The present paper examines the historical evolution of China’s rural taxation system from the pre-reform period to the late 1990s. We propose that because of information asymmetry between the upper-level and the lower-level governments, local governments had to be granted some informal tax autonomy to fulfill the upper-level policy mandates. This easily led to excessive local informal taxation ...

Due to both internal and external factors, Western Asia has long been suffering from security problems and political instability. The institution of various military and militia groups in the region in the absence of powerful central governments is the focal point of the crises, where the internal and external factors meet. The development of such security and military interactions outside the ...

Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies has a tradition of about 25 years. The basic technologies and ideas were found until 1995 while the last decade was dominated by the utilisation of such technologies. The question arises if there is a market for Privacy Enhanced Technology. The answer is yes, however Privacy Enhancing Technology may not have been broadly known yet in order to make it p...

A central problem in designing effective models of provider governance in health systems has been to ensure an appropriate balance between the concerns of public sector and/or government decision-makers, on the one hand, and of non-governmental health services actors in civil society and private life, on the other. In tax-funded European health systems up to the 1980s, the state and other publi...