The articles in this volume directly or indirectly examine central tenets of neoliberalism: interference with market mechanisms is the cause of poor economic performance, and returning to market fundamentalism will restore prosperity. Despite these bold claims, scholars have not examined the extent to which neoliberal policies result in positive outcomes or whether economic successes are explained by neoliberalism. This volume of Research in Political Sociology assesses these neoliberal claims. The introductory article compares classical liberalism to neoliberalism, and summarizes the political-legal changes in corporations? environment and the redistribution of income and wealth from the mid-1970s to the present in the United States. The first part of this volume examines the effects of neoliberal policies on higher education in the state of Missouri and workers? health in Canada, and whether neoliberalism can explain changes in social service provisions and economic development initiatives by local US governments. The second part of this volume examines how the politics of neoliberal reforms affected polices of racial redress in Fuji and Tanzania, and the capacity of neoliberalism to explain economic development and change in the organization of business enterprises in China and India. Together, these articles find little support for the claims of neoliberalism, which suggests that liberalism is better understood as an ideology than as a theory.

Water scarcity is one of the key problems that affect northern China, an area that covers 40 percent of the nation's cultivated area and houses almost half of the population. The water availability per capita in North China is only around 300 m3 per capita, which is less than one seventh of the national average. At the same time, expanding irrigated cultivated area, the rapidly growing industrial sector and an increasingly wealthy urban population demand rising volumes of water. As a result, groundwater resources are diminishing in large areas of northern China. For example, between 1958 and 1998, groundwater levels in the Hai River Basin fell by up to 50 meters in some shallow aquifers and by more than 95 meters in some deep aquifers.

Past water policies have not been effective in solving water scarcity problems. China's leaders have put priorities on increasing water supply through developing more canal networks or building more reservoirs. In 2001, the State Council started the South-to-North Water Transfer Project. However, these supply-side approaches cannot meet the increasing demand for water from all of the different sectors and cannot solve water scarcity problems in the long run.

The purpose of this executive summary is to provide a concise statement about what we have learned about investment into China's rural environment. The overall purpose is to help the Bank understand what is happening in rural China, what farmer's are thinking about the current trends and what they are hoping will happen in the future (if they had a say). One of the most important questions is answer what should the role of the state be.

The dynamics of a global economy is being reshaped by the economic emergence of two Asian giants, China and India. How the world's two most populous countries manage globalization as they pursue economic reform and liberalization will impact significantly their societies, the rest of Asia, and the world.

This book brings together articles by first rate scholars of China and India to share and discuss their research findings in four areas: Challenges, Opportunities and Responses to Globalization; Social Security and Governance; National Security in the age of Globalization; and Ethnicity and Identity in the New World.

The book includes an opening address by Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, from his speech on Managing Globalization: Lessons from China and India, delivered at the official opening of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy on 4 April 2005.

Evidence from sample surveys and local field studies have long supported opposed arguments about the impact of market reform on the value of political office in the rural economy. This article reviews the evidence, describes a gradual convergence in findings, and identifies unresolved questions about qualitatively different local paths of development. Examining previously unexploited data from a nationally representative 1996 survey, a resolution of the remaining issues becomes evident. The value of political office initially is very modest, as the first private entrepreneurs reaped large incomes. However, subsequent economic development led to rapid increases in the earning power of cadres and their kin, and by the end of the Deng era the returns to political office were roughly equal to those of private entrepreneurs. The political advantages were not limited to regions that industrialized rapidly under collective ownership: they were large even in regions where the private economy was most extensive. However, despite evidence of large and enduring political advantages, those who reaped wealth from political position were only a small fraction of the newly rich, the vast majority of whom achieved wealth without current or past office-holding or kinship ties to cadres.

This article examines the logic of China's corporate restructuring. It argues that there is a political logic that mediates the pattern of corporate restructuring that has occurred in China since the 1990s. Even though China's officials need not worry about being voted out of office, they must worry about the political fallout from restructuring. Privatization cannot be allowed to proceed unless provisions are made to placate workers who will be affected by the enterprise restructuring. The mixing of political and economic agendas has implications for the sequencing of restructuring and privatization. It affects not only the speed and the nature of the reforms, but also which enterprises can be declared bankrupt or sold. Such constraints explain why some forms of corporate restructuring are preferred over others, why ailing and already dead firms that have stopped production remain open, and why some firms for which there are takers are not privatized. Political constraints in China have resulted in significant restructuring but relatively little genuine privatization. Restructuring and privatization are distinct and separate processes that do not necessarily lead from one to the other. This paper is based on extensive interviewing and supplemented by a survey of over 400 enterprises, with time series information from 1994 to 2000.

The usefulness and political implications of Area Studies programs are currently debated within the Academy and the Administration, where they are often treated as one homogenous and stagnant domain of scholarship. The essays in this volume document the various fields' distinctive character and internal heterogeneity as well as the dynamism resulting from their evolving engagements with funders, US and international politics, and domestic constituencies. The authors were chosen for their long-standing interest in the intellectual evolution of their fields. They describe the origins and histories of US-based Area Studies programs, highlighting their complex, generative, and sometimes contentious relationships with the social science and humanities disciplines and their diverse contributions to the regions of the world with which they are concerned.

China's path of political and economic change has diverged sharply from the experience of virtually all other state socialist regimes. Distinguishing it are its rapidly growing economy and expansion of higher education, deep engagement with the world economy and radical shift towards educational attainment in Party recruitment. These signs of political revitalisation portend a quiet transformation of China's elite, and may reinforce a stable evolution towards effective and less authoritarian forms of government. The greatest threat to this scenario would be state sector reform via privatisation that leaves large percentages of state assets in the hands of elite families.