China＇s Changing Pattern of FDI

正INWARD investment into China continues to be the highest of any developing economy,at US$101 billion in 2013,according to UN fi gures,but its pattern is changing signifi cantly as the country develops,and this trend will inevitably deepen.In the first decades after the start of China’s economic reforms in 1978,foreign direct investment was primarily     

China＇s Changing Development Pattern

正DATA available on the world’s two largest economies,China and the U.S.,for 2013provide an opportunity to take stock of China’s immediate economic prospects and the more general challenges facing its economic development strategy.     

China Can Maintain Its Economic Growth

正EARLIER this year sections of the Western media tried to spin a story that the world economy was experiencing"severe slowdown in China"and"strong recovery in the U.S."In other words,China’s economy was allegedly in trouble and the U.S.was doing well.Now that the factual data is in for the fi rst half of the year it shows the opposite was true.China’s economic growth was 7.5 percent to the second quarter of 2014;that of the U.S.was 2.4 percent.China’s economy thus grew more than three times as fast as the U.S.’s.Still more signifi cantly for the U.S.,its own statistical agencies and the IMF have offi cially revised their projections for long-term U.S.growth.Both now estimate it at     

SUPERVISION REGIMES,RISK, AND OFFICIAL REACTIONS TO PAROLEE DEVIANCE*

Parolee deviance has emerged as a central issue in policy debates about crime and punishment in American society as well as in scholarship on “mass incarceration.” Although the prevailing approach to studying parolees conceives of parole violations as outcomes of individual propensities toward criminal behavior (i.e., criminogenic risk), we consider how indicators of individual risk and characteristics of formal social control systems combine to account for reported parole violations. Using data on California parolees, we examine the effects of parolees’ personal characteristics, their criminal histories, and the social organization of supervision on parole violations. We advance the notion of a “supervision regime”—a legal and organizational structure that shapes the detection and reporting of parolee deviance. Three components of a supervision regime are explored: 1) the intensity of supervision, 2) the capacity of the regime to detect parolee deviance, and 3) the tolerance of parole officials for parolee deviance. We find that personal characteristics and offense histories are predictive of parole violations. However, we also find that introducing supervision factors reduces the effects of offense history variables on violation risk, suggesting that the violation risks of serious, violent, and sexual offenders are partially explainable through the heightened supervision to which they are subject. In addition, we find that supervision intensity and tolerance are generally predictive of violation risk. Capacity effects are present but weak. We conclude with a discussion of how the supervision regimes concept illuminates the gap between macro‐ and micro‐analyses of social control.     

TOWARD AN ANALYTICAL CRIMINOLOGY: THE MICRO–MACRO PROBLEM,CAUSAL MECHANISMS,AND PUBLIC POLICY

In this address, I revisit the micro–macro problem in criminology, arguing for an “analytical criminology” that takes an integrated approach to the micro–macro problem. I begin by contrasting an integrated methodological‐individualist approach with traditional holist and individualist approaches. An integrated approach considers the concept of emergence and tackles the difficult problem of specifying causal mechanisms by which interactions among individuals produce social organizational outcomes. After presenting a few examples of micro–macro transitions relevant to criminology, I discuss research programs in sociology and economics that focus on these issues. I then discuss the implications of social interaction effects for making causal inferences about crime and for making crime policy recommendations.     

HOW COLLECTIVE IS COLLECTIVE EFFICACY? THE IMPORTANCE OF CONSENSUS IN JUDGMENTS ABOUT COMMUNITY COHESION AND WILLINGNESS TO INTERVENE

Existing studies have generally measured collective efficacy by combining survey respondents’ ratings of their local area into an overall summary for each neighborhood. Naturally, this approach results in a substantive focus on the variation in average levels of collective efficacy between neighborhoods. In this article, we focus on the variation in consensus of collective efficacy judgments. To account for differential consensus among neighborhoods, we use a mixed‐effects location‐scale model, with variability in the consensus of judgments treated as an additional neighborhood‐level random effect. Our results show that neighborhoods in London differ, not just in their average levels of collective efficacy but also in the extent to which residents agree with one another in their assessments. In accord with findings for U.S. cities, our results show that consensus in collective efficacy assessments is affected by the ethnic composition of neighborhoods. Additionally, we show that heterogeneity in collective efficacy assessments is consequential, with higher levels of criminal victimization, worry about crime, and risk avoidance behavior in areas where collective efficacy consensus is low.     

The New Philadelphia Story: The Effects of Severe Punishment for Drunk Driving*

This article documents the experience of a community–New Philadelphia, Ohio–in which a concerned judge attempted to apply severe penalties in order to deter drunk driving. Surveys of drivers on weekend nights were performed in this community and the nearby comparison city of Cambridge in order to determine the extent to which the legal threats were perceived and the extent to which people drank and drove. It was found that the judicial policies were well known in New Philadelphia, but no differences could be discerned in the extent of drinking and driving between the two cities. No significant differences were found in the subsequent records of samples of sentenced drivers in the two cities, the New Philadelphia sample being sentenced to heavy punishments and the Cambridge drivers being sentenced traditionally. The accomplishments and limitations of the experience reported in this study are relevant both to formulating effective countermeasures to drunk driving in specific American communities, and to understanding the role of law–its capabilities and limitations–in addressing social problems more generally.