Linking Local Government Discretion and Accountability in Decentralisation

Decentralisation offers significant opportunities to improve government accountability by exerting stronger pressures both from below (demand) and above (supply). The literature contains many examples, however, where the potential has not been realised, partly because decentralisation reforms have often been introduced without thinking through their accountability implications. Even when accountability is taken into account, the efforts tend to emphasise either the supply or the demand side of the equation, but not both. Drawing on the sets of literature on fiscal, administrative and political decentralisation, this article presents a methodology for studying this.     

Nationalism and democracy in post‐communist Central Asia

The paper evaluates misconceptions of the so‐called transitologists in terms of the relationship between nationalism and democracy in the post‐Soviet Central Asian context. The analysis looks at only four of the five Central Asian republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The paper puts forward two main arguments. First, contrary to the argument by some political scientists that nationalism is compatible with, and indeed is the same as, democracy, the author argues that there is a significant degree of trade‐off between nationalism and democracy. Second, contrary to the transitologists' assumptions that an incipient trend would enforce a regime change from communism to liberal democracy in all post‐communist cases, the author argues that it is indeed nationalism, not liberal democracy, that is the real successor to communism at least in Central Asian countries. The paper provides evidence indicating the pervasiveness of ethnic nationalism and the deficiencies of liberal democracy in post‐Soviet Central Asia.     

Functions of Concordance and Dependence with Related Measures

Some functions that serve as building blocks for construction of a wider range of modes of concordance and dependence are pointed. We probe into interplays of such modes. From the standpoint of their conformity to stochastic dominance ordering of distributions within a Fréchet class, all such derived modes display some parallelism under certain conditions. We finally suggest a novel numeric measure of dependence that covers similar existing measures in literature.     

The Coverage Probability of Confidence Intervals in One‐Way Analysis of Covariance after Two F Tests

Volume 3 of Analysis of Messy Data by Milliken & Johnson (2002) provides detailed recommendations about sequential model development for the analysis of covariance. In his review of this volume, Koehler (2002) asks whether users should be concerned about the effect of this sequential model development on the coverage probabilities of confidence intervals for comparing treatments. We present a general methodology for the examination of these coverage probabilities in the context of the two‐stage model selection procedure that uses two F tests and is proposed in Chapter 2 of Milliken & Johnson (2002). We apply this methodology to an illustrative example from this volume and show that these coverage probabilities are typically very far below nominal. Our conclusion is that users should be very concerned about the coverage probabilities of confidence intervals for comparing treatments constructed after this two‐stage model selection procedure.     

Likelihood ratio procedures and tests of fit in parametric and semiparametric copula models with censored data

Copula models for multivariate lifetimes have become widely used in areas such as biomedicine, finance and insurance. This paper fills some gaps in existing methodology for copula parameters and model assessment. We consider procedures based on likelihood and pseudolikelihood ratio statistics and introduce semiparametric maximum likelihood estimation leading to semiparametric versions. For cases where standard asymptotic approximations do not hold, we propose an efficient simulation technique for obtaining p-values. We apply these methods to tests for a copula model, based on embedding it in a larger copula family. It is shown that the likelihood and pseudolikelihood ratio tests are consistent even when the expanded copula model is misspecified. Power comparisons with two other tests of fit indicate that model expansion provides a convenient, powerful and robust approach. The methods are illustrated on an application concerning the time to loss of vision in the two eyes of an individual.     

Change-making problems revisited: a parameterized point of view

The change-making problem is the problem of representing a given amount of money with the fewest number of coins possible from a given set of coin denominations. In the general version of the problem, an upper bound for the availability of every coin value is given. Even the special case, where for each value an unlimited number of coins is available, is NP-hard. Since in the original problem some amounts can not be represented, especially if no coin of value one exists, we introduce generalized problems that look for approximations of the given amount such that a cost function is minimized. We recall algorithms for the change-making problem and present new algorithms for the generalized version of the problem. Motivated by the NP-hardness we study fixed-parameter tractability of all these problems. We show that some of these problems are fixed-parameter tractable and that some are \(\hbox {W}[1]\)-hard. In order to show the existence of polynomial and constant-size kernels we prove some general results and apply them to several parameterizations of the change-making problems.