Mandates: Fiscal Accountability Issues
National leaders under pressure are often tempted to consider shifting costs to other levels of government and to satisfy new demands for public services by passing mandates and costs to other levels of governments to finance new programmes. These new mandates take a variety of forms but have one central feature: they permit the national government leaders to claim credit without paying for the costs of their own initiatives. This article examines intergovernmental relationships and the various forms of mandates including direct-order mandates, grants, pre-emptions, and tax policy. The article discusses the arguments for mandates, trends in their use, and reforms to curb them. The roles of agency cost-benefit analysis and legislative information and deliberation are particularly important. JEL classification: H200, H300, H540, H710, H810.
Unfunded Mandates Reform Act: History, Impact, and Issues
This report examines debates over what constitutes an unfunded federal mandate and the Unfunded Mandate Reform Act's (UMRA's) implementation. It also discusses particular mandates and procedures associated with UMRA, and assesses UMRA's impact on federal mandates and arguments concerning UMRA's future, focusing on UMRA's definitions, exclusions, and exceptions that currently exempt many federal actions with potentially significant financial impacts on nonfederal entities.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1