Competitive federalism and workers’ compensation: do states race to the bottom?

This article builds on the competitive federalism literature by examining the role federalism plays in determining policy trajectories with consequences for public welfare in individual jurisdictions. It examines the argument that federalism encourages a ‘race to the bottom’ using the case of workers’ compensation benefits for injured workers in Australia. It finds state systems have been characterised by a downward slide in the protections afforded injured workers since the late 1970s, and this has been associated with policy makers’ real or rhetorical concerns around interstate competition for business investment.     

Privatisation and new public management: Asset sales and Commissions of Audit in Queensland, 1990–2013

Governments since the 1980s have reshaped the public sector by selling public businesses and other assets, and by introducing competition in the supply of taxpayer-funded services. Explanations for these new directions have focused on political ideologies about the proper role of government, and economic arguments about business efficiency, while noting an international trend towards diffusion of these policy ideas. However, the methods for achieving significant policy shifts have often been overlooked. This study examines the case of Queensland, highlighting a wider range of reform factors, including bureaucratic advice and commission of audit recommendations.

1980年代以来各国政府通过出售公共产业和其他资产,通过在纳税人出资的服务业引入竞争而改造了公共部门。对这类新方向的解释都集中在政府职能以及企业效率的政治意识形态一面,以及造成这类政策思想扩散的国际潮流。不过,他们都忽视了造成如此重大政策转变的方法。本文考察了昆士兰的案例,讨论了更广泛的改革因素,包括官僚咨询以及审计委员建议等等。     

提升青海企业核心竞争力的思考

核心竞争力是企业实现科学发展的关键。面对激烈的市场竞争,青海企业普遍缺乏核心竞争力。在经济飞速发展的今天,青海企业要发展,必须加快转变发展方式,不断提升企业核心竞争力。     

Strategic competition and the evolving role of Indo-Pacific paradiplomacy

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on paradiplomacy, or sub-national diplomacy, has often focused on economics, trade, cooperation and politics. The deepening of strategic competition between the People’s Republic of China and the United States has raised the stakes for sub-national diplomacy. While US-PRC strategic competition occurs primarily at the national level, the subnational level plays an important role in terms of creating opportunities for influence and advancing the strategic interests. In this article recent paradiplomacy in the Indo-Pacific is examined, as is the is the intersection of paradiplomacy with strategic competition.     

EXPERIENCE THE DIFFERENCE: THE COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES OF FOOD‐RELATED ENTREPRENEURS IN RURAL DENMARK

As food production becomes increasingly integrated, globalized and competitive, small‐scale food‐related enterprises in many European countries are struggling to market and monetize their products. Although these struggles have been well documented, few studies have considered the ways in which food‐related entrepreneurs in rural contexts are adapting to and overcoming these challenges. In particular, little is known about how they differentiate and add value to their products. This article focuses on the development and implementation of new and hybrid commercial strategies by food‐related entrepreneurs in three rural communities in Denmark. These strategies add experiential elements to the longstanding practice of commodifying myths associated with rural settings and identities. Although harnessing culture and experiences to sell things is nothing new, we demonstrate that some Danish entrepreneurs are responding to market competition by tweaking and extending these concepts. In particular, it is argued that entrepreneurs use different experiences with varying levels of intensity and consumer engagement for different purposes. Whereas passive experiences such as storytelling are used to educate consumers about the specific qualities of products, more active and participatory experiences are sold as add‐ons and standalone products. The findings contribute to our understanding of food‐related entrepreneurship in rural contexts, consumption, value creation and the experience of economy more broadly.     

Unpacking administrative rank: Intercity competition and the remaking of local state space in China

The literature on interurban competition emphasizes that market rules as an external coercive power dominate local state space conductive to economic growth. Is there another external coercive power, other than the market as a hidden hand, to promote and mitigate interurban competition? Addressing this question, this paper specifies that the Chinese state's political efforts to downplay the role of the market in, and remake the rule of, interurban competition could have far reaching implications for urban political economy. The two cases are Ruili and Wanding, two border cities located on the edge of China's southwestern borderland adjacent to Myanmar. While reranking is supposed to balance out the inefficiencies of market principles in interurban competition, multiple rounds of reranking in Ruili and Wanding in the past seven decades indicate that this political orchestration can accelerate interurban competition into a cutthroat game for economic growth and thus create problems for macro economic management. Nevertheless, it can become a political tool to revamp the game by strategically selecting some cities as nodes of development at the sacrifice of urban fortunes of other cities. In this process, market rules operate in parallel with, and sometimes succumb to, the principle of political order from above. This finding expands the geographies of the state: the co-constitution of the local and the national becomes necessary and pragmatic since interurban competition is not a territorially-conditioned endeavor, but remains open to extralocal stakeholders—upper-level governments in this case—who can remake local state space.