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2. The Imbalance between Patient Needs and the Limited Competence of Top-Level Health Providers in Urban China: An Empirical Study
- Author:
- Qunhong Shen, Liyang Tang, Yilin Feng, and Jenny Tang
- Publication Date:
- 11-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
- Abstract:
- The increasing importance of patient satisfaction is a common trend for the global health delivery system. This development is one of the consequences of wider social movements toward consumerism (Sitzia and Wood 1997) and also is the result of the new public management (Christoffer 2002).
- Topic:
- Communism, Development, Government, and Health Care Policy
- Political Geography:
- China
3. Local Governments and the Chinese Stock Market
- Author:
- Mary Comerford Cooper
- Publication Date:
- 04-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
- Abstract:
- This paper examines a key aspect of the politics of stock markets in China—the distinct differences in interests between central government leaders and local governments. Central government leaders have a powerful incentive to promote macroeconomic stability and good performance of the stock market. Local leaders, for their part, are less concerned with the overall performance of the stock market than with gaining access to the stock market for companies under their own jurisdiction. The paper demonstrates that company listing brings tangible economic benefits to municipalities. Listed companies are associated with higher levels of gross domestic product (GDP), budgetary revenue, and industrial and commercial tax revenue. Therefore, it is not surprising that local officials put substantial effort into lobbying for the right to list additional companies on the national stock exchanges.
- Topic:
- Communism, Democratization, Economics, and Government
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
4. International Organizations and Democratization: Testing the Effect of GATT/WTO Membership
- Author:
- Mary Comerford Cooper
- Publication Date:
- 04-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
- Abstract:
- Does the World Trade Organization promote democracy? A large part of the heated and protracted debate over China's application for WTO membership revolved around this question. Prior to China's WTO accession in December 2001, this debate had dragged on for nearly fifteen years. While one side argued that WTO membership would promote democratization in China, others argued that the wealth generated through economic integration would provide the resources to maintain authoritarian rule. Only time will tell whether WTO accession will contribute to pressures for democratization in China. In the meantime, however, this paper examines the empirical basis for these competing claims about the effects of GATT/WTO memberships on domestic political systems. Based on statistical analysis of a global data set, this paper concludes that members of the international trade regime are more likely than nonmembers to be democracies. However, there is little evidence that WTO membership in itself can promote democratic transition. Instead, it appears to be the case that democratic countries are more likely to seek to join the WTO.
- Topic:
- Communism, Democratization, Economics, and Government
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
5. Politics and Property in Transitional Economies: A Theory of Elite Opportunity
- Author:
- Andrew G. Walder
- Publication Date:
- 04-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
- Abstract:
- Command economies gave communist-era elites administrative control and material privilege but severely restricted money income and private wealth. Markets and privatization inject new value into public assets and create unprecedented opportunities for elite insiders to extract incomes or assume ownership. These opportunities vary with the extensiveness of regime change and the barriers to asset appropriation. Within these limits, they further vary with the concentration and form of economic assets and structural changes induced by reform. Elite advantages are smallest where regime change is extensive and barriers to asset appropriation are high, and in small-scale economies that grow rapidly. In China, there has been no regime change and privatization has been delayed and slow. In the rural economy, elites keep their posts as a source of economic advantage, while low entry barriers to household enterprise and rapid growth have created new entrepreneurial elites. After two decades, rural officials nonetheless enjoy large net income advantages that grow along with the expansion of labor markets and private entrepreneurship. These are not generic outcomes of market reform, but the product of market reform in distinctive political and structural conditions.
- Topic:
- Communism, Economics, Government, and International Trade and Finance
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
6. Political Office, Kinship, and Household Wealth in Rural China
- Author:
- Andrew G. Walder and Litao Zhao
- Publication Date:
- 12-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
- Abstract:
- For more than two decades after the demise of Maoist collectivism, a resurgent market economy has deeply transformed the social structure of rural China. By the mid-1980s, peasant households had already returned to historical marketing patterns of agricultural produce and other sidelines and services. By the turn of the century, almost 140 million individuals, or 30 percent of the rural labor force, earned regular incomes from wage labor outside agriculture. Twenty million rural households had registered individual family enterprises, and two million of them had already grown into substantial private firms. A massive rural industrial sector grew up under public ownership in the 1980s, employing more than 80 million at its height. It was then extensively privatized in the 1990s, and is now less than half its former size. While these developments have been widely noted in studies of rural industrialization and income inequality, it is still far from clear how they have altered the structure and wealth of village political and economic elites.
- Topic:
- Communism, Economics, and Politics
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
7. Privatization and Elite Mobility: Rural China, 1979-1996
- Author:
- Andrew G. Walder
- Publication Date:
- 07-2002
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
- Abstract:
- The ideal types that motivate research on transitional economies have led to a neglect of the varied mechanisms that generate social change. One example is the implicit treatment of privatization as a single process whose initial impact will become more pronounced through time. Privatization in fact occurs via distinct mechanisms that have different consequences across types of assets and through time, as shown in an analysis of career trajectories over two decades in rural China. During the first decade, when privatization proceeded via the rapid expansion of household enterprise, ordinary individuals with nonagricultural work experience were the most likely to become private entrepreneurs. Village officials, their relatives, and public enterprise managers did not enter the private sector at rates higher than others. However, during the second decade the privatization of public enterprises began to transfer collective assets to individual ownership. During this period, public enterprise managers and the relatives of cadres emerged as the most likely to become private entrepreneurs. Private entrepreneurs, however, have yet to move into cadre posts, and cadres have yet to move into private entrepreneurship, at rates higher than others. Administrative elites have therefore proven resilient in the face of private-sector expansion, and the benefits of privatization have gradually shifted in their favor.
- Topic:
- Communism and Economics
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia