Speech at the Ceremony of Renewing MOU between CAFIU and FES

<正>Distinguished Vice-Minister Li Jinjun,Ladies and gentlemen,friends,It is a delightful event for all of us to renew the MOU between FES and CAFIU for the nineth time.Years of cooperation and fruitful results are worth celebrating.For a long period of time,the two organizations have been making efforts to put the thoughts of Deng Xiaopeng and Willy Brandt into practice,namely,the thoughts of having dialogue and enhancing mutual understanding while putting     

The evolution of suburban relative housing-unit diversity

The diversity of housing-unit supply in suburban areas has been a central concern for planners and policy makers for at least 50 years. Absence of census cross-tabulation data on housing unit structure-type by unit-size (number of bedrooms), has limited our understanding of the historical and regional evolution of relative suburban housing-unit diversity. I use census microdata to estimate measures of relative housing diversity between cities and suburbs, including the housing-unit portfolio compositions, and availability ratios of diverse housing-unit types. Data are presented for the US, regions, metropolitan areas, and across different time periods. Effects of housing-unit supply on household structure and location are estimated. Results indicate that suburban areas, while growing in terms of the absolute number of diverse housing units constructed, are relatively undersupplying diverse housing units, thereby constraining households’ housing opportunities.     

Biosafety considerations for autopsy

An autopsy may subject prosectors and others to a wide variety of infectious agents, including bloodborne and aerosolized pathogens such as human immunodeficiency virus, hepatitis B and C viruses, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Other hazards include toxic chemicals (e.g., formalin, cyanide, and organophosphates) and radiation from radionuclides used for patient therapy and diagnosis. These risks can be substantially mitigated through proper assessment, personal protective equipment, appropriate autopsy procedures, and facility design.     

The contribution of beneficiary participation to development project effectiveness

Criticism of development projects is widespread, and blame for disappointing results is cast in many directions. One line of criticism which has become quite strong in the recent development literature is that development projects are too top-down and need to be more bottom-up (e.g. Maguire, 1981). Projects should involve more participation by beneficiaries. In fact, some would argue that real development, by definition, must involve beneficiaries in their own improvement (e.g. Gran, 1983a,b). Without participation the people may benefit but not develop from a project. Thus participation has intrinsic value. As the recognition of the value of public, popular, beneficiary, or community participation has increased, so has the range of what is meant by participation. Some authors have expanded the concept to mean empowerment and capacity-building, sometimes including institution-building. In this paper we do not attempt to redefine participation per se. but aim instead to make an inventory of the principal concepts that have evolved in the literature so far, elicit a general model of participatory development projects, deduce the central implicit hypotheses from this literature on the relationship between participation and project effectiveness, and statistically test these hypotheses from the empirical evidence provided by AID'S series of 52 Impact Evaluation Reports. Our major question is how much does beneficiary participation contribute to project effectiveness?     

An Approach to Measuring the Affordability of State Debt

Affordability is one important and widely accepted element of state and local debt policy. However, there is no well-established measure of affordability and no clear standard for making normative judgments about what amount of debt is affordable for a specific jurisdiction. This article suggests a six-step method for measuring affordability of state debt that provides a useful guideline for determining when a state may be entering a "danger zone" by having debt that exceeds norms of affordability.     

From Leviathan to Gulliver? The Decline of the Developmental State in Brazil

This article advances an institutionalist explanation for the decline of Brazil's developmental state, showing how an initially strong state undermined its own strength over time. The Brazilian state greatly expanded its interventionism and fragmented society—through state-corporatist mechanisms—in order to enhance its power to guide development. Yet the mushrooming state apparatus increasingly lacked internal coordination. This disunity diminished the state's capacity to attain its goals and provided added opportunities for the fragmented social groups created by the state's divide-and-rule strategies to "capture" public agencies. The resulting weakening of the state is evident in taxation, the policy focus of this article. Competing state agencies granted proliferating tax privileges, and business sectors supported by clientelist politicians blocked governmental efforts to maintain or raise the tax burden. This decline in extractive capacity contributed to the fiscal crisis that has paralyzed Brazil's developmental state since the early 1980s.     

Is Activity-Based Costing Up to the Challenge When It Comes to Privatization of Local Government Services?

After its initial success in the private sector, activity-based costing (ABC) has been embraced by the public sector as an analytical tool that can be used to improve the efficiency of government operations, especially in the area of the privatization of operations. Despite claims that ABC can greatly enhance the evaluation of how to most efficiently deliver services, there are significant obstacles that must be overcome before ABC can be effectively implemented. In order to underscore the challenges facing successful ABC execution in the public sector, the use of activity-based cost accounting by the City of Indianapolis for its privatization initiatives is discussed. Generally ABC is not up to challenge of providing local governments with the tool necessary to comprehensively evaluate direct services and determine which are candidates for contracting out or privatization.