The regulation of political financing in Portugal

The regulation of political financing in Portugal has taken place through successive waves of reform since the adoption of the first decree which gave legal recognition to parties in 1974. The incremental nature of adjustments and the overall inefficacy of instruments adopted, often introduced without a clear understanding of the problems and opportunities for impropriety and corruption, can be interpreted as an attempt by the political class to anticipate the worst, that is, scandal and the threat this would represent to the normal performance of democracy. In spite of the legislators' increased knowledge about successes and failures of foreign regulatory experiences and the importation of instruments tested abroad, Portuguese regulatory efforts are shaped by specific lines of legal-historical development and the dominant attitudes of Portuguese society towards that sort of illegality.     

La Generalización del Impuesto al Valor Agregado: ¿Una opción para México?

Given poor tax collection in Mexico –which has registered an average of 10 to 11 percent of the GDP over the last 10 years, while spending has remained around 20 percent–, fiscal reform has been a recurring issue in public debates. In this context, the vat generalization appears as a major option for the country. Nonetheless, its viability has been caught in a discussion tinged with dogmatic hues. This paper presents some important elements that should be taken into account in the debate regarding a generalization of the vat. If the argument for not generalizing this tax is based on the tax’s regressive turn, it should then be stressed that current tax structure has created a situation of greater inequality in terms of the recipients of the support.     

La economía cubana: entre voluntarismo e intentos de planifcación (1959-2012)

Throughout more than fifty years, the Cuban Revolution has been unable to implement an Economic Management System (ems) to face and overcome the traditional problems of centrally planned economies. When Cuban leaders tried to back away from the planning methods adopted in socialist countries, the economic management suffered from “voluntarism”, with invariably negative consequences. This article proposes a categorization of the economic cycle into upward phases –in which rational economic planning and organization predominate– and downward phases with a highly centralized direction of the economy. A historic-economic analysis of each phase of the cycle is presented, revealing that upward phases were characterized by good or acceptable economic outcomes, while these were poor during downward phases with a prevalence of voluntarism, unless external factors appeared.     

高校辅导员自我建设内涵的思考

高辅导员的工作纷繁复杂,工作的对象——大学生的思想也是日趋复杂的。高校辅导员的自我建设是提高思想政治教育工作成效的应有内涵,其主要内容包括坚定理想信念,增强责任心和事业心,满怀激情爱心,完善知识体系,注重总结反思,创新工作方法。     

Endogenous Development Dynamics of Multisectoral Network Management

ABSTRACT

Little is known about the effects of regime change on government workers’ job satisfaction. Conventional theories of work satisfaction have identified various individual or organizational antecedents of public employees’ well-being in many different contexts. In this study, we add an additional level of analysis to the study of job satisfaction. The German reunification in 1990 constitutes a natural experiment where public employees’ institutional work environment changed dramatically. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we show that, after the reunification, East German public employees who stayed in their jobs experienced a “satisfaction shock” by substantially decreasing their levels of job satisfaction. This finding is in line with what has been labelled as “survivor syndrome” in the general management literature. We also find that, after three years’ time, differences in satisfaction levels between East and West Germans reverted to pre-reunion levels. These findings are robust to various model specifications and alternative estimators. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.     

Problems Facing China＇s ＂Going Out＂

The risks facing Chinese investors overseas vary according to the field of investment and the country of investment. There are six key problems which spring to mind when this topic is brought up:First, there is the type of investor who does not have a basic knowledge about the countries he is planning to invest in. China opened itself long ago to the outside world, but it is na?ve to think that other countries will do the same. The U.S. is a good example. It is very hard for     

Jacques Vergès,Rupture Strategy and the Argentinean New Left: Circulations and Adaptations of a Judiciary Theory

This article deals with the transatlantic circulations of the theory of “rupture strategy”, popularised by French lawyer Jacques Vergès in the early 1960s. In the early 1970s, the concept was imported and adapted to the Argentinean context by radical left-wing lawyers. Their uses of rupture strategy were modelled by their perception of Argentina as being a “semi-colonised” country, whose situation was comparable to that of Algeria. In the 1980s however, in a context of democratisation, the same lawyers reassessed their uses of “Vergesian” vocabulary and progressively renounced rupture strategy, while still maintaining a critique of liberal penal law. To account for this evolution, this article adopts a socio-historical perspective. It shows that the reception of Vergès’ theory must be understood as a dynamic process, in which the permanent interaction and the contradictory evolution of two different contexts (context of reception and context of origin), interfere with the continued importation of rupture strategy.