Local Markets and the Polarization of Public-Sector Schools in England and Wales

Notwithstanding the recent change of government, UK educational policy continues to stress school performance tables, parental choice and competition – reflecting an acceptance by New Labour of Tory notions concerning the role that market mechanisms play in improving school performance. In view of the 1997 Education White Paper's insistence that the new government's goal was to 'overcome the spiral of disadvantage … passed from one generation to the next', this implies that the DfEE remains unimpressed by long-standing arguments concerning the socially-divisive consequences of market forces in education.
This paper seeks to add empirical weight to this debate. Arguing that recent analyses of aggregate levels of social stratification have masked polarization occurring at the local level, our analysis places schools in the context of the local markets within which they operate. This yields clear evidence that educational markets tend to exacerbate existing differences between schools in terms of both their performance and social status.     

从突破部族社会桎梏的意义去认识周初变革——兼谈五种社会形态问题

周初的政治变革,打破了殷商时期以血缘纽带为依托的族邦方国结构,使中国历史从此走上了一条崭新的发展道路。它使生活于广大地域的人们开始突破狭小的、具有极强稳定性的族邦结构社会的桎梏,而形成了一种以语言文字、道德伦理和风俗习惯等文化认同为纽带的、强固紧密的精神凝聚力量,从而具有了不断向更高社会阶段发展的现实基础。     

论广告的起源问题

传统观点认为,广告是伴随着商品生产和商品交换而出现的,是商品经济发展的必然产物。这种观点所揭示的只是“商品广告”的起源问题。从广告的发展、演变历史及人们对广告的理解来看,无论是原始意义,还是现代意义上的广告,均并非单指“商品广告”。它还应包括政治、军事、文化广告,统称为“社会广告”。其产生的时间早于“商品广告”。本文的主要观点是：广告是人类有目的信息交流和传播活动的产物。     

Executives, Legislatures, and Decentralization

This article considers the role of executives and legislatures in authoring decentralizing legislation to study the type of decentralization each sought to achieve. I find that differences across branches are more significant than differences across political parties. The executive played a significant role in the process of decentralization emphasizing administrative forms of decentralization. Congressional efforts to write laws, on the contrary, focused on the political aspects. Thus, the involvement of both branches in policymaking contributed to the multidimensional form and high degree of decentralization in Colombia.     

二十世纪一二十年代沿海城市社会文化观念变动评析

20世纪一二十年代沿海地区,随着清王朝的覆灭、民国的建立,尤其是新化运动的兴起,城市知识群体和市民阶层的社会价值观念发生了变革;以性别平等观念和妇女解放为标志,平等自由的精神开始渗入到社会伦理观念之中;在生活习俗方面,社会风俗观念发生明显变化;反映市民阶层需求的大众化逐步形成。     

Reconstructed nationalism in Taiwan: a politicised and economically driven identity

Since the late 1980s, Taiwan has been engulfed in waves of both democratisation and integration with mainland China. These two waves have pulled identity reconstruction in Taiwan in two different directions. In the process of democratisation, a shift to a majoritarian system encouraged a Taiwanese renaissance on the political platform and consequently led to the deconstruction of Chinese identity. On the other hand, in the 1990s, with the high mobility of capital and people across the Taiwan Strait, close economic ties could have put the brakes on Taiwan independence movements. Hence, this paper uses random coefficient models to explore how the democratic transition and increasing cross‐strait relations brought about psychological and structural mechanisms that motivated people to opt for identity change in Taiwan. It also attempts to investigate how people dealt with the dissonance between rising Taiwanese nationalism and the economic interests that deterred a radical Taiwanese identity.     

Do municipal unions improve cost efficiency for the social function? A quasi-experimental endogenous stochastic frontier approach

Homogeneous national policies can generate heterogeneous effects on the territory. This paper aims to verify the impact of the entry of single Italian municipalities into an inter-municipal association on the unitary costs of the social services supplied to the local communities. Panel cost stochastic frontier model in the presence of endogeneity has been introduced based on two pillars: a counterfactual setting to verify the aggregation effects concerning a set of similar municipalities and the use of a cost efficiency estimation methodology which considers the endogeneity of output with respect to cost. The results of our analysis show that the effects of adopting associated forms of service delivery can be very multifaceted and diversified according to the typology and the degree of implementation of the Municipal Union itself. The analysis sheds light on the effects of municipalities' organisational choices, addressing the consolidation of small municipalities not in binary terms but also—and above all—suggesting that it is the type of union that impacts the possibility of convergence towards greater cost efficiency.