Analysis of the Bottleneck Restricting Party Building of China’s State-Owned Commercial Banks in the New Era

Since the 18th CPC National Congress, socialism with Chinese characteristics has ushered in a new era, so has China's financial industry. As the reform of state-owned commercial banks deepens, party-building plays an increasingly vital role in the operation and development of banks. Meanwhile, party-building of state-owned commercial banks is also confronted with bottlenecks and challenges, including party-building fails to effectively guide the finance industry to serve the real economy, to be integrated into bank management in-depth, to completely prevent the financial system from corrupting, and to vigorously restrain excessive pay in the financial sector

Tracing policy influence of diffuse interests:The post-crisis consumer finance protection politics in the US

Dodd–Frank, the financial reform law passed in the United States in response to the 2008 financial crisis, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new federal regulator with the sole responsibility of protecting consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices. This decision marked the end of a highly politicized reform debate in the US Congress, in which proponents of the new bureau would normally have been considered to be much weaker than its opponents. Paradoxically, an emerging civil society coalition successfully lobbied decision-makers and countered industry attempts to prevent industry capture. What explains the fact that rather weak and peripheral actors prevailed over more resourceful and dominant actors? The goal of this study is to examine and challenge questions of regulatory capture by concentrated industry interests in the reform debates in response to the credit crisis which originated in the US in 2007. The analysis suggests that for weak actors to prevail in policy conflicts over established, resource-rich opponents, they must undertake broad coalition building among themselves and with influential elite allies outside and inside of Congress who share the same policy goals

Food and Drug Administration Regulation of Food Safety

Food-borne illness remains a major public health challenge in the United States, causing an estimated 48 million illness episodes and 3000 deaths annually. The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), enacted in 2011, gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) new tools to regulate food safety. The act emphasizes prevention, enhanced recall authority, and oversight of imported food. The FSMA brings the FDA’s food safety regulation in line with core tenets of public health by focusing on preventing outbreaks, rather than reacting to them, and differentiating between foods and food producers based on the degree of risk they pose. The FSMA also recognizes the increasing importance of imported food and enhances the ability of the FDA to safeguard the U.S. food supply from hazards originating abroad. The act achieves its prevention objectives through requiring food production facilities to establish preventive control plans and by increasing inspection frequency—a shortcoming of the FDA in recent years. The act also enhances the FDA’s ability to respond to food safety problems when they occur. Through pilot projects on food tracing systems and an enhanced surveillance system, the FDA will be have better tools to determine the source of outbreaks. Additionally, the act gives the FDA new mandatory recall authority—a badly needed addition to its enforcement capabilities. In an increasingly globalized food environment, the FSMA gives the FDA new authority to regulate imported food. Among other provisions, the act allows FDA to inspect foreign facilities and to partner with foreign food regulatory agencies to help build capacity. Through new tools and increased enforcement, the FSMA holds great promise for public health. The act, however, leaves several regulatory gaps, including keeping the food safety functions of the USDA and FDA separate. Additionally, the potential of the act to improve food safety may be thwarted by inadequate funding in the current budget environment. The act includes numerous programs for building the capacity of domestic and foreign regulators and food producers. Such programs are essential to an improved food safety system, but require adequate funding from Congress to be fully implemented. In addition to national capacity building, FDA and Congress should fully engage partners in government and industry to improve global food safety at the international level

Legislative Organization and Administrative Redundancy

Congress regularly enacts legislation providing for redundant administrative programs. For example, there are more than 100 federal programs for surface transportation, 82 programs to ensure teacher quality, 80 programs to promote domestic economic development, and 47 programs to provide employment and job-training services. Recent high-profile legislation–-such as the financial-industry reform measure and the health-care reform measure–-add new programs without repealing existing ones directed at the same policy goals. Prior academic analyses generally have not considered why Congress pursues redundancy. This article addresses that question through both theoretical and institutional analysis. The article first constructs an organizational theory that attributes redundancy in administrative programs to the congressional committee system. Specifically, the article demonstrates that two critical components of the existing committee system-–fragmented jurisdictions and parliamentary prerogatives–-systematically bias legislative outcomes in favor of redundancy. Building on leading theoretical accounts of congressional committees from political science, the article then presents a novel cost-benefit analysis of this tendency toward redundancy. It shows that redundancy allows legislators to increase distributive favors for constituents and interest groups but that redundancy is also linked to the desirable pursuit of informational efficiency. Thus, the institutional structures facilitating redundancy have mixed effects. Consequently, the article describes and analyzes specific institutional reforms that trade off the distributive costs and the informational benefits associated with redundancy. One approach would subject more legislative decisions to external advisory processes such as that used to close unneeded military facilities. A second and more promising approach would preserve existing committee jurisdictions but would scale back committees’ parliamentary prerogatives, thereby encouraging redundancy in program design but discouraging redundancy in program implementation

Statement of Robert A. Georgine Before the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations

Testimony_Georgine_121593.pdf: 268 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Job Loss and Infrastructure Job Creation During the Recession

[Excerpt] After the long economic expansion that characterized much of the current decade, the nation entered its eleventh postwar recession in December 2007. The unemployment rate rose from 5.0% in that month to 6.7% in November 2008, the latest data released to date by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). A majority of those unemployed in November—some 6 out of 10 million people—had been laid off by their employers. In November 2008 alone, employment at nonfarm businesses fell by 533,000, marking the biggest one-month drop recorded by the BLS Current Employment Statistics program since December 1974. The announcement by the Business Cycle Dating Committee in November 2008 that a recession had begun, which preceded by one week the monthly BLS Employment Situation release containing employment and unemployment data for November, intensified congressional interest in passage of legislation aimed at encouraging creation of new jobs and warding off the further loss of jobs. In the 110th Congress, the Senate did not act on legislation (H.R. 7110) the House passed in September 2008, which contained among other things spending on infrastructure (public works) projects to promote employment in the troubled construction industry and in industries that supply it with goods and services (e.g., concrete and steel manufacturing). To mitigate all but one recession since the 1960s, Congress has chosen to increase federal expenditures on infrastructure. This means of job creation has not been without its critics, however, chiefly because of how long it typically takes for public works projects to start up. (See CRS Report 92-939, Countercyclical Job Creation Programs, by Linda Levine, for more information.) This would seem to be less of an issue if the recession is a long one and if Congress passes the legislation while the recession is still taking place. Members of Congress have spoken of having ready for the president’s signature shortly after his inauguration a second economic stimulus bill that would include provisions to create and maintain jobs in the construction industry and in other infrastructure-dependent industries. A more expansive definition of public works than was used in the past is under consideration; one which includes so-called green jobs. Although no consensus definition currently exists, they appear to include jobs in the renewable energy industries (e.g., wind, solar), jobs retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient, and jobs expanding mass transit systems. The report first examines trends in employment and job loss since the start of the latest recession. It next focuses on job creation estimates associated with increased spending on infrastructure, placing a heavy emphasis on explaining the limitations and caveats associated with the input-output methodology that often is utilized to develop the estimates. The report will be updated after the 111th Congress convenes to reflect legislation that includes “direct job creation” provisions, i.e., economic stimulus bills having the government raise demand for goods and services through increased federal spending for the purpose of creating and preserving jobs. It will not discuss stimulus measures that give consumers more money in the hope they will spend rather than save it and that provide income support such as extension of unemployment benefits. (Information on these forms of fiscal stimulus can be found in CRS Report RL34349, Economic Slowdown: Issues and Policies, by Jane G. Gravelle et al.

Job Loss and Infrastructure Job Creation Spending During the Recession

[Excerpt] After the long economic expansion that characterized much of the current decade, the nation entered its eleventh postwar recession in December 2007. The unemployment rate, which is a lagging economic indicator, did not start to rise until May 2008 when it jumped 0.5 percentage points to 5.5%. By December 2008, the unemployment rate exceeded 7.0% and well over 600,000 jobs were lost—the biggest monthly decrease since December 1974, when another deep recession was taking place. These labor market indicators and comments equating the latest recession to the Great Depression intensified congressional interest in passage of legislation early in 2009 aimed at encouraging creation of new jobs and warding off further loss of jobs. (See CRS Report R40655, The Labor Market During the Great Depression and the Current Recession.) To mitigate all but one recession since the 1960s, Congress chose to increase federal spending on infrastructure. (See CRS Report 92-939, Countercyclical Job Creation Programs.) But, there are a number of issues associated with using expenditures on public works to quickly create jobs in times of recession. (See CRS Report R40107, The Role of Public Works Infrastructure in Economic Stimulus.) Public works expenditures traditionally have gone chiefly to construction activities (e.g., building highways and bridges, dams and flood control structures) which indirectly increase demand in industries that supply their products to construction firms (e.g., manufacturing). Today, the definition of infrastructure has been expanded to include green jobs, which include those in industries that utilize renewable resources (e.g., electricity generated by wind), produce energy-efficient goods and services (e.g., mass transit), and install energy-conserving products (e.g., retrofitting buildings with thermal-pane windows). A question that typically arises during congressional consideration of economic stimulus legislation is which approach produces the most bang for the buck. In the instant case, this means how many jobs might be supported by federal expenditures on traditional and green infrastructure projects. Once stimulus legislation is signed into law, the focus of Congress customarily turns to estimates of the number of jobs that result as federal funds are allocated to specific activities. Therefore, after briefly examining the trend in employment and unemployment since the recession’s onset, the report turns to an in-depth look at estimates of job creation, including the limitations of the methodology often used to derive them and the difficulties associated with developing job estimates for green infrastructure in particular. The report closes with a review of what is known to date about the number of jobs supported by infrastructure spending among other provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, P.L. 111-5). Section 1512 requires entities that receive ARRA appropriations from federal agencies, totaling approximately $271 billion, to include in quarterly reports the number of jobs created or maintained as a result. Section 1513 requires the Council of Economic Advisors to report quarterly on the effect of ARRA provisions on employment and other economic indicators

Proceedings of the 8th International congress on architectural technology (ICAT 2019): architectural technology, facing the renovation and refurbishment challenge.

During the past decade, the construction industry focus has largely been on the many new challenges brought about by the sustainability/climate change agenda and the introduction of BIM in new build. The theme of the next ICAT conference will focus on all issues related to the renovation, refurbishment and re-use of existing buildings. Given the fact that more than half of the industry’s activity is dedicated to these types of building work, the focus seems highly needed. Architectural technology is at the core of the industry where the interplay of many factors creates varied interfaces. Academics and professionals associated with the discipline are ideally placed to lead as we strive to enhance the design, delivery and performance of existing and new buildings as well as the industry at large. This congress will be a vehicle to disseminate research, education and practice at these interfaces