Implementing Reforms in Bolivia: Too Much to Handle?

Abstract

This article looks at the implementation of budgeting and financial management reforms in Bolivia. These reforms were intended to facilitate the introduction of an integrated approach to budgeting and financial management, and a results-orientation in management. Evidence suggests that, at least in its first few years, there was little successful reform implementation. The main factors seen to impact reform implementation include the entrenched patronage of the political system, the weak nature of reform incentives, weaknesses in central financial management systems and processes, poor internal monitoring, authority limits in the Audit Office, a lack of Parliament scrutiny, questions about transparency and participation, and relational complexities arising from donor involvement.     

To return or not to return? Politics vs. economics in China's brain drain

This study, based on 273 face-to-face interviews with students, scholars, and former residents of China in the United States in 1993, uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to explain people's views about returning to China. Although less than 9 percent of interviewees had concrete plans to return, over 32 percent were positively disposed to returning in the future. Key background variables that affect that decision are people’s age, sex, social background in China, and their views about returning when they first left China. Concern about children’s future was not significant, but having a wife abroad greatly increased the desire to stay abroad. Why people chose not to return varied significantly between people with children and those who didn't. Even four years after the Tiananmen crackdown, concerns about political instability, lack of political freedom, and a lack of trust that the government would let people who returned leave again were significant reasons for not returning. But economic factors—better U.S. housing and incomes—as well as professional concerns about lack of job or career mobility in China and a poor work environment there were equally important. Given the weight attributed to economic factors and political stability, if China weathers Deng Xiaoping’s succession and the economy continues to grow, significant numbers of Chinese may return. David Zweig is Associate Professor, Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is the author ofFreeing China’s Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Deng Era (forthcoming),Agrarian Radicalism in China, 1968–1981 (1989), co-author ofChina’s Brain Drain to the United States: The Views of Students and Scholars in the 1990s (1995), and co-editor ofChina’s Search for Democracy: The Student and Mass Movement of 1989 (1992) andNew Perspectives on China’s Cultural Revolution (1991). He writes about China’s rural political economy, transnational relations, and domestic politics. He is currently completing a book on the impact of China’s open policy and transnational relations on urban development, rural industry, universities, and recipients of foreign aid.     

To History or to Hollywood? Monuments to Foreign Celebrities in Twenty-First Century Balkans

The article identifies an emerging trend in the reconstruction of identities in the Balkans which involves the memorialisation of foreign celebrities, including Rocky Balboa, Tarzan, Bruce Lee, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, and Samantha Fox. The article aims to understand the meaning and the purpose of foreign celebrity monuments to the local communities. The findings suggest that the monuments represent radical political statements by emerging civil societies in a process of transition from Yugoslav socialism, 1990s nationalism, and foreign-led liberalisation and democratisation in post-conflict times. The monuments are constitutive in themselves as democratic expressions and examples of citizens performing political acts.     

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation: ‘Tackling the Three Evils’. A Regional Response to Non-traditional Security Challenges or an Anti-Western Bloc?

This article examines how, despite the initial scepticism about its viability, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) has become the primary security organisation in Central Asia. Two major factors are identified. Firstly, the focus of the SCO on tackling the so-called ‘three evils’ (terrorism, extremism, separatism) has won it favour with the prevailing leaderships of its member states. Secondly, the specific organisational framework adopted is appropriate for the region. The article concludes that the SCO is best characterised as a regional organisation concerned with non-traditional security and not as a hostile new ‘Warsaw Pact’ as suggested by some.     

Performance pledges–power to the consumer or a quagmire in public service legitimation?

One of the latest initiatives in Hong Kong's public sector reform is the launch of “performance pledges” in 1992, which have essentially been modelled on citizen's charters in the United Kingdom. While the stated aims of performance pledges, citizen's charters, or similar initiatives, are to raise the standard of public services and to make such services answer better to the needs of ordinary people, hence “empowering” the public service consumers, this latest consumerist trend in public management has more far-reaching implications, both in terms of the organization as well as the legitimation of public service provision. This article examines such implications, with specific reference to the Hong Kong situation, and argues that the outcome of the development seems to point to the empowerment of public managers rather than the consumers as the official rhetoric would imply.