Browse by: "2007"

A well-functioning public expenditure management system is considered a critical pillar of government efficiency. This article discusses PEM systems in developing countries using an analytical framework based on principal-agent theory. This simple model can be applied to various PEM systems and allows for comparisons between institutional settings. To illustrate this, the authors analyse the benefits derived from the use by the ministry of finance of ex post audits and ex ante controls, and assess their value in terms of their ability to deter cheating. The authors derive a set of possible “control regimes” which can be used by the ministry of finance.

The impacts of market-related policies and revenues on higher education are not uniform but globalisation has opened most institutions to new pressures. The public funding models developed 50 years ago underestimated the full cost of mass higher education as an entitlement while the sheer scale of resources needed to sustain a comprehensive research university demand a more nuanced balance of research and teaching for most institutions. These same pressures threaten equitable access if rising tuition fees are not fully matched by adequate need-based financial aid while in the absence of tuition pressures, unfunded increases in student participation undermines the quality of higher education. In this environment, justifications of increased funding are often based on utilitarian goals affecting the motives of research and scholarship and distorting the balance of curricular developments. In contrast, the increased range of revenue streams has created opportunities for more creative and less regulated institutional priorities. The potential impacts of private interests on higher education are well recognised but a politically vulnerable and often singular dependency on state funding is also capable of deflecting academic values. As institutions of higher education clarify their values to cope with global pressures to provide mass higher education and to meet the needs of the knowledge economy, they must also serve as places of imagination, innovation, disputation, scepticism and questioning. Those values are also critical as leaders in higher education attempt to confront themselves with the changes that they themselves need to make to their institutions.

Sub-central taxes are needed because sub-central governments spend large sums. This article discusses some key issues in sub-central taxation from an economist’s perspective, including the scale and role of sub-central governments, their main revenue sources, and questions of equity, tax sharing, economic management and accountability. A more detailed discussion explores the relative shares of domestic taxes and business taxes.

The size of the hedge fund sector, using IOSCO sources and results from responses to an OECD Questionnaire on Hedge Funds, is around USD 1.4 trillion in assets under management (AUM). While this does not seem that large compared to total global AUM, the hedge fund share of trading turnover (augmented by leverage and investment style) is much greater than its share of global AUM....

This paper was originally prepared for the OECD Working Party No. 1 under the authority of the OECD’s Economic Policy Committee. Jens Høj and Giuseppe Nicoletti work for the OECD Economics Department as a senior economist in the Country Studies Branch and as Head of the Structural Policy Analysis Division 1, respectively. Vincenzo Galasso is an Associate Professor of Economics at Università Bocconi in Italy and Thai-Thang Dang is a private sector consultant. The authors wish to thank Jean Philippe Cotis, Jørgen Elmeskov, Michael P. Feiner, Christopher Heady, Nick Johnstone and many other colleagues in the OECD Economics Department as well as representatives from OECD member countries for useful comments on a previous version of the paper.

The requirement to assess public employees is increasing within European public services. Dictated by budgetary imperatives and performance improvement concerns, it is becoming the norm in all administrations. One of the most sensitive areas of application is undoubtedly higher education. The traditional independence and autonomy of the academic personnel tends to clash with the state’s desire to revamp its human resources management using the assessment tool. This study relates to the implementation of a procedure designed to assess higher education public employees in France and Finland, based on the observation of two institutions. It focuses in particular on the role of trade unions in this reform. The behaviour of the different players is analysed in relation to several traditional sociological approaches.

Pension funds have become the largest class of investors in many markets and, given their size, the allocation of their assets has important implications for the relative prices of financial assets. There may be a trend shift of private (defined benefit) pension fund asset allocation strategies away from equity to bonds, especially to government bonds, given their limited credit risk. The potential demand for such bonds could, in principle, be very substantial, sufficient in fact to result in a scarcity of such bonds in circulation. Many debt managers have taken advantage of current bond market conditions and issued long-term to ultra-long-term bonds. But whether they should follow a strategy of maturity-lengthening with the express aim to facilitate the task for pension fund managers is a different matter. Most policy makers would not recommend that governments undertake to issue long-term debt with the express intent of meeting this demand, not least because they expect the price mechanism to clear apparent imbalances in asset markets.