Present public policy in Britain towards the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) funding is unusual if not exceptional; first because the funding is earmarked and second because no other area of medicine receives such high levels of resources. This paper examines the cause of AIDS and the likely trend of new cases and hence future resource demands upon the NHS. This paper offers four explanations for massive ‘ring-fenced’ AIDS expenditure of public revenue. The distribution to and allocation of those monies by Regional Health Authorities is analysed. It concludes that there is very little rationale for this, especially when alternative uses of funds are considered. Furthermore the politics of incrementalism indicates that what has already become a major misuse of public funds is likely to continue in the foreseeable future.

The emergence of large technical systems like railroads, telecommunication networks or power grids was closely associated with hierarchical governance. Despite the success of hierarchical structures in promoting the development of these systems they have recently come under strain. They are suspected of being too slow, too cumbersome, and too unimaginative to deal with the complexity and turbulence of modern technology. Practical people as well as academics look for functional alternatives. One of the alternatives is the decentralisation of technical control via standards. The paper investigates this alternative by analysing the role that standards have achieved in telecommunications after the hierarchical order was eroded by globalisation and deregulation. It discusses how the demise of hierarchy has boosted the ‘demand’ for standards and how the institutional infrastructure for standardisation was adapted to meet this demand.

Under what conditions do dominant policy ideas change in Japanese bureaucratic organizations? The answer is developed in reference to a rare empirical case in which critical information has been released about intra-bureaucracy politics, the Japanese Ministry of Finance during the 1969–1971 international monetary crisis. The paper contends, first, that the crisis did not automatically lead to a change of a dominant policy idea prevalent in the Ministry. A policy change occurred only after tactful leadership was exercised by the highest Ministry official. Second, dynamics of paralysis and change were strongly shaped by structures and norms characteristic of Japanese organizations. At a more general level, the case study shows that the exercise of policy-changing leadership vis-á-vis bureaucracies depends on two intra- governmental structure variables: institutional arrangements within and surrounding bureaucracies; and the level of information control exercised by bureaucracies.

Analytically, privatization and pluralization may be treated as separate economic and political phenomena, but in the actual conditions of a post-Communist society they are integrally related to the development of a middle-class society that was absent due to ‘deprivatization’ in a one-party state. The creation of a society of plural interests and private enterprise represents a shift from Sovietization to Europeanization. However, the process is extremely difficult, for there are many paradoxes in the logic of privatization. In addition, issues of ownership – past as well as future – are major political battlefields. Political strategies of privatization include a grand coalition; a new state-party; Latin-Americanization; creating a broad entrepreneurial class and/or a European working class; and a wide coalition. These complexities are examined with particular reference to the experience of contemporary Hungary.

Apart from the preoccupation with raising revenue for the welfare state, the question of popular support is central to its future. Arguments about the prospects for the welfare state, about its social and political bases of support and about classifying different types of regime provide the context of our investigation. Our approach is to examine empirical evidence of the connection between support for the welfare state and (a) different types of regime and (b) social and political factors. The analysis of these relationships has important implications for policy-makers who are concerned about consent to their programmes and about the experiences of comparable regimes.

The role of semi-public intermediary institutions is underestimated in political research. This paper elaborates the dynamics of the interaction pattern of mission-agencies, promoting and conducting research in the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany. The principal-agent-model serves as the organizing theoretical concept. By stressing the role of the third party, usually neglected in the model, it is shown that intermediary agencies in policy-making are drawn into cooperative and almost symbiotic relationships with the recipients of programs. The use of intermediary agencies becomes a double-edged sword for policy-makers. While close relationships with the scientific community improve the acceptance of political research programs, the formulation of research policies becomes subject to compromise and coalition building within funding agencies.

Since day-to-day implementation of exchange-rate policy has been neglected in the literature on international monetary relations, U.S. and Japanese intervention policies in the post-Bretton Woods period are analyzed. The determinants of Japanese intervention policy are clearly identified: international coordination and U.S. intervention increase the amount of Japanese intervention. A strong tendency to ‘lean against the wind’ and some indication of ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policy exist as well. On the other hand, U.S. intervention policy is more elusive. There is some evidence, however, that Japanese and German intervention as well as the Louvre Accord and Democratic administrations led to larger amounts of U.S. intervention. Some interpretations are offered as to why it is difficult to unravel U.S. policy.

Professional economists have for a long time had significant roles as advisers to policy makers. In recent years they have gone well beyond this in many countries and have come to occupy the highest positions in government. While their technical knowledge is an important reason for their influx into governments, their acquisition of the highest positions of authority, we contend, is to an important degree a ceremonial display. The symbolic aspect of the appointment of high-level economist-politicians is as significant as any specific stock of knowledge they bring to political life and is a part of an emerging transnational political culture in which economists occupy a sacerdotal role.

The dramatic overseas expansion of Japanese banks during the 1980s provoked major policy debates within the European Community. Fears that Japanese firms in the banking industry might replicate earlier successes in other industries, together with charges that Japan did not grant reciprocal access to European banks, raised important questions for EC member states committed to the implementation of common banking policies. Adoption of the crucially important Second Banking Coordination Directive and other public measures enabled the Community flexibly to impose strong controls on Japanese banks in the region. The nature of these public measures toward Japanese firms in the Community's banking industry, together with related EC policies toward local Japanese competition in other industries, suggested the emergence of a more general EC policy model for confronting the vaunted ‘Japanese challenge.’

As the debate throughout the eighties has concluded, the efforts of governments to intervene at the firm level has largely been disappointing. Using two examples drawn from the British experience, Rover and Inmos, this paper offers an analysis as to why the Government has encountered difficulties when it has sought to intervene in a strategic fashion. Essentially, public policy makers lack adequate mechanisms to intervene effectively in technology-based companies. Locked out of the knowledge base of the firm, inappropriate financial control is imposed which reinforces the ‘outsider’ status of the Government. Having addressed the limitations of strategic intervention, the paper, drawing on the comparative experience of other countries, then goes on to address how this policy boundary might be pushed back in the long term.

Policymakers hold and seek to act on beliefs concerning trade strategies as well as those concerning trade tactics and instruments. In contrast to prominent hypotheses in the literature, this article argues that constraints placed on specific dimensions of trade policy by societal groups and state institutions appear to play a greater role in shaping the impact of beliefs on policy choices than overall shifts in discretion accorded to policymakers. Insights into the resurgence of the retaliatory tariff in U.S. trade policy during 1985–88 are at the interaction of policy beliefs and variation in executive discretion. Although lending support to scholarship focusing on the interaction of ideas and institutions, these findings raise questions concerning prominent claims about the significance of policy beliefs.

The analysis of European integration has tended to use a toolkit drawn from international relations. But since the revival of integration in the mid-1980s, the governance of the European Community and European Union has increasingly come to resemble that of a multi-tiered state. Accordingly, this article analyzes the governance of the European Union from a comparative public policy perspective. Using new or historical institutionalism, three levels are considered. In the first part, attention is focused on the EU's institutions and the available instruments of governance. The second part examines the analysis of governance at the policy-specific or sub-system level, and puts forward an approach based on governance regimes. The final part considers the institutional roots of the persistent, regulatory character of governance in the European Union.

Securing the personal safety of citizens has traditionally been a state monopoly. However, increased fear of crime and victimization has produced individual and community actions to secure personal safety. This paper discusses the emergence and development of the community-initiated ‘Civil Guard’ in Israel, a sweeping movement which emerged in 1974 from a growing fear of terrorism. This grass roots initiative has raised government's concern over its ability to monitor, inspect and control the volunteers. The national police has co-opted the entire movement in three phases. In the first, a spontaneous emergence of self-help initiatives covered the country. Next, the movement was transformed into a national body of volunteers with a clear legal status, albeit under the complicated and joint auspices of the national police and local government. Finally the national police force co-opted the ‘Civil Guard’ into auxiliary units. What began as a neighborhood-based, self-help initiative was molded into a quasi-governmental, police-oriented voluntary organization.

Germany's economic resilience, even in the face of the extreme pressures of unification, cannot be explained by the neoclassical economic approach. Its social market institutions induce the major actors in the political economy to negotiate over the terms of economic and political adjustment in such a fashion as to diffuse innovative new organizational and institutional practices broadly and thoroughly throughout the economy and polity. The reorganization of the financial sector and the spread of new forms of workplace organization and corporate governance are used to illustrate this dynamic. The paper concludes with implications for how we think about regulation.

This paper examines the logic and implications of the Single European Market for the food manufacturing sector. It points to the role of multinationals in this sector and the process of concentration through merger and acquisition as a central growth strategy. It suggests that rather than encourage further concentration, European policy should concern itself with the benefits as well as the problems of regional differentiation and the complementarity rather than the conflict of different scales of production and distribution.

This article examines the institutional characteristics of market and centrally planned economies and their impact on the environment. It argues that while the planned economies are utilising market mechanisms in environmental protection, their market counterparts are facing more and more environmental problems that require governmental intervention. Using the latest statistical information, the records of sulphur dioxide emission under market and planning over the past twenty years are compared. The findings show that while planned economies generated more pollution due to energy inefficiency, they were nevertheless quite effective in reducing pollution under centralised coordination. This is particularly true at the initial stage of pollution control. Although the industrialised market economies were capable of diverting resources into pollution control, they were equally capable of causing environmental disruption, especially at their early stages of industrialisation. Finally, it is argued that environmental protection in post-socialist societies is likely to experience a downturn in the near future. This is due to the decreasing role of government coordination, the lack of a legal system, and the difficulty of developing a well-functioning market.