Dilemas do desenvolvimento na China: crescimento acelerado e disparidades regionais (da Revolução Comunista à globalização)
Because China´s outstanding economic performance in the last three decades is seenas an imitative experience for the whole developing countries, this paper aims tobring evidences on the fact that Chinese-style economic success can not be appliedinstantaneously for other countries. The lines presented here can be used as a warningfor Brazilian policy-makers not to abandon the idea that government intervention ?like many liberal thinkers had predicted widespread recently ? is always harmful forthe economy. In fact, the opposite has been proved more beneficial with publicaction more intensely required in these present days of economic globalization.China´s state intervention in the production factors (capital, investment and labor)has been steady and decisive to achieve the observed growth rates as well as goingahead with the modernization of economic structures. Meanwhile, there have beenundesirable results concerned with increasing regional inequalities. The creation ofspecial economic zones (SEZ´s) to attract foreign investment to coastal areas resultedin strong concentration of industrial plants in the coastal region widening regionalper capita income gaps.
The Anatomy of Rising Earnings Inequality in Urban China
Abstract A labor market is beginning to emerge in urban China during a period of rapid growth and changed labor supply. In this paper, we investigate how earnings inequality and relative earnings have changed between 1988 and 1995 using two large samples covering 10 provinces. The results verify that, as expected, earnings inequality has increased rapidly. The expansion can be traced to two components, the basic wage and subsidies. The analysis shows that the growth in earnings inequality is not limited to certain segments of the labor force but affects all categories as defined by ownership sector, region, and education. J. Comp. Econ. , March 2001 29 (1), pp. 118–135. Department of Social Work, University of Goteborg, P.O. Box 720, SE 405 30 Goteborg, Sweden; and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany; and Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2 Yuetan Beixiaojie, Beijing, People's Republic of China. Copyright 2001 Academic Press. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: J31, O18, O53, P23.
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.