes in the realization of their goals. In order to demonstrate this idea, the author analyzes how negotiation skills – such as identifying key actors and their interests, recognizing hardbargaining tactics and changing the players, knowing your best alternative, creating value and building trust – permeated and contributed to the success of the City of São Paulo’s Invoice Program (“Programa Nota Fiscal Paulistana”), a public policy aimed at combating tax evasion of service tax in the City of São Paulo.

Rational expectations and the service of public debt: a recursive approach

This paper uses dynamic programming to study the time consistency of optimal macroeconomic policy in economies with recurring public deficits. To this end, a general equilibrium recursive model introduced in Chang (1998) is extended to include govemment bonds and production. The original mode! presents a Sidrauski economy with money and transfers only, implying that the need for govemment fmancing through the inflation tax is minimal. The extended model introduces govemment expenditures and a deficit-financing scheme, analyzing the SargentWallace (1981) problem: recurring deficits may lead the govemment to default on part of its public debt through inflation. The methodology allows for the computation of the set of alI sustainable stabilization plans even when the govemment cannot pre-commit to an optimal inflation path. This is done through value function iterations, which can be done on a computeI. The parameters of the extended model are calibrated with Brazilian data, using as case study three Brazilian stabilization attempts: the Cruzado (1986), Collor (1990) and the Real (1994) plans. The calibration of the parameters of the extended model is straightforward, but its numerical solution proves unfeasible due to a dimensionality problem in the algorithm arising from limitations of available computer technology. However, a numerical solution using the original algorithm and some calibrated parameters is obtained. Results indicate that in the absence of govemment bonds or production only the Real Plan is sustainable in the long run. The numerical solution of the extended algorithm is left for future research.

About DAPP: Meet the Department of Public Policy Analysis

The Department of Public Policy Analysis of Getulio Vargas Foundation (DAPP-FGV) is a research boutique concerned with the innovation of state structures and the relations between these and Civil Society, based on an interdisciplinary approach of applied social science, together with Information and Communication Technologies.