Until recently, institutional reforms implemented under the so-called 'apertura' economic strategy has emphasized the correction of macroeconomic imbalances through specific policy measures (i.e. privatization, open trade, fiscal balance, stable exchange rates). As overall imbalances have been corrected, policy makers are considering the introduction of a second generation of 'institutional reforms'. Consequently, the focus of reform would shift into the promotion of productivity, competition and innovation at the entrepreneurial level. These institutional goals presuppose a new regulatory framework, amenable to market functioning. Antitrust policy is one example among many regulatory initiatives being advocated to support market reforms. This thesis shows how the broad misconceptions about the nature of markets still pervades policy-making throughout the region. Antitrust policies could threaten to reproduce, under powerful new forms, the former interventionism that characterised 'development' policies of the 1960s and 1970s. Paradoxically, this interventionism would be justified in the name of preserving market transparency. Advocate of antitrust policies often share a subtle anti-market bias: Markets are regarded structures, where density of concentration determines how competitive they are. Following the welfare implications drawn from the neoclassical models of equilibrium, economic exchange is examined under severely constrained conditions: individuals are assumed to possess complete information and transactions are 'timeless'. The aftermath of this perspective is that all business arrangements are regarded 'restrictions to competition', some of these suspected of sheltering monopolistic purposes. The effects of these policies in the region could be particularly harmful in Latin America, as business interacting in the domestic markets of the region have developed over time numerous forms of unofficial institutional devices, most of them addressed to complement the lack of transparency of the enforcement of the official legal framework. In the wake of apertura, these institutional devices, coupled with high levels of economic concentration, appear to favour monopolistic conducts, but in fact they attempt to correct the adverse effects of decades of dirigisme and uncertainly of a stable rule of law upon business activities. Latin markets are undergoing a fast transformation since aperture began. Due to the lifting of trade regulations, there is a significant wave of mergers and acquisitions, privatization processes, setting up joint ventures, selling undervalued assets, and proliferation of new corporate forms and other forms of efficient association reshaping old inefficient structures and replacing them with new ones. Young Latin American antitrust agencies have already challenged many of these udertakings as sheltering some form of monopolistic endeavor. Under a perspective emphasizing the evolutive nature of market interaction, these conducts appear simply as modalities by which the economic knowledge of each market participant is passed on to others in the system. These seemingly monopolistic attempts are in fact efficient arrangements allowing businesses to plan in advance their activities relating to conjectural future business scenarios. These arrangements sometime encourage mergers, vertical integration, and even collusion, but they are also responsible for new market discoveries, innovation and increased production. To support this conclusion, this theses is supported on the heuristic process view of markets initiated by the School of Subjectivism in economic science. To promote competition and innovation within Latin America's weak institutional setting, a strong policy of deregulation, and limitation to government intervention through political accountability and judicial review is advocated in place of conventional antitrust policy, which would retain a marginal role.

The quality of Nigerian Legal Education is fast deteriorating and in addition, the current structure of monitoring the training of lawyers is grossly ineffective. This thesis discusses steps that can be taken in reforming the current structure of Nigerian legal education to revert this trend. This thesis proposes a sytem of internal institutional assessment by law faculties in Nigeria. Financial, social-cultural constraints and politicl economy interference are obstacles to reforming Nigerian legal education, but institutional assessment can mitigagte these obstacles. Using Mariana Prado's concept of institutional bypass as a solution to overcoming these obstacles and also as a means of advancing reforms in the training of lawyers in Nigeria, this thesis proposes the adoption of institutional assessment as a strategy to create an avenue for stimulating reforms and promoting quality in Nigerian legal education.

This dissertation argues that conventional analysis of business-state relations fails to capture the nuances of networks shaping Egypt's neoliberal reform experience. Instead, it posits that both the 'business-state' and 'domestic-international' divides should be reconsidered - with categories better understood based on the nature of individuals' socio-economic capital (Bourdieu 1986). I argue that only by using such a framework can we make visible insidious forms of resource capture and economic exclusion. On the macro-level, this dissertation tells a story of elite resource capture that occurred alongside Egypt's experience of economic liberalization. While particular attention is paid to reforms of the 2000s, I also trace developments to roots laid by international partnerships and platforms established during the first IMF-led reform project of the Mubarak era in the 1990s. On the micro-level, this is a story of some of the central networks of 'globalizers' (Springborg and Henry 2010) - or individuals who rose to become chief mediators for internationally funded initiatives to empower Egypt's 'private sector.' I examine their ascent in the industrial policy-making space during the tenure of the first businessman cabinet member, Rashid Mohammed Rashid (2004-2011). I focus on the role of these networks in capturing the central 'business development' programs initiated alongside the reforms of the 2000s, which I argue served as platforms for accessing both immediate rent streams, as well as for shaping industrial policies to gain future rents. I then follow a handful of these individuals as they secure one highly controversial industrial policy: the Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ) trade agreement between Egypt, Israel and the US. In particular, I highlight the web of individuals and organizations mobilized in the process, providing close examination of the small cohort standing at the center of negotiations. I draw from targeted interviews and participant observation conducted over three years of fieldwork and triangulate findings with printed sources including corporate press releases, leaked US embassy cables and evaluations by international development organizations.

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This research is aimed at analyzing the legal aspects of state enterprise reform in the People's Republic of China. It attempts not only to explain relevant laws and regulations in the context of China's complex economic, social and political environments, but also to reveal the basic nature and the practice of these laws and regulations. Since the late 1970s, considerable efforts have been made by the Chinese authorities to use formal laws and regulations to adjust different and often conflicting interests emerging in the course of the programme of reforms, and, in particular, to reshape and protect the rights and interests of state enterprises. Among the most noteworthy of the efforts at state enterprise reform are the official conferment of legal personality and management rights to state enterprises, the establishment of a director responsibility system, the adoption of a bankruptcy law, and employment of the contracting system for settling the government -- enterprise relationship. These attempts have had some effect, and state enterprises have gained the capacity to act as independent legal entities. Furthermore, state enterprises, in some places and from time to time, have come to possess a certain degree of autonomy which was impossible prior to the reforms. Nevertheless, these efforts have not been as effective and authoritative as they were designed and expected to be. Many enacted laws and regulations have not been followed in practice. Indeed, in many respects, they are readily undermined or even completely disregarded. The relevant laws and regulations are strongly policy-oriented. Being the mere embodiment of state policies, they can be easily undermined as a result of policy changes. The ineffective application of many laws and regulations is due less to the defects in their legal and technical provisions than to the ambiguity and uncertainty of the policies underlying state enterprise reform.

The late1980s, early 1990s was a time of change in the Swedish education system. New political reforms changed the Swedish living and school standards. The outcome of the reforms were decentralization, parents’ right to choose school and independent schools. The reforms opened up for a more local influence in schools, and paretns right to choose school and education of their own intreset. The focus of this essay is the concept of decentralization and equivalence and how it has changed and formed todays ementary school. This is a literary study about changes in the Swedish education system founded on studie reports and political reforms. The outcome of this study shows a change in the Swedish school, whitch has segregated both schools and students in a more homogeneously way, and the equality  has deteriorated.

Reform of state administration during the reign of Augustus Roman law reflected in non-legal antic relics Abstract The period of the late republic and the early principate was a time of many political, social and legal changes in the history of the ancient Roman state. In a relatively short period of time, the old state institutes collapsed and were fundamentally reformed or replaced with new ones. This thesis mainly focuses on the issue of reforms in selected areas of public law, namely the areas of state administration, tax administration and financial administration. In the field of state administration, the attention is paid to the reform of the provincial order, which had to be adapted to the new constitutional order of the state in which the princeps dominated, and the beginnings of the centralized offices of the Roman Empire, which were founded by Augustus, and which, under the rule of his successors, were further formalized and expanded into highly specialized bureaucratic bodies. In the field of tax administration, attention is paid both to the difficulties of the tax system of the late republic and its comparison with the tax system of Augustus' principate, while attention is paid both to tax collection and individual newly introduced taxes in their relation to new needs of the reformed financial...

Several scholars have identified institutional and regulatory conditions under which Information Communication Technologies (ICT) reforms can accomplish positive public policy outcomes. This literature pays little attention, however, to the role of parliaments in these reforms. The institutional factors determining the degree and nature of parliamentary participation in ICT sector reforms in Africa is what this thesis examines. Drawing from the political economy tradition, this thesis explores the interplay between the executive, the parliament and the various sectoral interests that determine ICT sector reforms in developing countries. It does so by placing parliament in a conceptual framework that combines the concept of ICT as a complex ecosystem with that of a constellation of institutions. The gathered empirical evidence is studied through this conceptual lens to build the cases of parliamentary participation in Kenya and South Africa - two of the most dynamic ICT markets in sub-Saharan Africa - which are then analysed comparatively. Some of the information is gathered through a self-assessment survey by members of the ICT parliamentary committees and complemented by high-level interviews with the main sector players. The findings are triangulated with those from an extensive document analysis. This thesis contextualises institutional analysis in specific political circumstances of the two countries in order to understand the relevance of parliament in sector reforms. The findings have important implications for our understanding of structural and institutional constraints on parliaments in developing countries and nascent democracies. Parliaments lack capacity to simply fulfill their legislative and oversight roles, let alone creating an enabling environment for innovative public policy, sector investment and public interest outcomes as required by this dynamic sector in any modern, globalised economy. Systematic coding of the data revealed national governance and institutional arrangements as key determinants of an ICT ecosystem that adapts to local and international conditions, confirming parliament as not simply a neutral legal structure but a significant power broker, reflecting competing interests at play. The formal legal system in both countries is uneven and underutilized, ineffective in achieving robustly-contested public interest outcomes. In order to manage political interests, parliament structures and serves principal agent-relationships, vetoes ICT policy and decision-making processes, links interest groups to government and party agendas, resolves conflicts and, sometimes, builds consensus among key players. The examination of institutional designs of both parliaments identifies critical capacity deficits that are at the heart of the negative outcomes in national legislative and oversight processes. In South Africa, the reason for these deficits is primarily that the parliamentary system promotes political party and executive dominance, which undermine multi-party and participatory structure of parliamentary processes to achieve party preferences and control outcomes. In Kenya, whilst the combination of distinct separation of powers and a constituency-based electoral system provides a legal basis for greater parliamentary accountability, the highly fragmented sector arrangements compounded by lack of internal capacity to utilize parliamentary instruments and mechanisms constrain parliament's participation. These weak institutional arrangements and designs, in both Kenya and South Africa, limit independence of parliament from the executive and sometimes industry, compromising the parliamentary oversight and visionary leadership expected from specialized portfolio committees. This calls for a transformation of arrangements to uphold and reinforce constitutional mandates that give parliament the power and ability to fulfill its role in policy reforms.

This thesis explores some of the implications of contemporary science studies for current science education reforms. The scientific literacy effort proposed by Project 2061 is described and criticized with regard to its educational and philosophical commitments. It is argued that a number of controversies involving science studies can aid students and educators in learning about science, education, and society. The educational ramifications of post-Kuhnian philosophy of science, sociology of science, constructivism, and hermeneutics are discussed, and it is argued that scientific literacy needs to be reconceptualized in order to take into account the understandings and debates of contemporary science studies. / Master of Science

The purpose of this study, is to investigate the dynamics of reforms (i.e. why and how) in the delivery of public services and management controls in an Irish local authority, paying particular attention to the role of a newly appointed CEO and austerity measures. The case study method is adopted. Several complementary socio-political theoretical lenses are adopted to give greater emphasis to agency and structure including concepts such as institutional entrepreneurship, institutional contradictions, institutional change, organisational change and power. Such theoretical pluralism illuminates the complex nature of public service reforms in an Irish local authority, as it sought to realise services efficiency targets in times of austerity. This study makes important contributions to research on public service deliveries and management controls. As far as its author is aware, this study is the first of its kind to detail the unfolding journey of reform in the delivery of services and management controls in an Irish local authority that faced the significant challenges of austerity. Hence, for this reason alone the research contributes significantly towards the development of new knowledge in this important area. Furthermore, an in-depth process-oriented account of a purposeful institutional entrepreneur, utilising management accounting information, power and communication, in reforming the delivery of public services and management controls, is provided. Also revealed is how external factors, such as the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent central government funding cuts, enabled rather than constrained, institutional entrepreneurship. In addition, the case findings informed, how in conditions of austerity, the fundamentals of budgetary control became easier to enforce.