Risk management for targeting customs controls in developing countries: a risky venture for revenue performance?

Customs authorities in developing countries are often reluctant to forget systematic inspections for fear of risking revenue loss. Such physical inspections however, impede rather than facilitate trade. Control selectivity is therefore a key issue in customs administration reform. This paper shows how a sophisticated risk management method can facilitate trade by automatically and rationally selecting transactions, with the end result of actually enhancing revenue performance. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attitudes towards German Immigration in South Australia in the post-Second World War Period, 1947-60

Considering the reaction against Germans in Australia during and after the First World War, it is surprising that German immigration to Australia was permitted again soon after the Second World War and even subsidised by the Australian government. Just seven years after the second war fought with Germany within a generation, Australia signed a five-year agreement to permit Germans to immigrate. This article examines the extent of the Australian public's acceptance of this policy during the period from 1947 to 1960. It concentrates on the state of South Australia where some of the earliest settlers in the colony had been of German origin, where their behaviour and achievements had been praised in historical writings about the colony, and where German immigrants may, therefore, have been viewed more positively. Yet there was some suspicion towards and discrimination against Germans in South Australia after 1945. Negative stereotypes of Germans were apparent in comments made by politicians and in press reports. However, these fears were minor and faded even further when more Germans arrived in Australia.     

Money,Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.     

Contesting Legality in Authoritarian Contexts: Food Safety,Rule of Law and China's Networked Public Sphere

Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top‐down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law.     

Structural reform histories and perceptions of organizational autonomy: Do senior managers perceive less strategic policy autonomy when faced with frequent and intense restructuring?

Through recurrent structural reform programmes governments are on a quest to design public organizations that will stand the test of their environment. One of the approaches to uncertain or sensitive issues has been to create various forms of (semi‐)autonomous organizations with substantial strategic discretion. However, while governments repeatedly experiment with designs, one might simultaneously expect that such interference through repeated structural change may limit the degree of strategic policy autonomy perceived by senior managers. More specifically, we propose that intense structural reforms may inadvertently reduce strategic policy autonomy perceptions through two mechanisms. First, intense sequences of structural reforms may lead to perceptions of relatively controlling political principals. Second, they may reduce an organization's ability to accrue resources beneficial to autonomy, such as a strong internal culture, network embeddedness and expertise. Results indicate that strategic policy autonomy perceptions will indeed be detrimentally affected for organizations that experience intense sequences of structural reform.