Volunteer Teaching

正Iwalked into the schoolroom in Wuwei County, east China’s Anhui Province, without theslightest clue of what to expect.I’d joined the Summer Service Learning Project at Tsinghua University for an adventure; to experience a chunk of China I hadn’tseen before. Through the project,small groups of six or seven Tsinghua     

Past and Future Directions of the APS: Some Personal Reflections

Reform of the public service has not been just some management fad, nor is it even driven by purely management considerations. Fundamentally, public service reform, both in the last decade and in the future, is being driven by basic changes in our society, economy and technology, which in turn influence what the public expects from government.
The reforms of the last decade or so have concentrated on changing the management framework and culture. Future reforms are likely to impact more heavily on the responsibilities of the APS and what it actually does. However, the underlying rationale will continue to be to ensure the delivery of services which respond more effectively to the needs of the community.     

Social Expectations in China

I remember the scene vividly:Late last year,I was eating lunch with a Chinese friend who was obviously upset.When I met her at the gate of the student canteen,she tried her best to make small talk,but something was clearly wrong.Her head hung low,her eyes were glued to the floor,and she     

The propensities to consume labour and property incomes in the commonwealth Caribbean

This article outlines theoretically the aggregate savings implications of differences in business and personal savings propensities. Time series empirical tests for two developing economies generate the conclusion that the marginal business savings rate is much higher than the marginal personal savings rate. For double‐log consumption functions differences in the personal propensity to consume labour and property incomes are substantial and statistically significant.     

The unheeded present and the impossible future: temporalities of relocation after Typhoon Haiyan

Recovery plans were developed for both the Philippines and Tacloban City in particular. They framed Haiyan as a climate change emergency, and sought to respond to future risks to the city and country. This focus on future recovery came at the expense of attention to the transitional needs of those worst affected by the Typhoon. International humanitarian organizations were co-opted into the government’s refusal of transitional assistance to Tacloban City shoreline residents. This was because they construed their mandate of apolitical assistance in a particular way. An alternative framing of emergency deployed by a local organization produced a very different result. In order to respond to the range of temporal needs in post-disaster situations, humanitarian actors need to be cognizant of the range of epistemic frameworks available to them.