Jessica Wallack

the early phases of this research and the excellent research assistance of Catherine Lawas, and express thanks to the many participants of the Beijing Conference who offered useful comments on an earlier draft of the paper. Comments on an earlier paper related to this work from Malcolm Dowling, Jeffrey Liang, J.P. Verbiest, and Xianbin Yao are also gratefully acknowledged. This research was carried out with the financial support of the Asian Development Bank. The paper may not be quoted or cited without permission of the authors. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the institutions with which they are affiliated. 33 ERD Working Paper No. 30

La mayoria de las iniciativas para aminorar el calentamiento global incluyen la reduccion de las emisiones de dioxido de carbono. Se ha prestado poca atencion a la reduccion de las emisiones de las particulas que absorben luz, conocidas como carbono negro o de los gases precursores del ozono, a pesar de que seria mas facil, mas barata y tendria un efecto mas inmediato

This essay places the eight country case studies of federalism, economic reforms, and globalization (available as SCID working papers 147-153) in context. We trace the evolution of the literature on federalism from its early focus on the design of fiscal arrangements to achieve efficient outcomes in a world of benevolent social planners and closed economies to later work relaxing these assumptions and exploring different policy areas. The essay also discusses the motivating questions for the collection of case studies.

This monograph is part of a larger investigation of the political economy of institutional reform in Latin America undertaken by the Latin American Research Network. It examines some hypotheses about what can be done to improve the chances for successful institutional change. It draws on the results of four case studies (Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Uruguay) to identify the characteristics of successful reforms and provide recommendations for policymakers who seek to improve their countries' institutions.

This collection focuses on the ways in which federalism has affected and been affected by economic reform, especially global integration. The editors and contributors focus in particular on the political economy of institutional and economic change - how the division of authority between national and subnational governments shapes debates over policy changes, as well as how the changing economic environment creates incentives to modify the basic agreements between levels of governments. Each chapter contains a historical overview, and an in-depth account of division of authority, lines of accountability, and legislative, bureaucratic, and other arenas in which the levels of government interact for a particular country. The analyses are based on reform (or non-reform) episodes for each country - most from recent history, but some spanning the century. As a collection, the country studies span a range of developing and industrial countries with varying political systems.

This article calls for a conceptual and empirical research agenda on ways in which policymakers and researchers can aggregate socioeconomic information shared by diverse communities without losing contextual information that is important for extracting meaning from the data. We describe the knowledge loss that occurs when information is aggregated across diverse ontologies into databases or archives relying on a single schema and use a series of illustrative examples demonstrate the significance of this information loss for policy design and implementation. While there are important gains from information aggregation across ontologies, the potential trade‐offs involved in creating large‐scale databases are significant. The differences between locally constituted ways of knowing and the organizing ontology used for larger scale databases affects the extent to which these collections, or “knowledge banks,” provide accurate guidance for policy and action. The article draws on insights from information science and social science to discuss two classes of socio‐technical approaches for overcoming information loss at the interface between ontologies: first, technology‐enabled efforts to soften ontological interfaces by making data open, unconstructed, and available and/or creating ontologies collaboratively and, second, organizational changes that reduce the need for information to cross interfaces, such as reconstructing knowledge platforms to be more interactive, thereby decentralizing decision‐making. The framing of the challenges involved in building large‐scale knowledge banks as a matter of ontology mismatch creates an opportunity for an interdisciplinary and analytically integrated research agenda to implement and test these potential approaches.

This paper uses international data on voter turnout and individual-level data to describe levels and distribution of political participation in Latin America The paper finds that, while voter turnout in Latin America is rather low. the analysis of more general indicators of political activism reveals that participation is fairly homogenous across socio-economic strata The finding that participation in Latin America, though low. is comparatively egalitarian seems to partly contradict the perception that Latin America’s history has been one of exclusion and marginalization.

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se presenta un nuevo conjunto de datos sobre sistemas electorales y se bosqueja sus usos potenciales en nuevas investigaciones sobre las conexiones entre los sistemas electorales y los resultados económicos. El conjunto de datos brinda indicadores del grado al que políticos individuales pueden promover sus carreras apelando, por un lado, a grupos de electores de zonas geográficas reducidas o a simpatizantes de su partido por el otro.

The panel will bring together scholars of information with training in computer science, economics, cultural studies, and the interdisciplinary social sciences to explicitly probe into the relationships held between information and technology initiatives and international ...

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se pone a prueba si los resultados de Rodrik (1999) de que las instituciones de manejo de conflictos se relacionan con la capacidad de reaccionar a sacudidas económicas son valederos ante maneras distintas de definir la calidad de tales instituciones. Cuantificamos la calidad de las instituciones de manejo de conflictos con dos índices distintos. El primero tiene que ver con las limitantes políticas sobre la capacidad del Poder Ejecutivo de imponer su voluntad. Estas limitantes coartan la capacidad del gobierno de modificar arbitrariamente las reglas del juego, y por lo tanto pueden reducir las pugnas de la redistribución. El segundo índice mide el nivel de particularismo político. Definimos el particularismo político como la capacidad de los diseñadores de políticas de promover sus carreras mediante la atención de intereses subalternos, en vez de los de una plataforma nacional más amplia. Los índices usados en este trabajo resuelven las distorsiones de la endogeneidad y subjetividad que afectan la medida de la calidad institucional de Rodrik. Hallamos un fuerte apoyo a la idea de que elevados niveles de limitantes políticas y niveles intermedios de particularismo político guardan relación con una recuperación rápida de las sacudidas económicas.

In recent years, political scientists and electoral reformers have paid greater attention to how electoral institutions affect the extent to which electoral competition revolves around political parties versus individual candidates. The interest transcends simply understanding how institutions influence elections and outcomes to concerns about policymaking and the consequences of institutions for politicians' incentives to cultivate a "personal vote." We hope that our completion of a new dataset - Electoral Institutions and the Personal Vote - will assist researchers in the exploration of these and other questions about the relationships between electoral institutions, politics, and policy. This paper provides a brief overview of the literature that motivated collection of the dataset and discusses the dataset itself. This database updates, expands, and (in some cases) corrects the electoral systems coding presented in Wallack, et al (2003)'s Database of Particular...

This paper uses international data on voter turnout and individual-level data to describe levels and distribution of political participation in Latin America. The paper finds that, while voter turnout in Latin America is rather low, the analysis of more general indicators of political activism reveals that participation is fairly homogenous across socio-economic strata. The finding that participation in Latin America, though low, is comparatively egalitarian seems to partly contradict the perception that Latin America's history has been one of exclusion and marginalization. JEL Codes: D72. The views and interpretations of this paper are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Inter-American Development Bank. The usual caveats apply. 2 "A happy country, it seems, is one where politics is not just a spectator sport." "Happiness is a Warm Vote" The Economist, April 17, 1999.

... thank two anonymous reviewers and Jay Chaudhuri for excellent comments, Aditi Tandon and Lissa Ziegler for assistance with the grievance data and Raja Dhanabal for ... 7. See Jessica Wallack and Ramesh Srinivasan, “Local-Global: Reconciling Mismatched Ontologies in ...

... Arun Agrawal, “The Indian Parliament,” in Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds., Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design (New ... Rajeev Gowda and Sridharan argue that parties today are more likely to choose criminals because these people have the clout to ...

... hence necessity for tax collection) chosen independently by each country that iswelfare-enhancing for ... capital flows, for exam-ple, subnational borrowing is naturally limited by the consequences of its ... determined by the relative size of the sum of central and subnational ...

... While the 1992 break in trade, transport, storage, and communication is encouraging, it is still too early to measure the full effects of the more recent reforms in the 1990s. JESSICA SEDDON WALLACK ... The answers to these questions ulti-mately lie in the data. ...

The panel will bring together scholars of information with training in computer science, economics, cultural studies, and the interdisciplinary social sciences to explicitly probe into the relationships held between information and technology initiatives and international ...

This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization episodes on movements of labor across sectors. The aim is to assess empirically whether increased trade openness leads to increased structural change and, if so, to what extent. Results for a set of 25 liberalization episodes suggest weakly negative effects of liberalization on the extent of intersectoral labor shifts at the economy-wide 1-digit level of disaggregation. We do uncover increased sectoral change after liberalization at the 3-digit level within manufacturing, although the estimated ...

Enhancing the Flow of Credit and Managing Risks in Agriculture NACHIKET MOR, D. CHATTANATHAN and RAJIV PANTHARY Introduction ... The authors would like to thank MadhaviSoman, Professor Jessica Wallack, Ajun Uppal, Manish Khera, Bindu Ananth, Madan Sabnavis ...

This paper extends pre-existing digital divide conceptualizations to further investigate the important issue of mismatches between the ontologies of state-created information systems and local communities' representation of their contexts. Comparability of data across time and place, as well as compatibility of data with state administrative needs come at a cost of information loss about the setting and individuals that policymakers are trying to impact. We argue that the reconciliation of community and state logics and framings is critical for effective engagement with communities as well as formulation and implementation of development policies. We suggest several paths toward overcoming mismatched ontologies: education and communications strategies to enable communities and states to translate across ontologies and fill in significant gaps; re-assignment of policy responsibilities to minimize information loss; and several mechanisms that would enable communities to be directly and productively engaged in developing shared ontologies.

ABSTRACT In recent years, political scientists and electoral reformers have paid greater attention to how electoral institutions affect the extent to which electoral competition revolves around political parties versus individual candidates. The interest transcends simply understanding how institutions influence elections and outcomes to concerns about policymaking and the consequences of institutions for politicians' incentives to cultivate a "personal vote." We hope that our completion of a new dataset - Electoral Institutions and the Personal Vote - will assist researchers in the exploration of these and other questions about the relationships between electoral institutions, politics, and policy. This paper provides a brief overview of the literature that motivated collection of the dataset and discusses the dataset itself. This database updates, expands, and (in some cases) corrects the electoral systems coding presented in Wallack, et al (2003)'s Database of Particularism . Data now cover up to 180 countries from 1978-2005; the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovakia, and Taiwan are new countries. The database has evolved to cover more aspects of electoral systems as well, providing additional information on more complex systems with multiple tiers.