The reforms initiated in Central and Eastern European countries imply dramatic changes at social, economic and political level. The transition from a centrally planned to a market–based economic system requires profound reformation of all economic and social institutions, amongst them, in prominent place, the way social benefits are provided and financed. Social programs in these countries are challenged from two sides: Firstly, they have to provide a social safety net for the most vulnerable in society during economic transition in order to support the reform program in social and political terms; secondly, social programs have to be restructured in order to be financially sound, socially equitable and economically efficient in a more (or fully) market-oriented environment.

The neo-corporatist experiments of the 1970s were attempts to preserve the labor-inclusiveness of post-war European political economies in increasingly adverse domestic and international conditions. Since their demise in the early 1980s, industrial relations in Western Europe are characterized by high divergence between national systems combined with rising interdependence among national economies, creating a growth potential for inter-regime competition. Endeavors to provide the Internal Market with a Social Dimension are attempts to make the externalities of national industrial relations systems governable in a supra-national industrial order. The odds against European-level political reconstruction of industrial relations appear overwhelming.

This paper examines trends in world military expenditures and offers an econometric examination of their determinants in 125 countries from 1972 to 1988. A simultaneous equation framework based on a public choice model shows military expenditures as a ratio of GDP to be influenced by the level of GDP, central government expenditures, other financial indicators, the form of government, and geographical characteristics of countries. The study also examines the opportunity cost of military expenditures and analyzes the budgetary trade-off between military, social, and development expenditures. Although military expenditures may benefit a given country, they may also have a negative impact on the welfare of rival nations. Hence a coordinated reduction in military expenditures that does not alter the strategic balance will increase economic wellbeing in the world.

Familiar theories of market failure have diagnosed shortcomings in the economy, but theories of government failure argue that the state is incapable of correcting them. More than that, many criticisms of government implicitly or explicitly see failure as due to fundamental shortcomings of democracy. This paper argues that democratic forms of governments are not necessarily inefficient relative to other types of decisionmaking, for example, authoritarian government, and that if individuals are as rational in their actions and expectations as voters as they are meant to be in the market, then failures attributed to democracy lessen or disappear altogether. The paper demonstrates how more democracy, i.e. the use of the initiative and referendum, may actually improve the efficiency of government by giving the mass of citizens the information and opportunity to frustrate efforts of the classe politique to form a coalition against the voters. Empirical examples are drawn from the experience of Switzerland.

Multiple knowledges are available for utilisation in policy choice. The rank ordering of knowledges for use in decisionmaking is thus a fundamental predecision. This article shows how this predecision necessarily constrains the processes associated with a politics of ideas, using cases from American international commodity policy. Even when the supposed preconditions of this sort of politics are present, policy change did not occur when the proposed ideas arose from a knowledge accorded secondary status in policymaking circles. Several implications are discussed for the influence and the study of ideational politics. Ultimately, the politics of ideas, so often portrayed through cases of innovation, may be quite conservative, contained by knowledge hierarchies which reflect prior political circumstances.

This paper addresses two related questions: How has the transformation from a centrally planned to a market economy affected the second economy and how has the second economy influenced the transformation? The existence of a second economy compensating for some faults of the planned economy has been a contributing factor in the non-violent transformation of the Hungarian economy. Transformation is making the concepts of a first and second economy obsolete. The informal economy, which is replacing the second economy, differs from the latter in its degree of internalization, and in relying upon fulltime rather than part-time work. It is also increasing in size. The social impact of the informal economy is also different, increasing income inequality and regional disparities, thus replacing the gradations of social differences found in the multi-coloured activities of the second economy with sharper black and white differences. The analysis is illustrated with data from Hungary before and after the transformation.

Past discussions of market versus planned economies in terms of the efficiency/equity tradeoff missed the adverse equity implications of totalitarian political systems and the importance of pluralistic political decisionmaking structures. The paper demonstrates the role of the paternalistic party–state in creating nonmarket inequities, limiting the articulation of political preferences concerning social safety nets, and restricting nonstate sources of welfare. The transition to pluralistic market economies implies potential improvements both in equity and efficiency. The distinct problems of the transition are primarily rooted in uncertainties arising from the scarcity of resources and the fluidity of political preferences.

Multiple knowledges are available for utilisation in policy choice. The rank ordering of knowledges for use in decisionmaking is thus a fundamental predecision. This article shows how this predecision necessarily constrains the processes associated with a politics of ideas, using cases from American international commodity policy. Even when the supposed preconditions of this sort of politics are present, policy change did not occur when the proposed ideas arose from a knowledge accorded secondary status in policymaking circles. Several implications are discussed for the influence and the study of ideational politics. Ultimately, the politics of ideas, so often portrayed through cases of innovation, may be quite conservative, contained by knowledge hierarchies which reflect prior politicaxl circumstances.

Whether corporatism matters or not is one of the most difficult and intriguing questions confronting policy analysts. One approach to the problem not previously adopted is to use systems analysis as a means of teasing out the implications of general structural differences between corporatist and pluralist polities. By using a framework derived from the systems analysis of Easton but incorporating elements of political competition and accountability, it is shown that corporatist and pluralist states differ significantly in the ways in which they process information and generate support. The combination of centralisation and consensus proves to be the key to the apparently greater learning capacity of corporatist systems. The analysis suggests that policymaking may itself be better understood as a learning mechanism rather than as an allocative process.

The concept of regulatory capture is multidimensional according to data from Australian nursing home inspectors. There are three empirically distinct forms of capture: identification with the industry, sympathy with the particular problems that regulated firms confront in meeting standards, and absence of toughness. Inspectors who have prior senior management experience in the industry tend to be less tough in their attitudes to regulatory enforcement. For the other two types of capture, it is not coming in the revolving door (from an industry job), but aspirations to go out of the revolving door (to an industry job) that predicts capture. Captured regulatory attitudes and revolving door variables have little power, however, in explaining the toughness of actual enforcement practices. We do find that over time tougher inspectors are more likely to leave the regulatory agency than softer inspectors. These data are used to inform a policy analysis of capture and corruption. It is concluded that there is limited analytical merit in a conception of capture as an enduring unitary character trait that is structurally determined by a history of interest group affiliations. Capture, we attempt to show, is instead a situational problem that requires situational solutions. Constraining the free movement of the revolving door by restricting regulatory appointments from or to the regulated industry is an example of a flawed policy grounded in an overdrawn structural determinism.

Changes of labor market attitudes in a post-centrally planned economy are examined on the basis of survey data in terms of the production and utilization of human capital; work incentives and rewards; private ownership and job allocation; work perspectives and unemployment; and the role of the state. The transitory period is confused. The transformation of post-communist countries is being carried out when the era of market regulation is over in the West and state guardianship in the labor market is being eroded, but in Central and Eastern Europe the inheritance of institutions and attitudes from the era of central planning remain palpably present, and surveys show that the population of working age has not yet fully perceived the extent of what is required to achieve the transformation to a market economy.

Using Kingdon's agenda setting model and broadening it to the entire policy formation process, I offer an explanation of why the British privatised their telecommunications authority but the French did not. Privatisation is brought about by coupling three streams or factors in critical moments in time: available alternatives generated in policy communities, high government borrowing needs, and party politics. The findings illuminate the usefulness of Kingdon's model beyond its original application in the United States, and have implications for broader theoretical debates in comparative policy research.

Economists could profitably treat academic publishing as a lagging economic indicator. Just as the Tokyo stock market hit its peak in late 1989, books on Japan's economic sucess began to pour off the presses; they still thrive today despite the fact that in the intervening three years, the Tokyo market has dropped over 50 per cent. In a like manner,academics are suddenly blessed with a plethora of studies of the countries presumably following in Japan's successful economic wake - the new Asian NICs of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; plus the potential 'next NICs', Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia - just at the time that the world's investors are liquidating their holdings in these rather stagnant Asian markets and pouring them into the suddenly thriving economies of Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Brazil. Fortunately for scholars, the dividends paid by good books are less affected by the transitory events that create such wild swings in the equities markets. Good scholarship, like blue chip stock, generates high dividends regardless of the short-term performance of the ephemeral economic markets.

An extended conceptual and analytical framework is elaborated where proximity in time as one dimension of a multidimensional concept of disparity is used as a tool to integrate space and time in comparative analysis. Time distance measures the difference in time (number of years) when two compared units achieve a given level of the indicator. Time distance emphasises a novel perspective of disparity between the compared units, and time is a universal unit of measurement comparable between countries, levels and units of comparison. It complements rather than substitutes for conventional measures, at the conceptual level the overall degree of disparity is looked upon as a weighted combination of static and dynamic dimensions of disparity.

The comparative analysis of socio-economic data sometimes employs comparison across time within a country, e.g. monitoring trends in productivity, per capita income or unemployment. Alternatively, comparison is made across space between countries, e.g. comparing the level of productivity or unemployment in different countries at a given point in time. In each case, the analysis seeks to identify disparities. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the advantage of analysing disparities, referred to often as inequalities or differences, by intergrating comparisons across both time and space. Empirical examples from the regions (republics and autonomous provinces) of the former Yugoslavia are used to provide empirical illustrations of this expanded analytical framework

This paper tries to integrate and generalise research results from selected comparative policy studies in the fields of economic, social, educational, environmental and health and safety policies. The countries included are Britain, Sweden and the United States. The concepts of institutional and organisational structure, culture orientation and policy style are applied in order to develop descriptive taxonomies to suggest how these factors might influence ultimate policy outputs.