Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

This dissertation consists of three essays that examine various important macroeconomic issues that are of concern to the Chinese economy. The analysis that supports the empirical work is inspired by post-Keynesian theory. The first chapter presents the mechanism of endogenous sterilization by extending the theory of demand-led money supply to the case of China. This view of money is confirmed by the fact that foreign reserves are not cointegrated with base money, meaning that there is no long-run relationship between foreign reserves and the supply of base money, whereas foreign reserves are long-run related with the claims of the central bank and the amount of bonds issued by the central bank. The second chapter outlines Kaldor's laws and tests for the contributions of the manufacturing sector to labor productivity and overall output growth using the panel dataset of 29 Chinese regions during the period of 1986-2007. Empirical findings, taking advantage of spatial panel econometric techniques, provide significant support for the Kaldorian thesis, while the incorporation of spatial autocorrelation improves the performance of empirical models compared to traditional ones. The third chapter analyzes the relationship between functional income distribution and Chinese economic growth from 1993 to 2007. Based on a demand-driven macroeconomic framework, there is a possibility of either profit-led or wage-led demand regime depending on the total effects of changes in the profit share on all components of final demand. Our results suggest that the Chinese economy presents a profit-led nature both for all 29 regions and for the coastal regions. We also find that while the expansion of interregional and international trade plays an important role, it is investment expenditure that determines the profit-led pattern of economic growth.

Marriage is an intimate interpersonal bond, a juridic reality, between a man and a woman, who are legally habiles, and it comes into being through their mutual, free and irrevocable consent expressed in accord with the norm of law (cf. CIC, c. 1057; CCEO, c. 817). This mutual consent can be affected by several intrinsic and external factors which can render it null or invalid. One among these factors is grave fear imposed from without, which the person is not able to resist except by choosing marriage, and this no doubt invalidates the marriage. One form of grave fear implied in canon 1103 of the Latin Code and canon 825 of the Eastern Code is reverential fear. The effect of reverential fear on the choices one makes is determined largely by the culture of people. The system of arranged marriages is so deeply rooted in Indian culture that, even today, almost ninety-five percent of the marriages are contracted in accord with that system. Although this system has its own merits within the context of a particular culture, it is not without its negative impact on the freedom of the Christian faithful in the choice of their life-partners. This is particularly evident in cases of reverential fear. The specific question we responded to in our thesis is: What is the impact of reverential fear, which is deeply rooted in the Indian culture, on matrimonial consent? We have organized our response to this question under four sub-questions and the response to these questions is developed in four chapters. In the first chapter we deal with the interpretation of ecclesial law in light of culture. The second chapter deals with the nature and the elements of matrimonial consent. The third chapter is a study of reverential fear as a ground of marriage nullity with particular reference to the factors that underlie reverential fear in the Indian cultural context. The focus of the fourth chapter is canonical jurisprudence on reverential fear. What we have discovered in our study is that there is a very close link between culture and law, and that a proper understanding of the cultural background of a person or of a community is very important to provide a just and equitable interpretation of law, marriage law in particular, and to apply it to a concrete case. Hence, a careful analysis of various cultural factors which impinge on matrimonial consent leads us to conclude that cultural factors can have a serious impact on the consent of the spouses and, indeed, the culturally rooted reverential fear can substantially affect the freedom of choice of marriage itself and/or of the marriage partner.

This thesis examines the role played by the United Nations in the implementation of the August 1962 New York Agreement. The Agreement ended a thirteen year dispute between the Netherlands and Indonesia concerning the future of West New Guinea and its Papuan inhabitants (or Irianese as they were known by Indonesia). Under the terms of the Agreement, the territory's administration was transferred to a temporary UN authority (UNTEA) which remained from 1 October 1962 until 1 May 1963. Following this, control of West New Guinea was handed over to Indonesia which renamed it West Irian (later Irian Jaya, now Papua). In 1968, a small UN team returned, led by Fernando Ortiz Sanz, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for West Irian (UNRWI). The team's responsibility was to "advise, assist and participate" in Indonesian preparations for an act of Papuan self-determination planned for 1969. This 'Act of Free Choice' (or Pepera as it was known by Indonesia), and the UN's involvement, were central to the Agreement and its fulfillment. Following the Introduction and a short chapter on the background to the dispute, chapters two to four look at the UNTEA administration. Chapter five examines briefly the first years of Indonesian rule in West Irian between 1963 and 1967. The arrival of the UN team in 1968 and Ortiz Sanz's first two tours of the territory are discussed in Chapters Six and Seven. Preparations for the Act in 1969, including the selection of the 1022 Papuan representatives who took part in it, are examined in Chapters Eight and Nine. Chapter Ten looks at the conduct of the Act itself and international reaction culminating in the UNGA vote of November 1969. The thesis ends with a conclusion in Chapter Eleven.

This dissertation examines the communication of identity in a Chinese Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Christian (CIREC) religious community in Boston, Massachusetts. Members of this community are English-dominant, Indonesian-born, racially and/or ethnically Chinese , and fundamentalist Christians. They have had to face and negotiate issues of identity that do not fit neatly into pre-existing social categories of race, ethnicity, religion and nationality, all of which are geographically-bound and determined by ruling powers of nation-states. Not tethered to specific geo-political locations and those locations' accompanying identity categories, it is solely through communication and daily social performance of `who they are' that members of this community create and negotiate their identity. Being a CIREC requires one to form one's identity around the act of evangelizing. In this community, evangelizing is practiced by engaging in (among other practices) a unique form of prayer referred to as `prayer of the faithful', distributing generic Christian pamphlets in Boston Common, the city's main public park, and discussing effective evangelizing strategies, without necessarily putting them into action. Engaging in these communication practices provides members with a sense of identity and belonging, a sense they never had due to the marginalized position of Chinese in an Indonesian socio-cultural context . Data used for this dissertation were drawn from twenty-one months of participation in prayer meetings, Bible study, Sunday service and social events outside of church settings. Using cultural discourse analysis as the main analytical framework (Berry, 2009; Carbaugh, 1996a, b, 2005, 2007, 2007a; Carbaugh, Gibson, and Milburn, 1997; Scollo, 2010), I explicated the daily social performance of the CIREC multicultural and international identity. This work seeks to contribute to scholarship on cultural communication, religious communication, Chinese diaspora identity studies, and suggests a comparison with practices of a mainstream fundamentalist evangelical Christian community in the United States. The focus on daily communicative enactments of identity in social settings also serves to bridge the gap between macro-level issues of ethnicity, race, and religion in an Indonesian and U.S socio-cultural context, and micro-level analyses of how a multicultural identity is enacted on a daily basis.

This dissertation is a study of the consequences of decollectivization (1978-1984) in rural China, a fundamental institutitional change that replaced Maoist collective economy with the Household Responsibility System, for the conditions of Chinese rural poverty. It first examines how decollectivization reshaped the spheres of prodution, exchange and distribution in Chinese rural economy, and discovers that it produced some adverse impacts on poverty reduction in rural China. The author then conducts a critical evaluation of official rural poverty statistics and reestimates the post-1978 Chinese rural poverty reduction performance. The results show that Chinese rural poverty might not have been reduced by much, or even worse, might well have increased since decollectivization. The research findings presented in this dissertation challenge the conventional wisdom that decollectization made a great contribution to poverty reduction in rural China. This dissertation study has an implication for poverty studies: institutional changes that seem to work well in generating economic growth may not work for promoting poverty reduction.

While community-based natural resource management projects have acquired increasing importance in the last decade, the notion of ‘community’ that is implicit in them has been subject to critique on a number of grounds. It is this that forms the starting point for my dissertation. This dissertation starts by discussing the diverse forms that ‘the community’ takes in three different water projects in the state of Maharashtra in western India. For instance, the community could be either an administrative unit or an ecological unit or an irrigation unit, and each of these has different equity and sustainability implications. The three cases also differ in the kind of internal characteristics they possess and how these contribute to decentralized sustainable development. Furthermore, while reified notions of the community serve a strategic purpose in one water project, in general, utopian notions of communities could lead to lack of acknowledgement of the interaction between the community and other institutions such as markets, with the result that an important arena of influencing equity is lost. Secondly, a study of three kinds of equities within the three communities—equities in rule content, process of rule-making and outcomes, reveals that the redistributive potential of water is realized only to a limited extent. The different equities are inter-related and depend on a variety of factors such as ideological motivation of the actors, the kind of water source, the prior internal organization present, the legal validity of the institutional arrangements and the nature of the leadership. Equity in content is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for equity in outcome. But equity in rule-making is the most critical—it is needed for implementation, to ensure continued equity in content and outcome, and to provide flexibility to use unexpected opportunities for changes in equity. Thirdly, I discuss the role that the state can play in further facilitating community-based sustainable development efforts. For instance, the state can use legislation for a clearer constitution of the unit of the community, as well as facilitate equity by influencing the decision-making rules that associations involved in water projects follow.

The 20th Century saw dramatic agrarian changes among third world countries. In many countries, the agrarian relations tended to be peasant-oriented at first, and then started favoring capital and landlord in the recent decades. In this dissertation, I explored the historical conditions and consequences of these profound changes, in particular focusing on the history of rural collectives and decollectivization in China. My findings differ from the existing literature in the following aspects. First, the literature argues that the Chinese rural collectives suffered from inefficiency and the decollectivization reform greatly improved agricultural productivity. My research shows that the previous studies suffer from a number of serious logical and/or methodological problems. After adjusting some data misusage, my results suggest that decollectivization did not increase productivity. I also construct an index of the legacy from the commune era to evaluate the long run impacts from the socialist period on agricultural productivity. The empirical results suggest that the provinces with higher socialist legacy tend to have higher agricultural productivity growth rates even after decollectivization. Second, the mainstream history suggests that due to their dissatisfaction with the rural regime, the peasants spontaneously organized and collectively dismantled the collective system. My research shows that the government was enthusiastic rather than passive in promoting the household model. The cadres who did not follow the orders from the central leadership would face immense political pressure. The mainstream view holds that those people who opposed decollectivization were local cadres who were afraid of losing control. But my research suggests that the cadres and a small part of peasants implemented and benefitted from the reform while the normal peasants were not enthusiastic and even opposed decollectivization in some cases. Moreover, my fieldwork suggests that many rural collectives experienced work avoidance and inefficiency, not because of egalitarianism but stratification (which basically means a cadre-peasant/manger-worker divide). The demise of rural collectives was mostly due to political pressure from the government. But the stratification contributed to peasants' passiveness in resisting the institutional change.

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