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Labour Market Reform in China documents and analyses institutional changes in the Chinese labour market over the last twenty-five years, and argues that further reform is necessary if China is to sustain its high growth rates. The book first assesses the problems associated with the pre-reform labour arrangements. It offers an in-depth analysis of the urban labour market and its impact on individual wage determination, ownership structure, labour compensation and labour demand and of social security reform. In its main chapters, the book investigates the impact of rural economic reform on rural labour market. Detailed consideration is given to the rural agricultural labour market, labour arrangement in the rural non-agricultural sector, and the wage gap between the rural agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. Finally, the book examines the phenomenon of rural-urban migration, its impact on rural and urban economic growth, and models its effect on urban employment, unemployment and earnings

How can the trickle of market reforms be turned into a flood? Paul Reynolds, of the Adam Smith Institute, explains why privatisation in developing countries is still difficult to achieve.

This booklet gives an introduction to the issues raised by regulatory reform of the electricity sector. The sector is undergoing change worldwide. A key objective of reform is to improve efficiency in order to reduce prices for electricity consumers. More competitive power markets are required to achieve this objective, but security of supply must also be sustained in the new conditions, and environmental objectives are of growing importance. Ultimately, choices must be made by end-users themselves and not by others on their behalf. Hence, the structure of the industry needs to change to promote end-user choice, as do the regulatory institutions and rules that set the framework.

The paper argues that the finance dimension of economic
development has often been treated as an aftellhought by researchers and
politicians alike, because it is considered to be too "sophisticated" to
matter for "simple" economies. The role of the financial sector was
considered to be primarily for mobilising resources to increase growth.
However, expclicnce has also revealed that financial development,
including stock market development, is correlated with current and
future economic growth, capital accumulation, and productivity
improvements. It is suggested that a strategy for financial market
development in emerging economies is better evolved from the perspective
of the "functions" of financial markets as envisaged in modern financial
literature. It is also argued that financial sector policies in emerging
economies should focus on enhancing, rather than inhibiting, the
multiple roles of financial markets.

Everyone knows that officials in China are corrupt. It would be difficult to find a China scholar who would disagree outright with this statement. However, because official corruption is illegal, immoral or both, it is painstakingly concealed from the public and from researchers alike. So, what do we do about it if we can't even measure it? Many authors have answered this challenge by using descriptive methods that discuss political corruption as a broad phenomenon that has commonalties of both cause and effect across many different situations. These works often focus more on the effects and potential future effects of corruption than on explanations and possibly helpful responses to its existence. In this paper, I propose that a solution to the problem of studying political corruption in China can be found in the analytic approach of game theory. I model particularistic gift-giving from citizens to officials for necessary goods as a product (equilibrium outcome) of choices made by different players attempting to maximize their individual payoffs in the context of certain clearly understood and common priors (a specific institutional framework and incentive structure). Using this method, we can then proceed to a discussion of how part of a "stably corrupt system" such as China's might be altered or broken by exploring how changes in the system and the incentive structure might shift players' choices and thus the equilibrium outcome. In this way, I hope to replace interesting but vague and finally unhelpful descriptions of modernization, democracy and marketization as 'natural' and long-term cures for corruption with a more concrete discussion of specific policy options and institutional and political structural changes that can begin to address corruption and its related problems in the short to medium term (though may not promise to eliminate it). Thus, using game theory, not only can we hope to explain the macro phenomenon of corruption as an aggregation of individual choices , but we will also discover that it takes extreme environmental changes to crack corruption as the modus operandi of Chinese citizen/official interactions.

The British government has restructured Britain's electricity markets through a programme of electricity market reform (EMR). Energy security and climate change mitigation are public goods that are prioritised. Cultural theory (CT) is used to explain changes in the regulatory regime under EMR. EMR involves an incomplete shift from 'individualist' to 'hierarchical' frames of regulation. Conflicts between these frames hamper the institutional design of EMR. This has obstructed deployment of nuclear power. Policymakers must fit the cultural framing to suit their preferred public good and not expect a defined public good to emerge from a preferred mix of cultural bias.