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During the Communist Party of China's endeavors over the past century, China has created “two miracles,” namely, large-scale and rapid economic development and long-term social stability.

The causes for China's achieving the “two miracles” lie in the adherence to the Party's leadership as the political guarantee, the scientific theoretical guidance as the ideological guarantee, the socialist system as well as the national governance system as the institutional guarantee and giving full play of people's creativity under the Party's leadership as the driving force guarantee.

From a political economy point of view, the theoretical logic behind the creation of the “two miracles” is that the combination of the state capacity and the scaling up of markets under the Party's leadership contributes to the rapid economic development and further the long-term social stability based on the financial foundation laid by rapid economic development. The historical experience of the “Two Miracles” can be summed up as the cultivation of state capacity under the leadership of the Party, the synergy and complementarity between the central government and local governments, the combination of development planning and market mechanisms, and the coordination of selective, functional and inclusive industrial policies.

It is necessary to judge future development trends from a medium and long-term development perspective, further promote the co-evolution of the state and the market, reshape the growth regime for high-quality development, fully tap the potential of domestic demand and create a “people-centered” economic development model so as to continue the “two miracles” and achieve a miracle of high-quality development in the second century.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relation between estate transformations produced during the governments of the Citizen Revolution (CR) in Ecuador (2007-2017) and welfare regime transformations.

The CR’s project registers an array of specificities that make it a relevant case study to understand it. Among them, it articulated the transformation of the development model with a comprehensive state reform: emphasized both the modernization of the state and the productive structure, and the creation of the basic pillars of a welfare state. The ambitious project materialized in an ambivalent manner, revealing accomplishments and limitations.

The recovery of resources for the state, the efficient organization of resources, decentralization and deconcentration processes, public administration transformations and policy de-corporatization processes accompanied and even propelled important achievements in the social sphere in terms of decommodification, stratification, commodification and defamiliarization. Ecuador’s starting point, as a small and impoverished country with pubic and communal goods and services dismantled through neoliberal reforms, was quite precarious. But, progress was made. Beyond the identified limitations, its accomplishments must be highlighted because they are novel in comparison to other progressive government experiences, especially in the context of Central Andean countries.

This article vindicates the need to link state transformation processes to welfare regime transformations, as well as the academic literature that informs both fields. The description of what took place in Ecuador in the field of social welfare during the ten years of the CR continues to confirm the theoretical potential of the concept of welfare regime with the necessary translations and appropriations that allow for the analysis of countries in the region. It enables an approach to a more theoretically and methodologically elusive object that is at the same time tremendously potent in analytical terms and in its contributions to social transformations. An object that alludes to areas gravely affected during neoliberal hegemony, linked to public institutionality, state capacity and state autonomy. This is why everything that affects the state and the management of public goods and services must be incorporated into the analysis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of government institutions and prompted a broad range of policy measures from governments around the world. Policy responses to the pandemic have varied considerably, both in nature and in success. This paper highlights the policy capacities of the UAE in different areas that have contributed to managing the COVID-19 crisis. Specifically, the paper examines the functional capacity, analytical capacity, fiscal capacity, well-timed information-sharing capacity and political capacity of the UAE in addressing the pandemic.

The study on which this paper was based adopted a mixed-method approach to analyze policy capacities. The trajectory and timeframe of COVID-19 from February 2020 to February 2021 were observed intensively and included in the policy capacity analysis. The secondary dataset was collected from several sources and assessed using rapid content analysis to highlight the formal and institutional policy measures implemented during the crisis. To complement the policy analysis and understand the key role of policymakers, semi-structured interviews were conducted with local officials working in various line departments that formulate and implement policy strategies for the UAE government.

The findings of the study showed that although COVID-19 has severely impacted the UAE, the nation has effectively controlled the spread of the virus and reduced its mortality rate. The UAE government has taken swift policy actions concerning coercive control and mitigation based on a centralized decision-making style, the strengthening of administrative capacity by collaboration, coordination with different departments, successful communication with residents, the allocation of adequate financial resources and a high level of trust in the government by citizens.

This work contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the policy capacity approach to managing the crisis. The UAE case can be used by policymakers as comparative studies of policy designs, tools and capabilities that can be implemented to manage future pandemics and other crises.

The spread of COVID-19 is not just a health crisis. The pandemic has taken a geopolitical dimension. The health crisis amplified the competitive dynamics between the USA and China, affected the provision of global public goods and injected instability into the global order. In line with the geopolitical zero-sum thinking, both the USA and China have sought to capitalize on the crisis to boost their international profile. Instead of working together to mitigate the health and economic impacts of COVID-19, the two powers fear that the other will exploit the current situation to accrue political, economic or military gains that will give it an edge after the pandemic subsides. The spread of COVID-19 has set off a “battle of narratives,” in which China and the USA are accusing each other of failing to rise to the challenge. The world seems to be falling into a “Kindleberger Trap,” in which the established power is unable to lead while the rising power is unwilling to assume responsibility. The COVID-19 crisis is occurring amid the collapse of global cooperation. The USA, the traditional leader of international collective efforts in times of crisis, has abandoned its role entirely. The lack of leadership at the global level during an international crisis may cause the breakdown of the international order.

This paper examines the US-China competitive dynamics through the lens of the work of Charles Kindleberger, which both liberals and realists regard as foundational when examining the dynamics of global crisis management. This paper also uses the meta-geopolitics framework to determine the ability of both China and the USA to respond to the current COVID-19 crisis and its implications for their power and standing in the international system.

This paper concludes that the only way to escape the Kindleberger trap is “to embed Sino-American relations in multilateralism.”

As rivals, both the USA and China are seeking to capitalize on the crisis to boost their international profile. This paper probes how China and the USA navigated the ongoing COVID-19 crisis to determine whether or not they are currently in a “Kindleberger Trap,” using elements of the meta-geopolitics framework of analysis, namely, health issues, domestic politics, economics, science and international diplomacy. Using the meta-geopolitics framework will help us determine the ability of both China and the USA to respond to the current COVID-19 crisis and the implications of that on their power and standing in the international system.

This paper aims to demonstrate that state shareholders are confronted with contradictory logics leading to institutional contradictions that activist shareholders can exploit. The competing logics of the state as shareholder and their impact on corporate governance and shareholder activism offer fertile grounds for research advances in Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs).

Through an extensive literature review of state ownership, institutional contradictions and shareholder activism, this paper analyzes two case studies involving the French State as shareholder.

In the French context, these two cases illustrate how institutional contradictions result in opportunities for shareholder activism. By focusing on the institutional contradictions of the state shareholder, this investigation suggests a need for experimental research to observe how shareholder activists adapt to each institutional change in CMEs. This experimentation can help policymakers to avoid creating additional conditions that shareholder activists can exploit.

This focuses only on France and its state shareholdings. To generalize results, studies of other CMEs and state shareholders are needed.

Policymakers should consider all legislative proposals for their potential to deviate from corporate governance practice by experimenting with them in a laboratory setting. Shareholder activists can compare state shareholders’ actions against the state’s legislation to emphasize institutional contradictions that counter minority shareholders’ rights.

This research is the first to analyze how the state as shareholder can exploit its competing logics to resist against shareholder activism and support management or to become itself a shareholder activist.

The purpose of the study is to investigate how the processes of exploration and exploitation have developed in parallel in the literature of organizational ambidexterity and organizational learning, since James March published his seminal paper in 1991. The goal of the paper is to provide a synthesis of exploration and exploitation based on the two areas of literature.

The study is conceptual and no empirical data have been used.

The study advances current understanding of exploration and exploitation by building a new model for organizational ambidexterity that takes into account multiple levels of learning, perspectives from absorptive capacity and inter-organizational learning.

The study’s novelty lies in the creation and discussion of a synthesis of exploration and exploitation stemming from organizational ambidexterity and organizational learning.

Single-party regimes increasingly use Subnational Performance Assessments (SPAs) – rankings of provinces and districts – to improve governance outcomes. SPAs assemble and publicize information on local government performance to facilitate monitoring and generate competition among officials. However, the evidence are sparse on their effects in this context. The authors argue that built-in incentive structures in centralized single-party regimes distort the positive impact of SPAs.

The staggered rollout of the Vietnam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) created a natural experiment. Due to 2010 budget constraints, the first iteration of the PAPI survey covered only 30 of Vietnam’s 63 provinces before covering all in 2011. The PAPI team used matching procedures to identify a statistical twin for each province before randomly selecting one from each pair. The authors use randomization inference to compare the outcomes of these control and treatment groups in 2011.

Exposure to PAPI helped improve almost all aspects of governance; however, significant evidence of prioritization bias exist. The positive effects only persisted for the dimension of administrative procedures, which was the one area of governance that was prioritized by the central government at the time. Other dimensions only registered short-term effects.

Our study provides an examination of the impact of SPAs in a single-party regime context. In addition, the authors leverage the natural experiment to identify information effects causally. The authors also look past short-term effects to compare outcomes for five years after the treatment occurred.

The purpose of this study is to develop new type of reverse mortgage contract. How to provide adequate services and housing for an increasing number of people that are dependent on the help of others is a crucial question in the European Union (EU). The housing stock in Europe is not fit to support a shift from institutional care to the home-based independent living. Some 90% of houses in the UK and 70%–80% in Germany are not adequately built, as they contain accessibility barriers for people with emerging functional impairments. The available reverse mortgage contracts do not allow for relocation to their own adapted facilities. How to finance the adaptation from housing equity is discussed.

The authors have extended the existing loan reverse mortgage model. Actuarial methods based on the equivalence of the actuarial present values and the multiple decrement approach are used to evaluate premiums for flexible longevity and lifetime long-term care (LTC) insurance for financing adequate facilities.

The adequate, age-friendly housing provision that is appropriate to support the independence and autonomy of seniors with declining functional capacities can lower the cost of health care and improve the well-being of older adults. For financing the development of this kind of facilities for seniors, the authors developed the reverse mortgage scheme with embedded longevity and LTC insurance as a possible financial instrument for better LTC services and housing with care in assisted-living facilities. This kind of facilities should be available for the rapid growth of older cohorts.

The numerical example is based on rather crude numbers, because of lack of data, as the developed reverse mortgage product with LTC insurance is a novelty. Intensity of care and probabilities of care in certain category of care will change after the introduction of this product.

The model results indicate that it is possible to successfully tie an insurance product to the insured and not to the object.

The introduction of this insurance option will allow many older adult with low pension benefits and a substantial home equity to safely opt for a reverse mortgage and benefit from better social care.

While currently available reverse mortgage contracts lapse when the homeowner moves to assisted-living facilities in any EU Member State, in the paper a new method is developed where multiple adjustments of housing to the functional capacities with relocation is possible, under the same insurance and reverse mortgage contract. The case of Slovenia is presented as a numerical example. These insurance products, as a novelty, are portable, so the homeowner can move in own specialised housing unit in assisted-living facilities and keep the existing reverse mortgage contract with no additional costs, which is not possible in the current insurance products. With some small modifications, the method is useful for any EU Member State.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.