当前我国新农村建设中人力资本投资探析——基于舒尔茨的人力资本理论视角

十八届三中全会提出要让广大农民平等参与现代化进程、共同分享现代化成果,而社会主义新农村建设是农民全面享有现代化成果的最重要途径。但在新农村建设过程中,农民科学文化素质较低、医疗卫生条件较差、"二次就业"困难等问题都制约着新农村建设的顺利开展。充分运用舒尔茨的人力资本理论,对于解决我国新农村建设过程中存在的人力资源问题具有重要的启示。     

海峡两岸多层次资本市场比较及合作路径探析

经过50多年的发展,台湾地区形成了由“集中交易市场一上柜市场一兴柜市场”构成的多层次资本市场,有效促进了台湾地区金融资源的配置。经过20多年的发展,大陆业已具备了多层次资本市场的雏形,但同台湾相比,大陆资本市场层次性不够清晰、不同层次资本市场间升降转板机制尚未形成、场外市场发展相对滞后。由于两岸多层次资本市场的优势存在较大差异并有明显的互补性,两岸可以通过合作达成优势互补、获得双赢。两岸多层次资本市场在主板市场、场外市场、升降转板、资本监管等领域存在很大合作空间。     

域外财税法学发展及其对中国的启示

在市场经济和法治较为发达的国家,财税法往往相对完善,这不仅表现在财税立法、执法和司法上,也表现在财税法的教育和研究上。质言之,财税活动自国家产生之日就已存在,并在现代受到民主、法治等理念的深刻影响,在理财治国中发挥着系统性的作用。域外财税法学一直遵循独立的发展轨迹,尤其以税法为核心建构起了成熟的法律框架和教学体系。而财税法学在中国作为一门交叉学科、新兴学科,亟需厘清自身的性质和定位,围绕公共财产的收入、支出、监管展开制度构建,才能有效地推动财税改革和法治建设。同时,与欧美、日本等国相比,中国财税法学人地提出了"财税一体"的广阔视野,从而为财税立法和财税法学的后续发展奠定了良好基础。     

社会资本:民族区域自治的元制度分析--兼谈民族区域自治的善治问题

社会资本作为民族区域自治的元制度,其信任、规范和网络是建立和维护民族区域自治社会秩序的一种极为重要的工具,也是整合民族区域自治的社会"粘合剂".然而,社会资本也会在一定层面上阻碍民族区域自治的良好发展.民族区域自治善治的根本在于引导社会资本的再生产.     

Chinese Eastern Industrial Zone in Ethiopia: unpacking the enclave

Abstract

This paper examines China’s engagement with Africa through economic zones (EZs). It moves beyond the conceptualisation of EZs as undifferentiated enclaves of foreign investment to a dynamic perspective on the locally negotiated process of zone development. Such a perspective entails critical unpacking of the specific zone regime to understand the diverse and evolving relationships among different state and non-state actors. Drawing upon empirical research on the Eastern Industrial Zone (EIZ) in Ethiopia, we explore the complex process of learning and adaptation by government, developers, investors, and workers throughout the development of a zone regime, with specific attention to capital–labour and expatriate–local relations. We find that despite the EIZ being a state-level cooperation project, private Chinese developers work diligently with the Ethiopian government to improve the institutional support for EZs. Chinese investors also collectively generate a management regime to enhance their overseas operational capacity and experiment with various tactics to transform local recruits into an industrial workforce. Local workers, with limited protection by official labour unions, turn to individual- and group-based agency to improve their working conditions. Despite the momentum created by multiple stakeholders, there are concerns regarding the long-term contributions of EZs to engender sustained industrial transformation and skills development.     

Coordination and control in Russia’s foreign policy: travails of Putin’s curators in the near abroad

Abstract

This article seeks to challenge the conception of the Russian state as being centred on Vladimir Putin by looking at the actors implementing Russia’s foreign policy in its near abroad. In particular, it explores the activities of curators (kuratory), a term applied in Russia to describe officials tasked with making things work often bypassing, and sometimes competing with, formal institutions. Following the state transformation framework, the argument put forward in the article is that curation (kuratorstvo), as a practice of coordination and control in Russia’s system of governance, can be seen as a manifestation of fragmentation and internationalisation of Russia’s foreign policy making. The empirical basis for this article is a case study of Russia’s policy towards Abkhazia, which Russia officially recognised as a sovereign state in 2008. This article addresses the involvement of curators in their attempts to exert political influence as an expression of fragmentation as well as emerging institutionalised curation in development assistance as a part of internationalisation.     

A mob for hire? Unpacking older women’s political activism in Kyrgyzstan

This article explores the politics of older women in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, who have emerged as informal leaders in urban neighbourhoods to ‘speak for the poor’ to the state. Their mediating role is crucial for understanding community micro-politics, women’s political agency and more broadly state–society relations in the post-Soviet context. Drawing on in-depth interviews with older female informal leaders, the paper examines their political legitimacy and modes of mediation with the state and elites. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of political capital and ‘double dealings’, the paper argues that older women are important informal mediators, whose representational practices involve communal leadership, protest activism, bargaining and vote mobilization. Their multitasking roles are necessitated by their legitimation struggles and elites’ strategies of state capture. The article challenges the dominant media representation of older women activists as ‘a mob for hire’ and offers a more nuanced account of older women’s politics, addressing a blind spot in the literature on politics in Central Asia.     

Labor market integration of returned educational migrants in Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan has experienced increasing educational migration, and many of these students hope to return home after graduating. The ability of returned migrants to succeed in Turkmenistan’s labor market is complicated by a variety of factors, including variation in educational quality across countries, intrusive state regulation of foreign education, and Turkmenistan’s large informal sector. Based on a survey of 98 Turkmen citizens, this study compares the career trajectories and perceptions of the labor market of people educated in Turkmenistan to those educated elsewhere. Because men and women undertake different strategies of educational migration, it also compares patterns of labor market integration by gender. Country of education does appear to matter for employment in Turkmenistan, but the effect is most prominent immediately after graduation. Women were less likely to be employed in Turkmenistan, partly because they were more likely to have been educated abroad, and more likely to have a partner abroad.     

Decomposing Audience Costs: Bringing the Audience Back into Audience Cost Theory

According to a growing tradition in International Relations, one way governments can credibly signal their intentions in foreign policy crises is by creating domestic audience costs: leaders can tie their hands by publicly threatening to use force since domestic publics punish leaders who say one thing and do another. We argue here that there are actually two logics of audience costs: audiences can punish leaders both for being inconsistent (the traditional audience cost), and for threatening to use force in the first place (a belligerence cost). We employ an experiment that disentangles these two rationales, and turn to a series of dispositional characteristics from political psychology to bring the audience into audience cost theory. Our results suggest that traditional audience cost experiments may overestimate how much people care about inconsistency, and that the logic of audience costs (and the implications for crisis bargaining) varies considerably with the leader's constituency.     

Intellectual iconoclasm as modernizing foreign policy: the cases of Mahathir bin Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew

This article attempts to engage in a preliminary twinned study of the foreign policy styles of Mahathir bin Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew within the framework of ‘modernizing Southeast Asian foreign policies’. Modernization is a process of immense multidimensional displacement in economy, society, political system, attitudes towards politicians, identities, work, and consumption. As such the onus falls upon their leaders to either mitigate change or productively awaken their followers to embrace a new mode of thought. Both Lee and Mahathir have however chosen to engage in the foreign policy of intellectual iconoclasm featuring the narrative of ‘productive shock’, manufactured nationalist logics, elitist policy-making and elaborate self-propaganda.