Showing papers by "Paul Mosley published in 1985"

The Political Economy of Foreign Aid: A Model of the Market for a Public Good

Abstract: What determines the type and quantity of overseas aid given by individual donor countries? Answers to this question in the existing literature are polarized into two groups. One of them offers a theoretical treatment based on the theory of public goods which is not consistent with the available data, and the other offers empirical correlations without any explanatory theory. The first group-for example, Pincus and Olson and Zeckhauser-treats aid, like defense, as an "international public good." Small countries, on this approach, are free riders, spending relatively little themselves while deriving benefits from the expenditures of larger countries.' But this approach is not consistent with even a casual scrutiny of the OECD aid community in which, broadly speaking, the smallest countries are the most generous donors.2 The second group-for example, Hoadley and Beenstockdiscover correlations between a country's ratio of aid to GNP and certain independent variables which may be expected to influence it (e.g., that country's GNP, its dependence on foreign trade, its government's position in the ideological spectrum, and the state of the domestic economy).3 However, these findings are not fitted into any theoretical framework, so that it is difficult to work out what they really mean.4 The approach of this paper is to treat foreign aid as a public good for which there is a market, albeit a highly imperfect one because the consumers-donor country taxpayers-are ignorant about the very nature, let alone the price, of the commodity they are buying. On this view, factors on the demand side (i.e., taxpayers' response to their country's aid program) will help to determine the quantity of aid disbursed as well as factors on the supply side such as the donor government's desire to obtain strategic or trading benefits from aid. This view

When is a Policy Instrument not an Instrument? Fiscal Marksmanship in Britain, 1951–84

Abstract: The paper considers the size and the implications of the errors made by the British Treasury in forecasting the budget over the period 1951-84. On average the Treasury underestimated the public sector fiscal deficit by 0.5 per cent of GDP; this is about half the average amount by which Chancellors attempted to change aggregate demand by means of their budgets. The general pattern was for tax revenue to be under-predicted, but for public expenditure to be under-predicted by even more. The government's fiscal deficit and thus the reflationary effect of government policy was therefore greater than the Treasury intended. A decomposition exercise carried out on the Treasury's own model for the fiscal year I 980/8 i suggests that only about half of this error is due to errors in the specification of the model; the other half is due to errors in data estimation and in forecasting exogenous variables. Hence, the scope for improving forecasts by improvements to the model is limited. The paper copisiders three alternative methods by which forecasts could be improved: the application of realisation functions relating forecast to actual values; more frequent budgeting; and an attempt to derive more tax revenue from those categories (such as excise duties on alcohol, petrol and tobacco) whose yield is easiest to predict. It is not possible to manage an economy the way that you can hope to manage a business, or even a house ... An important reason why management is perhaps the wrong word when you are talking about the economy is that the government has no direct control over the actors in the economic process. It can't make people work if they don't want to, it can't make people invest if they don't want to, and it can't make them manage their affairs better if they don't want to and haven't the ability to do so. You are always coming up against the fact that you don't really control your raw material at all, you can only hope to influence it in a general way. When I first went to the Exchequer in March 1974 and was told to produce a budget in three weeks, the centre of the budget was something called the Budget Judgment, which was a guess of how much demand the government should put * The author would like to thank Professor Richard Rose, three anonymous referees of theJournal and his colleagues in the University's Centre for Fiscal Studies for most valuable criticisms and advice. This content downloaded from 40.77.167.88 on Sat, 28 May 2016 06:48:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Achievements and contradictions of the Peruvian agrarian reform: A regional perspective

Abstract: (1985). Achievements and contradictions of the Peruvian agrarian reform: A regional perspective. The Journal of Development Studies: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 440-448.