Urban government and market reforms in China

Chinese reformers wish through their economic programme to create a new form of developmental state in China and a new relationship between state and economy. This paper examines these issues through a study of the impact of Chinese economic reforms on the structure and behaviour of local government, focusing on urban government at the district level. It looks at three aspects of the issue—the trend towards financial decentralization, institutional changes in district administration and changes in the relationship between local government and the urban economy. It concludes (contrary to arguments which regard bureaucratic response to the reforms as one of pure inertia and obstruction) that urban local government has changed in several major ways, the most obvious being a trend towards institutional expansion and proliferation. From the point of view of the reform process, some institutional changes have been positive, others negative, resulting in a ‘dualistic’ state which contains elements of both old and new forms of developmental state. There is a need for systematic analysis of the specific future needs and evolution of China's urban government which would guide a process of politico-administrative reform comparable to the current economic reform.     

The failure of market failure

The concept of market failure was originally presented by economists as a normative explanation of why the need for government expenditures might arise. Gradually, the concept has taken on the form of a full‐scale diagnostic tool frequently employed by policy analysts to determine the exact scope and nature of government intervention. For some time, economists have known that the market failure idea is conceptually flawed. The authors of this article demonstrate why this is so, employing concepts drawn from the perspective of transaction costs. In a review of empirical studies, they further show how the market failure diagnostic leads analysts to make generalizations that are not supported by facts. Transaction cost analysis helps to explain the underlying processes involved. © 1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

市场经济背景与政府主导的制度创新

政府是制度创新最主要的主体.尤其是在我国目前转型期,政府在制度的创制中发挥着极重要的作用.但政府也有自身的缺陷.在向市场经济的转变中,政府要做的是为市场活动主体的制度创新提供一个既有严格规范又有一定自由活动空间的制度框架.从而构建一个以政府的制度创新为主导的,市场的制度创新也充满活力的制度创新格局.     

Pathological politics: The anatomy of government failure

This essay is a slightly altered version of chapter 4 in Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare, and the Failure of Bureaucracy.(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994). Reprinted by permission from The Independent Institute.     

论市场经济条件下中国政府能力建设

政府能力正日益成为各国现代化发展进程中衡量政府优劣的重要指标。提高政府能力是促进社会主义市场经济发展的保证。社会主义市场经济的发展对政府能力建设提出新的要求 :诸如要提高政府宏观调控能力、公共财政能力、社会平衡能力、制约腐败能力、公共服务能力。市场经济条件下 ,尤其重点开发和建设适应我国社会主义市场经济发展急需的政府能力     

Designing property rights for water: mediating market,government, and corporation failures

Recent decades have seen an acceleration in public concern about the allocation of increasingly scarce water supplies. There are many reasons for this concern, such as growth in urban populations. In this article, we focus on how surface water’s special qualities (the combination of spillovers, rent-seeking behavior, and common pool resources) complicate the assignment of property rights in any legal framework. These characteristics make specific market structures necessary in order to efficiently allocate rights. The state usually designs those structures. Yet, just like markets can fail, so can governments fail to effectively allocate those rights. So designers often turn to quasi-judicial conservancy boards as a second-best solution. We argue that those boards may themselves fail through a form of “corporation failure.” We address these three types of failures, and offer an analysis of two cases that suggests that the likelihood conservancy boards will suffer from corporate failure depends on the actions of the boards and outside stakeholders (like governments).

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。     

Market failure,government failure,and the private supply of public goods: The case of climate-controlled walkway networks

Two opposing models of public-goods undersupply are those of “market failure” and “government failure”. Empirical work on the relative explanatory power of these two frameworks has been limited by the scarcity of acceptable data. The case of climate-controlled walkways in major urban cores is a rare instance where such difficulties can be overcome. We investigate the supply of CCWs in 55 large city-cores in North America. We find that (1) CCW networks are well-supplied by market forces, when (2) such forces are not frustrated by government policy. We also find evidence that (3) rules-based regimes dominate discretion-based regimes. These results are consistent with the position that the “government-failure” paradigm is a viable alternative to the traditional “market failure” paradigm.     

Information, market government, and health policy: a study of health data organizations in the states.

Information is essential to the success of market-oriented policies. Information on health care costs and quality is collected and distributed by state governments through health data organizations (HDOs) to enhance competition and lower costs in the medical industry and to improve consumer choice among medical alternatives. This article examines the information collected, produced, and distributed by state health data organizations in Colorado and Pennsylvania. Findings reveal that information was not the objective determinant of choice and competition as market-oriented policy designers had hoped. Nor did market-oriented bureaucracies produce and distribute data readily accessible for public choice. Instead, information produced and distributed by these HDOs was the result of political and bureaucratic exercises that conform much more to classic interest group policymaking and captured bureaucracies than to contemporary market-oriented government ideals. The findings underscore the extraordinary difficulties facing federal-level policy designers as they contemplate introducing market-oriented health care policies on the national level.     

Just and honest government

This article addresses the ways in which the United Kingdom has sought to apply principles such as ethics and values as the foundation of a strong public sector, the evolution of values, specifically the tensions between old and new values, and the ethical challenges brought about by the new public administration and management. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Initiatives and government expenditures

This paper demonstrates that provisions for initiatives have important effects on government spending. Provisions for initiatives encourage legislatures to approve any proposal which might attract substantial popular support. If these proposals are more likely to advocate increases than reductions in expenditures, the presence of initiative provisions will increase total expenditures. Direct government expenditures per capita are significantly higher in both states and municipalities which permit initiatives.The Project in State and Local Government Finance of the National Bureau of Economic Research supported the research presented in this paper. Only I am responsible for the content.     

Elections and government spending

It is widely believed that electoral pressures cause legislators to favor government spending programs. This electoral theory of spending is shown to encompass two core hypotheses: (1) the electoral consequences hypothesis, which states that support for spending programs improves the representative's electoral showing; and (2) the legislator insecurity hypothesis, which states that greater electoral insecurity leads representatives to be more in favor of spending programs. A test of these ideas using spending scores for U.S. representatives in 1986 finds that neither hypothesis is supported by the data.     

Gifts and government largess

He also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. His books include Social Science Theory: Structure and Application, The Broken Apple: New York City in the 1980s,and Military Doctrine and the American Character: Reflections on Airland Battle,published by Transaction.