The Annual Report objectively reflects the year's developments in terms of politics, the economy, society, culture, the environment, innovation and reform, and describes the problems, challenges and countermeasures in both traditional and new special economic zones. It provides an analysis of China's special economic zones, including a review of the year's developments in the form of experimental zones. It also presents new special economic zones and focuses on analyzing the transformation of these zones; the use of resources; sustainable, economic and social development; social security and technical innovation in the context of current developments. It also offers a comparative analysis and makes policy and development suggestions for each issue.

Volume three of the official history of Canada's Department of External Affairs offers readers an unparalleled look at the evolving structures underpinning Canadian foreign policy from 1968 to 1984. Using untapped archival sources and extensive interviews with top-level officials and ministers, the volume presents a frank "insider's view" of work in the Department, its key personalities, and its role in making Canada's foreign policy. In doing so, the volume presents novel perspectives on Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the country's responses to the era's most important international challenges. These include the October Crisis of 1970, recognition of Communist China, UN peacekeeping, decolonization and the North-South dialogue, the Middle East and the Iran Hostage crisis, and the ever-dangerous Cold War.

The integration of the Central and Eastern European transition countries into the European Union is one of the most exciting economic policy issues of today. The book provides a detailed analysis of the economic effects which EU integration has on accession countries. It shows that these countries have already managed to fully remove the anti-trade bias with the EU that existed before the fall of the iron curtain. Benefits from further integration into the EU could result in particular from the fact that full membership in the European Community will increase the credibility of government policy in accession countries. The study explores in depth how these credibility effects can be quantified. The author develops a novel approach to model the transformation process within a dynamic computable general equilibrium framework. Furthermore, he estimates the potential income and welfare effects of EU integration for Poland, the largest transition country with EU candidate status.

The election of 1980 represented not only a departure from a 44 year-long period of predominantly Democratic presidents, but also a change in the rules of American politics. Anthony Bennett takes us through the last five elections of the twentieth century, from Ronald Reagan's 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' in 1980 to Bill Clinton's 'Bridge to the twenty-first century' in 1996. Beginning with the fundamentals of process and terminology, Bennett devotes a chapter to each election - including the candidates, the conventions, and the campaigns - and then explains why the race turned out as it did. Finally, he explains how the system continued to evolve to its modern day state and how Reagan, Bush and Clinton built their winning coalitions.

"The historical response to bank crises has always been more regulation. A pattern emerges that some may find surprising: regulation often contributes to bank instability. It suppresses competition and effective response to market changes and encourages bankers to take on additional risk. This book offers a valuable history lesson for policy makers"--

The Nature of Party Government examines relationships between governments and supporting parties on a comparative European basis. The book does so at the level of principles: there is a major conflict between governments, which should govern and parties, which being representative, wish to shape the way governments operate. The book studies relationships empirically as well: it shows that they occur on three plans, appointments, policy-making and patronage and assesses the extent of two-way influences, from parties to governments and from governments to parties.

This book explores the intricacies of the science-policy linkage that pervades environmental policymaking in a democracy. These are the key questions that this primary textbook for courses on American public policymaking and environmental policymaking addresses and attempts to answer. Turmoil in American Public Policy: Science, Democracy, and the Environment first lays out the basics of the policymaking process in the United States in relation to the substantive issues of environmental policymaking. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, the authors highlight the views and experiences of scientists, especially natural scientists, in their interactions with policymakers and their efforts to harness the findings of their science to rational public policy. The proper role of science and scientists in relation to environmental policymaking hinges on fundamental questions at the intersection of political philosophy and scientific epistemology. How can the experimental nature of the scientific method and the probabilistic expression of scientific results be squared with the normative language of legislation and regulation? If scientists undertake to square the circle by hardening the tentative truths of their scientific models into positive truths to underpin public policy, at what point may they be judged to have exceeded the proper limits of scientific knowledge, relinquished their role as impartial experts, and become partisan advocates demanding too much say in a democratic setting? Providing students-and secondarily policymakers, scientists, and citizen activists-a theoretical and practical knowledge of the means availed by modern American democracy for resolving this tension is the object of this progressively structured textbook. Includes excerpts from 100 interviews with natural scientists and social scientists conducted over the past several years Provides two figures illustrating the concepts of pluralism and elitism in the United States public policymaking process Offers end-of-chapter reflection questions and suggested readings for students

This book explores the Arctic as a rapidly evolving phenomenon in international affairs of a rising number of stakeholders. For decades, Arctic studies used to be an affair of a relatively narrow group of experts from northern countries. This time is over due to a new Chinese Arctic policy, as well as growing regional interests from South Korea, Singapore, India and Japan. Contributors reflect on new roles for the Arctic region: both as a playground for the old school nation state competition and even confrontation, and a new source for international cooperation in energy, logistics and natural sciences. Climate change, political tensions and economic competition make Arctic a hotter venue of international relations. This new Arctic fever, studied through a comparative analysis of different regional agendas, especially with a focus on the US-China-Russia triangle, represents the main subject of our book, which will be of interest to scholars of geopolitics, of climate change, and of 21st century energy economics.

An entrepreneur and educator highlights the surprising influence of humanities scholarship on biomedical research and civil liberties. This spirited defence urges society to support the humanities to obtain continued guidance for public policy decisions, and challenges scholars to consider how best to fulfil their role in serving the common good.

Teachers, students, experts, policymakers, and citizen activists all should welcome this authoritative, systematic, single-volume sourcebook of who makes foreign policy, how it is made, and what U.S. policy has been since the 1960s. Well-known experts assess all the significant literature and research about U.S. policy in the region over the last three decades and analyze the role and procedures of foreign policymaking through regional institutions, key factors and major players in the United States, and special issues such as interventionism, human rights, democratization, and peacekeeping efforts.

This volume provides information about the structures and composition of the higher civil service and its position in the political structure through a comparative analysis of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Greece, Denmark and Sweden. The book explores how higher civil service has developed in the light of the massive changes in European societies in the past 30 years. Changes include the size of the top level of the civil service, the growing social diversity of its ranks and well as the tendency to recruit from outside the civil service. The book also examines how wider social changes, such as the democratization of education, the growth of interest groups, and the increasing importance of the European Union impact on the higher levels of bureaucracy producing similar patterns of change throughout Europe.

Radical new technologies are developing in Western societies at ever-increasing rates but contemporary democracies often lack the appropriate organizational forms to confront these developments. "Creative Democracy" discusses the failure of politicians and democratic institutions to cope with modern challenges, and proposes a specific strategy to address these problems in contemporary society. The authors propose new strategies to increase public awareness of, and democratic control over, major technological developments explaining the advantage of democratic discourse and consensus formation over voting, and insisting that scientists must work with politicians to formulate and articulate their alternative futures for major technological developments. Overall, "Creative Democracy" provides a thorough, scholarly and practical analysis in support of democratic dialogue.

This book explores the relationship between land use planning and ethno-religious segregation. It draws on a range of empirical research and case studies to explore the meaning attached to land in contested places, the challenges these present to planners and the possibilities for accommodating differences over the use and development of territory. The author argues that planners have a significant role in the management of these processes and sets out some ideas about how this might be addressed in local and global settings, including the Balkans and Palestine.

Lemco investigates those political, economic, and social conditions that theorists of federalism have associated with the stability or instability of federations. For many years, there have been pervasive arguments that federalism provides the best government possible for a nation of considerable ethnic and regional disparity. Students of federations have suggested that a centralized federal government that protects the national interest, and governments of the constituent units that protect local and regional interests, are the most responsive administrative forms for a society of great diversity.

Following a review of the theoretical literature concerning federalism and political stability, data pertaining to political, social, and economic conditions that are reputed to be related to federal political stability are collected and tested. These conditions include the structure of politics, the impact of political freedom, the importance of the party system, and the relevance of ethnically and territorially based cleavages. The associations among economic modernization, social mobilization, relative deprivation, and federal political stability are also investigated. The author concludes with a discussion of the most significant independent variables, the prospects for future research, and a focus on the extent to which federal and unitary structures can protect minority rights effectively. Lemco's provocative study will be of considerable interest to political theoreticians as well as to students of contemporary nationalist movements.

Discusses the ambiguous nature of the state in Russia, focusing on elite networks and their role in policy processes. This book examines the paradoxical dualism of state institutions and ruling networks, providing answers as to why some decisions are not implemented, and why the state exists despite the systemic inefficiency of its institutions.

Christian Potschkaprovides a comprehensive comparative analysis of the evolution of British and German broadcasting policies with a specific focus on processes of marketization and liberalization as they have affected national policy-making processes, regulatory frameworks and media structures. The study frames the development of communications policy in two ways. First, the book explores tensions in both countries between the public and private sectors; second, it evaluates the differential impact of federalization and centralization.By discussing the various political, economic and cultural factors relevant to the emergence of contemporary broadcasting structures and institutions, Potschka contextualizes the development and impact of policies on media systems. Drawing attention to the dynamics and changing paradigms of communications policy-making and regulatory trends, this bookhighlights many of the ideas and values that have been brought to bear on processes of policy-making in the UK and German

The book examines the conditions for successful high-technology policy from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It enhances the predominant national systems of innovation approach to innovation policy with concepts based on new developments in the governance of complex systems and processes. The conceptual framework of complex networks and systems is used to examine national policy approaches in countries that have created environments conducive to high-technology industries as well as individual high-technology sectors, such as biotechnology, alternative energy, and aerospace. Theoretical and empirical contributions are synthesised into lessons for high-tech policy and further research.

This book is an analysis and exploration of the relationship between peasants and policies within the process of reform in China. After examining the long term rural policies, either before or after the reform, it was found that all these polices have been expected to promote peasants' interests and claimed to take enhancing peasants' happiness as their goal. Nonetheless, the history and current reality of rural development have demonstrated that the same policy starting point had lead to very different policy designs. Even today, quite a few institutional arrangements with good intentions have ended up with opposite results and have even become bad policies that do harm to people. This book argues that the reason for such serious deviation, between political intentions and institutional arrangements, as well as between policy goals and its results is: as a political force, the peasantry itself has not effectively engaged with the political process of the country.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the political environment in Europe has changed dramatically, and security requirements for NATO countries have undergone a radical transformation. Yet, as illustrated by the recent bombing of Kosovo, restructuring of the defense industrial sectors in Europe lags behind the United States. The most egregious example is the armored vehicle sector, particularly in Britain, Germany, and France. Identifying five conditions necessary for restructuring the armored vehicle industry, this book looks at the absence or presence of these economic conditions in each of these countries and analyzes the impact on the armored vehicle industry.

Comparing these countries to the United States, where the armored vehicle industry has restructured as fully and as ruthlessly as the defense aerospace and electronic industries, the author shows private ownership, flexible capital and labor markets, a profitable scale of production, a lack of commercial diversification, and an active state defense industrial policy to be necessary prerequisites. All five factors exist in the United States, whereas two or more are missing in the European countries, retarding development of this industry.

This volume analyses Kirchnerismo in Argentina and the developmental regime approach in the political economy of development in Latin America. It shows the systematic way in which relationships between state-market, state-society, and national-international dichotomies can be characterised within a developmentalist paradigm.

This book describes 11 "great policies" - strategic innovations designed to deal with problems that transcend normal boundaries of government action. Examples range from the Marshall Plan in the U.S. to the "reverse brain-drain" policy in China, and from the financing of land reform by the distribution of industrial bonds in Taiwan to exploration of community natural resource management in Latin America. These actions did not emerge incrementally from existing policies, but represented departures from conventional organizations and sectoral responsibilities. Although such strategic innovations are rare, these examples suggest that when they occur, they are recognizably different from policies that develop incrementally. They create new paradigms of public action, they generate new expectations and demands, and they require extraordinary processes of implementation. Such "mega-policies" imply the possibility of developing transferable lessons from otherwise unique cases. These "mega-policies" range from economic growth strategies to social initiatives and from international economic transactions to technical exchanges. This work will be of great interest to scholars and policy makers involved with economic and social change, and Asian/Pacific and Third World Studies.

Government supported junk social science-or sanctified snake oil as Sarnoff terms it-exists in all policy arenas along the entire political spectrum, as policy advocates seek to justify the continuation of ineffective programs and to block alternative solutions. This form of junk science is particularly dangerous and wasteful in terms of tax dollars because professional confirmation, media investigation and government support lend it an unwarranted imprimatur of validity. Sarnoff argues that it confuses the public and convinces them to support programs as ends in themselves, rather than determining whether or not such efforts actually achieve purported goals.

Ineffectiveness, incompetence, lack of technology, ideology masquerading as policy, and even outright fraud serve to perpetuate the general confusion. This situation is exacerbated by the proliferation of media attention, much of it unmonitored for accuracy or bias. Sanctified snake oil, Sarnoff contends, spawns industries that drain public resources and attention from real, serious cases and distort public perceptions of the magnitude of the issues involved. This study sheds new light on this muddle and offers recommendations which will make it more difficult for junk science to represent itself as legitimate social policy.