Capitalist junctures: Explaining economic openness in the transition countries

Abstract.  Current transition theories attribute the varying economic openness of post-communist countries to the lack of democracy or the inhibiting veto power of vested interests. In this article, the authors offer micro-foundations for such claims and link the key changes in the foreign economic policy of these states to internal coalition building during the first stages of the political transformation. A simple game-theoretic model demonstrates that the way in which ruling elites' responses to the competing demands of domestic stakeholders crucially shaped the chance of foreign economic liberalization years later. This 'early starter' hypothesis is contrasted with contending accounts of economic opening in multivariate tests using the ELITE data set (Economic Liberalization in Transition Economies). The regression models confirm that the scope of the political transformation process has fostered foreign economic openness, while the existence of veto players helps rather than inhibits the process of foreign economic liberalization.     

国外行政公开制度的发展趋势

国外行政公开制度的迅猛发展,越来越引起人们的广泛关注和深入思考。这场大规模的行政公开运动,有其深刻的思想、政治、社会和经济动因,也有较为明显的发展趋势。分析和把握国外行政公开制度的发展趋势,有利于我们更好地审视和推动国内行政公开制度的建立与发展。     

What goes around comes around: Perceived vulnerable employment and economic voting in developing countries

Voters who perceive the economy to be weak are generally less likely to support the incumbent government. Yet there is a debate over whether all people respond equally to economic shifts or if the state of the economy is more salient for those who feel economically vulnerable. This article examines whether insecure employment situations and employability concerns strengthen responses to the government's economic record. Data from Latin America and Eastern Europe confirm that workers who feel anxious about being fired or who believe it would be difficult to find a new job place significantly greater weight on sociotropic evaluations than do those with more secure employment situations. Thus incumbents who create risks for vulnerable workers are sanctioned, while those who create opportunities are rewarded most.     

Waiting for privatization in developing countries: Towards the integration of economic and non-economic explanations

The intention of this paper is to examine the political and administrative limits on the effective implementation of privatization in developing countries and so to present a challenge to the view that slow progress is primarily attributable to economic constraints. After examining these economic aspects, the paper provides an explanatory framework which incorporates those political and administrative processes central to an understanding of what happens to state economic policies in practice. The significance of these processes is demonstrated by drawing on research material from India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. The conclusion drawn is that responses to pressures for economic reform will be determined, not so much by economic criteria as by the political and bureaucratic resources available to decision makers. Since policy processes in developing countries show considerable variety it is likely that there will be substantial variations in the practical achievement of privatization objectives.     

Party competition and the politics of economic openness and growth

Abstract. The political effects of economic openness have recently attracted considerable scholarly attention. This paper analyzes the relationships between openness of trade, party competition, and economic performance in 15 advanced Western democracies. Restraints on party competition are found to depend more on domestic social pluralism than on openness of trade. Economic growth is promoted both by economic exposure and by party-system competition. The results suggest that restraints on political competition may be less beneficial in party systems than in interest group systems.     

Destructive decision-making in developing countries

In most developing countries strategic decision-making has been largely based on false premises that have led to destructive results. One set of false premises stems from the assumption that development can be dissociated from the destructively exponential growth in developed countries, from the limits on the planet's physical resources and from complex ecological linkages. Another set is grounded on the popular myths of entrenched development economics: particularly, the enshrining of GNP as the overall indicator of progress, and the concomitant withdrawal of attention from poverty and concentrated wealth, unemployment, and the injurious effects of many modern technologies. These destructive premises tend to reinforce the evolving institutions of new-style empire and oligarchy.More successful development requires standing present development policies on their head through development goals calling for (1) a recognition of redistributive and nonmaterial growth possibilities, (2) redistributive, material and nonmaterial growth in developing countries, (3) redistributive, nonmaterial growth in overdeveloped countries, with a major slowing down of material consumption, (4) large-scale employment projects in developing countries, and (5) the fostering and use of more constructive technologies. All such shifts, however, would require—and tend to lead toward—substantial, long-term changes in the sociopolitical structure of developing countries and the world society.This paper is based on and adapted from The Limits of Development Administration, the keynote paper presented in October 1972 at the U.N. Public Administration Division's conference on development administration in Kiev, USSR, and Unemployment: The Snag in Development, prepared at Kiev and published in The Nation, Dec. 11, 1972.     

Rent-seeking and institutional stability in developing countries

We are grateful to Mark Toma, Gordon Tullock, Stephen Drew Smith, Bob Collinge and participants of the rent seeking panel held at the 1990 meetings of the Southern Economic Association for their helpful comments. Remaining errors are our responsibility.     

Mobilizing local resources in developing countries

Many developing countries are putting increased pressure on local governments to mobilize resources, especially to meet the recurrent costs of operating and maintaining locally sited capital projects. Local taxes, user charges and voluntary contributions are all possible mechanisms to carry out these efforts. Yet several important issues arise whenever these mobilization instruments are contemplated and evaluated. Several, often competing, objectives must be considered when evaluating fiscal instruments including the ability of the mechanism to raise revenues, its effect on economic efficiency, its equity implications and its administrative feasibility. After discussing each of these objectives, we show how numerous constraints, including those imposed by the political/legal system, administrative structure, the economy and the culture of the country, must be recognized while searching for a workable set of reforms that will mobilize additional resources without doing great harm to the other objectives. The key to these reforms would seem to be incentives or disincentives inherent in the revenue structure. Without recognizing these incentives or attempting to alter them, resource mobilization efforts are likely to go astray.     

Ranking economic liberty across countries

We have constructed a number of summary indexes of economic liberty based on principal component and hedonic weighting techniques. While overall these indexes are related to each other in a statistical sense, there are sufficient differences among them to impact the rankings of the individual countries. Because the liberty indicators currently available for use are fairly coarse, the differences that these weighting techniques yield in the summary liberty indexes are understated. As research on liberty yields finer measures of the liberty indicators, the choice of the weighting technique will become more crucial in defining an overall measure of economic liberty. As Table 3 indicates, the simple overall ranking index we created summarizes the information content of all the other indexes (based on hedonic, data variance, etc. rationale) and appears to be very robust with respect to all of them. In addition, all the rankings indicate that economic growth and RGDP are positively correlated with the level of economic liberty within a nation.     

发展中国家的政府职能

发展中国家所面临的问题与西方发达国家不同 ,发展中国家没有建立制度化的政治秩序 ,迫在眉睫的是解决人民群众的基本生存问题 ,更没有建立起市场经济体制 ,也没有健全的法律制度。这些行政生态情况决定了发展中国家的政府职能要比西方发达国家的政府职能强。无论是经济 ,还是社会发展 ,政府主导都是发展中国家发展的必然之路。     

Economic vulnerability and economic voting in 14 OECD countries

The economic voting literature shows that good economic performance bolsters the electoral prospects of incumbents. However, disagreement persists as to whether voters in vulnerable economic conditions are more likely to engage in economic voting. It is argued in this article that a crucial factor in explaining individual‐level variation in economic voting is the degree of exposure to economic risks, because risk exposure affects the saliency of the economy in voting decisions. In particular, the focus is on job insecurity and employability as key determinants of economic voting patterns. The article hypothesises that the extent of economic voting is greater in voters who are more vulnerable to unemployment and less employable in case of job loss. Support for these hypotheses is found in a test with a dataset that combines survey data on incumbent support with occupational unemployment rates and other measures of exposure to economic risks.     

Elections and the structure of taxation in developing countries

This article analyses the impact of the electoral calendar on the composition of tax revenue (direct versus indirect taxes). It thus represents an extension of traditional political budget-cycle analyses assessing the impact of elections on overall revenue. We appeal to the opportunistic political budget model of Drazen and Eslava (2010) to predict the relationship between taxation structure and elections. Panel data from 56 developing countries over the 1980–2006 period reveals a clear pattern of electorally-related policy interventions. Taking the potential endogeneity of election timing into account, we find robust evidence of lower indirect taxes being applied by incumbent governments in the period just prior to an election. Indirect tax revenue in election years is estimated to be 0.3 GDP percentage points lower than in other years, corresponding to a fall of about 3.4% of the average figure in the sample countries, while there is no such relationship with direct tax revenue.     

Quality assessment and assurance in hospitals of developing countries

Quality assessment and assurance programmes - although widespread in many industrialized countries, particularly in the United States, and achieving their objectives of improving the quality of care - have not been introduced into hospitals of developing countries. The paper discusses the factors that might have impeded the introduction of such programmes into these hospitals. The structure, process and outcomes of health care in developing countries are compared with those of developed countries. The attitudes of government agencies are analysed. The difficulties in the applicability of the criteria, standards and techniques - designed in developed countries - to the conditions existing in the hospitals of developing areas, and the reluctance of governing agencies of these hospitals to provide initiative because of anticipation of consequently increased expenditure, are considered to be the two main impeding factors. The paper further argues the need to promote such programmes in these hospitals and suggests guidelines for their development and implementation in terms of general principles, criteria for the assessment of hospital care, and standards appropriate to local conditions.     

FDI and the costs of contract enforcement in developing countries

This article examines the relationship between foreign direct investment and host countries’ contracting institutions, the rule systems which govern commercial transactions between private actors. Given their liability of foreignness and costly exit options, we suggest that multinational corporations have incentives to influence the formal contracting environment in host countries. Further, host governments are more likely to respond to multinationals’ wishes when they are more dependent on foreign capital markets. We draw on the World Bank’s Lex Mundi dataset (Djankov et al. 2003) on micro-level contracting environment for private actors. Our analysis of a cross section of 98 developing countries suggests that FDI is associated with lower contract enforcement costs, particularly when the host country is more indebted.     

Administrative reform in developing countries: A comparative perspective

This study investigates administrative reform in seven Arab states, delineates common problems and describes general tendencies via content analysis of official statements. The study deals with reform in three major phases: defining administrative problems and needs; developing strategies for reform; and developing instruments of action for implementation. Appraisal of reform efforts discloses mediocre results based on a poor implementation record attributable to incongruities of methods and objectives of reform. Among such incongruities are the conventional limitations of bureaucracy, the copying of Western administrative rationality in form if not in substance, and insufficient attention paid to traditional, cultural, religious, and political contexts of administration. Recognizing the difficulties involved in conceptualizing and implementing reform in any society, the analysis offers several recommendations to improve the outcome of reform efforts, among them: encouraging employee involvement in reform decisions; improving collected diagnostic data; providing special training for employees responsible for managing reform; soliciting unwavering political commitment; developing incentive systems; and replacing the piecemeal approach with reliance on a systems perspective.     

Cost-utility assessment: Planning with local decisionmakers in developing countries

In the past decade countries and donor agencies have endorsed health policies which (1) give a very broad definition of health, (2) see the pursuit of health as part of the development process, and (3) emphasize the local community's and local decision-maker's participation in the planning of health projects. Despite these broad principles, health delivery systems in developing countries have access to a very limited set of resources. Health planners are faced with the dilemma of creating cost-effective programmes while recognizing the need to take into account the broad definition of health and the importance of local participation in planning. This dilemma has led to a division between those planners who put greater emphasis on the use of cost analysis techniques in which the decision-making process rests more with professional planners (often outside consultants) vs those who emphasize greater local control of the decision-making process. The purpose of this paper is to present a study in which two alternative approaches to cost utility analysis were used. Consideration was given both to the actual cost analysis strategy and to the integration of the cost variable into the total decision-making process. Finally, major emphasis was placed on including local decision-makers in the planning process and providing them with feasible and understandable decision-making tools.     

Voluntary environmental agreements in developing countries: the Colombian experience

Voluntary agreements (VAs) negotiated between environmental regulators and polluters are increasingly popular in developing countries. According to proponents, they can sidestep weak institutions and other pervasive barriers to conventional mandatory regulation in such countries. Yet little is known about the drivers of their use and their effectiveness in poor countries. The considerable literature on voluntary initiatives in industrialized countries, where both VAs and socioeconomic conditions differ, may not apply. Using a conceptual framework drawn from the economics literature, we examine four prominent VAs in Colombia, a global leader in the use of this policy. We find that the main motive for using VAs has been to build capacity needed for broader environmental regulatory reform and that partly as a result, VAs’ additional effect on environmental performance has been limited. These findings contrast with those from industrialized country studies, which typically conclude VAs are used as a low-cost substitute for impending mandatory regulation and have few benefits because of weak regulatory pressure. Our findings suggest that in developing countries, VAs may be best suited to capacity building, not environmental management per se.     

Extending urban services in developing countries: Policy options and organizational choices

Governments in developing countries will face serious problems in extending basic social services, public facilities and infrastructure for their rapidly growing urban populations during the next decade. The steadily increasing concentration of the poor in cities will exacerbate already severe strains on urban services. Innovative solutions will be needed to meet the growing demands for urban services. In addition to expanding national and municipal efforts, governments in developing countries must also explore alternative policies and organizational arrangements for meeting the basic needs of their urban population. Among the potential alternatives are: using market surrogates to improve service delivery; lowering the costs of service provision through changes in regulations and controls on urban development; actively supporting self-help and service upgrading schemes by the poor; promoting public-private co-operation and private sector participation in service delivery; increasing effective demand for services by promoting employment and higher incomes; and enacting and implementing policies that attempt to redistribute migration to small and intermediate-sized cities. Each alternative has advantages and limitations that planners and policy-makers must take into consideration in forging effective urban development strategies.     

西方国家宏观经济调控的比较与借鉴

西方国家均采用市场经济体制,因而宏观经济调控具有某些共同点。由于各国市场发育程度、社会政治经济结构、经济发展阶段及历史文化背景不同,使其市场经济模式各具特点,宏观调控存在差异。比较西方国家宏观经济调控之异同,可以为建构中国宏观经济调控体系提供许多借鉴。