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In the early months of 2020, news spread that a coronavirus (COVID-19) had been detected in Wuhan, China The virus quickly spread across the country and to other continents As deaths mounted in the United States, evidence indicated that some states experienced a higher rate of COVID-19 deaths than other states and that African American communities were hit harder by the virus than other racial groups Hence, we pose two questions in this research: Are COVID-19 deaths spread equally across different states and regions of the United States? Secondly, are African Americans more likely to die from COVID-19 than other racial groups? Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and APM Research Lab, we show that some states witnessed significant loss of life due to the virus and that African Americans were more likely to die from the virus when compared with White residents © 2020 by The American Society for Public Administration

The January 2016 presidential and legislative elections in Taiwan produced a dramatic and unprecedented victory for the Democratic Progressive Party over its long-time rival, the Kuomintang. The party had never had a parliamentary majority before 2016. The elections indicated the potential for fundamental change in Taiwan’s party system. This is what political scientists call a critical realigning election. The problem with identifying these elections, such as the 1896 and 1932 ones in the United States, is that we can only be sure of such an interpretation after a significant amount of time has passed. Still, some of the changes in Taiwan are fundamental enough to make such an evaluation worthwhile. We summarize realigning elections; discuss the factors that may lead to a change in the partisan balance; and describe the growing role of protest parties and social movements in Taiwan politics.

In a world of globalized markets, sizeable core states gain greater benefits from economic integration. Small peripheral states generally increase in trade incomes yet at cost of sovereignty and ag...

Over the last fifty years, the United States has been marked by two important secular trends. One is a continuous increase in income inequality. Second, the nation has transitioned through three periods of manufacturing: (a) “The Industrial Period” during 1945-1979, (b) the “Deindustrialization of America” during 1980-2000, and (c) the “Re-industrialization of America” during 2000-present, as it began to shift to an economy largely dominated by service and knowledge jobs, with a major reduction in labor-intensive manufacturing. This study examines the relationship between manufacturing employment and income inequality in the state of Alabama to test the hypothesis that manufacturing plays a key role in moderating inequality. In particular, we consider whether manufacturing or other economic and demographic factors are determinants of the rising income inequality in Alabama. We control for other factors that are also likely to be related to rising income inequality. We employ empirical techniques that are best suited to address potential econometric problems in the empirical work. In general, our results indicate that manufacturing does indeed play a key role in moderating inequality. Other key findings are that more educated communities have less inequality, that rural areas have especially high inequality, that counties with a high proportion of African Americans face disproportionately high inequality, and that the poorest counties have the highest level of inequality Keywords: Manufacturing, Deindustrialization, Reindustrialization, Income Inequality DOI: 10.7176/JESD/11-6-12 Publication date: March 31 st 2020

Substantial research has been conducted examining policy diffusion among both the American states and the nations of the developed world and to a somewhat lesser extent, developing worlds. Little research, especially at the nation-state level, has focused upon budget systems, however. We use case studies of 18 diverse countries (Menifield, 2011) to conceptualize national budget systems and, based upon this conceptualization, to identify clusters of nations with similar systems. We found evidence suggesting that policy diffusion may be occurring in the realm of national budget systems. Our analysis shows that budgetary institutions and behaviors can and do form clusters that are useful in analyzing national budget systems. Our ability to describe clusters of nations with similar budget systems could prove to be a helpful tool for analyzing international policy diffusion.

This article applied the policy diffusion model as a theoretical framework for interpreting the international spread of performance-based budgeting, based upon 33 OECD case studies of countries that have implemented this reform. The data show that the historical development of performance-based budgeting was fairly consistent with the diffusion model. In particular, the adoption of performance budgeting took off during 1985–1995 and then accelerated over the following 15 years, and the primary innovators were a group of four English-speaking countries with comparatively laissez-faire economies (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The case studies indicated that performance-based budgeting was generally part of a broader program of governmental reform, that executive agencies were more important than parliaments in managing it, that it became quite important in budget- and policy-making, and that implementing it faced a significant number of challenges.

This chapter seeks to evaluate the question of what Teng Hsiao-p’ing’s reforms are likely to bring by comparing mainland China to the well-established Communist regime in the Soviet Union. It illustrates the nature of communism in mainland China, the strategies of Communist regimes for retaining power and creating popular allegiance, the role of communism in promoting economic modernization, and what these factors suggest about the probable outcomes of Teng’s reforms. The chapter describes the Soviet Communist system and analyses the system of Chinese communism by comparing it to the Soviet model. It argues that the Chinese Communists suffer several distinct disadvantages compared to the Soviets. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution represents a watershed in the politics of mainland China. The Cultural Revolution resembles the period of collectivization and the great purge under Stalin in the 1930s.

This chapter discusses that the rise of the so-called gender gap in the 1980s represented such a "broken contract" for women in America, since the growth of a distinctive women's perspective on political issues arose, essentially, because the polity failed to respond to several basic needs facing different types of women in modern society. Several sets of social forces are generally credited with producing the gender gap in ideology and partisanship. Once again, the enduring nature of the gender gap indicates that it taps some basic value and role differences between men and women in American society. The contention that feminism and/or self-interest explain at least part of the widening gender gap is based on the assumption that social change led to a shift in the attitudes of certain types of women. The gender gap in voting and partisan affiliation seemingly reflected important changes in the way men and women viewed the central issues in American politics.

Over the past twenty years, there have been two important trends in Taiwan’s political economy whose contradictory implications provide an important explanation for the dramatic events of 201 4. The logic of each pulls Taiwan in different directions. In this paper, we describe one of the two contending trends of integration and identity. We then discuss the institutional inheritance from the authoritarian era which we believe is a factor that makes policymaking in Taiwan quite difficult. We conclude by analysing how these phenomena interacted to produce the dramatic events of 2014.

Clark, Cal.2015.The paradoxes in globalization's economic empowerment of South Korea,Report,[Paris]UNESCO

This paper compares the status of women in Chile and Taiwan in order to examine two research questions: First, what can explain Taiwan's considerably better record in enhancing the status of women? Second, what are the implications for the ongoing debate among global feminists about the effects of globalization on the status of women? Case studies of the two countries suggest that they are fairly similar in terms of progress on women's education and health, but that Taiwan has a very significant advantage in terms of women's employment status and political representation. Taiwan's better performance in these areas reflects its distinctive development pattern and electoral institutions, while the implications of the case studies for the nature of globalization's effects on the status of women are more complex and nuanced.

Institutionalist theory argues that fairly permanent economic structures and policy-making arrangements create “institutions” which shape future policy-making and economic performance to a considerable extent (March and Olsen 1989; North 1990; Riker 1982). This perspective suggests that it might be valuable to look for the political institutions that evolved during Taiwan’s development which could have inhibited the country’s adaptability after the mid-1990s. From this perspective, Taiwan’s current institutional imbroglio results from a combination of a complex and somewhat indeterminate constitutional system, a long-time election system that contained some perverse incentives, and its long era of authoritarian rule. This paper, hence, seeks to provide an “institutionalist” explanation for the polarization and gridlock in Taiwan’s politics in the early 21st century.

The Republic of Korea was one of the major victims of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98, but it recovered its economic dynamism quite quickly. In the short term, its budgetary response to near economic collapse was immediate and quite significant. The government increased spending and, once the peak of the crisis was over, taxes and expanded its previously very limited support of needy Koreans by substantially increasing funds for social development and for aiding local government. Thus, despite its being forced to accept a large International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan in late 1997, Korea clearly rejected the IMF model of fiscal austerity and governmental downsizing, giving a much higher priority to the welfare of its citizens. However, this short-term response to the devastating fallout from the crisis seems to have exacerbated several long-term challenges facing Korea. The liberal fiscal policy clearly contributed to the country's burgeoning debt problem, and there have been only limited att...

This review of public opinion about the role of government in the United States finds a perhaps surprising combination of conservative and liberal beliefs. For example, while they are strongly supportive of tax cuts, Americans also want more government activism in a wide variety of areas. This certainly presents a challenge for public administrators and government since the means for fulfilling these desires of the citizens are far from readily apparent.

uring the 1980s and much of the 1990s, East Asia was the most dynamic D region in the global economy (see table 1). China had the highest growth rate in the world; the four "little dragons" of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan were not far behind; and Japan had the highest growth rate by a considerable margin among the industrialized nations during the 1970s and 1980s, although the bursting of its "bubble economy" in 1989 brought economic stagnation throughout the 1990s. This "East Asian dynamism" (Chan 1993) was widely recognized, and many scholars sought to conceptualize an East Asian development model that had created such "miracle economies" (Amsden 1989; Bernard and Ravenhill 1995; Chan 1993; Chan and Clark 1992; Clark and Roy 1997; Cumings 1984; Fallows 1994; Gereffi and Wyman 1990; Hofheinz and Calder 1982; Johnson 1982; Noble 1998; Ravenhill 1995; Woo 1991; Woo-Cumings 1999). East Asia's success even was canonized by the World Bank in 1993, which coined the term "high-performing Asian economies" to characterize Japan and the little dragons (as well as three Southeast Asian nations). The financial crisis of 1997 and 1998 in Southeast and East Asia, which was dubbed the "Asian flu" (although pneumonia probably would be a better metaphor), reversed East Asia's image of economic success and invincibility (Arndt and Hill 1999; Clark 2002; Goldstein 1998; Haggard 2000; Hunter, Kaufman, and Krueger 1999). Only China and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan were able to escape the ill winds unleashed by the Asian financial meltdown (see table 2). In

This paper applies aggregate data analysis to explore the relationships among the economic development level, the status of women, and the quality of life in developing societies. In particular, it tests the hypothesis that the status of women is positively related to the quality of life even after the effects of economic growth and development are statistically controlled. Our analysis strongly confirms this hypothesis since the status of women in a society appears to rival the economic development level for explaining how good or ill is the quality of life enjoyed by its citizens. We undertook this study from the theoretical perspective that questions conceptualizing and measuring development simply in terms of the level and growth of GNP per capita. Rather, the social needs and quality of life in a society, the presumed consequences of development, are important as well.

Since the mid-1990s, the cross-strait relationship between the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROC) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been fairly stormy, with periodic crises in which the risk of armed conflict has been significant (although not highly probable). In contrast to the deadlock and hostility of "high politics" between Taipei and Beijing, other aspects of cross-strait relations are far more promising. Over the last decade or so the huge increase in economic transactions between Taiwan and China has created a growing integration that implies a good deal of amity at the level of "low politics," "people-topeople diplomacy," and social communications. This contact suggests that the gradual growth of the European Union (EU) in the postwar era might provide a more positive model for managing cross-strait relations, reducing the threat of new crises and military hostilities that neither side seems to desire. This essay thus explores the question of whether the growing economic integration across the Taiwan Strait might hold the key to overcoming the deadlock in high politics created by the incompatible views of the PRC and ROC on the critical issue of sovereignty. In the first part I briefly sketch the theory of how growing integration and social communications create the bases for a "community," and I apply that theory to the evolution of the EU. The second part describes the economic and social processes that are increasingly linking Taiwan to the Chinese mainland. In part 3 I argue that growing economic and social integration across the Taiwan Strait had created processes similar to the EU model by the

(2002). Implications of the Asian Flu for Developmental State Theory: The Cases of South Korea and Taiwan. Asian Affairs: An American Review: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 16-42.

This article explores the possible impacts that globalization might have upon the nature of local governments and the economic development policies that they adopt. We begin by outlining the theory of how “corporate regimes” dominate most urban centers, why they implement skewed economic development policies, and why globalization appears to be exacerbating these problems. Research on state-and-local economic development outside urban centers indicates that several types of business development exist and that they differ significantly in their implications for improving conditions in a community. This suggests that other types of corporate regimes are possible. The logic of globalization points toward the need to establish more progressive corporate regimes willing to implement some of the reforms advocated by critics of the “growth machine.”

The key issues of the health care system are often conceptualized as involving three basic dimensions: 1) the quality of health care provided, 2) access to the health care system, and 3) the cost of health care. Following two decades of rapidly escalating health costs throughout advanced industrial societies, the relationships among these three dimensions now constitute what has been called an “unholy trinity” in that improvements along one dimension will almost inevitably provoke problems in terms of one or both of the others. This symposium examines two distinct types of reform that have been developed in response to the crisis in health care costs. The first focuses upon attempts to reorganize existing institutions in order to make them more effective and cost-efficient. The second considers the move toward “evidence-based medicine,” that is, more critically evaluating health care outcomes to make sure that treatments are effective and cost-efficient.

This paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of how macro health systems work by comparing three possible sets of influences on national health care outcomes: 1) health care facilities and their presumed link to national affluence, 2) social characteristics which are assumed to promote healthy behavior, and 3) political variables in the form of welfare state development. Our findings bear both optimistic and pessimistic connotations. On the one hand, the somewhat limited importance of the first set of factors shows that good health in a country is not simply the function of high spending levels. However, the surprisingly strong role of “social development” in determining health care outcomes that emerges implies that much more than the direct provision of health care must be manipulated to ensure optimal health for a nation's population.

Taiwan has long had a reputation for effective policy-making based on a highly skilled and educated bureaucracy. In addition, this capacity for technocratic leadership has not resulted in a huge, inefficient bureaucracy since the size of government remains comparatively small. This paper explores the implications of Taiwan's recent democratization for the effectiveness of the country's public administration. On the one hand, democratization reduced the power of regime conservatives, thereby expanding the role of technocrats in the government; on the other burgeoning corruption and policy gridlock have clearly undercut effective policy-making. Thus, the most fundamental challenge for public administration in Taiwan appears to be re-establishing the bureaucratic integrity of technocratic government.