国际制度与中国的选择

中国要成功实现和平崛起,就应当充分重视并认真研究国际制度。目前我国的国际制度环境并不乐观。本文研究了国际制度对崛起国家的重要意义,提出了中国参与并影响国际制度的有效途径,即国际制度的先占原则和修制原则,并进而讨论了这两项原则实现的可能性。     

试析全球治理的非正式化与私有化发展

传统的全球治理模式主要是霸权与多边主义的结合,是由美国等西方发达国家主导的以国际组织为载体的治理。冷战结束后尤其是2008年金融危机后,由于全球性问题的凸显以及国际权力结构的变化,使得传统治理模式遭遇"治理赤字",非正式与私有化治理模式逐渐受到国际社会的广泛关注。非正式治理模式是世界主要国家就应对全球问题进行平等协商的非正式制度安排。私有化治理模式是非国家权威以市场为导向建立的治理体系,主要在环境保护与气候变化等领域发挥作用。新治理模式的灵活性、操作性强的优势弥补了传统治理模式的不足,因此在全球治理中发挥着积极作用。虽然新的治理模式也存在缺陷,但其在未来全球治理中的作用将进一步提升。全球治理模式的转型对中国而言既是机遇也是挑战,中国需要处理好新旧两种治理模式的关系,并推动全球治理朝着公平和民主的方向发展。     

原中国APEC高官王嵎生大使谈对上海APEC的厚望——多点和气,少点霸气

作为今年 APEC 的东道主,第9次APEC 领导人非正式会议和第13届双部长会将于10月在上海举行,有关方面对此寄予厚望。为此,本刊记者特地采访了曾长期担任中国 APEC 高官的王嵎生大使。     

构建中拉命运共同体:从确定性到同舟共济

正中国政府发布的第二份对拉政策文件《中国对拉美和加勒比政策文件》明确提出,愿意加强中拉政治领域的合作,愿同拉美和加勒比国家加强治国理政的经验交流。这是因为,中拉都是发展中国家和地区,处于相同的发展阶段,面临类似的挑战。"中拉时间"又一次开启。2016年11月17日到23日,中国国家主席习近平访问厄瓜多尔、秘鲁和智利三国,并出席在秘鲁首都利马举行的亚太经合组织(APEC)第二十四次领导人非正式会议。这     

亚太政治安全形势的新变化与区域合作的发展

<正>近年来,亚太地区在世界格局中的战略地位不断提升,地区内的力量结构也发生了一些新变化。伴随着地区内国家之间利益关系的调整,地区出现了一些不稳定与不确定因素,其安全形势与未来发展已成为国际社会备受关注的焦点,区域合作也在地区政治安全因素的影响下,出现了阵营化和碎片化的趋势。刚刚在北京召开的亚太经合组织(APEC)领导人非正式会议,不仅为区域合作提供了强有力的战略指引,也将对亚太安全格局产生深远的影响。     

APEC进入“中国时刻”

<正>从APEC会议的最后文件看,无论是亚太自贸区路线图还是通过反腐宣言、强化互联互通,都体现了中国的影响力。中国已经完成了从APEC的跟随者、参与者到引领者、推动者的蜕变。从2001年的上海到2014年的北京,APEC领导人非正式会议时嗝13年重回中国,变化的不仅仅是会议举办地点。无论从会议的议题设置,还是会后通过的共同宦言来看,这次APEC会议都深深打上了"中国烙印"。韩国《每日经济》报道就称,这次APEC会议文件内容超过半数由中国提议,表明中     

釜山APEC:各家花落知多少

11月12～19日,亚太经济合作组织(APEC)第13次领导人非正式会议于韩国釜山举行。经济议题:只开花不结果? 按照会前没想,本次APEC蜂会主题为“作为一个共同体迎接挑战与变革”,有两大议题:促进贸易自由化和便利化:增强亚太地区的安全与透明。     

中国参与全球卫生治理的制度路径与未来选择——以跨国传染性疾病防控为例

2003年以来,中国以更加积极的姿态参与以世界卫生组织为中心的全球卫生治理机制,不仅很好地遵守以《国际卫生条例(2005)》为主要内容的国际规则,而且通过多种途径提升国际社会应对传染性疾病的行动能力。在参与区域和跨区域多边制度建设过程中,中国积极推动将卫生议题纳入合作进程,为在区域层面治理跨国传染性疾病积累了经验。中国坚持以世界卫生组织框架为基础、以区域和跨区域多边机制为补充的参与模式,在应对新冠肺炎疫情国际合作中得到明显体现。鉴于重大跨国传染性疾病对各国社会经济造成的广泛影响以及既有多边机制所面临的能力不足困境,多层次布局、多元行为体参与,是中国更好地引领全球卫生治理,推动构建人类卫生健康共同体的有效路径。     

亚太经合组织30年:亚太区域经济合作进程回顾与展望

亚太经合组织(APEC)成立30年来,在机制建设和多个合作领域取得了引人注目的成果。随着国际和亚太地区政治经济格局的演变,各种内部和外部因素的叠加给APEC带来了新的机遇和挑战。APEC应与时俱进,对新时期的亚太区域经济合作进程作出新的顶层设计和整体规划。作为中国加入的第一个区域经济合作组织,APEC给中国带来了多方面的经济和政治收益。展望未来,中国要在习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想特别是习近平外交思想指导下,进一步推动APEC在构建新型国际关系、人类命运共同体、开放型世界经济和"一带一路"建设等方面发挥重要作用。     

有所作为之后

<正>许多年以后,回顾新中国改革开放以来的外交史,那时的外交学者一定会想起2014年初冬的北京。为什么呢?因为中国承办的这次亚太经合组织(APEC)峰会足以被当作中国外交的一个转折点,中国在对外关系上终于超越了韬光养晦的层面,开始有所作为了。超越韬光养晦,不等同于否定韬光养晦,这个策略仍在起作用,主要体现在处理对美国的关系上。借前来出席APEC领导人非正式会议的便利,"跛脚"的美国总统奥巴马对中国进行了国事访问。习近平主席既和他在中南海里散步喝茶,轻松地闲谈,     

The Best Laid Plans: The Impact of Informal Rules on Formal Institutions in Transitional Regimes

How do informal institutions influence the formation and function of formal institutions? Existing typologies focus on the interaction of informal institutions with an established framework of formal rules that is taken for granted. In transitional settings, such typologies are less helpful, since many formal institutions are in a state of flux. Instead, using examples drawn from post-communist state development, I argue that informal institutions can replace, undermine, and reinforce formal institutions irrespective of the latter’s strength, and that the elite competition generated by informal rules further influences which of these interactions dominate the development of the institutional framework. In transitional settings, the emergence and effectiveness of many formal institutions is endogenous to the informal institutions themselves.     

Authoritarian legality and informal practices: Judges, lawyers and the state in Russia and China

To participate in the global economy authoritarian states are pressed to offer international business a legal order that protects the interests of investors, customers, and sellers, but the creation of a modern legal order threatens to undermine the leaders’ control of public life. An increasingly common way to resolve this dilemma, I argue, is developing formal legal institutions that appear to meet world standards, while using informal practices to maintain control over the administration of justice when needed. In this paper I show how the governments of post-Soviet Russia (with its hybrid or competitive authoritarian regime) and the fully authoritarian People’s Republic of China as well, have used this approach in their relations with judges and defense lawyers in their respective countries. The analysis underscores the utility of investigating informal practices along with the reform of formal legal institutions, especially in the context of transition.     

Which Institutions are Good for Your Health? The Deep Determinants of Comparative Cross-country Health Status

We extend the literature on the deep determinants of economic development by focusing on life expectancy, instead of income per capita, as an indicator of economic development, and by examining the role of informal, as well as formal, institutions. Our empirical results suggest that formal and informal institutions are substitutes. Improving informal institutions has positive effects on life expectancy that are statistically significant for most countries and stronger than the effects of improving formal institutions. The gains from improving informal institutions are greatest for countries in which institutions are weakest. Geographical factors also help explain cross-country variation in life expectancy.     

Limits of regulatory governance change in the post-developmental state: Korean telecommunications market restructurings from a comparative perspective

This study explains the limits of institutional transformation in Korea from the developmental state to a post-developmental state, in terms of regulatory institutions instead of developmental institutions. The Korean state has taken advantage of the government's discretionary policy changes and power formed by both informal state institutions and informal policy networks, while the regulatory state has placed a special emphasis on social consensus as well as political support for changes of market institutions. New market rules and laws have also been inefficient and ineffective for fair market competition. Limits of regulatory governance change have occurred due to misalignments between informal regulatory institutions in the developmental state and formal regulatory institutions in the post-developmental state. State managers have created discretionary state intervention in policy implementation, politicized the roles of regulatory agencies, and brought ministry-type regulatory state institutions back in. The establishment of effective market institutions has failed due to informal market institutions (unfair and illegal market practices) that have interfered with the policy implementation of new formal market regulations.     

Co-Investment and Clientelism as Informal Institutions: Beyond ‘Good Enough’ Property Rights Protection

How do we explain high rates of investment in the production of oil palm in Indonesia under conditions of legal uncertainty and uneven protection of property rights? This article argues that what are commonly seen as deficiencies in the formal institutional environment actually enabled investment, but only when informal institutions were able to provide investor assurances. Although the finding that informal institutions provide investor assurances is not new, this study addresses outstanding questions about how such informal institutions work. An examination of the micro-level details of informal institutions in the oil palm industry shows that informal institutions frequently grouped under umbrella terms such as ‘patronage’ or ‘relational ties’ are not uniform. Rather, two types of informal relational tie operate to provide investor assurances: clientelistic and co-investment. Although they serve similar purposes, clientelistic ties work well only under restrictive conditions and are vulnerable to decay. Co-investment, in contrast, is a more robust informal institution, especially when political power is fragmented. Although co-investment provides investor assurances under conditions of legal uncertainty, it remains a particularistic solution and does not guarantee generalized public interest protections.     

APEC and its enemies: The failure of the new regionalism in the Asia-Pacific

This article looks at the rise of APEC as a vehicle for the promotion of free trade in the Asia-Pacific. It argues that, although the Japanese government was more interested in trade cooperation than free trade, it played a key role, along with the Australian government, in the establishment of APEC, while the main challenge to APEC came from the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamed. During the 1990s, however, Mahathir's proposal for an East Asian Economic Bloc which excluded the USA, Australia, New Zealand and all other 'non-Asian' nation-states, was incorporated into APEC and took the name of the East Asian Economic Caucus. The accommodation of Mahathir's proposal to the APEC process, and his inability to get Japanese support for his pan-Asian initiative, symbolised the limits on any and all regional challenges to US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific. The article also emphasises that, with the coming of the East Asian crisis, the prospects of a successful regional challenge to US hegemony have become even more remote. In particular, the growing influence of the IMF in the region since the crisis has made APEC irrelevant, while the inability of regional elites to deal with the crisis in a unified fashion has thrown into sharp relief the serious obstacles which exist to any pan-Asian effort to challenge neoliberalism. At the same time, although the East Asian crisis has precipitated a reassertion of US hegemony and a consolidation of neoliberalism, the present juncture may also herald the start of a crisis of neoliberalism, with regional and international implications.     

Constructing a social safety net in Africa: An institutionalist analysis of colonial rule and state social policies in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire

This article attempts to explain why, despite nearly identical cultural and economic landscapes and the potentially homogenizing pressures of globalization, social policies differ in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, two neighboring countries in West Africa. In Ghana, the government has generally attempted to strengthen the informal social welfare systems of the extended family and community through a more decentralized social policy, whereas the government in Côte d'Ivoire has tried to replace these informal social networks with the centralized arm of the bureaucracy. The article shows how different legacies of colonial rule produce these divergent social policies in a complex and iterative process over time. While domestic institutions do mediate the effects of globalization, the domestic factors highlighted in this article are not the formal political institutions cited in most studies. Rather, the analysis reveals the critical role of informal institutions, or normative frameworks, that existed under colonial rule and continue to endure in the post-colonial state. The article also contributes to current theories of institutions by showing how formal and informal institutions dynamically interact in the construction of the state and the African family.     

GENDER AND THE HIDDEN LIFE OF INSTITUTIONS

New Institutionalism has shown that the ‘rules of the game’ are crucial to structuring political life in terms of constraining and enabling political actors and influencing political outcomes. A limitation of this approach, however, has been its overemphasis on formal rules, with much less attention paid to how informal rules work alongside and in conjunction with formal institutions to shape actors and outcomes. This article contributes to an emerging literature that highlights the importance of informal institutions by bringing into focus one element that has been hidden in these debates – the influence of gender norms and practices on the operation and interaction between formal and informal institutions. It highlights some of the key benefits of a gender analysis for understanding political institutions in both their formal and informal guise and considers some of the challenges in building a research agenda that requires new methods and techniques of inquiry.     

Exhaustion and Exclusion in the African Village: The Non-State Social Welfare of Informal Reciprocity in Rural Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire

This paper examines the consequences for equity of different patterns of non-state social welfare provision, specifically the informal institutions of reciprocity among families, friends, and village neighbors in rural West Africa. Based on over 18 months of fieldwork in similar regions on either side of the Ghana-Cote d’Ivoire border, this paper challenges many existing assumptions in the literature, revealing that the informal institutions of reciprocity were not only less vibrant overall, but also differed strikingly in terms of who was helping who and how in particular localities. The paper argues that the informal institutions of reciprocity were more exhausted in the Ghanaian villages and more exclusive in the Ivoirian ones. The study highlights that the informal system of non-state social welfare provided by the family, friends, and neighborhood did not simply expand to fill the functional gaps left by the neoliberal retrenchment of the state. The paper concludes that when policies are designed based on an overly romanticized image of kinship and communal reciprocity in Africa, it is the very poor that increasingly fall through the gaps of the state and non-state system of social welfare.     

Stalinism and Executive Power: Formal and Informal Contours of Stalinism

Abstract

One of the key characteristics of Stalinism was the relationship between its formal and informal aspects. This is reflected clearly in the way in which, over time, the formal institutions of rule were supplanted by more informal mechanisms of decision-making. However, although the formal institutions seemed to atrophy, they were not abolished, but continued to become the basis upon which the post-Stalin leadership rested. The essay explains why one of those institutions, the Politburo, was maintained despite its atrophy as a decision-making organ, explaining this principally as a result of both strategic and tactical considerations.