We wish to acknowledge the assistance and support of this research, which has been provided by the Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina. We also express appreciation to Professor Hal G. Rainey for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This is a revised version of a paper presented a...

Public administration has enormous implications for government’s capacity to cope with both internal and external pressure. China’s old-fashioned ruling style has not been able to meet the nation’s development needs. Since the early 1980s, China has launched six administrative reforms in order to solve the socioeconomic problems associated with rapid economic development. The ve completed refor...

The practice of Common Law and Roman Law differ, even though both systems in theory permit what they don't prohibit. The Common Practice derived from Common Law in fact truly does tend to permit what it doesn't prohibit, while the Roman Practice derived from Roman Law tends to prohibit what it doesn't permit. Tracing the historical sources for the evolutionary divergence between current Roman P...

he Supreme Court is the highest court of India. It is at the apex of the Indian judicial system. In the previous two lessons, you have learnt that the Union legislature, which is known as Parliament, makes laws for the whole country in respect of the Union and the Concurrent Lists and the executive comprising the President, Council of Ministers and bureaucracy enforces them. Judiciary, the thir...

Formalizing a concept developed by de Soto (1989), I construct a simple general equilibrium model of the informal sector. Agents in the economy can choose to be entrepreneurs in the formal or informal sector, or work in the labor market. Government rent-seeking and bureaucracy leads to a bifurcation in the size of firms: small informal firms and large formal firms. The empirical implications of...