The Kuomintang's secret service in action in South China: operational and political aspects of the arrest of Liao Chengzhi (1942)

The arrest in May 1942 of Liao Chengzhi – a CCP spy chief as well as the son of a celebrated KMT elder assassinated in 1925 – is considered a Big Case in China. Using the original KMT case file on Liao Chengzhi, van de Ven describes how the KMT's secret service turned the Jiangxi Provincial Committee and then arrested leading members of the CCP in south China and thereby eliminated its organization there. The article further uses letters by prominent CCP and KMT personalities involved in the case to suggest the existence of a revolutionary aristocracy bound by personal relations and with an elite code of conduct. When the political will was present, members of this elite deployed their personal connections in the search for solutions to complex political problems.     

Managerial autonomy: does it matter for the performance of water utilities?

The public administration literature asserts that autonomy is central to performance. In this article we develop a managerial autonomy index, which we apply to 22 water utilities in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The 16 items that underlie our composite autonomy index display a high degree of internal consistency. This speaks for the validity of the autonomy concept. We find that the autonomy scores of the 22 utilities vary widely. We also find strong and positive associations between autonomy scores and six out of eight key performance indicators. Our results support the idea that autonomy is central to the performance of water service providers. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Disposable income,unemployment, inflation and state spending in a dynamic political-economic model

This paper formulates a medium-term macroeconomic model of disposable income, unemployment, inflation and state spending, proposes a theory of qualitative choice to explain electoral popularity in terms of these variables and develops three approaches to the formulation of political-economic policy. The first approach is static, sets the tax rate to reconcile the interests of various pressure groups and yields a political trade-off between the private and public sector. The second approach relies on maximizing the probability of winning the next election and gives rise to a political business cycle unless the electorate votes strategically. The implications of crowding out of private investment under alternative monetary rules, autonomous behaviour of the state bureaucracy and tax-indexation for the political business cycle are also examined. The third approach analyzes the objective of maximizing the uninterrupted length in office. It yields a short-run political cycle superimposed on a longer cycle.