少数民族贫困县县级政府职能转变研究

随着我国各项社会事业的发展,政府职能在性质、内容上也都发生了相应变化。县级政府是国家宏观与微观结合处,起着承上启下的作用,进行职能转变的任务最为艰巨。在我国政府职能改革进程中,县级政府在转变自身职能方面都获得了一定成绩。但在少数民族贫困地区,由于县级政府在实现经济发展过程中过多干预,强化了政府权力而弱化了政府公共职能,导致政府在职能转变中存在着诸多困惑。新形势下如何探寻合理、有效的解决思路,是推进少数民族贫困县政府职能转变的关键;是实现伟大"中国梦"的重要依据。     

政府贫困化与近现代中国国家建设的失败

鸦片战争把晚清帝国推进到了国家建设的进程中。晚清的覆灭,民国的建立,标志着中国国家建设的启动。近现代中国国家建设的核心主题是建立一个强而有力的中央政府来实现国家的整合。然而在1949年新中国成立之前,由于中央政府的贫困化,近现代中国始终未能成功地建立起一个能有效推进中国现代化进程的现代国家体系。     

A political genealogy of political economy

If, at the end of the eighteenth century, political economy became the prevailing representation of economic phenomena, this was due to the fact that, better than other economic or political discourses, it constructed a political framework in which three forces could co-exist. These forces were those that all the authors of this century tried to articulate: the state, capitalism, and those who tried to protect themselves from their power.     

A poverty of distinction

Homogenizing the poor, treating them as a shapeless blob, is not only dehumanizing but also makes them candidates for a single set of public policies. We propose to show, instead, using cultural theory, that there are different types of poor people, who follow different strategies in coping with or overcoming their condition.     

A study on the rising of service-oriented government

With the development of the society, governments strengthen their functions and expand the scope of management, as well as administrative agencies and staffing increases, resulting in organization overstaffing, bureaucracy and public expenditure can not survey burden. From the 70s of 20th century, the model of managerialism-based government began inefficient, and appeared fnancial crisis, managing crisis and trust crisis, which led to large-scale administrative reform. In this reform, a lot of theories appeared. To redefine the functions of government and look for the way to achieve the government functions become the requirement of the age and the focus of attention. The paper is to show the defects of traditional managerialism-based mode and the new requirements of people and society, by researching into the rising of service-oriented government, so as to enhance the construction of the service-oriented government in China.     

The politics of the culture of control: undoing genealogy

The third volume of David Garland's trilogy attempts to characterize recent developments in the field of crime control and criminal justice in terms of the emergence of a ‘culture of control’. For these purposes the author claims to use the genealogical method developed by Michel Foucault. This essay argues that Garland's selective reliance on this method amounts to an undoing of the Foucauldian ‘project’ insofar as it re-introduces the objectivity/subjectivity dichotomy which Foucault had tried to subvert throughout his work. This undoing entails profound consequences for the politics of The Culture of Control, which concludes on a reformist proposition that forsakes a form of resistance grounded on the awareness of its own, intrinsic limitations.     

Who is the new citizen? Towards a genealogy

The essay establishes a theoretical framework and outlines an empirical research toward a genealogy of the citizen. It argues that a genealogy would focus on the conditions of citizenship rather than its content (rights and obligations) and extent (eligibility criteria). It describes class, territory and capital as such conditions and outlines significant episodes in which these conditions created different ideal types of citizen: warrior‐citizen, peasant‐citizen, patrician‐citizen, plebeian‐citizen, artisan‐citizen, bourgeois‐citizen, and worker‐citizen. In each episode a genealogy would focus on the emergence of differential class powers resulting from the ownership of different forms of capital that condition the territorial as well as the legal and moral boundaries of citizenship. The essay defends genealogy as a history of the present by finally discussing how significant contemporary changes in class, territory and capital are creating a new type of citizen yet to be defined.     

A distributional theory of government growth

This article presents a closed form solution for time-consistent taxation and public spending in a dynamic game between government and median voter. Extending Meltzer and Richard’s static analysis of government size the article offers a theory of growth of government. At low stages of economic development the median voter, identified as a relatively poor worker, prefers to have no or only small redistributive taxation in order to foster savings. Through this channel he expects improvements of his labor productivity and wage. At higher stages of development, however, when capital is relatively abundant and prospects of further labor productivity gains through capital accumulation are smaller, the incentive to tax and redistribute income rises. Yet, in line with previous work on growth and infrastructure spending the median voter prefers a constant share of productive public spending at all times. Hence, government growth is solely driven by an expanding welfare state.     

A partisan model of government expenditure

Partisan models of budget politics largely concentrate on the size of government, budget deficits and debt, but most theories have little to say as to what the effect of party politics on both the size and the composition of budgets is. This paper seeks to extend previous literature in two directions. First, a model of spending preferences is developed that relates actors' preferred level and allocation of expenditure to electoral gains from fiscal policies. Second, changes in both total expenditure and the expenditure mix of two budget categories are analyzed for the effect of parties' spending preferences as stated in their election manifestos. Using data on 19 OECD countries from 1971 to 1999, the paper finds support for general partisan hypothesis. The results suggest that the actual spending preferences of parties matter whereas they do not indicate that parties of the left consistently differ from parties of the right in their spending behavior.     

Sizing the government

Is there such a thing as an optimal government size? We investigate the so-called Armey curve, which claims an inverted U-shaped relationship between government size and economic performance, using non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The DEA scores are linked to control variables, such as initial per capita income, openness, population density, urbanization, country size and family size. For 23 OECD-countries we estimate the country specific efficiency scores, which reveal the extent to which a country uses excess public resources to achieve the observed growth rate of GDP.     

中央与地方利益均衡分析

利益是人类生活的永恒话题。我国中央与地方关系的核心内容就是中央与地方的利益关系。在中央与地方的“利益博弈”中,中央过分集权会严重限制地方的积极性,影响公共利益的整体实现;而理性的地方政府不顾一切地追逐本地区经济利益的最大化,累积到一定程度,最终又会引发“公用地”的灾难。要解决这一两难问题,必须从制度上明确中央与地方各自的职权范围,逐步健全法律制度的有力制约,同时建立一套政府系统内部有效的治理制度,规范政府权力的正确行使,实现中央与地方利益的制度均衡     

Escaping poverty: behind the numbers

Head counts of poverty are the most commonly used indicator of poverty level. While not ideal, the analysis of poverty head counts informs conclusions about whether households move in or out of poverty over time. Longitudinal data from repeated surveys show that, at the country level, some countries have lifted their populations out of poverty, while the populations of other countries have either remained poor or become poorer. How these scenarios come to be is the key question that challenges the development community. What mix of country characteristics, policies, structural features and external influences conspire to either improve or deteriorate well-being and to affect overall poverty levels? Unfortunately, changes in poverty levels might sometimes be the result of changes in poverty measurement methodology, with no real change in the well-being of the population. For this reason, poverty assessment should begin with an analysis of the measurement methodology – particularly given the increased global enthusiasm for poverty reduction. This article examines panel data from Mongolia and the Philippines to show how seemingly slight variations in survey methodology can have a rather significant impact on poverty results. In order to make a robust comparison of poverty head counts from different surveys, the basic building blocks of the poverty measures must be identical. This is not always the case. Given the difficulties identified with money-metric head counts, this study concludes by arguing for a move beyond economic statistics, toward multidisciplinary approaches to poverty assessment. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Poverty spending and the poverty gap

This paper examines two questions basic to welfare policy: (1) whether the amount of poverty-related transfers is sufficient to fill the poverty gap, and (2) which families actually get benefits and how much of their income deficit is filled by those benefits. Transfers are sufficient: the post-Social Security poverty gap is $74 billion while poverty-related programs total $198 billion. Further, 86% of current income-conditioned benefits go to the pretransfer poor and 89% of those are used to alleviate poverty (fill the poverty gap). Thus, if a substantial fraction of total Federal and State expenditures on poverty-related programs could be targeted more toward the poor, the poverty gap can be eliminated. The current programs, however, would have to be changed substantially to achieve the necessary retargeting.     

The production of poverty

The idea of cultural resistance has been taken up in combative analysis of metropolitan racist situations. It is a legacy from analyses by combatants in anti-colonial struggles. Fanon's were among the most searching of such analyses. His writings indicate an unusual concept of culture and of a people. The concept is at the same time of a political subject and of a the formation and direction of psychic energies. What he wrote on violence and counter-violence should not be abstracted from his concepts of culture and its colonial situation. That situation as it is described in Fanon's writings and then the concept of culture and people are elaborated and then extended so that their application to metropolitan racism can be tried.