THE STATE SOCIALIST WELFARE SYSTEM and the POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PUBLIC HOUSING REFORM IN URBAN CHINA

This aticle analyses China's housing reform against the background that a new housing policy has been implemented since 1988. The crucial point of the 1998 housing policy package is to stop the allocation system of state‐subsidized public housing. By changing this rule of the game, a major institutional obstacle to housing reform will be removed, and some unfeasible policy measures become feasible within the new institutional context.     

Self-imposed term limits

In “Reconciling voters' behavior with legislative term limits,” Dick and Lott argue that since more senior representatives are better at rent-seeking, there is an inefficient tendency to re-elect incumbents. In their model, term limits are preferred collectively by constituencies, even though no constituency would independently oust its incumbent representative. However, many term limits are unilaterally self-imposed (in particular the 22nd amendment limiting presidents' terms to two), and their model cannot explain these limits. In this comment, I suggest that term limits may be self-imposed by risk-averse voters, who prefer cycling between left and right wing candidates to a once-and-for-all election that imposes a candidate of a single ideology on the entre electorate. The market failure that makes term limits helpful is that out of power minorities cannot bribe the median voter.     

Chinese nationalism,Taiwan autonomy and the prospects of a larger war

In contrast to the belief that the 1995–1996 Taiwan Straits crisis was caused by the visit of the President of Taiwan to Cornell University, in fact, the post‐Mao ruling groups in Beijing made forcing early reunification with mainland China on Taiwan a top priority soon after assuming power in 1978. This new focus on Taiwan's reunification reflects a policy switch. It is not a continuation of Mao era policies. The switch is basic. It involves a profound change in the content of Chinese nationalism from Mao era nationalism, which is seen by its critics in China as insufficiently promoting the national interests of the Chinese people. The new, post‐Mao nationalism in China not only challenges Taiwan's autonomy, it also could endanger peace in the Pacific‐Asia region. Consequently, it is important to rethink the political dynamics at work in China and in the region if the parties involved hope to avoid a larger war.     

The Coming of Parliamentary Television: The Lords and the Senate Compared

Subscribing to a Burkean view of representation, legislators have long tended to resist constant public scrutiny. In recent years, however, they have overcome this reluctance in a large number of countries and voted to allow the televising of their proceedings. But why they did so remains a mystery. Some media theorists argue that television exposure is a 'great democratizer'. It demystifies public authority figures and obliges them to become more accountable for their actions. The experience of the British House of Lords and the United States Senate suggests instead that television was invited in by rational political actors as a means of achieving their goals in a time of change. In this view, television is best seen not as a force in its own right, but as a medium of communication that can be strategically deployed by goal-oriented political élites responding to different political circumstances and institutional incentive structures.     

The Cost of Discrimination in Latin America

Indigenous and linguistic minorities are in an inferior economic and social position. The ethnic concentration of inequality is increasingly being recognized in the literature. In this review, studies from six Latin American countries that estimate the costs to an individual of being an economic minority are reviewed. The studies decompose the overall earnings gap into two components. One is the portion attributable to differences in the endowments of income-generating characteristics (“explained” differences) and the other is attributable to differences in the returns that majority and minority workers receive for the same endowment of income-generating characteristics (“unexplained”). This latter component is often taken as reflecting the “upper bound” of wage discrimination. In two studies for Bolivia, one using a 1966 survey and the other a 1989 survey, decomposition of the differential between indigenous and nonindigenous earnings leads to the conclusion that most of the overall differential is due to productivity. In Guatemala, Mexico and Peru, only one-half of the earnings differential can be attributed to differences in productivity-enhancing characteristics. In Paraguay, decomposition of the overall earnings differential between monolingual Spanish speakers and Guaraní speakers shows that most of the differential is explained by human capital differences. In Brazil, however, there is a significant cost to “being non-white.” Harry Anthony Patrinos is a Senior Education Economist at the World Bank. He leads the Economics of Education Thematic Group and manages EdInvest (www.worldbank.org/edinvest), the Education Investment Information Facility. He is co-author ofDecentralization of Education: Demand-Side Financing (1997). His latest co-edited book isPolicy Analysis of Child Labor: A Comparative Study (St. Martin's Press, 1999).Indigenous People and Poverty in Latin America: An Empirical Analysis (edited with George Psacharopoulos), was one of the first studies of the socioeconomic situation of indigenous peoples in Latin America.     

A Classification Tree Approach to the Development of Actuarial Violence Risk Assessment Tools

Since the 1970s, a wide body of research has suggested that the accuracy of clinical risk assessments of violence might be increased if clinicians used actuarial tools. Despite considerable progress in recent years in the development of such tools for violence risk assessment, they remain primarily research instruments, largely ignored in daily clinical practice. We argue that because most existing actuarial tools are based on a main effects regression approach, they do not adequately reflect the contingent nature of the clinical assessment processes. To enhance the use of actuarial violence risk assessment tools, we propose a classification tree rather than a main effects regression approach. In addition, we suggest that by employing two decision thresholds for identifying high- and low-risk cases--instead of the standard single threshold--the use of actuarial tools to make dichotomous risk classification decisions may be further enhanced. These claims are supported with empirical data from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study.