Book reviews

The Imaginary War: Understanding the East‐West Conflict By Mary Kaldor. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1990. 290 pp. £19.95.

The Nonsuperpowers and South Africa ‐ Implications for U.S. Policy. By Richard J. Payne. Indiana University Press. 336 pp. $35.00.

Elites and the Idea of Equality: A Comparison of Japan, Sweden, and the United States. By Sidney Verba, Steven Kelman, Gary R. Orten, Ichiro Miyake, Joji Watonuki, Ikuo Kabashima, G. Donald Ferreer, Jr. Harvard University Press. 276 pp. £10.25.

Controlling the Sword: The Democratic Governance of National Security By Bruce Russett. 261 pp. £17.95.

America's Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany By Thomas Alan Schwartz. Harvard University Press: 1991. 404 pp. £23.95.     

How Many Separated Aboriginal Children?

Acknowledging the difficulty in arriving at an accurate estimate of the number of Aboriginal children removed from their families during the twentieth century, I argue that the greatest accuracy will flow from working with specialist scholars of small areas. Their studies, many of which already exist, draw on archival, documentary, oral and community sources. Such locally specialised knowledge is necessary to unravel official population figures and shifting definitions of Aboriginality, sometimes deliberately intended to deceive. Community-based knowledge is needed to expand upon the files of removed children, at least half of which, in Wiradjuri country, are missing or inaccessible. Lastly I consider some of the implications of the discussion in relation to a "Stolen Generations Tribunal".     

Risk and the Outsourcing of Risk Management Services: The Case of Claims Management

Outsourcing of risk management activities is a well-established practice, involving a range of services from actuarial audits to loss control training to risk financing management to claims administration services. Surprisingly, little work has been done to examine the risks associated with outsourcing risk management activities. This article examines the outsourcing of claims management services by reviewing the research on outsourcing risks and by interviewing leading practitioners. In doing so, the authors draw some provisional observations about risks and risk costs associated with outsourcing claims management services—observations that seem generalizable to all risk management outsourcing.     

Corruption,Cooperation and Endogenous Time Discount Rates

Virtually all uses of repeated games tostudy of cooperation assume that people'stime discount rates are exogenous andfixed. Here we offer an evolutionary gameembedded in a multi-period model ofinvestment and consumption in whichindividual time discounts are determined bytheir convergence to values determined byEvolutionary Stable Strategies. Oursubstantive motivation, though, iscorruption and its relationship to economicgrowth. To understand the observedrelationship between levels of corruptionand economic indicators of social welfare,we argue that corruption is a form ofcooperation that requires closeinterpersonal monitoring. If we assume,moreover, that when people discount thefuture greatly the only sustainable formsof cooperation are those that allow forclose monitoring, then our analysis can beinterpreted as a dynamic model of therelationship between corruption andinvestment.     

Devolution and outsourcing of municipal services in Kampala city,Uganda: an early assessment

The late 1980s saw the beginning of wide‐ranging economic and political reforms in Africa, prompted by both external and internal pressures. Demands for political reform pushed for democratisation, including decentralisation of power and resources to lower levels of government. Alongside pressures for democratisation were those for economic liberalisation, including the rolling back of the state characterised by, among other things, reducing its role in service provision. This article looks at aspects of political and economic liberalisation in Uganda, involving devolution and outsourcing of service provision in Kampala city. It focuses on the city's experience with devolution and outsourcing of solid waste management. It shows that, pockets of resistance notwithstanding, the reforms enjoyed widespread popularity and led to many positive changes. In addition, it shows that they begot problems and encountered others that rendered the process of change more problematic than its advocates had anticipated. Its major conclusion is that while devolution and outsourcing are useful tools for improving service delivery, they cannot ensure long‐term success in the absence of financial, technical and managerial capacity on the part of contractors and contracting authorities. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Economic Freedom and Taxation: Is There a Trade-off in the Locational Competition Between Countries?

This paper investigates the relationshipbetween economic freedomand taxation. We argue that an economicallyfree environment improvesthe attractiveness of a location, which, inturn, enables governmentsto levy higher business taxes. To test thishypothesis empirically, weestimate the impact of economic freedom onthe national tax policy,where the latter is measured by thecorporate tax revenue related toGNP (corporate tax ratio). We utilize adata set of 46 developed and lessdeveloped countries between 1980 and 1997and find a clear confirmationof our hypothesis. Further, a simulationanalysis reveals that the observedchange in economic freedom has equalizedthe international distributionof corporate tax ratios.     

National identity and Taiwan's Mainland China policy

Taiwan is a mildly divided society—divided essentially along the lines of national identity. Indeed, there is no doubt that national identity is the dominant factor affecting Taiwan's mainland China policy. Other factors such as business interests and security concerns may enter the picture from time to time, but they often get bogged down in the national identity controversies. As a matter of fact, there is high correlation between people's attitudes toward business and security concerns and their positions on the national identity issue. The key to understanding Taiwan's mainland China policy is thus the distribution of voters on the national identity issue and how it is translated into the political fortunes of various political parties in the electoral game.     

Book reviews

Journal of Chinese Political Science -