Suchergebnisse

AbstractWhether or not bilateralism and regionalism have threatened multilateralism has been debated in the literature. In recent years, the United States has argued that the increasing numbers of regional and bilateral trading arrangements made under the Bush administration are 'complementary' to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Accordingly, the case of Taiwan's bilateral trade negotiations with the United States and its accession to the WTO provide a useful case study for examining the relations between bilateralism and multilateralism. This article not only aims to study the role of bilateralism and multilateralism in Taiwan's liberalization process, it also seeks to compare the two types of trade diplomacy in terms of power relations, decision-making and negotiation, and the influence of negotiation on economic liberalization. The article is divided into three sections: the first section focuses on US–Taiwan bilateral trade negotiations during the 1970s and 1980s; the second section mainly discusses the process of Taiwan's WTO accession; and the final section examines Taiwan's bilateral and multilateral trade diplomacy after its accession.

The tension between mobilizing resources to meet education-related growth targets and regularizing educational funding for a more stable and sustainable growth is structurally rooted in China's educational system, which features growth-oriented, centralized mandates and county-based, decentralized financing. It was manifested in 2012, when China experienced a 'great leap' in educational expenditure. Based on interviews and school-level data from a province in western China, this article suggests that the 'great leap' was real rather than fabricated. Local governments have demonstrated remarkable capacity in resource mobilization involving both formal and informal strategies. It also shows the scarring effects of too much mobilization. The 'great leap' has clearly stressed and strained local governments to the extent that there is clear evidence of policy non-compliance and greater irregularity in government funding for education in the aftermath. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

To accurately forecast container throughput is crucial to the success of any port operation policy. This study attempts to create an optimal predictive model of volumes of container throughput at ports by using genetic programming (GP), decomposition approach (X-11), and seasonal auto regression integrated moving average (SARIMA). Twenty-nine years of historical data from Taiwan's major ports were collected to establish and validate a forecasting model. The Mean Absolute Percent Error levels between forecast and actual data were within 4% for all three approaches. The GP model predictions were about 32–36% better than those of X-11 and SARIMA. These results suggest that GP is the optimal method for this case. GP predicted that container throughputs at Taiwan's major ports would slowly increase in the year 2008. Since Taiwan's government opened direct transportation with China in July 2008, the issue of container throughput in Taiwan has become even more worthy of discussion.