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Altruistic punishment (AP)–punishment of those contributing little to the public good–has been proposed as an explanation for the extraordinary extent of human culture relative to other species. AP is seen as supporting the high levels of altruism necessary for the cooperation underlying this culture, including information exchange. However, humans will also sometimes punish those who contribute greatly to the public good, even when those contributions directly benefit the punisher. This behaviour–antisocial punishment (ASP)–is negatively correlated with gross domestic product, and may be a hindrance to overall wellbeing. In this chapter, we pursue a better understanding of ASP in particular and costly punishment in general. We explore existing data showing cultural variation in the propensity to punish, and ask how such sanctioning, whether of those who give much or little, affects the individuals who conduct it. We hypothesise that costly punishment is a mechanism for regulating investment between different levels of society, for example, whether an individual's current focus should be on their nation, village, family or self. We suggest that people are less likely to antisocially punish those they consider to be `ingroup' and that the propensity to apply this identity to strangers may vary with socio-economic–political context and resulting individual experience. In particular, an increased propensity to express ASP should correlate with a lower probability of benefiting from public goods, as may be the case where there is a low rule of law. We show analysis of both behavioural economics experiments and evolutionary social simulations to support our hypotheses and suggest implications for policymakers and other organisations that may wish to intervene to improve general economic wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of ethics and regulation was the focus of the October 2011 AFP think tank 'Regulation, Ethics and Philanthropy: A Sector-Wide Dialogue in the Interest of the Public Good.' This chapter summarizes the main points raised by the guest speakers, including the concept of building ethical fitness and a culture of integrity by examining core shared values, making ethical decisions, and acting with moral courage; and the need for both effective government regulation and greater self-regulation in the nonprofit sector. The chapter also describes breakout discussions on case studies related to ethical situations. Each breakout reported to the group on the 'is' and the 'ought' of its case study, and how fundraisers, individually and in common, might respond to the ethical, legal, and regulatory issues raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 49 of the book "HANDBOOK OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS," VOLUME 4, edited by T. Paul Schultz and John Strauss is presented. It focuses on the theory and evidence of public goods and political economy. The theory includes power or influence, tastes, group size, distribution of group benefits, and cohesion. It also presents the evidences, empirical methods, role of group characteristics, experiments of public goods, as well as the welfare costs of the misallocation of public goods.

The record of the United Nations shows a surprising capacity for institutional innovation, conceptual advances, policy adaptation and organisational learning. This can be shown with respect to peacekeeping and peace operations, human security and human rights, sanctions and the use of force, and so on. Yet in 2005, when this book was completed, the United Nations was an organisation in turmoil. On the one hand, there were efforts to initiate the most far-reaching, comprehensive and bold reforms in the UN's sixty-year history. On the other, the organisation was struggling to cope with a string of allegations of fraud and misconduct by foot soldiers and senior officials. A high-profile inquiry into the deeply damaging oil-for-food scandal fingered the son of the Secretary-General (SG) and faulted the SG for failure to conduct a proper investigation of possible conflict of interest. His former chief of staff was accused of shredding documents in relation to the scandal shortly after the inquiry was launched. The explanation that these were duplicates that had been destroyed in order to free up office space did not pass the ‘smell test’ for many American critics. The High Commissioner for Refugees had to resign in the aftermath of allegations of sexual harassment. The chief of the UN's internal oversight office – meant to oversee accountability and integrity in the organisation – left under a cloud with respect to oversight and recruitment lapses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Iraq War in 2003 brought to a head a sometimes troubled and uneasy relationship between the world's premier international organisation and its most important member state. The whole affair generated heated controversy about the system of multilateral governance centred on the United Nations and the capacity and propensity of the USA to embark on unilateral adventures. The tension between the competing imperatives to unilateralism and multilateralism in US foreign policy has long bedevilled relations between the UN and the USA with respect to international peace operations, well before the advent of the administration of President George W. Bush. This chapter will seek to demonstrate that the critical UN–US relationship in fact soured over the course of the 1990s with respect to a range of peace support operations. This forms the necessary backdrop to understanding the ill-tempered UN–US exchanges of 2002–5. The UN Security Council (UNSC) is the proper locus of authorising and legitimising the creation, deployment and use of military force under international auspices. The major powers were given permanent membership of the UNSC and the veto power in recognition of their special role and responsibility in underwriting world order and collective security. When collective security proved unattainable and peacekeeping emerged as a substitute technique for keeping the major powers out of competitive involvement in armed conflicts, direct military involvement by the five permanent members (P5) of the UNSC was not welcome. But they still had to consent to the creation, deployment and financing of UN peacekeeping missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All autocratic regimes face two dilemmas: first, they must deter potential elite rivals, and second, they must induce some form of political loyalty from the masses. How does a hegemonic party manage to solve elite disputes and keep the party united? Why would voters support an autocratic regime? To answer these questions, I present in this chapter my theory of hegemonic-party survival, which will be assessed using systematic empirical evidence in subsequent chapters of this book. Elite Divisions and the Golden Years of the PRI During the golden years of the PRI, the most serious threats came from within the party itself (Molinar, 1991). The PRI experienced a series of splits during its history, the most important of which were those of Juan Andreu Almazán in 1940, Ezequiel Padilla in 1946, Miguel Henríquez Guzmán in 1952, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in 1988. All of these splits occurred because prominent politicians objected to the party's presidential nominee. The 1988 split was different because it resulted in the formation of a new political party, the PRD. To understand how a hegemonic party manages to deter party splits and the factors that account for elite divisiveness, consider the following decision-theoretic problem of a politician who is evaluating whether to remain loyal to the hegemonic party or to split. The expected utility of joining the hegemonic party is given by the probability of winning under that party's label, PI, multiplied by the likelihood of obtaining that party's nomination, NI, times the utility of office, O, minus the costs incurred in running a campaign under the incumbent's label, CI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 7 of the book "Rural Social Work Practice" is presented. It states that social workers must have knowledge and skills in community building to help rural communities respond proactively to changes in the environment. It also indicates that professional social workers' mission is to help local citizens respond to change in ways that promote fairness in social arrangements and distribute public goods.

OVERVIEW The second kind of social spending emerged in the nineteenth century. Country after country turned toward tax revenues as a basis for launching or expanding schools, especially primary schools. Yet some countries took far longer than others to develop universal primary schooling – and most countries have deficient primary education even today. These differences in basic schooling have long been recognized as one of the keys to global income inequalities. Of all the kinds of public spending considered in this book, expenditures on public schooling are the most positively productive in the sense of raising national product per capita. Here we concentrate on primary public education, the kind of education that involves the greatest shift of resources from upper income groups to the poor. What holds back primary and secondary education in so many societies, and what forces promoted it in the history of today's high-income countries? How some nations came to promote mass schooling through taxation, capturing its external benefits for growth and democracy, while most others lagged behind before 1914, is the central issue in this chapter. As with poor relief, so too with early schooling, the roles of elite self-interest, democracy, and decentralization will help us interpret the rich variety of national experiences. The main arguments are as follows: Global leadership: German states led the way in elementary education from 1815 until about 1860. In terms of enrollment rates, it was then overtaken not only by the United States, but also by several other countries. By 1882 France had become an enrollments leader in Europe. In the share of national product spent on education, Germany retained leadership throughout the nineteenth century, though other countries were not far behind. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The four puzzles just distilled from a survey of poor relief before 1880 deserve answers. Why did England have a dramatic early rise of poor relief? Why was poor relief a rural and regional outcome in England, when it was heavily urban in the rest of the world? Why did poor relief stagnate as a share of national income in many countries between 1820 and 1880? Why did it fall to central governments to limit relief, when theory suggests that central governments might be more efficient than local governments in providing it? A few key factors help to resolve all four puzzles. The comparative history of poor relief becomes somewhat less mysterious if we follow the roles of electoral democracy, decentralization in government, and changes in economic self-interest. The same forces that push back the veil of mystery about early poor relief, it will turn out, will also help to explain some puzzles about the rise of public schooling in Chapter 5. THE RISE AND FALL OF ENGLAND'S OLD POOR LAW, 1780–1834 The first puzzle to be addressed in the pre-1880 experience is the peculiarity of English poor relief movements. Why did England lead so early in poor relief in the eighteenth century? Why did it then cut relief, yet remain one of the top-spending nations? Did the same powerful interests change their minds on this issue, or was it the arrival of new interest groups that led to the relief-slashing Poor Law Reform of 1834? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the eighteenth century, the rise of tax-based social spending has been at the heart of government growth. It was social spending, not national defense, public transportation, or government enterprises, that accounted for most of the rise in governments' taxing and spending as a share of GDP over the last two centuries. The increasing role of social spending in our lives has been linked to three other great social transformations: the transition to fuller democracy, the demographic transition toward fewer births and longer life, and the onset of sustained economic growth. Social spending's share of national product derives its permanence from the likely permanence (we hope) of these three great transformations – that is, of democracy, of human longevity, and of prosperity. NINE CONCLUSIONS Exploring these themes leads to a set of varied but logically consistent results. The rest of this chapter offers a guide to the whole set of arguments of the entire book, grouping most of them around these nine conclusions: (#1) There was so little social spending of any kind before the twentieth century primarily because political voice was so restricted. (#2) The central role of political voice is shown by an exceptional early case. Both Britain's relatively high poor relief in 1782–1834 and its cutbacks in 1834 and 1870 fit the changing self-interest of those with voice. (#3) Similarly, just noting the interests of those with voice helps to explain Chapter 1's education puzzles: Why did Germany and laissez-faire North America lead the way in tax-based public schooling, and why did Britain lag behind in the nineteenth century? How did the United States remain a leader in educational attainment, yet end up ranked about fourteenth in students' test scores? Again, the concentration of voice was the enemy of education. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CONTROVERSY Over the next one hundred years, there will be waves of intense debate over using taxes for social programs. Defenders will package such programs as high-return investments that benefit most of society and tax only those people whose share of income and wealth could stand to come down. Opponents will decry the two-sided stifling of initiatives that invites both the taxed and the subsidized to be less productive. Both sides will invest in studies showing that they are right. This future debate seems to follow naturally from the flow of history, the logic of self-interest, and the inevitable help-versus-incentives quandary. The two opposing sets of arguments have been rediscovered and repeated for centuries, mainly in debates over social transfers to the poor. Any reading of the social history of early modern Europe turns up all the arguments we hear today. Long before the Fabians, there was a Left argument that the poor, elderly, and uneducated were people who needed help through no fault of their own. Many of these unfortunates could never be self-supporting, so that harsh work incentives would be cruel and unproductive. Others were the “able–bodied” whose productive potential could handsomely repay any society that wisely invested in them. And long before Malthus there was a conservative argument that any combination of taxes and transfers is doubly costly. It erodes incentives to work, to take risks, and to accumulate, both for those being taxed and for those receiving benefits based on their low incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two preceding chapters have shown that attitudes, economic structure, and wealth are insufficient, if not problematic, explanations of variations in environmental performance among advanced industrial democracies. This chapter and the next one discuss a crucial factor that mediates between structural or cultural characteristics of countries and national environmental performance: the institutional context. This chapter investigates the influence of institutions linking economic and policy actors and their impact on environmental policy. The subsequent chapter investigates the influence of more traditional political institutions on the ability of countries to provide environmental protection. As with other explanations of environmental politics, studies examining whether institutions matter do not deal with environmental outcomes in a direct manner. Doing so allows us to evaluate competing explanations more systematically. Garrett and Lange (1996) provide an extensive theoretical treatment of the role that domestic institutions play in mediating exogenous changes in actors' preferences over economic policy. In seeking to explain the specific ways that “institutions matter,” they suggest that both the organization of socioeconomic interests (e.g., structure of trade unions and employer groups) and the formal political institutions of a country (e.g., electoral laws, separation of political powers) can strongly influence how nations adjust to a changing configuration of economic preferences. Although their argument is developed around exogenous changes in the economy brought on by globalization, the model is general enough to be a useful way to conceptualize understanding how countries adjust to influences like the growth of environmental concern since the late 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common explanation for environmental protection in advanced democracies is public awareness and concern about environmental problems. Virtually all studies cite, in one form or another, theemergence of environmental preferences among citizens as an important cause of action. According to such arguments, citizens perceive the environmental impact of industrial production as undesirable. Advances in the scientific understanding of the effects of human activity on the natural environment and recognition of the dependence of human society on environmental processes have also helped focus attention on environmental policy reforms. Greater scientific understanding has been ever more widely communicated via the news media, and increases in physical well-being since World War II have increased the salience of environmental protection on the political and social agenda. Despite the research on increasing environmental concern and its causes, the relationship between mass attitudes and environmental outcomes in comparative politics remains virtually unexplored. This chapter attempts to address this oversight by investigating the relationship between the “mobilization of environmental bias” and environmental performance in advanced democracies. Drawing on several international opinion surveys and electoral data on environmental parties, I assess whether cross-national differences in aggregate support for environmental protection help us to explain cross-national differences in environmental performance in ways commonly assumed. Additionally, I investigate the extent to which cross-national differences in environmental mobilization are related to income. Then, the chapter more systematically evaluates the idea introduced in the preceding chapter that “environmental mobilization” is largely a product of income growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, I evaluate economic and structural explanations of national environmental performance. One of the most prominent explanations for differing commitments to environmental quality in the contemporary literature is national income and economic development. Conventional wisdom (and many studies) suggests that higher incomes increase people's attention to environmental problems and willingness to pay for environmental improvements (Baumol and Oates 1988; Grossman and Krueger 1995; Inglehart 1977, 1990; Jänicke 1992). Often associated with increased wealth are broader structural changes in the economy that, according to many, should reduce environmental pressures by shifting production and consumption away from pollution-intensive goods toward less polluting services. Without necessarily rejecting such explanations, others suggest that general physical and demographic features of a society help to explain differences in the salience of environmental performance and scope for better environmental quality (Cropper and Griffiths 1994; Kitschelt 1989). These factors – national wealth, the structure of production, demographics, and geography – can all be considered structural explanations of environmental performance in the sense that they cannot be easily changed, or if they can be (as in the case of wealth or population density), they can change only very slowly. For instance, increasing population density is not a conscious strategy of trying to augment concern for the environment; and, practically speaking, there is little that a democratic country can do in the short run to alter its population density. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book examines the success of seventeen Western nations in reducing environmental pollution since the early 1970s. Environmental conditions play an increasingly important role in the politics of advanced democracies. Increased human expansion has placed unprecedented strains on the resource base upon which the economy depends. Holes in the ozone layer, global warming, and the loss of biodiversity are only a few of the best-known problems connected with the environmental crisis. Also important are problems less global in scope, like acid rain or the disposal of wastes. Few dispute that historic trends in environmental degradation could hinder the ability to provide increasing levels of well-being into the next century. Current problems stem first and foremost from a failure to use natural resources effectively and from the implications of that failure on historic development paths. The public has begun to recognize some of the environmental problems confronting the physical and economic sustainability of modern societies. Opinion polls since the 1960s show that large majorities in most economically advanced countries have consistently supported increased public action to ensure the protection of ecosystems and to reduce pollution. Policy makers have responded both to the growing evidence of long-term threats and growing public opposition to past practices by creating a variety of reforms to control environmental degradation. Today, most Western democracies have a wide array of measures to limit pollution and other forms of environmental degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The health problems of the poor do not stop at national borders. A globalised world presents new risks to health and at the same time, it provides opportunities to prevent, treat or contain disease. Development agencies and partner countries should strengthen ways of working together globally. One way is to promote the development of Global Public Goods (GPGs) for health, which can provide enduring benefits for all countries and all people. This approach includes such actions as medical research and development focused on diseases that most affect the poor. In addition, trade in goods and services and multilateral trade agreements have an increasing influence on the health of the poor. Of particular significance are those agreements dealing with trade related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and trade in hazardous substances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of the topics discussed within the issue of the book "DAC Guidelines and Reference Series: Poverty and Health." The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) include health improvement objectives such as the reduction of child mortality and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) prevention. It cites the need for development agencies to help partner countries to develop health systems and promote the development of Global Public Goods (GPGs) for health.

This chapter discusses collective political violence as rational choice. Rational choice explanations of collective political violence emphasize individual rather than collective interest as the motivation for participation in collective action to obtain a common objective. Such explanations are theoretically distinct from social-structural, functionalist or other sociological theories of civil violence. Rational choice is an attempt to introduce utilitarian thought in the study of collective political violence and other social movements.

This chapter addresses the transnational dimension of the role of international public goods. Associated with global integration, the number of development problems that call for supranational policy responses grows. These challenges arise from combinations of market failure, government failure, and systemic failure. Investments in international public goods can make national development efforts more productive. The end of the Cold War and the emergence of an intensified globalization have altered the development challenge and the motivation for foreign aid.

Public sector rent-seekers raise the transaction costs of public goods, services, and "contracts" with which the public and private sector try to create an efficient market for public goods. The high transaction costs lead to a special type of market failure--the market failure of externalities. These constitute the main obstacle to development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]