The shift from a command economy to a market economy is not only a question of following appropriate macro-economic policies but also a matter of instilling a market ethic in the minds of people who had been socialized and rewarded in a non-market command economy. In that system, many concentrated on technical rules of survival. The lumpenproletariat in favoured industries were rewarded even when they shirked or pilfered from state enterprises. The ethics of the lumpenintelligentsia reflected Communist party values, as professional. associations were under party control. The maintenance of such attitudes creates substantial resistance to the transformation of the economy, because a Weberian protestant ethic is lacking. Transition does occur, but the legacy of the old ethic imposes high transaction costs, inefficiencies and inhibits forward direct investment.

For nearly 100 years the Indian Congress organization has flourished in and through the press. Of the 72 representatives who gathered in Bombay at the first Congress meeting in 1885, more than a dozen were professional journalists. Not only did the early and subsequent nationalist leaders collect news for, editorialize in, or own outright, important vernacular and English-language newspapers—one thinks of, among others, Tilak's Kesari, Surendranath Banerjea's Bengalee, Motilal Nehru's Leader and Mahatma Gandhi's Young India and Harijan—but they readily submitted themselves to the curious, often naive probings of foreign correspondents from Europe and America. It was Gandhi who taught the Congress both how to spin its cotton and how, when it served a purpose, to wash its linen in public. Jawaharlal Nehru, when prime minister, brought to a high art the interview granted to the favored Indian or foreign correspondent.

This article seeks to answer the question of why we see continuity in German monetary policy but relative discontinuity in German policy toward European monetary regimes. The paper develops an analytical framework for understanding the factors that account for the dynamics of policy. The article argues that the institutional structure of policy-making is the key factor that accounts for patterns of policy dynamics. The way domestic policy institutions are structured will determine who has a say and when they have a say in policy-making, thus shaping the pattern of policy dynamics. The article shows that the institutions of policy-making are crucial determinants in the dynamics of German monetary and regime policy by the way they offer or block opportunities, at particular points in the policy process, for interested policy actors to achieve the types of policies they want.

Within the space of a few years a remarkable transformation took place in the taxation system of the Federated Malay States (FMS). Up until the early 1900s the British administration of these states relied, as had the sultans and chiefs from whom the British had taken control in the 1870s, on the revenue farm system for collecting many taxes. Most revenue farms were constituted according to the standard pattern found elsewhere in Southeast Asia at this time and in Europe up to the eighteenth century. The government granted a private contractor, the revenue farmer, the exclusive right to collect a certain tax in a specified area for a set number of years in return for a fixed rent, and the farmer kept for himself any money which he collected over and above what he owed the government in rent. A great variety of taxes were collected in this way. There were farms to collect the export duty on atap, firewood, timber, and rattan; most towns had market farms; and in Perak there was even a ‘farm of river turtle eggs’.

Malaysia's planning organization has become the institutional centrepiece of that country's development effort. Indeed, Malaysia ranks as one of the non-Communist developing countries where planning is most highly institutionalized. Malaysian planning evolved as an effective policy mechanism for directing the authoritative allocation of public resources towards declared developmental objectives. Despite this attachment to national planning, Malaysia remains a staunchly market-oriented, open, and predominantly private enterprise economy. Nevertheless, as the role of planning expanded, private sector activity became increasingly subject to policy interventions predicated upon the politically-determined goals of development planning.

In order to shed light on the recent debates that are reinterpreting the role played by organized employers in the development of modern social policy, this paper examines the origin of the system of contributory social insurance during the Weimar period. Contrary to ‘laborist’ accounts of the origin of the modern welfare state that view the working class as the most important protagonist behind the transition from ‘assistance’ to ‘insurance’ policies, this paper argues that employers' dissatisfaction with the means-tested system of unemployment assistance and employers' endorsement of an insurance solution to the risk of unemployment remained the decisive factor leading to the introduction of the insurance system during the Weimar period. Drawing on employers' deliberations and archival material, the paper reconstructs the process of preference formation of German employers. The significance of a sectoral conflict between employers of large and small firms about the organization of the ‘risk pool’ within the system of unemployment insurance is also highlighted. While the existing literature fails to characterize employers' preferences towards social policies and to explain the variation in the degree of employers' support for particular social policies, this paper does so. Firms' preferences towards social policies can be analyzed along three dimensions: ability of social policies to redistribute risks, locus of control within alternative policy arenas and the costs imposed by different social policies.

Using reproduced inscription data the present study examines two social facets of the Chinese in nineteenth-century Singapore. The first facet pertains to group participation (economic and social) and it was found that the average amount of donations made by the Hokkiens to their subcommunal organizations was much higher than that given by the Cantonese and Hakkas.

On the other hand, more Cantonese and Hakka people contributed to their subcommunal organizations. The interplay of differential economic status and organizational objectives is heuristic in explaining this discrepancy.

In this paper we analyse the effects, over time, of the liberal (US), corporatist (German) and social democratic (Dutch) welfare states on poverty, inequality and income redistribution 1985–89. Unlike previous international comparisons relying on static frameworks and cross-sectional data, we use panel data from the Dutch Socio-Economic Panel (SEP), the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and the American Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) — all of which have large samples (15,000+ respondents) and all of which have been running for fully a decade — to compare welfare state performance over one and five years. We find that both the corporatist (German) and especially the social democratic (Dutch) welfare states redistribute income substantially to reduce poverty and inequality, and that in both cases these effects are substantially greater over five years than one. In the social democratic (Dutch) regime very few people have incomes which, taking a five year average, put them below the poverty line. The corporatist (German) regime also turns out to be much more redistributive over five years than would ordinarily be expected. The liberal (US) welfare state, in contrast, is not only much less redistributive on a one-year basis but also no more so over five years than one. There is, however, evidence of efficiency losses in the more ‘generous’ social democratic welfare state, in that fewer people appear to escape poverty through labour markets than in the liberal welfare regime.

The study of Indonesian history is still very much in its infancy. There is as yet nothing like the breadth or depth of historical writing on Indonesia that there is on China or India, let alone on Europe or the United States. Nowhere is this more evident than in the dearth of urban history. Certainly, Indonesia was, and is, predominantly an agricultural society, but since the 1870s an increasing number of Indonesians have lived in towns and cities, earning their living from the urban economy. In the colonial period many worked in the Indies bureaucracy, while others formed a small but growing professional class of doctors, lawyers, engineers and teachers. From this group came most of the intellectual and organizational leadership of the nationalist movement. Through their writings and speeches we have a reasonably clear picture of their changing perceptions of the world and their struggle to work out what it meant to be an Indonesian in the last three decades of colonial rule.

Merchants in the Tokugawa period were placed at the bottom of the shinōkōshō hierarchy of samurai-peasants-artisans-merchants. This social hierarchy was produced by a combination of social reality at the time Japan was unified in the late sixteenth century and an ancient Chinese physiocratic theory, never taken very seriously, in practical ways, in China. Once the country was unified, the social mobility of the previous years, of a kind which permitted men of ability to climb from the lowest ranks to join the military nobility—Hideyoshi is the prime example of this mobility—was viewed, by Hideyoshi above all others, as a cause of prolonged chaos and internecine warfare. With the argument that war had been abolished and common people therefore no longer needed weapons, Hideyoshi carried out his ‘sword-hunt’. He thus established the most fundamental of the class distinctions, between the samurai, the ruling class, who now enjoyed a monopoly of bearing arms, and the common people, who were henceforth expected simply to produce the food and other necessities of life, and to pay their taxes, which remained high even though warfare was supposedly ended.

Unlike the State Department Officials of the United States who were subjected by the Senate to postwar Congressional investigation in the Pearl-Harbor hearing, British Far Eastern policy-makers were saved such parliamentary ordeals. The loss of the whole British position in the Far-East at the hands of the Japanese between December 1941 and May 1942 was humiliating enough. It was, as Winston Churchill later claimed, ‘the worst disaster and the largest capitulation of British history’.