Communism is vulgar capitalism; that is, the communist command economy is based on mistaken notions of how capitalism grew by exploiting workers. Command economies not capitalism fulfil Marx's predictions, collapsing because they are unproductive and immoral, basing economic choices on corrupted personal relations. Without competition, decision in command economies are unproductive through negative selection, and immoral, being based on corrupt personal relations. Each and every Marxist and neo-Marxist prediction about capitalism, from commodity fetishism to the alienation of the citizen from the state, comes true under communism. The explanation is straightforward: Marxist assumptions about the state and the economy are far more true for communist than for capitalist countries.

As intense international competition along with rapidly changing product markets and technology have come to dominate the economic environment for firms, industries, and nations, government pursuit of a coordinated, proactive industrial policy has increasingly been viewed as a key to national economic success. Owing largely to its utility in generating consensus-formation, corporatist concertation has been suggested by a number of commentators as an ideal mechanism for implementing industrial policies. However, the legitimacy of corporatism as a mode of interest intermediation rests on the capacity of interest group representatives to win benefits for all their members, while industrial policy decisions are by nature selective or discriminatory. This feature of industrial policy casts doubts upon its compatibility with corporatism. The postwar policy-making experiences of Japan, Sweden, and West Germany support this skepticism.

This paper examines approaches to public investment appraisal as theyare currently recommended in the British Treasury and implemented byevaluation units within the Department of Health, Department of Transport and the Home Office. The evidence suggests that spending departments have reacted to the pressure for increased selectivity in their expenditures by adopting a heterogeneous blend of appraisal techniques, including financial analysis, cost-effectiveness and option appraisal, withcost-benefit analysis eventually playing a minor role. The imposition of cash limits rations capital expenditures. When these constraints bite departments differently, either a unique social discount rate for projectappraisal is inappropriate or the rations themselves are giving wrong signals to the departments The departments do not have an incentive todevote time and effort to cost benefit analysis and other techniques of a more limited scope are implemented.

A complete conceptual framework for policy analysis requires a theory of government supply and government production failure to complement the well-developed theory of market failure provided by welfare economics. Charles Wolf has made an important start by attempting to draw parallels between market failures and the manifestations of government supply failures. This article provides a more useful analytical framework for government supply failure in two important ways. First, it draws on several perspectives from the economics of organization to sketch both normative and positive theories of government supply. Second, it uses the positive theory of government supply behavior to make direct comparisons with the traditional market failures. It concludes with some implications of the framework for assessing the potential gains from privatization.

This paper analyzes the use of nationalization and privatization policies to redistribute costs and benefits among interest groups, using a rational-choice framework. The major cases considered are the post-war nationalizations and the current wave of privatizations in the United Kingdom, plus France and the United States. The analysis indicates that governments tend to redistribute benefits to more concentrated interest groups, such as organized labor or shareholders, and to impose costs on more diffuse groups, such as consumers and taxpayers. This type of redistribution is often economically inefficient, but politically efficient for the party in power. Policy design is also influenced by the ease with which policies can be changed by future governments within the prevailing political institutions.

The medical profession is reputed to control decision-making in medical care to such an extent that one can speak of professional dominance. Yet West European health policies have radically changed the working conditions and incomes of doctors in many countries. Why have some governments been able to ‘socialize’ medicine? This article seeks to refute the view that the medical profession exercises a universal veto power. In contrast to scholars who explain medical influence in terms of singular characteristics of the medical profession or through the historical process of professionalization, this essay focuses on the properties of distinct political systems that make them vulnerable to medical influence. It argues that we have veto points within political systems and not veto groups within societies. By comparing the lobbying efforts of medical associations in Switzerland, France, and Sweden, the article analyses the role of political institutions in accounting for different patterns of medical association influence on health policy.

Drawing on data for 60 Australian Commonwealth government bureaucracies 1976–86, this paper explores what measurable consequences for bureaucratic structure can be associated with staffing and spending cutbacks. It looks at cutbacks both at government-wide and at individual-bureaucracylevel, on the basis of a casualty list intended to portray the different dimensions of relative bureaucratic ‘suffering’ more systematically than has hitherto been done in the cutback management literature. It then explores associations between measures of cutbacks and indicators of structural consequences, both at government-wide and departmental level, relating that to the debate as to whether ‘leaner means weaker’ in government cutbacks. The ‘leaner means weaker’ view of bureaucratic cutbacks is hard to sustain from these data.

This article explores the hypothesis that trends in the financial regulatory and supervisory policies of advanced industrialized countries encouraged the retreat of international banks from lending to developing countries during the 1980s. Drawing upon the illustrative cases of the United States, Japan, Canada, and the Federal Republic of Germany, it assesses the plausibility of the argument that convergent trends in regulatory policies reinforced that retreat, notwithstanding the efforts of top policymakers to promote adequate new lending in the context of a deepening crisis.

European Community policymaking has been predicated upon the member governments acting as gatekeepers which mediate between their respective domestic political systems and EC institutions. However, the sweeping changes associated with Project 1992 threaten the gatekeeping status of the Twelve. This article explores the domestic and international consequences, which are cast in terms of three scenarios: the maintenance of the status quo, the emergence of a ‘Europe of Regions’, and a variegated set of outcomes. As an attempt to move beyond the realm of pure speculation, concrete lessons are culled from the reform of the European Regional Development Fund since 1979 and its effect on national and subnational interests in Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany. The theoretical premise is that national and subnational actors respond to Community initiatives within a structured context, the domestic policy networks in which they are embedded. These clusters of interorganizational relationships at the domestic level reflect the underlying distribution of resources among actors, and endow them with different capabilities and vulnerabilities as they seek to cope with changes administered to their policy environment by the EC. The findings suggest skepticism of the image of strengthened regions breaking out of the orbit of weakened states with the assistance of the EC. While the ability of member states to retain their roles as gatekeepers varies, this capacity remains strong. Moreover, subnational actors often view the EC as yet another exogenous institutional constraint on action.

This article analyzes differences between United States and West German export controls. It shows that United States controls are more extensive and stricter than controls in West Germany. Three possible explanations for this variation in policy are considered. First, these two states differ in regard to their positions in the international system and in their choice of economic strategies. Second, the extent of domestic political support for strict export control policies varies between the two countries. Finally, West Germany lacks the institutional framework to adequately control its foreign trade. The evidence presented corroborates the first two alternatives, while institutional explanations receive relatively little support. The article then discusses the historical development of United States and West German export control policies and institutions. The analysis shows evidence of both change and stability. More specifically, the article questions the argument that institutions in foreign economic policy, once established, persist and resist change, instead of adapting to environmental changes. Several hypotheses are considered to explain why in the area of export controls changes in policy, and to some extent institutions, occurred more frequently in West Germany than in the United States.

This paper compares four different theoretical accounts of the reform of British local government finance at the end of the 1980s: public choice, marxian political economy, bureaucratic process, and party politics. Five key questions are identified as the most essential and puzzling features of the change: why reform; the timing of reform and implementation; the national non-domestic rate; the choice of a poll tax; and why the ‘final solution’ of direct central control has been eschewed. The ability of each theoretical approach in answering these five key questions is then assessed in the light of what we know about the history and logic of local government finance in Britain. The conclusion is that the reform can be explained, but that no single theoretical approach can give a completely satisfactory account. Overall, a competitive party politics model, complemented by public choice ideology and bureaucratic process, gives the fullest explanation.

This work examines the relationship between policy style and issue environment. Empirical research in the electricity supply sector in West Germany suggests that even at the sectoral level the expectation of a monolithic and static policy style cannot confidently be sustained. This sector displays a dual policy style, the source of which is located in the relationship between state and sector, the structure of interest representation, and ownership / market relations in the sector. Fluctuations in policy style are related to changes in the issue environment. Addressing the structural dimension of issues, the work abstracts the structure and form which issues assume from their substantive content to identify issue anatomy. This concept is deployed in an explanation of changing policy style in the face of a complex of sectoral issues.

Statutory design is the source of many problems encountered in implementation, yet policy scholars have not made much headway in providing coherent and consistent advice for framing smarter statutes. There is a great deal of disagreement about how much discretion statutes should leave to implementers, and four distinct and conflicting schools of thought have emerged. This article advises that none of the perspectives is always correct and patterns for allocating discretion should take into account the implementation context. Contexts vary from statute to statute and may change for different policy elements within particular policies. The core elements in policy content are identified and linked in a scheme that is more comprehensive and relevant to policy results than previous work. The article also provides a ‘value-added’ conception of implementation in which the extent of discretion exercised by implementers is measured by changes they make in the core elements of policy.

The social production of welfare provides a theoretical framework for the analysis of the consumption of social services and the impact of welfare policies. Based on the new home economics, it represents the unit of consumption as a unit of production of commodities. With the advent of disability this unit extends from the household to the informal care network. Social care agencies become involved when the production of basic commodities, such as nutrition and personal care, fall below threshold levels which threaten the survival of the informal care network. The social production of welfare allows comparisons across systems and provides the starting point for the development of tools for empirical analysis.

Following Wildavsky's argument that a federal bias is often the best principle for organising public policy, this study compares two national public broadcasting systems: the diffuse pattern of multiple agencies used in the United States of America and the highly centralized design employed in Australia. The paper examines whether each structure can respond to an audience while resisting the partisan demands of politicians. Significant advantages are found in the American model, though the question arises of whether participation and editorial independence in public broadcasting are bought at the cost of efficiency and effectiveness.

This article examines a neglected phenomenon in the existing literature on social regulation, namely political opposition to regulation that comes not from business but from consumers. It examines four cases of successful grass-roots consumer opposition to government health and safety regulations in the United States. Two involve rules issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a 1974 requirement that all new automobiles be equipped with an engine-interlock system, and a 1967 rule that denied federal highway funds to states that did not require motorcyclists to wear a helmet. In 1977, Congress overturned the Food and Drug Administration's ban on the artificial sweetener, saccharin. Beginning in 1987, the FDA began to yield to pressures from the gay community by agreeing to streamline its procedures for the testing and approval of new drugs designed to fight AIDS and other fatal diseases. The article identifies what these regulations have in common and examines their significance for our understanding the politics of social regulation in the United States and other industrial nations.