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The article introduces papers published within the issue which were presented at the 6th Annual Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE) in Amherst, Massachusetts in May 2011, including one on state-owned enterprises (SOE) in China, another on the implications of the need to prevent major climate change for the developmental strategies of China and India and a paper on the influence of neoliberalism on the reform of emergency services in Great Britain.

Background: The Chinese central government launched the third phase of health system reforms in 2009. After a decade since the initiation of the reform, the health system has witnessed noteworthy gains. However, there is no concurrent improvement in public satisfaction with the health system. This study analysed various factors that influence public satisfaction with the system and examined whether perceived quality of care affects public satisfaction. Methods: A longitudinal nationally representative survey was used for this study. We used five waves of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) survey data. The final sample consisted of 145 843 observations. A two-way fixed-effects ordered logistic model was used for the analysis. Results: The results indicate that perceived good quality of care was positively associated with public satisfaction in health system regardless of rural–urban residence. Older adults and individuals with more than 3 years of college education were less likely to be satisfied with the system in rural areas. Personal income and the density of medical professionals in the geographic area tend to improve public satisfaction in rural areas. Having medical insurance coverage and fair or good self-rated health improved the probability of reporting public satisfaction in urban areas. Married people and individuals who lived in the West region were less likely to be satisfied with the health system in urban areas. Conclusions: Knowledge and skills of healthcare providers or physical quality of facilities are not sufficient in improving public satisfaction in the health system. Policymakers need to identify options to influence the important factors that affect public perception of the system. This analysis identified several policy-amenable factors to improve public perception of the health system in rural and urban China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with the plight of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 come the xenophobic behaviors and hate crimes against people with Asian descent around the globe. The threat of a public health emergency catalyzed underlying xenophobic sentiments, manifesting them into racial discrimination of various degrees. With most discriminatory acts reported in liberal societies, this article investigates whether an economy more open to trade and migration can be more susceptible to xenophobia. Using our first-hand survey data of 1767 Chinese respondents residing overseas from 65 different countries during February of 2020, we adopt an instrumental variable strategy to identify the causal effect of openness to trade and migration of their residence country on the likelihood of them receiving discriminatory behaviors during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak. Our results show that greater openness to trade increases the likelihood of reported xenophobic behaviors, while openness to migration decreases it. On the other hand, stronger trade or immigration relationships with China are associated with less reported discrimination. And these effects primarily influence discriminatory behavior in interpersonal spaces, rather than through media outlets. Our findings highlight nuances of the effect of trade relations on the culture of a society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policy can directly or indirectly affect private philanthropy. Although previous studies have investigated the role of tax incentives and government grants to nonprofits, scholars do not pay much attention to how public welfare receipt affects philanthropic behavior. This study fills the gap by examining the impact of public assistance use on individual charitable giving using data from the USA and China. We employ propensity score matching to reduce the issue of selection bias and adopt logistic regression and the Tobit model to answer our research question. Our analysis demonstrates the different impacts of public assistance use on charitable giving in the two countries. In the USA, public assistance income is negatively associated with secular giving, and prior public assistance use is negatively related to religious and total giving. However, in China, there is no statistically significant relationship between public assistance use and charitable giving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does voting in village elections affect one’s assessment of China’s democracy? In a time when a majority of the Chinese people believe that China is a democracy, this question has important implications for the prospects of bottom-up democratization. Village elections may play a positive role if they can bring people to realize that China is not a democracy. By contrast, village elections may play a negative role if they reinforce the belief that China is already a democracy. Using the China data of the ABS II, I show that voting in village elections does lead to more negative democratic assessment, but this does not imply a positive role of village elections for bottom-up democratization, because the negative effect of voting is only detected in elections of poor quality. In free and fair elections, voting has no influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies suggest that public trust in government in China remains high and without any trend of decline despite the fact that public trust in government has declined dramatically in developed countries. This article analyses public trust in government in contemporary urban China with a comprehensive representative survey and tests the factors associated with public trust in government. Trust in government in China is found to be much lower than previous studies have indicated. Furthermore, the variables of citizen satisfaction with the quality of public services, general democracy, participation in government and the transparency of government are positively associated with public trust in government in China at both the city and central level. In addition, this research also finds that citizens who are younger, more highly educated and well-paid have a lower probability of trust in government in China. These findings suggest that maintaining political trust will be a challenge for the Chinese government. Points for practitioners The findings in this study suggest that public managers and policymakers in China should pay full attention to the challenge posed by maintaining public trust in government, and need to consider formulating specific and feasible measures to enhance public trust based on the determinants of public trust in government. Moreover, in terms of the fact that the determinants that make public trust in government decline in developed countries also affect public trust in government in China, such public managers and policymakers need to strengthen communication with developed countries to improve the handling of the common challenge of maintaining public trust in government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comparison of Hong Kong and New York City refines our understanding of globalization by examining how structurally similar processes unfold differently in cities which vary in terms of regional political-economy and metropolitan culture. The gateway city concept accounts for the interaction of global and local forces rather than conceiving of globalization as a hegemonic 'top-down' process. Local actors such as city officials, urban planners and culture producers may influence the pace and direction of globalization. Various culture industries are emerging along with capital-intensive producer services as leading sectors of the postindustrial economy in the global era. [Globalization, gateways, culture, capital, postindustrialism] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]