On Jon Halliday's Contribution to Understanding Japan

Abstract

The smashing of the Gang of Four and resurrection of Deng Xiaoping produced a sense of euphoria and gave rise to unrealistic expectations in many areas of Chinese life. In the economic realm, visionary planners drew up blueprints based upon resources that simply were not there. In the political realm, young men and women dared to act upon the conviction that the Gang's downfall would open the way to an overall democratization of Chinese politics.     

Report from Japan 1972 — Part II

Abstract

Since the Korean War in the early 1950’s, the strongest sustained impetus for altering the Japanese economy and constitution to serve militaristic ends has come not from military leaders, bureaucrats or conservative politicians but from the leaders of big business. Herein lies the crucial difference between prewar militarism and the still “non-ideological” variety emerging in Japan today.     

Designing a Legal and Regulatory Framework for Better Public Financial Management: Some Issues for Consideration from Trinidad and Tobago

Ill fitting legal shoes pinch citizen’s foot.

Chinese Proverb

Never ask of money spent where the spender thinks it went. Nobody was ever meant to remember or invent what he did with every cent.

Robert Frost

There is a sense in which discussions of public law and debates about budgeting have a good deal in common. Both budgets and law are essential to the task of public administration. Without legal authority and budgetary resources, agencies cannot function. Indeed, without legal authority they do not even exist, and without financial resources they exist in name only.

Cooper, Phillip J (1999) ‘Courts and Fiscal Decision Making’, in: Handbook of Government Budgeting (San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass) p 502.     

Families of nations and public policy

Employing cluster analysis, this article reconsiders a concept formulated by Francis G. Castles that stresses the existence of four families of nations, which markedly differ in respect of public policy‐making. For two policy fields — social and economic policy — the hypothesised families of nations can be shown to exist, and they are quite robust and stable over time. Cluster analysis also reveals different paths towards modernity. On the one hand, there are more state‐oriented versus more market‐oriented models of public policy‐making; on the other, there is a cleavage in public policy‐making between rich countries located at the centre and somewhat poorer countries located at the periphery.     

Jacques Barzun’s American university

He is author of The Broken Apple: New York City in the 1980s;and Social Science Theory;both published by Transaction Publishers.     

The impact of litigation on nursing home quality

Government reports indicate that regulations have been ineffective in improving quality of care in many nursing homes. Some analysts feel that litigation against nursing homes may be the result of quality problems that are monitored during the inspection process, some contend litigation merely causes quality problems by diverting financial resources away from patient care, and some argue that litigation is duplicating the efforts of the inspection process. Given that the relationship between litigation and inspection-oriented measures of quality is not clear, this article explores the relationship empirically. When a significant relationship is found, the empirical results suggest that litigation is associated with a decline in inspection-oriented measured quality in the nursing home facing the legal claim. In contrast, litigation against a chain has a very different relationship to firm-level quality, where firms within a chain that is being sued have higher levels of inspection-oriented quality. Our results suggest that legal claims may result from quality problems that go unmeasured during the inspection process. However, more research in this area is warranted.