Applying strategic management to economic development: benefits and challenges

Strategic management has become one of the popular managerial techniques emphasized by policy makers and public managers in recent years. Many local government officials are especially interested in applying this technique to improve the effectiveness of their economic development policies and programs. This paper examines issues associated with the application of strategic management concepts to local economic development. The paper first provides an overview of basic concepts of strategic management and special issues of public strategic management. It then focuses on the background of local economic development and the linkage between strategic management and economic development. The paper finally addresses the benefits and challenges associated with the development of strategic economic development.     

Administrative development issues in china's economic reform: an introduction

This introduction article provides the background information about the present symposium and the summary of the articles addressed in the symposium. On the background information, the article reviewed the process of economic reform and key measures of administrative reforms. On the symposium summary, the article explained issues and conclusions of the following articles: administrative decentralization and state-society relations, the role of government in economic development, ethical codes in China's civil service, transportation infrastructure and regional economic development, characteristics of recent financial reforms, and privatization of urban housing provision.     

The role of government in economic development: the chinese experience

This study examines the role of government in China's economic reform and development years. The study first provides a literature review about major functions government played in the modern economic system and the importance of government policies to economic development. It then evaluates the experience of the Chinese government in the process of reform and development by focusing on five major roles: (a) promoter of growth, (b) manager of economy, (c) distributor of income, (d) regulator of industry, and (e) protector of citizen and business. The implications of the Chinese experience are discussed.     

The fetishism of humanitarian objects and the management of malnutrition in emergencies

This paper examines two common objects in humanitarian assistance: a therapeutic food called Plumpy’nut, and a tape for measuring malnutrition known as the muac band. It argues that humanitarian relief has become a standardised package reliant on such objects, which receive excessive commitment from aid workers and are ascribed with almost magical powers. Drawing on the Marxist notion of commodity fetishism, the paper proposes a three-part model for examining this phenomenon, in which humanitarian objects are bound up in processes of concealment, transformation and mystification. First, these objects are perceived as rootless, recent discoveries, allowing the complex history and ambivalent results of technology to be concealed. Second, they facilitate a single-minded attention to efficiency and aggregate survival, which transforms the way humanitarian action is understood. Third, these objects are imbued with a mystical and autonomous spirit, redefined as irreplaceable elements of aid. This ‘fetishism of humanitarian objects’, the paper concludes, prevents a more flexible and people-centred approach to relief.     

The place of corporate ownership and management in local government anti‐poverty strategy in Britain

Since devolution in 1999, the Welsh Government has developed a distinctive approach to the management of local government policy. Alongside an emphasis on welfarism and partnership, local authorities have been exhorted to put the citizen at the centre of public service delivery. Drawing on the notion of assemblage, developed in the governmentality literature, this paper identifies two different rationalities running through Welsh Government policy documents. On the basis of a series of interviews with government officials and their counterparts in the Welsh Local Government Association we find evidence of important tensions in the Welsh approach. While the emphasis on the citizen has worked in building a ‘political rationality’, the evidence from our interviews suggests that it works less well as a ‘government technology’.     

The bush doctrine and the UN charter frame

Restless Europe? European Identity after the Iraq War and the Constitutional Referenda

Free World: Why a crisis of the West reveals the opportunity of our time / Timothy Garton Ash. ‐ London : Penguin Books, 2005. ‐256 p. ‐ISBN 0141016817

Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War / Daniel Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey (eds). ‐ London : Verso, 2005. ‐ 256 p. ‐ ISBN 1 ‐84467–018‐X

Europe: An Unfinished Adventure / Zygmunt Bauman. ‐ Cambridge and Maiden : Polity, 2004. ‐ 152 p. ‐ (Themes for the 21st century). ‐ ISBN 0745634028

Between sovereignty and compliance: A nuclear strategy for the 21st century

Universal compliance : a strategy for nuclear security / George Perkovich... [et al.]. ‐Washington D.C. : Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, c2005. ‐ 220 p.     

Civilian power and ‘history‐making’ decisions: German agenda‐setting on Europe

This article examines ‘history‐making’ decisions on Europe by the German government, drawing on the concept of civilian power, which has been refined by international relations theorists, subjecting it to a political science critique. Three case studies ‐ of economic and monetary union (EMU), dual enlargement and European defence and security policy ‐ are discussed and compared with the aim of assessing the value of civilian power for the analysis and explanation of key German decisions. The focus is on agenda‐setting in relation to key ‘history‐making’ decisions. It is argued that German European policy behaviour is better explained by civilian power than realism or neo‐liberal institutionalism. However, civilian power does not adequately capture the complex attitudes and values at work in Germany, the interests brought to bear in a fragmented, sectoralised policy process, the resource limitations on pursuing this approach, and the external conditions for sustaining such a role.     

Free Trade: A Paradox for Democracy

Free trade and global markets are issues that have dominated for some time the political and economic agendas of both industrialized and newly developing nations. While greater prosperity for all peoples is most frequently cited as the main gain, free trade is also considered a promoter of democracy, an argument deployed in bringing China into the World Trade Organization. World peace has also been cited as one of the fruits of closer economic integration, as parochial walls between peoples are undermined, interdependence grows and is made more transparent, and mutual prosperity assured. We contest the faith upon which these assumptions rely. We argue that the theory and practice of neo-liberal free trade and neo-revisionist democracy implicate the modern democratic nation state in paradoxes that it is ill-equipped to negotiate. To exit these paradoxes, or at least to mollify the rancor they can produce, both the ideas of free trade and of democracy need to become more robust.     

Health Care Reform in China: An Analysis of Development Trends and Lack of Implementation

ABSTRACT

China's health care system, under the direction of the central government, has undergone continuous reform in recent decades. Many problems have been encountered, with successive measures attempting to deal with shortcomings and failings of previous reforms. To what extent can implementation failures account for the recurring problems, and what explains these failures? The analysis adopts the theoretical lens of structural-instrumental and cultural-institutional perspectives, respectively, and draws also on recent developments in implementation theory. The historical trajectory of health reform is described, with particular reference to why health policies formulated by the central government during different periods repeatedly failed to achieve their objectives. The empirical analysis finds that structural factors, such as departmentalism and regional separation resulting in complex, overlapping horizontal and vertical actor patterns, have been a primary reason for implementation failures and suggests that they will continue to dog future reform efforts.     

Saints,scholars and the idealized past in Philippine Muslim separatism

Philippine Muslim nationalism appeals to two distinct but related imagined pasts: the traditional territorial past of the precolonial southern Philippines and the newly-emphasized moral past of the Sunna; the sacred traditions of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions in the earliest days of Islam. Problems arise when the imagined moral past, embodied in the present by a sharp increase in the influence of Middle East-educated Islamic clerics and their calls for the purification of local Islamic practice, comes into direct conflict with the authority of the traditional aristocracy and locally-cherished cultural practices. The Muslim separatist movement that began in 1968 had dual goals. It was primarily an ethno-nationalist endeavour that had as its primary goal the creation of a Philippine Muslim nation - a nation-state governed by Philippine Muslims and modelled on the sultanates of the precolonial period. The second goal of the Muslim separatist movement was to reform local religious and cultural practices under the leadership of a new set of religious leaders. To understand the place of atavism and puritanism in the Philippine Muslim separatist movement I review the largely local tradition of saints and the more universal Muslim institution of religious scholars as they have interacted in the contemporary Muslim Philippines. I consider the contradictions between revanchist and reformatist goals of the movement by interpreting the narratives of Sultan Muhammad Adil, a prominent supporter of Muslim separatism in the Philippines.