Fiscal Federalism and Public Service Provision in Canada

This paper provides a general overview of the allocation of revenues and expenditures across levels of governments in Canada and discusses how public services in specific areas are financed and delivered. In doing so, the paper draws attention to a number of important characteristics of the Canadian federation and of its evolution in the post-war period as well as in recent years. In particular, the discussion highlights the relatively high and increasing degree of decentralization of the Canadian federation, reflected through the rising importance of provincial revenues and expenditures in the last five decades and the recent devolution of some provincial responsibilities to local governments, among other things. The discussion also illustrates the significant overlap of taxation powers and expenditure responsibilities across the three levels of government. The paper is divided into five sections. The first section briefly describes the constitutional allocation of responsibilities of each level of government. The second section looks at some of the trends in the revenues and expenditures by levels of government, as well as intergovernmental transfers in the post-war period. In the third section, the sources of revenues are examined. The fourth section describes the allocation of expenditures in each area and discusses how some of the main public services are financed and delivered. The last section further examines the role of municipal governments by briefly discussing the budgetary process at the municipal level and by providing a succinct overview of the recent devolution of provincial responsibilities to municipalities in Ontario.revenues, expenditures, public services, municipal governments

Pragmatic Epistemic Justification and F. Gonseth"s Idoneism

What is knowledge ? How can knowledge be distinguished from simple opinion or belief ? Are we able to insure ourselves against error ? This is the kind of questions that Socrates asks the young Theaitetes. During the dialogue, several successive definitions are proposed, the last one being that knowledge is true belief followed by its justification

Semiparametric Fixed-Effects Estimator

This paper describes the Stata implementation of Baltagi and Li's (2002) series estimator of partially linear panel data models with fixed effects. After a brief description of the estimator itself, we describe the new command xtsemipar. We then simulate data to show that this estimator performs better than a fixed effect estimator if the relationship between two variables is unknown or quite complex.xtsemipar, Semiparametric estimations

Towards Consistency Management for a Business-Driven Development of SOA

The usage of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) along with the Business Process Management has emerged as a valuable solution for the complex (business process driven) system engineering. With a Model Driven Engineering where the business process models drive the supporting service component architectures, less effort is gone into the Business/IT alignment during the initial development activities, and the IT developers can rapidly proceed with the SOA implementation. However, the difference between the design principles of the emerging domainspecific languages imposes serious challenges in the following re-design phases. Moreover, enabling evolutions on the business process models while keeping them synchronized with the underlying software architecture models is of high relevance to the key elements of any Business Driven Development (BDD). Given a business process update, this paper introduces an incremental model transformation approach that propagates this update to the related service component configurations. It, therefore, supports the change propagation among heterogenous domainspecific languages, e.g., the BPMN and the SCA. As a major contribution, our approach makes model transformation more tractable to reconfigure system architecture without disrupting its structural consistency. We propose a synchronizer that provides the BPMN-to-SCA model synchronization with the help of the conditional graph rewriting

Role-Playing Game and Learning for Young People About Sustainable Development Stakes: An Experiment in Transferring and Adapting Interdisciplinary Scientific Knowledge

The study refers to the interactions between socio-economic and natural dynamics in an island biosphere reserve by using companion modelling. This approach provides scientific results and involves interdisciplinarity. In the second phase of the study, we transferred knowledge by adapting the main research output, a role-playing game, to young people. Our goal was to introduce interactions between social and ecological systems, coastal dynamics and integrated management. Adapting the game required close collaboration between the scientists and educators in order to transform both its substance and form and to run it with an easy-to-handle ergonomic platform.Children Education, Multi-Agent Environment, Role-Playing Game

On the holomorphic factorization for superconformal fields

For a generic value of the central charge, we prove the holomorphic factorization of partition functions for free superconformal fields which are defined on a compact Riemann surface without boundary. The partition functions are viewed as functionals of the Beltrami coefficients and their fermionic partners which variables parametrize superconformal classes of metrics.Comment: 5 pages, LATEX, MPI-Ph/92-7

Agent-Based Modeling of Human-Induced Spread of Invasive Species in Agricultural Landscapes: Insights from the Potato Moth in Ecuador

Agent-based models (ABM) are ideal tools to deal with the complexity of pest invasion throughout agricultural socio-ecological systems, yet very few studies have applied them in such context. In this work we developed an ABM that simulates interactions between farmers and an invasive insect pest in an agricultural landscape of the tropical Andes. Our specific aims were to use the model 1) to assess the importance of farmers\' mobility and pest control knowledge on pest expansion and 2) to use it as an educational tool to train farmer communities facing pest risks. Our model combined an ecological sub-model, simulating pest population dynamics driven by a cellular automaton including environmental factors of the landscape, with a social model in which we incorporated agents (farmers) potentially transporting and spreading the pest through displacements among villages. Results of model simulation revealed that both agents\' movements and knowledge had a significant, non-linear, impact on invasion spread, confirming previous works on disease expansion by epidemiologists. However, heterogeneity in knowledge among agents had a low effect on invasion dynamics except at high levels of knowledge. Evaluations of the training sessions using ABM suggest that farmers would be able to better manage their crop after our implementation. Moreover, by providing farmers with evidence that pests propagated through their community not as the result of isolated decisions but rather as the result of repeated interactions between multiple individuals over time, our ABM allowed introducing them with social and psychological issues which are usually neglected in integrated pest management programs.Socio-Ecological Systems, Farmers, Invasive Pest, Long Distance Dispersion, Teaching

Audiotactile interaction can change over time in cochlear implant users

Recent results suggest that audiotactile interactions are disturbed in cochlear implant (CI) users. However, further exploration regarding the factors responsible for such abnormal sensory processing is still required. Considering the temporal nature of a previously used multisensory task, it remains unclear whether any aberrant results were caused by the specificity of the interaction studied or rather if it reflects an overall abnormal interaction. Moreover, although duration of experience with a CI has often been linked with the recovery of auditory functions, its impact on multisensory performance remains uncertain. In the present study, we used the parchment-skin illusion, a robust illustration of sound-biased perception of touch based on changes in auditory frequencies, to investigate the specificities of audiotactile interactions in CI users. Whereas individuals with relatively little experience with the CI performed similarly to the control group, experienced CI users showed a significantly greater illusory percept. The overall results suggest that despite being able to ignore auditory distractors in a temporal audiotactile task, CI users develop to become greatly influenced by auditory input in a spectral audiotactile task. When considered with the existing body of research, these results confirm that normal sensory interaction processing can be compromised in CI users