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An informed modern plan for post-2020 American foreign policy that avoids the opposing dangers of retrenchment and overextension Russia and China are both believed to have \"grand strategies\"-detailed sets of national security goals backed by means, and plans, to pursue them. In the United States, policy makers have tried to articulate similar concepts but have failed to reach a widespread consensus since the Cold War ended. While the United States has been the world's prominent superpower for over a generation, much American thinking has oscillated between the extremes of isolationist agendas versus interventionist and overly assertive ones. Drawing on historical precedents and weighing issues such as Russia's resurgence, China's great rise, North Korea's nuclear machinations, and Middle East turmoil, Michael O'Hanlon presents a well'researched, ethically sound, and politically viable vision for American national security policy. He also proposes complementing the Pentagon's set of \"4+1\" pre'existing threats with a new \"4+1\": biological, nuclear, digital, climatic, and internal dangers.

Despite private enterprises dominating China's labour market, college-educated workers are still highly concentrated in the state sector. Using data from the Chinese College Student Survey, we find that 64 per cent of students in the sample expressed a strong preference for state sector employment. We also identify several factors associated with receiving job offers from the state sector, including being male, holding urban hukou status, being a member of the CCP, performing well on standardized tests, attending elite universities and having higher household income or high-status parental backgrounds. These findings suggest that despite China's economic transition, the private sector may still struggle to attract highly educated workers.

Broadly, a Public-Private Partnership (or PPP) is any collaboration between the public and private sector, but research in the UK has tended to focus on those that have been used for major infrastructure projects, such as roads, schools, and hospitals. This book compares and contrasts PPP research in the UK with that of cases in the USA, including interviews with some of the key stakeholders (decision makers in the public sector, contractors, and users) of PPPs in North America, and observations of PPPs in action (such as schools and roads). No prior major studies have compared the UK and USA when it comes to the development and operation of PPPs, and this book fills a gap in the literature, addressing a number of key questions, including: Is the private sector viewed with less suspicion in the USA when it comes to projects that would normally fall under the aegis of the public sector? How do politics affect PPPs? How do key players in the PPP process define project success, determine the merits and drawbacks of the initiative, and deal with controversial elements of the scheme such as value for money and risk transfer? The result is a volume that offers practical advice for the future development of PPPs in the UK.

Despite the remarkable economic growth, China maintains a large-scale State economy comprised of extensive State-owned enterprises (SOEs) that continue to play a dominant role in the national economy. In spite of this, China has been substantially restructuring its State economy in its long-lasting SOE reforms since 1978, and the fourth round of the reforms commenced in 2013. China's expanding geopolitical influence and escalating Sino-Western tensions warrant an in-depth examination of its genuine State economy reform objective and process. Based on comprehensive analyses of relevant laws and policies of China's major State economy restructuring programs promoted in the second and the latest round of the reforms, this study firstly demonstrates SOE's well-established primacy in China's political-economic system. This study argues that since the mid-1990s, the restructuring reforms implemented by successive Chinese governments for the State economy have promoted the 'Grasp the Large and Release the Small' pseudo-privatisation. The policy continuity speaks to a goal that successive Chinese leaders have sought to achieve-'the State advances, the private sector retreats'.

A sweeping, policy-oriented account of the private and public management of the world's essential natural resource. Governments dominated water management throughout the twentieth century. Tasked with ensuring a public supply of clean, safe, reliable, and affordable water, governmental agencies controlled water administration in most of the world. They built the dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts that store water when available and move that water to areas with increasing populations and economies. Private businesses sometimes played a part in managing water, but typically in a supporting position as consultants or contractors. Today, given the global need for innovative new technologies, institutions, and financing to solve the freshwater crisis, private businesses and markets are playing a rapidly expanding role, bringing both new approaches and new challenges to a historically public field. In Liquid Asset, Barton H. Thompson, Jr. examines the growing position of the private sector in the \"business of water.\" Thompson seeks to understand the private sector's involvement in meeting the water needs of both humans and the environment, looks at the potential risks that growing private involvement poses to the public interest in water, and considers the obstacles that private organizations face in trying to participate in a traditionally governmental sector. Thompson provides a richly detailed analysis to foster both improved public policy and responsible business behavior. As the book demonstrates, the story of private businesses and water offers a window into the serious challenges facing freshwater today, and their potential solutions.

This paper compares the impact of institutions on men and women's decisions to establish new business start-ups between 2001 and 2006. We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey (GEM) which cover at least 2,000 individuals per year in each of up to 55 countries and have merged it with country-level data, from the World Bank, Economist Intelligence Unit, Polity IV and the Heritage Foundation. We find that women are less likely to undertake entrepreneurial activity in countries where the state sector is larger, but the rule of law is not generally found to have gender-specific effects.However, more detailed institutional components of discrimination against women, in particular, restrictions on freedom of movement away from home, make it less likely for women to have high entrepreneurial aspirations in terms of employment growth, even if their entry into entrepreneurial activities, including self-employment, is not affected by this.

This study examines the role of executive compensation in public governance. We collect data on corruption cases that involve top-level executives in Chinese listed state-controlled firms. We find a significant positive relationship between underpayment of executives and the likelihood of an investigation into corrupt behavior. We also show that corruption is positively associated with firm performance and that the relationship between underpayment of executives and corruption is influenced by firm performance, suggesting that top managers are more likely to engage in illicit behavior if they are compensated poorly while the firms under their control perform well. Finally, we find that pay-performance sensitivity decreases when top executives are involved in corruption investigations, indicating a lack of pecuniary incentives. Our empirical findings point toward an important relationship between executive compensation and corrupt behavior, thus providing valuable input to the understanding of executive pay and its effects in China's state sector.

How is it that some conservative groups are viscerally antigovernment even while enjoying the benefits of government funding? InPiety and Public Fundinghistorian Axel R. Schäfer offers a compelling answer to this question by chronicling how, in the first half century since World War II, conservative evangelical groups became increasingly adept at accommodating their hostility to the state with federal support. Though holding to the ideals of church-state separation, evangelicals gradually took advantage of expanded public funding opportunities for religious foreign aid, health care, education, and social welfare. This was especially the case during the Cold War, when groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals were at the forefront of battling communism at home and abroad. It was evident, too, in the Sunbelt, where the military-industrial complex grew exponentially after World War II and where the postwar right would achieve its earliest success. Contrary to evangelicals' own claims, liberal public policies were a boon for, not a threat to, their own institutions and values. The welfare state, forged during the New Deal and renewed by the Great Society, hastened-not hindered-the ascendancy of a conservative political movement that would, in turn, use its resurgence as leverage against the very system that helped create it. By showing that the liberal state's dependence on private and nonprofit social services made it vulnerable to assaults from the right,Piety and Public Fundingbrings a much needed historical perspective to a hotly debated contemporary issue: the efforts of both Republican and Democratic administrations to channel federal money to \"faith-based\" organizations. It suggests a major reevaluation of the religious right, which grew to dominate evangelicalism by exploiting institutional ties to the state while simultaneously brandishing a message of free enterprise and moral awakening.

In 1967 the magazine Ramparts ran an exposé revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funding and managing a wide range of citizen front groups intended to counter communist influence around the world. In addition to embarrassing prominent individuals caught up, wittingly or unwittingly, in the secret superpower struggle for hearts and minds, the revelations of 1967 were one of the worst operational disasters in the history of American intelligence and presaged a series of public scandals from which the CIA's reputation has arguably never recovered. CIA official Frank Wisner called the operation his \"mighty Wurlitzer,\" on which he could play any propaganda tune. In this illuminating book, Hugh Wilford provides the first comprehensive account of the clandestine relationship between the CIA and its front organizations. Using an unprecedented wealth of sources, he traces the rise and fall of America's Cold War front network from its origins in the 1940s to its Third World expansion during the 1950s and ultimate collapse in the 1960s. Covering the intelligence officers who masterminded the CIA's fronts as well as the involved citizen groups--émigrés, labor, intellectuals, artists, students, women, Catholics, African Americans, and journalists--Wilford provides a surprising analysis of Cold War society that contains valuable lessons for our own age of global conflict.