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Full-Text Articles in Public Policy

Project Appraisal For The Keynesian Investment Planner, Greg Hill Jan 1999

Project Appraisal For The Keynesian Investment Planner, Greg Hill

Greg Hill

This paper outlines a theory of project appraisal wherein the neoclassical premises of conventional cost-benefit analysis are replaced by their Keynesian counterparts. The paper shows how the social rate of return on investment, the private and social rates of discount, and other concepts used in cost-benefit analysis may be modified to take account of the income externalities generated by the multiplier, mark-up pricing, and the causal priority of investment over saving.


Institutionalism: Intergovernmental Exchange, Administration-Centered Behavior, And Policy Outcomes In Urban Agencies, Herman L. Boschken Oct 1998

Institutionalism: Intergovernmental Exchange, Administration-Centered Behavior, And Policy Outcomes In Urban Agencies, Herman L. Boschken

Herman L. Boschken

This article inquires about the sufficiency of institutional exchange theory in explaining the impacts of intergovernmental power structure on agency policy making. Based on rational behavior, transactional exchange, and game playing, this so called new institutionalism points to the degree of autonomy held by an agency in its collaboration with other government jurisdictions as a principal determinant of a patterned bias in agency policy outcomes. The author first summarizes theory arguments and derives hypotheses about agency outcomes that are skewed to favor some interests over others. He then reports results of a multiple regression analysis of a sample of forty-two …


Global Shift In Container Traffic And Its Implications For Economic Development Along The American Land Bridge, Herman L. Boschken Apr 1998

Global Shift In Container Traffic And Its Implications For Economic Development Along The American Land Bridge, Herman L. Boschken

Herman L. Boschken

Since the “container revolution” in the 1970s, seaports on the Pacific Coast have been the engines of economic development, regionally, nationally and globally. But circumstances continue to change that threaten the long-term viability of the intermodal “land bridge” system that emerged from that revolution. These circumstances include railroads not maintaining rail lines critical to transcontinental container traffic and the shift in the locus of global production that raises the question of obsolescence for the existing infrastructure moving trade West to East from the Pacific Rim. The implications are enormous, especially for policy makers at the regional and local levels as …


Analyzing Performance Skewness In Public Agencies: The Case Of Urban Mass Transit, Herman L. Boschken Jul 1992

Analyzing Performance Skewness In Public Agencies: The Case Of Urban Mass Transit, Herman L. Boschken

Herman L. Boschken

Previous studies of public organizational performance have focused mostly on operating efficiency, without dealing with the complex accountability problems associated with plural public interests. The fact that an agency exhibits multiple and often paradoxical performances has not been of comparable concern. This failure to account for performance in a multiple-constituencies context has led to a narrow view of how well agencies do. To broaden the research on agency performance, a multiple-constituencies model is introduced and tested for statistically significant variances. The findings confirm the model's robustness in structuring a dependent variable for empirical research on why agencies perform toward different …


Strategy And Structure: Reconceiving The Relationship, Herman L. Boschken Jan 1990

Strategy And Structure: Reconceiving The Relationship, Herman L. Boschken

Herman L. Boschken

Discussions have drawn attention to the relationship between strategy and structure for much of the last quarter century. Yet, no firm basis has emerged to settle the issue of causal direction or to affirm the relationship's effects on organizational performance. By adding a new dimension to the strategy-structure model, this article attempts to conceptually link long-term performance with (a) the presence of subunits having distinctive competence in strategic planning and (b) the coordination of these differentiated subunits into a discernible micro-structure embedded within the overall organization. This new dimension is explored and developed by use of a case of the …