It affords the targeted group another opportunity to circumvent the intentions of reformers. Groups can report that required changes are impossible to make, exaggerate detrimental consequences, or even directly ignore policy reforms, especially if such changes would not be easily visible to an outside observer. Doctors, for example, have obligations to both their patient and to health insurance providers and hold information advantages in both relationships. Doctors can use this advantage in multiple ways. They can over-prescribe medications, or order unnecessary and expensive tests for their patients. They can also focus on more profitable medical procedures even when cheaper procedures would suffice. A possible response is to impose a system that includes independent review of medical bills to check for fraudulent or inappropriate charges. If a group’s monopoly on expertise cannot be overcome, then blocking that group from implementing, or at least rigorously monitoring the implementation of reforms, can strengthen the hand of reformers. A third strategy for combating a monopoly of expertise is to reframe the policy or issue under discussion by broadening it and/or raising the stakes. An added advantage of this strategy is that it often results in a more diverse group of participants, including policymakers from other government ministries and groups representing other interests. When the stakes are raised and the set of participants is widened,drainage planter pot the expertise of any one group is less consequential.
Health care policy provides a hard test for my argument because policy change is unusual, and significant reform is rare . Physicians in many countries, including Germany, have historically been successful at exerting a significant amount of influence over health policy thanks to their unified organization, capacity for mobilization, and plethora of resources . Despite these obstacles, Germany achieved a major reform of its health policy in the early 1990s. The costs of German reunification had been underestimated and a major looming financial burden was the integration of the East German socialized system into the West German employer-based system. Moreover, a global recession combined with Germany’s generous social benefits was driving major flagship employers, including BMW and Mercedes, offshore. Despite aggressive lobbying from the medical community, new reforms including lowering prescription drug prices, imposing new systems for monitoring physicians’ treatment and prescribing practices, and implementing a major reform of the hospital financing system were adopted . These reforms were ones that the medical community had successfully prevented in the past. The outcome was different in this case because reformers were able to reframe the debate. Instead of yet another attempt at reforming the health care system, these reforms were framed as facilitating the project of German reunification, helping German industry combat global recession, and keeping flagship German companies in Germany.
The participants in policy making also changed; they now included representatives from the finance and economics ministries, industry officials, and officials tasked with managing the reunification project. These representatives were able to emphasize the need for oversight and financial discipline in health care policy and refused to sign without it. This health care overhaul succeeded because policymakers were able to tie the reform to disruptive politics, in this case, German reunification and crises in the manufacturing industry, thus raising the stakes and broadening the set of actors involved. A final set of implications of my research builds on the foundations of Gerschenkron , Moore , and Polanyi , and speaks to scholars of social class decline and policymakers seeking to successfully manage that decline. Both Polanyi and Gerschenkron provide cautionary tales of the mismanagement of class decline, demonstrating that the consequences are not merely social unrest, unemployment, or increased social expenditures, but potentially the collapse of democratic regimes and the rise of authoritarian alternatives. For both Gerschenkron and Polanyi, poor management of a declining class results in democratic collapse and fascism. The routes to fascism, however, are different. In Gerschenkron’s account, democracy is destroyed when declining classes capture the state and use it to preserve their status. For Polanyi, democracy is destroyed when the state moves too quickly, crushing traditional classes under the wave of rapid modernization without offering some form of compensation or protection.
My dissertation points to an alternative trajectory, one that does not entail the collapse of democracy. It provides an example of effective, though expensive, management of a declining class. Compensation for farmers has been exceptionally costly. However, democracy has endured and social suffering and disruption have been minimal. While the farming sector has shrunk dramatically, the rural exodus was managed. Cities were not overwhelmed by flocks of farmers looking to start new lives, and countries were not overturned by the political and social unrest that might accompany the simultaneous abandonment of rural communities and exodus to the city. The tale of post-war European farmers suggests, then, that one way for the state to successfully manage the decline of a major and once powerful social class is to soften the blow with the extension of subsidies and financial compensation. Such a program is likely to be very costly, but also offers more certainty that decline of this class will be minimally disruptive- both politically and socially. Essentially, the state can pay a price to avoid a seismic disruption of the existing social order. An important caveat to be considered, especially by policymakers, is that once extended, this compensation may prove difficult, if not impossible to wind down. As my cases have demonstrated, despite repeated efforts to cut the CAP, policymakers have been unable to slash farmer support. Therefore, if policymakers choose to extend financial support to declining classes, they need to be careful about the early choices they make concerning how much support will be offered and how it will be structured. Based on my research into the CAP, there are three crucial decisions to make if the goal is to manage class decline while minimizing costs. The first critical juncture is the decision between supporting production and supporting incomes. Supporting production keeps people in the labor force but requires difficult to estimate spending commitments and risks crisis, while supporting incomes keeps costs more predictable and requires less risk in exchange for deactivating a potentially large sub-set of the population. For those governments wishing to minimize costs,plant pot with drainage the most effective strategy will be to structure the program to privilege income support over production as early as possible. While this choice can be painted as paying the class in question not to work and thus may face push back from the public or even within government, it avoids the myriad complications that stem from subsidizing production, including surplus crises, fights over price adjustments, and conflicts with international trade agreements. In short, leaving production to the most efficient, while supporting the less competitive via income payments allows policymakers to open up more market share for the most efficient while protecting the uncompetitive from impoverishment. A second critical juncture concerns rules structuring benefits, specifically the imposition of benefit limits. A decision to forego benefit limits is arguably more inclusive as it does not discriminate based on some measure of success or size of operation but is also more expensive. Alternatively, the decision to restrict benefits can be seen as discriminatory, splintering the target group into the privileged and unprivileged while saving costs in the long run.
This decision has important consequences for the scope and type of future reform. Despite repeated attempts, a reform that the CAP has never been able to impose due to ardent opposition from a few member states is a benefit limit. As a result, some farmers receive hundreds of thousands of Euros in CAP income payments every year. Policymakers wishing to minimize the costs of support to extent possible will want to impose benefit limits, whether they be yearly or lifetime, at the time the policy is created. Benefit levels can always be extended and expanded, but it is much harder to retrench these policies. By imposing limits early, policymakers can better contain overall costs. In addition, these choices position politicians to make popular reforms rather than unpopular, and likely unsuccessful reforms . However, it may be quite difficult to get the target’s representative groups and unions to agree to a policy that essentially imposes a two-tier system. The third critical decision concerns qualification and/or behavior standards and requirements. On the one hand, avoiding or limiting standards and rules increases the odds of compliance and support from the target population. On the other hand, imposing standards and rules early controls costs and makes future reform easier. The CAP has struggled to evolve over time, largely failing to impose even the most basic of standards on payment recipients. Policymakers who decide to manage class decline through a CAP-style income support system must think carefully about what types of standards and requirements make sense and impose them early. For example, two reforms CAP officials have struggled to impose are environmental standards and eligibility rules . Neither of these ideas, that farmers should have to meet basic environmental standards or that one’s primary profession must be agricultural in order to receive aid for those employed in agriculture, is particularly radical, but since no real rules or standards for good environmental practices or eligibility existed when the CAP was created, it has been nearly impossible to impose them in a meaningful way in subsequent reforms. Taken together, these three junctures identify moments when policymakers must think carefully about their decisions for how to manage a declining class because these decisions are sticky, proving hard to reverse, and carry important long-term implications. My dissertation and its core findings speak to a broader question of what happens to declining social classes. By investigating the current status of farmer power, I cast light on how and when the political power of a social class is affected by a decline in numbers. Farmers are not the only class to have experienced a dramatic reduction in its share of the population; the blue-collar industrial working class has shrunk dramatically with the shift to a service sector oriented economy. European governments have buffered workers against the effects of deindustrialization with generous disability and early retirement benefits. In addition, in many countries, unemployment programs for workers were structured to ensure that benefits would not run out. As this brief example illustrates, the framework I have used to examine the decline of Europe’s farmers can also be deployed to examine and explain the decline of other social classes. For both blue-collar workers and farmers, policy took the same path. It started with an effort to preserve the class by subsidizing employment and ultimately ended up with a policy that paid individuals not to work. The path to this final policy outcome in both cases was long and expensive. The lesson, then, for reformers is move to an income support policy as quickly as possible. While these policies are expensive and often unpopular, costs can be contained and crises avoided if these types of programs are adopted first, and reasonable benefit restrictions are imposed early. In sum, my project is not only about the intricacies of CAP reform, but also about the conditions that permit or forestall EU and welfare state policy reform, the techniques for overcoming resistance to policy change, and ultimately the politics of and strategies for managing social class decline. This body of research beginning with my study of farmers and expanding to other threatened social classes will further clarify the important puzzle of why some groups are able, against all odds, to exercise strength without numbers.Agriculture continues to be a fundamental instrument for sustainable development, poverty reduction and enhanced food security in developing countries. It is a vital development tool for achieving the Millennium Development Goals , one of which is to halve by 2015 the share of people suffering from extreme poverty and hunger . In Africa, agriculture is a strong option for spurring growth, overcoming poverty, and enhancing food security. However, agricultural productivity in Africa has continued to decline over the last decades and poverty levels have increased. Currently, agricultural productivity growth in subSahara Africa lags behind that of other regions in the world, and is well below that required to achieve food security and poverty goals. Increasing agricultural productivity in Africa is an urgent necessity and one of the fundamental ways of improving agricultural productivity is through introduction and use of improved agricultural technologies.