Making the Harder Yards: Environmental Policy Integration in Australia

Solutions to environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and land and water resource degradation require long term integration of economic, social and environmental policies. This poses challenges to specialised, hierarchical public administration systems. The study reported here examined strategies, structures and processes to enable environmental policy integration in six Australian states and territories, and some federal arrangements. The study found that the most prominent success factors, barriers and gaps that affect environmental policy integration relate to leadership, long term embedding of environmental policy integration and implementation capacity. Factors deserving further research and policy attention include leadership, cultural change and capacity building; embedding sustainability in structures and processes; development of a long term evidence based approach; strengthening decentralised implementation arrangements; and evaluation of policy integration initiatives.     

基层检察机关科学管理机制探索与实践——以沈阳市和平区人民检察院“四大管理中心”为背景

我国检察制度承栽着重要的使命，是秩序、权利、公平和正义的守护者。其法律监督职能主要通过三个途径予以实现，即职务犯罪侦查权、公诉权和诉讼监督权。基层检察机关也基于上述职能设置主要业务部门及综合性辅助部门。在实际机制构建和完善过程中，各基层检察机关纷纷进行内部管理机制和模式的探索，方式不同效果也不同。本文结合沈阳市和平区人民检察院内部设置管理模式的改革。对基层检察机关内设机构的运行和管理模式进行探讨和分析。     

Bracing for Cold Peace. US-Russia Relations after Ukraine

Despite rising back to prominence during the global economic turmoil, the International Monetary Fund remains under severe pressure over its lack of legitimacy and effectiveness. It is surrounded by increasingly vibrant and potentially competing systems of regional financial arrangements. But while it is feared that regional arrangements can undermine the global financial order, they can also help buttress the multilateral institutions that are struggling to manage an increasingly complex global economy. The purpose of this article is to draw on trade, exploring the decades-long efforts to ensure compatibilities between regional trade agreements and the multilateral trading system, to offer lessons to financial policymakers.     

试论中国区域贸易安排战略

Regional Trade Arrangements (RTAs) have proliferated after the birth of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In these years, as the members of RTAs increased considerably, the instruments and formalities of RTAs have been varied, and the scope of RTAs has been expanded. With regards to China, it has changed its traditional view and has been engaged positively in the building its own RTAs. Facing the competition from neighboring countries, China should construct an appropriate strategy on RTAs as soon as possible. Without the derogation of multilateral trade agreement, the RTA strategy should be led by national strategic interest, contain the involvement of various levels of trade agreements, enlarge the scope of regional trade agreements, and expand the potential realm of partners for cooperation, etc. Chen Bin was a joint doctoral student of Wuhan University (China) and l’Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille III (France). Now, he is an editor of International Law Review of Wuhan University, a visiting scholar under the scholarship programme of UK foundation for Uniform Law of l’Institut International pour l’Unification du Droit Privé (Unidroit), a researcher under the doctoral scholarship programme of the Hague Academy of International Law, a research fellow of Heidelberg Max Plank Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, a research fellow under the Asser Research Fellowships Programme of T.M.C. Asser Instituut, a visiting fellow under the scholarship program for visiting fellows of Hamburg Max Plank Institute for Comparative and International Private Law. Mr. Chen is a member of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL), the Association for International Arbitration (AIA) and the Asian Competition Forum (ACF), and a researcher of the Arbitration Institute of Guangzhou Arbitration Court. Currently, his research interests focus on international trade law and public international law.     

Incarcerated Parents and Health: Investigating Role Inoccupancy Strains by Gender

This article elaborates research on parenthood, gender, and health by considering the context of incarceration using the stress process paradigm. The chronic strain of non-participation in a desired role, or “role inoccupancy,” in the form of non-resident parenthood on arrest is associated with psychological distress at time of lockup among women but not men, indicating a gendered strain. However, for both incarcerated men and women, anticipated resident parent role inoccupancy upon release (or expectations not to live with their minor children) is generically associated with current subjective mental health problems net of distress prior to lockup. Role inoccupancy strains are further associated with subjective physical health problems among women but not men, indicating more pervasive associations among the former.     

Wage Differentials in Brazil: Theory and Evidence

The investigation of wage determination and wage differentials in developing countries has concentrated on the effects of human capital and different sources of segmentation associated with institutional arrangements and structural characteristics on earnings. In this article, we use micro-data for Brazil for the 1980s and 1990s to test several competitive theories, and models with segmentation explained by efficiency wages. We find that unmeasured abilities and efficiency wage models seem to play a role in wage determination, while compensating differentials and transitory difference theories were found to be irrelevant to wages formation.     

Community‐based environmental management in Vietnam: the challenge of sharing power in a politically guided society

The article presents the challenges of introducing a ‘shared‐power’ community‐based management approach in the socialist society of Vietnam. The Portland State University (PSU)'s Oregon Environmental Management Alliance partnered with Vietnamese organisations in a shared‐power pilot project aimed at strengthening stakeholder participation in environmental improvements in two communities along the Tan Hoa‐Lo Gom (THLG) canal in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). The Oregon Solutions model, a community‐based environmental management (CBEM) approach, was adapted for the shared‐power project. This article analyses three core ingredients of the shared‐power CBEM approach: multiple stakeholder structure, dispersed authority arrangements and diverse policy instruments. Critical reflections are offered on the meaning and appropriateness of these shared‐power ingredients when they are reinvented in Vietnam's politically guided governance system. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The political economy of regional integration in East Asia

A widely held consensus view claims that East Asia has been shifting recently from a market-led to an institution-based form of regional economic integration, primarily as a result of the 1997–1998 financial crisis. Next to post-crisis financial cooperation schemes under the ASEAN+3, the surge of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) involving East Asian countries is thought by some to further substantiate this claim. The objective of the paper is to question the validity of this claim. By examining the current state of play of economic cooperation, in the financial and monetary areas as well as in the trade sphere, the paper highlights the limitations of the formal regional integration movement in East Asia to date, as well as the vastly different dynamics underlying the financial and trade developments. It also explores the changing nature of intra-regional trade and investment linkages and concludes that this new form of interdependence may be instrumental in changing the trade-offs of formal regional economic schemes.     

Outsourcing in China: an exploratory assessment

The increasing demands for public services, growing resource externalisation and decentralisation have driven Chinese governments to seek alternative means of service delivery. This article addresses the largely ignored outsourcing practice in China. Lack of awareness of and research on the widespread outsourcing was a result of the conceptual barriers created by China's economic transition and its choice of incremental reform path. By decomposing national fiscal expenditures, the article finds that from 2002 to 2004, outsourcing accounted for about one‐third of the total governmental services expenditures and demonstrated a trend of continuous growth. Such developments effectively transformed the basic landscape of public service delivery and created significant external dependence. Within just three decades, China has quickly shifted from an omnipotent state to an ‘incomplete’ state. The capacity of the administrative hierarchy has become severely constrained. Nonetheless, the political risks of the macro‐level transformation are largely mitigated at the micro‐level by mechanisms of public–private cooperation. These developments are embedded in informal arrangements that, remarkably, maintain the survival of the current power structure. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Income transfers,entrepreneurial effort,and the Coase theorem: The case for efficiency reconsidered

The Coase theorem asserts that private bargaining can overcome the difficulties posed by an externality situation and lead to a first-best allocative solution. For such idealized efficiency to be achieved, however, it is generally recognized that certain very special conditions must be met—including the assumption of zero transaction costs. In opposition to this view, the paper argues that the special simplifying conditions usually specified in the literature are not sufficient. Unless stringent supplementary conditions are introduced, private bargaining will not bring about a first-best solution. Indeed, if the standard assumptions are met but the supplementary conditions of the paper are not, government intervention in the externality case can be expected to produce a solution that is Pareto superior to the one generated by private bargaining.