INSTITUTIONAL Change as Cultural Change. An Illustration by Chinese Postsocialist Transformation

Culture of a society reflects its social values. So, through Chinese experience, we want to show that institutional change is not only an economic or a political process but fundamentally a cultural one. It is therefore based on a change in values and mentalities. Like in a chemical reaction, we discern initial conditions, factors which triggered the reaction, catalysts and elements of synthesis. Chinese institutional change per se derived from a cultural shock induced by the Chinese economic, political and cultural opening which acts as trigger. The remain paper deals with the other elements of the process.China; institutional change; culture; causality

Economy, order and social control: the maoist case

Faced with a mixed civilian population, the action of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can be grasped in the light of collective action. According to its support to the PCC, we can divide up the population into two groups. The first has an interest in the action of the new government which must then prevent the attitude known as "free-riding". The second is unfavourable and the CCP must prevent it to be obstructive. In these conditions how the Chinese leaders can build a new order while enjoying, if not the cooperation, at least the "silence" of the population? Coercion, satisfaction of the interests of a portion of the population and in particular ideology are solutions. Indeed, people can act collectively if they have an interpretative framework, or in other words a common ideology. Various elements of what Lindblom calls "préceptoral system" are implemented. Admittedly, coercion and granting favors are also used to regulate the new order in formation. But it rests essentially on education, persuasion, indoctrination. As the episode of the Great Leap Forward show, ideological incentives replace the traditional economic one that are crystallized in contracts and property rights.Collective action, coercion, incentive, ideology, Great Leap forward

Post-socialist transformation and growth regime: some comments about the Chinese case

This article attempts to show that Chinese post-socialist transformation has involved a deep change in its growth regime. China's current growth strategy is the consequence of institutional changes that operated from the end of the seventies. Thus, since its transition is gradual, the economic system is "hybrid" with both capitalist and socialist elements. During the Maoist era, the growth strategy took the form of a "forced growth" as theorized by Kornai (1972). Today, it is not the case anymore since China follows an export and investment-led growth regime. Indeed,"investment hunger", inherited from the socialist system, is still standing and the economic opening of China results in an increase of its exports. This new situation could be particularly difficult to manage with respect to inflation stabilization and China’s dependence on external demand in a context of low domestic-demand. In particular, the main difficulty to which this export-led growth regime could be confronted with concerns the occurrence of an external contraction in the US. We then try to assess why such an event may appear by providing a list of external risks and their possible outlets in order to emphasize the economic vulnerability of China. Finally, we conclude on the difficulty to switch regimes and to adopt a more balanced growth strategy

Applying Decision Tree Algorithm and Neural Networks to Predict Forest Fires in Lebanon

Fires have been threatening green forestry all over the world. In Lebanon, green areas declined dramatically during the last decades, what imposes an urgent intervention with strict governmental policies and support of non-governmental organizations. The orientation is towards techniques that predict high fire risks, allowing for precautions to preclude fire occurrences or at least limit their consequences. Two data mining techniques are used for the purpose of prediction and decision-making: Decision trees and back propagation forward neural networks. Four meteorological attributes are utilized: temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and daily precipitation. The obtained tree drawn from applying the first algorithm could classify these attributes from the most significant to the least significant and better foretell fire incidences. Adopting neural networks with different training algorithms shows that networks with 2 inputs only (temperature and relative humidity) retrieve better results than 4-inputs networks with less mean squared error. Feed forward and Cascade forward networks are under scope, with the use of different training algorithms

Bernard Lahire, ed., Enfances de classes. De l’inégalité parmi les enfants

Dans ses Considérations inactuelles, Nietzsche écrivait : « J’estime un philosophe dans la mesure où il est en état de donner un exemple ». Dans Enfances de classes, ce n’est pas un, mais une multitude d’exemples qui sont donnés, afin de prouver que les inégalités se forment très tôt, au moment de la petite enfance, période cruciale et pourtant angle mort de la recherche en sciences sociales. Or, c’est durant cette période, et notamm..

Forest Fires Prediction: A Proposal for a new hybrid index

All over the world, statistics show that forest fires rate has been increasing in the recent decades although many studies and various indices were proposed to predict fire occurrence and then take in advance the necessary actions. These indices use only weather data to make their decision of prediction. In this paper, a new proposal for a fire detection index is presented that combines between meteorological and topographic parameters. The reason is to reduce errors due to inaccuracies in weather prediction. The parameters of slope, aspect and elevation are introduced, and a comparison is held between the proposed index and other existing indices that reveals the distinction of the new combination over the present models: Angstrom, Nesterov, KBDI and Canadian Fire Weather Index. The implementation of the proposed hybrid index using data from Lebanon demonstrated its ability to accurately predict the hazard of fire occurrence

Chinese postsocialist transformation: economic opening and external constraint

This article is an attempt to show that China's post-socialist transformation involved a change in its growth regime. Indeed, during the Maoist era, it took the form of a "forced growth" as theorized by Kornai (1972). In addition, "export aversion" was one of the main characteristics of Chinese external economic relations. Today, it is not the case anymore since China follows an export-led growth strategy. Nevertheless, this situation could be particularly difficult to manage with respect to its dependence on external demand in a context of low domestic-demand.Changement institutionnel; transformation postsocialiste; Chine; export-led growth

INSTITUTIONAL Change as Cultural Change. An Illustration by Chinese Postsocialist Transformation

Culture of a society reflects its social values. So, through Chinese experience, we want to show that institutional change is not only an economic or a political process but fundamentally a cultural one. It is therefore based on a change in values and mentalities. Like in a chemical reaction, we discern initial conditions, factors which triggered the reaction, catalysts and elements of synthesis. Chinese institutional change per se derived from a cultural shock induced by the Chinese economic, political and cultural opening which acts as trigger. The remain paper deals with the other elements of the process