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The article examines the state of the Bundeswehr reform in the context of the European Security and Defence Policy. The emphasis is laid on the process of major decisions preparation, problems to be solved in the course of the reform, the state of the Bundeswehr, the role of a subjective facilitation, and on the approaches of three German Ministers of Defence. According to the article, the Bundeswehr is being transformed into an offensive army. It will be active outside Germany, and is gradually changing its essence as a parliamentary army. The reform was prepared gradually and imperceptibly to the public. In 2010, the Weise-Commission presented the reform proposals. The new Defence Minister De Maizière left these proposals unchanged. His merit was a good management of the reform. The scandal with the Euro Hawk forced him to resign. As the next Minister Von der Leyen was new to the Ministry of Defence, the reform of the Bundeswehr stopped. Germany will have to realize a dual strategy: а) to strengthen the military cooperation in the EU and NАТО; b) to maintain the own strength before the emergence of the EU security and defence structures and mechanisms.

AbstractSchool reform has deeply affected the education and business communities in Chicago. In this chapter, three prominent Chicagoans assess reform and its impact.

In 2009, China initiated a new round of health reform to establish a well functioning health system by 2020. Local pilot reforms were encouraged for all five components of the health reform. Between 2009 and 2011, the growth in government health expenditure was a hefty RMB1.24 trillion. Three years on, total health expenditure was over RMB2.2 trillion, or about 4.8% of GDP in 2011. Issues that remain to be tackled include addressing the incentives of providers and insurers as well as improving quality of services and medicines.

The central argument of this paper is that while political reform has remained a focal preoccupation of China's leadership, no unified vision of either the goal culture or the transfer culture of reform has yet emerged. Instead, there are at least three more or less clearly articulated visions of political reform currently in play. The first is the developmental perspective, according to which political reform is defined as whatever is most appropriate for rapid economic growth. The second vision is one of institutionalized personalism, according to which the informal sector will become normatively integrated and ultimately formalized, a source of innovation and no longer a threat to the established political order. The third vision, the percolation model, foresees the dissemination of successful local experiments as the appropriate engine of reform, a more open public realm as its goal culture. Each of these visions, though not necessarily incompatible, harnesses different grievances, satisfies different interests, and appeals to different constituencies.

In the thirty years since China initiated economic reforms and its open-door policy, China has been transformed from a poor nation almost completely isolated from the global economy to an engine of growth of the world economy. China's dynamic transition has been among the most dramatic developments of recent history; and its economy continues to grow rapidly, with important consequences for China's own society and environment, as well as for the wider world. This book provides a fascinating insight into a wide range of issues on Chinese economy and its three decades of economic reforms. Wit.

In 1996 the United States passed a major reform of welfare, the federal and state program that had provided and continues to provide money to poor, mostly single mothers since 1935. One element of the reform was that it capped benefit receipt at no more than five years regardless the age of a recipient's child. This dissertation focuses on understanding what led to these time-limits. Chapter 1 makes the case that changes in the welfare caseload-- brought on by population changes, the Supreme Court, and other government programs--could have led to its reform. The problem was that too many people receiving welfare were people for whom it was not intended. The solution Washington chose was to cut the program's generosity intertemporally by instituting five-year time limits. Chapter 2 adds rigor to the welfare reform story in Chapter 1 by analyzing (1) how lack of observability affects the design of a social insurance program, and (2) how it interacts with an increasing population who find going on social insurance attractive. It shows that a lack of observability affects the generosity and incentives of the program because what is preferred with observability often cannot be implemented when it is absent. Finally, it shows that a rising population of the poor can induce programs to switch from allowing the poor not to work to ones that do require them to work because the high types subsidizing the program slash the benefit to reduce excessive redistribution. Chapter 3 examines our ability to use observable information to explain future welfare usage and finds that it has gone down since reform. I argue that this result is consistent with the social insurance function of welfare being more important than it was before reform. I note, however, that it is also consistent with a rise in the importance of unexplained variation