The political economy of the peace dividend

We develop a model of the peace dividend and use it to predict the fiscal consequences of a reduction in the demand for military spending. The model is based on the assumption that the political process responds to political demands and costs in a way that maximizes net political benefits. The predictions of our model on how a peace dividend will be allocated over nonmilitary spending, tax relief, and deficit reduction is tested against the experience of eight major wars in United States history.     

中国高等教育的将来

目前,我们处在一个相互依赖和多元文化的全球社会。世界变了,高等教育却仍然没有出现任何实质性的变革。因此,我们需要对高等教育重新进行思考,我们需要全新的教育内容、途径以及步骤。教师必须学着将学生们自己的知识看成是教——学过程中一个非常重要的新资源,同时应该继续掌控学生在课堂的学习过程。我们有关学习的新的认识和当前实际的学习方式是互相矛盾的。对于真正的素质教育来说,培养更高层次的思考方法必须优先于实际知识的学习。与其他社会制度一样,高等教育也往往抵制变革。因此我们必须设计出新的机制,不断进行变革,使这些变革对于所有的教育机构、教职员工和学生来说都是很平常的,都是容易实现的。我提议,邀请大学和学院参与进来,重新定义中国的高等教育。批准参与的大学和学院都将收到一笔特殊基金,用于贯彻实施他们自己设计的独立的改革方案。这些方案都须是小型的、独立的,并且是不受传统的和官僚性的改革方案限制的。     

Chief executive officers and voluntary environmental performance: Costa Rica's certification for sustainable tourism

This study evaluates whether the education, environmental expertise, and nationality of firms' chief executive officers (CEOs) are associated with greater participation and environmental performance in a voluntary environmental program implemented in a developing nation. Specifically, we collected data from the Certification for Sustainable Tourism (CST) program, a voluntary initiative aimed at promoting beyond-compliance environmental performance by hotels operating in Costa Rica. Our findings suggest that CEOs' level of formal education and environmental expertise appear to be significantly associated with higher corporate participation in voluntary programs and also with higher beyond-compliance environmental performance ratings. Contrary to conventional expectations, CEOs from industrialized countries (as opposed to developing countries) do not appear to show a statistically significant association with participation in the CST program and with higher beyond-compliance environmental performance.     

In remembrance of Robert D. Tollison

We discuss the mechanisms related to quadratic voting, from Vickrey’s counter-speculation mechanism and his second-price auction, through the family of Groves mechanisms and its most notable member, the Clarke mechanism, to the expected externality mechanism, Goeree and Zhang’s mechanism, the Groves–Ledyard mechanism, and the Hylland–Zeckhauser mechanism. We show that each mechanism that involves collective decisions has a quadratic aspect and that all of the mechanisms that we discuss are applications of the fundamental insight that for a process to be efficient, all parties involved must bear the marginal social costs of their actions.     

Re-examining Social Work Roles and Tasks with Foster Care

In order to promote developmental outcomes with children and young people and to nurture their positive health and well-being in foster care, social workers and case managers are required to direct professional attention toward both the child or young person and her/his daily living environment(s)—at home, at school, and in the local neighborhoods in which they live. When viewed from an ecological perspective, foster care environments are represented conceptually as a nested cluster of settings ranging from immediate life spaces and networks of relationships in a foster home, at school, and in a neighborhood, to organizational contexts holding a statutory duty of care for children and young people assigned looked after status, along with national policies and statutes which frame foster-care environments. This article explores how social-work roles and tasks with children and young people in foster care change as Social Workers transition from case management roles within state, provincial, or local authority departments to become Supervising Social Workers, or Team Managers of Foster Carers, or Directors of foster care services.     

The role of global cities in land grabs

Key trends link a globally connected urban archipelago and its hinterlands, warranting new studies of power in its most contemporary forms. This article locates land power and where that power is exercised – looking at the burgeoning global land rush from the perspective of cities. Urbanisation continues to drive vast political transitions, uprooting longstanding agrarian modes of living while creating myriad inequalities within cities. Are the world’s most powerful agglomerations active agents in this transformation? Answering affirmatively, the article reframes urbanisation as a vast, global geopolitical transfer of power from rural to urban. Leading global cities like New York, London, Hong Kong, Chicago and Singapore are not merely impressive collections of factor endowments. They are also sites of concentrated power with coercive influences beyond municipal boundaries. The article asks how cities project power in the contemporary global system. Juxtaposing data on global connectivity with the location strategies of private firms, we learn that the world’s most successful global cities are also sources of exploitative accumulations of land.     

The Singapore Mutiny (1915) and the Genesis of Political Intelligence in Singapore

This paper describes how political intelligence evolved in Singapore and the establishment for the first time of a political intelligence bureau, the forerunner of the Singapore Police Special Branch and the present-day Internal Security Department (ISD). It is an example of British imperial practice as the early roots of intelligence in Singapore owed much to the experience gained earlier in British India in dealing with intelligence matters. The establishment of an intelligence bureau in Singapore came about as a direct result of the Singapore Mutiny (15 February 1915), and in the following year the newly-established bureau was renamed the Criminal Intelligence Department and absorbed into the Straits Settlements Police. In September 1933, it became the Singapore Special Branch, the forerunner of present-day Singapore's Internal Security Department.