The White House wants to make about 240,000 different sets of data available to the public over the next month. It took the first step Thursday by launching its Data.gov web site with 46 sets of data in 13 areas from 26 agencies.
Incorporating the factors that created problems in the financial markets makes the theory complex. But to be effective in the real world, to be able to communicate economic ideas, you have to simplify. Sometimes, you start believing your simplifications as if they were the general theory.
Summary: The paper notes that the development of sound budgetary institutions in countries such as France, the U.K. and the U.S. has taken a very long time?200 years or more?and is still evolving. It discusses Douglass North's prediction 'which is supported by available data that institutional reform is also likely to be very slow in developing countries since the budget is especially prone to rent-seeking influences. Finally, the paper discusses the currently fashionable emphasis on complex, multiannual PFM reform strategies, which have been strongly promoted by the donor community; and advocates a simpler approach grounded on Schick's important principle of "getting the basics right." The paper identifies several areas where further research would be fruitful.
Now South Africa's incoming President Jacob Zuma is moving Manuel to a new job, a cabinet-level post heading a National Planning Commission (NPC) that is key to Zuma's plans for overhauling much-criticised public services.
"The NPC will be responsible for strategic planning for the country to ensure one national plan to which all spheres of government would adhere," Zuma said in announcing the change.
"This would enable us to take a more comprehensive view of socio-economic development in the country."
Manuel's successor at the finance ministry, former tax boss Pravin Gordhan, is also a respected figure credited with improving tax collection during his time at the helm of the revenue service...
Appointed Nelson Mandela's finance minister without any formal economics training in 1996 at the age of 40, the trained civil engineer announced a budget surplus a decade later -- the first in 30 years.
Stringent fiscal policies under his watch are also credited with steering South Africa's banks safely through the global meltdown.
But while widely applauded, Manuel has not shied from unpopular choices and has frequently raised the ire of South Africa's powerful political left who criticise his tight controls over the budget and views on inflation targeting.
Planning ministries are quite common in developing countries, but become less common as countries develop. Across the world, there has been a shift from traditional detailed planning, as reflected in 5-year plans and similar instruments, towards strategic coordination. This coordination is increasingly done by finance ministries or by prime ministers’ offices. This is often accompanied by a gradual integration of planning, strategy development and budgeting into a single, coordinated process, and a unified, strategic budget document. Planning ministries were often involved in project preparation, but this function is shifted to line ministries as their capacity develop. Macroeconomic forecasting is often transferred to the emerging macrofiscal and macroeconomic departments in the finance ministries, and statistics are increasingly produced by independent statistics agencies.
Infectious-disease specialists say they understand the logic: surviving the current, apparently mild strain of the virus may be protective if a more virulent strain emerges next fall. But they are generally against it.
Dr. Anne Moscona, a flu specialist at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, said she had been called by a reporter for a women’s magazine “asking if mothers should hold swine flu parties, like chickenpox parties.”
(Chickenpox parties, at which children gather so they can all be infected by a child who has the pox, are often held by parents who distrust chickenpox vaccine or want their children to have the stronger immunity that surviving a full-blown infection affords and are willing to take the risk that their child will not get serious complications.)
“I think it’s totally nuts,” Dr. Moscona said. “I can’t believe people are really thinking of doing it. I understand the thinking, but I just fear we don’t know enough about how this virus would react in every individual. This is like the Middle Ages, when people deliberately infected themselves with smallpox. It’s vigilante vaccination — you know, taking immunity into your own hands.”
The idea has arisen from the history of the 1918 Spanish flu. A mild spring outbreak was followed by two deadly waves in the early and late winter of 1918-1919. Some believe, although there is little evidence beyond anecdotal reports in old newspapers, that those who got sick in the first wave were less likely to get sick in the second and third.
Many cite as the source of their thinking the book “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 pandemic by John M. Barry.
Mr. Barry, in a telephone interview, said he had never publicly suggested deliberate self-infection, “but I used to joke with my wife, and I may have jokingly said it in speeches, that if a virus emerged and looked mild, I’d be on an airplane to Indonesia.”
In the 1918 Spanish flu, American cities that reacted quickly had fewer deaths than those that acted slowly and used fewer precautions, according to a 2007 study of 43 cities by researchers from the University of Michigan and the Centers for Disease Control. The most common combination was school closings and bans on public gatherings, which in 34 cities lasted for a median of four weeks. All those cities except New York, Chicago, and New Haven closed their schools; the median time was six weeks.
Deaths per 100,000 population ranged from 210 for Grand Rapids, Mich., to 807 for Pittsburgh.
Although some scientists and historians have argued that those measures just delayed deaths that later happened anyway, Dr. Cetron, one of the authors of the 2007 study, denied it.
“There’s no evidence of that,” he said. “Cities that acted early and layered on different interventions did well.”
Many people do not realize how long measures take to work. A child can shed flu virus for 10 days, Dr. Imperato said, an adult for 5.
Some experts are cautiously optimistic. A computer simulation of this outbreak released Wednesday by a team from Northwestern University projected a worst-case scenario, meaning no measures have been taken to combat the spread. It predicted a mere 1,700 cases in the United States four weeks from now.
Mexico’s public health budget is about 3 percent of gross domestic product — within the range of spending by other major Latin American economies, but well below the rate in developed countries, according to the World Bank; and Mexico has only about half as many hospital beds per capita than the United States.
To help Mexico meet the extra costs of the flu epidemic, the World Bank issued a loan of $205 million.
“The two key things that they need to work on now,” said Keith Hansen, a World Bank health official for Latin America and the Caribbean, “is surveillance, to pick up patterns of infection, and to make sure that everybody who needs care has access to it.”
In an acknowledgment that Mexicans frequently act as their own doctors, the government’s announcements, played repeatedly on the radio, advise people not to self-medicate and instead to seek out medical attention.
