What Does Foreign Study Do for China?

<正>China now leads the world in sending students to the United States for education.Recent reporting on the experiences of those young men and women should cause us to question the value this has for the     

Inertia and Neighboring Effects in Local Tax Policy: Illinois' Experience with a Local Option Tax on Telecommunications

Illinois reconfigured the legal basis and constraints for municipal telecommunications taxes in 2003. We use data on municipalities' initial (assigned) tax rate, fiscal condition, population, changes in tax rates of neighboring municipalities and neighbors' initial (assigned) tax rates to explain changes in telecommunications tax rates between 2003 and 2008. We find clear evidence of an important and statistically significant inertia effect—municipalities initially assigned a zero tax rate continued to stay tax free—and important and statistically significant neighboring effects—municipalities whose neighbors changed tax rates did the same, and municipalities whose neighbors were assigned relatively high initial rates increased their own rates faster.     

The Dust Settles

I think my Beijing sleep patterns are nearly back to normal.It has taken a few weeks,but in the wake of the world’s greatest sporting event,the need to pass entire work nights without     

Beijing by Bicycle

okay, I just want to get something out in the open here. I am a bike-oholic. It’s not that I have always had this affliction: In the past, I     

TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR ESTABLISHING POLICY SUCCESS

Claims that a particular policy has been a ‘success’ are commonplace in political life. However, a few of these claims are justified in any systematic way. This article seeks to remedy this omission by offering a heuristic which practitioners and academics can utilize to approach the question of whether a policy is, or was, successful. It builds initially on two sets of literature: Boyne's work on public sector improvement; and the work of Bovens et al. on success, failure and policy evaluation. We discuss the epistemological issues involved in whether it is possible to produce an objective measure of ‘success’. Subsequently, we present a framework for assessing success, focusing on three dimensions: process success; programmatic success; and political success. We then move on to raise a series of what we term complexity issues in relation to success for whom; variations across time, space and culture; and methodological issues.