The Financial Crisis and Varieties of Pension Privatization Reversals in Eastern Europe

Since the global financial crisis, those East European countries that had partly privatized their pension systems in the 1990s or early 2000s increasingly scaled back their mandatory private retirement accounts and restored the role of public provision. What explains this wave of reversals in pension privatization and variation in its outcomes? Proponents of pension privatization had argued that it would boost domestic capital markets and economic growth. By revealing how pension privatization helped increase sovereign debt and how large a part of pension funds' assets was invested in government bonds, the crisis strengthened the position of domestic opponents of mandatory private accounts. But these actors' capacity and determination to reverse pension privatization depended on the level of their country's public debt and on pension funds' portfolio structure. Empirically, the argument is supported with case studies of Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak pension reform.     

Privatization in Central Europe: The Case of Housing Policy in Hungary

Policymakers in Central and Eastern Europe are encountering difficulties in resolving the clash between market efficiency and distributional equity. A similar tension characterized post-war Western Europe. However, in Central and Eastern Europe expectations emanating from the previous regime presume that distributional equity will compensate for the lack of market efficiency. The possible resolution of this tension is discussed in the context of the privatization in Hungary.     

公立医疗机构民营化改革的模式及其比较

公立医疗机构民营化改革是新自由主义思潮波及并影响医疗卫生领域的重要表现,是当代全球公共部门治道变革的有机组成。尽管全球金融危机的爆发引起了人们对新自由主义思潮的全面反思,但是公共部门民营化改革的取向不会因此发生重大的转变。从国内公立医疗机构民营化改革的实践来看,托管经营模式、股份合作制模式和产权整体转让模式是较为典型的三种模式,这三种模式不论是在改革的进路、力度、目标,还是在绩效、阻力与风险等方面均存在着较为显著的差异。文章借助于浙江公立医疗机构民营化改革的实证材料,对上述三种模式进行了多维度的比较分析,以期更好地解读公立医疗机构民营化改革的不同模式及其适用性。     

经合组织的规制改革政策及其对我国的启示

规制改革是经合组织国家政府改革的重要组成部分。本通过对经合组织规制改革献的研究，介绍了经合组织对政府规制概念的界定和分类、对规制改革的理解和推动改革的政策建议，并分析了对我国政府改革的借鉴性意义。     

混合型模式是公交民营化改革的理性选择

"新契约主义"强调以契约合同为核心,但非完全市场化和民营化,而是竞争激励机制与公平民主机制相结合,以实现地方公共服务的有效供给.由于城市人口分布、消费水平、线路竞争度等客观因素的差异,使得我们不能在公交改革上简单地实行"一刀切".在对公交民营化改革模式的安排上,不能单纯选择一种模式主导改革,而应综合北京和香港城市公交的做法,根据不同情况进行相应组合,灵活地实行公私合作的"混合型模式".     

The Politics of Financial Regulatory Reform in Britain and Germany

Over the past decade, Britain and Germany have both made fundamental changes to their financial regulatory regimes with the creation of single powerful regulators. In both cases, this meant either ending or severely limiting the regulatory role of central banks. This article argues that the creation of these new regulatory actors cannot be understood without reference to the preferences of domestic political actors responding to the increased political salience of financial regulation as a policy issue. The result was distinct partisan differences about institutional design and responsibilities with centre-left parties seeking regulatory actors clearly accountable to government and parliament. Such an account of institutional change is in contrast to previous accounts of the evolution of financial regulation that are largely exogenous to domestic politics.     

The Third Force? Independent Regulatory Agencies and Elected Politicians in Europe

Governments and legislatures in Europe have created or greatly strengthened independent regulatory agencies (IRAs). Yet they also retain many formal controls over those agencies. The article analyzes whether elected politicians have used their powers to create IRAs in their own image and kept IRAs under tight control or whether they have allowed IRAs to become a distinct set of actors, hence a "third force" in regulation. Principal–agent (PA) theories, largely based on U.S. experience, emphasize the importance of certain formal controls for elected politicians to limit "agency losses." However, an analysis of four European nations between 1990 and 2001 shows that elected politicians did not use their powers to appoint party politicians, force the early departures of IRA members, reverse IRA decisions, or reduce IRA budgets and powers. Using PA theory, two interpretations of this apparent puzzle are offered, each with differing implications for agency autonomy. One is that elected politicians used alternative methods of control, hence they suffered low "agency losses" and IRAs in practice had little autonomy. The other is that elected politicians found that the benefits of IRA autonomy in practice and the costs of applying their formal control outweighed agency losses, and hence accepted agency autonomy.     

Regulatory Competition and the Politics of Financial Market Reform in Britain and Japan

This article examines the impact that the internationalization of jnance has had on the regulation of domestic securities markets in Japan and Britain. In particular, it seeks to explain the apparent incompatibility of two distinct trends: deregulation (and state retreat) on the one hand, and increased regulation and state involvement in markets on the other.
Much of the literature about the efects of internationalization on domestic policymaking has drfjculty explaining these two distinct regulatory frends. First, there has been no uniform "competition in regulatory laxity." Second, the United States does not appear to have exerted hegemonic influence over outcomes. Finally, domestic-level explanations which deny the importance of systemic-level influences on domestic policy choices are unable to explain the similarity of policy choices undertaken by governments with very different regulatory traditions.
I argue instead that regulatory reforms have been undertaken primarily for the benefit of a particular set of private economic actors—mobile consumers of financial services, including both holders of liquid investment capital and large multinational borrowers. Internationalization has systematically strengthened their influence over the policymaking process by making "exit" from one political marketplace to another a more realistic and more potent bargaining strategy than the alternative of exercising "voice."     

Corporate Environmentalism, Regulatory Reform, and Industry Self-Regulation: Toward Genuine Regulatory Reinvention in the United States

Increasingly, corporations are proactively managing environmental impacts in response to pressures from the consumer, business-to-business, financial, and government procurement markets. In many cases, these efforts have produced results well beyond what could be required under public regulations. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began a process of regulatory reinvention in the 1990s as a means of promoting such innovations, the results have been somewhat disappointing. This article examines the recent trends in corporate environmental management and regulatory reform. It concludes with a discussion of changes in regulatory design that could promote ongoing gains in corporate environmental performance through the creation of a hybrid system combining elements of public regulation, government-supervised corporate self-regulation, mandatory information disclosure, and green procurement.     

Privatization and cost reduction

In this paper several examples of government contracts with private firms are examined to see how experience conforms to a principal-agent model of cost minimization via competitive bidding and how important are the many qualifications to the model. Fifteen cases of local government contracting are examined.The course of private contracting is not always smooth — as judged by the many contract disruptions observed and by the number of cities that believe they are no longer saving money by contracting and those which have resumed public production. It also seems to be the case, however, that competition generally reduces initial costs, that in many cases cost savings persist, that it is possible to stimulte competition, and that providing for continual interaction, as contrasted with simply monitoring performance, can prevent disruption.     

Privatization and the Courts: How Judicial Structures Shaped German Privatization

This article examines how legal institutional structures shaped the process of East German privatization by the Treuhandanstalt. It argues that the courts, as an important venue for oversight and accountability, were central to achieving the rapid and narrowly defined privatization carried out by the agency. Moreover, the experience of privatization after 1989 suggests the courts played a far more important role in shaping economic policy than one would have expected from traditional scholarship on public agencies, the courts, or the German legal system.     

Ideals and Reality in the Evolution of Fiscal Reform in Central and Eastern Europe

Jesse Burkhead believed in the importance of institutions in policy making. This article describes the evolution of fiscal reform in central and eastern Europe within the Burkhead tradition. After reviewing the changes in budgetary and intergovernmental fiscal institutions in the region, the article will illustrate the gap between ideals and reality with a case study of some of the changes currently taking place in the financing of culture in the Czech Republic.