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The Chinese government opened the door for faith-based organisations to provide public services in 2005. However, faith-based social work services remain an understudied research field. This article begins with a literature review of the institutional environment for faith-based organisations and addresses three issues: the types of faith-based social work organisations that have emerged in China; the development of faith-based social work organisations; and the implications of their rise for the development of social work as a profession in China. By analysing longitudinal data collected from 2006 to 2019, this article identifies three models of faith-based social service organisations that have emerged and developed in China: (i) traditional faith-based organisations that hire social workers; (ii) grassroots social service organisations that are supported by religious bodies; and (iii) grassroots social service organisations that are operated by religious social workers with no affiliation to religious bodies. Although most of the organisations obtain public funding partially from the government, findings have shown that organisations of the third model type have the most diverse funding sources and have developed minimal dependency on the government. With trust and support from diverse stakeholders, faith-based organisations of the third model type appear to be suitable placement agencies providing social work students with employment and the value base to reflect critically their personal faith and social work values in China's unique sociopolitical context. (China/GIGA)

Although the Chinese government has mobilised the world's largest number of youth participants in various civic service programmes since 1949, evidence indicates that the programmes remain far from achieving their goals. To examine the challenges of and options for implementing state-led youth civic services in China, this article begins with a literature review and later describes a study that involved the application of qualitative methods to explore structural features that have affected the implementation of state-led civic service programmes in China, including "Graduates Voluntarily Serving in Western China" (Daxuesheng zhiyuan fuwu xibu), "Graduates Serving as Village Officers" (Daxuesheng cunguan) and "Graduates Engaging in Teaching, Agriculture, and Health and Poverty Alleviation in Rural Areas" (San zhi yi fu). The findings indicate a boundary between state power and the market order that, as a structural factor, limits the number and types of institutions that may host youth in state-led civic service programmes in China. In response, China's state-led civic service programmes should not limit themselves to the public sector but invite the third sector to participate in order to overcome state–market barriers. Moreover, at the policy level, a win-win situation is possible if the central government delegates the hiring power to the local government and host institutions. (CIJ/GIGA)

In line with the opening up of Chinese society, a variety of policy adjustments have been undertaken to legitimise the voluntary service organisations (VSOs) that provide various services to the general public. This article applies the qualitative method in examining the legitimisation process of a faith-based VSO that has an international background, and aims to promote human rights and dignity. The findings indicate, first, that the VSO adopts rational compromise strategies, which include "doing rather than saying", using the "right" words that are acceptable to the government, seeking common interests with the government and seeking common core values with the clients. Second, the compromise strategies help the VSO to achieve a formal legal status and enhance its organisational autonomy, including financial sustainability and independent power in personnel matters. Therefore, the aforementioned compromise approach is a new form of state-society interaction that may gradually facilitate the legitimisation of civil society. (China/GIGA)

Ying Xu1 INTRODUCTION China�s banking sector has traditionally been under heavy government regulation and control and foreign participation in the banking sector has been restricted. However, since its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, China has gradually lifted these restrictions and substantially opened up the banking sector to foreign investors. In recent years, attracted by China�s huge market potential, foreign bank participation has increased significantly. Moreover, encouraged by the government, the majority of foreign investors have adopted a unique form of foreign entry: foreign strategic investment. Foreign strategic investment (FSI) is �medium-to-long-term� foreign investment based on minority equity participation and agreements on the transfer of know-how (CBRC, 2003). Compared to traditional forms of foreign entry, FSI has two important features. First, FSI is minority equity participation, currently under the ceilings ensured by the authorities of 20 percent ownership by a single foreign investor and 25 percent by the combined share of all foreign investors in one bank (CBRC, 2003). Through this form of participation foreign investors can therefore only own up to 20 or 25 percent of any local bank. This contrasts with foreign direct investment (FDI), which is characterized by foreign investors holding controlling ownership stakes of a domestic bank (OECD, 1996).2 Second, FSI also differs from international portfolio investment. The latter involves only equity participation, whereas FSI entails long-term business cooperation, managerial involvement and technology transfer. In almost all cases of FSI, foreign investor equity purchase is accompanied by agreements on transfer of information.

Forest management strategies directly affect landowner welfare, and factors ranging from natural disturbances to institutional environments play important roles in influencing the outcomes for both landowners and society. This dissertation, consisting of three essays, delves into the forest sectors in both developed and developing countries with an aim of uncovering the impacts of various factors in forest management, as well as resulting welfare changes felt by landowners and society. The first essay extends previous literature on natural disturbances and forest management, where a single disturbance and immediate clearcut after it are always assumed, through the introduction of multiple disturbances and flexible harvest timing. A Faustmann-type rotation model is developed and used to guide simulations of loblolly pine management in the southern United States. We show that failure to consider the possibility of multiple disturbances and the oversimplification of harvest rules after a single disturbance leads to suboptimal harvest decisions. The second essay further extends the natural disturbance literature by considering the amenity value of unharvested forests in addition to timber value. As before, multiple types of disturbances as well as flexible harvest timing are incorporated into a Hartmann-type framework. Alternative amenity functions are employed in the simulations in which socially optimal harvest strategies are derived. We further examine the discrepancies between optimal harvest decisions of the landowner and those of the social planner, and compute social costs of ignoring amenity value. Our results show that ignoring amenity value can generate social costs and render harvest decisions socially suboptimal. Forest production in developing countries also suffers from institutional weaknesses that distorts household decision making. The third essay therefore investigates impacts of village democracy on rural household welfare in China through changes in production efficiency in forestry and agriculture sectors using data collected from a household survey. A theoretical framework is first established, and based upon that framework stochastic production frontier models are estimated where democracy is incorporated as a potential factor affecting the variation of technical efficiency. We find that higher levels of village democracy significantly increase production efficiency. A first study on how village democracy affects rural household welfare, we provide policy lessons for other developing countries undergoing democratization. ; Ph. D.

Modern indoor environments contain a vast array of contaminating sources. Emissions from these sources produce contaminant concentrations that are substantially higher indoors than outside. Because we spend most of our time indoors, exposure to indoor pollutants may be orders-of-magnitude greater than that experienced outdoors. Phthalate esters have been recognized as major indoor pollutants. They are mainly used as plasticizers to enhance the flexibility of polyvinylchloride (PVC) products, as well as in humectants, emollients, and antifoaming agents. Phthalates are found in a wide range of consumer products including floor and wall coverings, car interior trim, floor tiles, gloves, footwear, insulation on wiring, and artificial leather. Because these phthalate additives are not chemically bound to the polymer matrix, slow emission from the products to the surrounding air or other media usually occurs. Biomonitoring data suggest that over 75% of the U.S. population is exposed to phthalates. The ubiquitous exposure to phthalates is of concern because toxicological investigations have demonstrated considerable adverse health effects of phthalates and their metabolites. Studies have shown that exposure to phthalates results in profound and irreversible changes in the development of the reproductive tract, especially in males, raising the possibility that phthalate exposures could be the leading cause of reproductive disorders in humans. In addition, effects such as increases in prenatal mortality, reduced growth and birth weight, skeletal, visceral, and external malformations are possibly associated with phthalate exposure. Epidemiologic studies in children also show associations between phthalate exposure in the home and the risk of asthma and allergies. Given the ubiquitous nature of phthalates in the environment and the potential for adverse human health impacts, there is a critical need to understand indoor emissions of phthalates and to identify the most important sources and pathways of exposure. In this study, a model that integrates the fundamental mechanisms governing emissions of semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) from polymeric materials and their subsequent interaction with indoor surfaces and airborne particles was developed. The emissions model is consistent with analogous mechanistic models that predict emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from building materials. Reasonable agreement between model predictions and gas-phase di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP) concentrations was achieved for data collected in a previously published experimental study that measured emissions of DEHP from vinyl flooring in two very different chambers. The analysis showed that while emissions of highly volatile VOCs are subject to internal control (through the material-phase diffusion coefficient), emissions of the very low volatility SVOCs are subject to external control (through partitioning into the gas phase, the convective mass transfer coefficient, and adsorption onto interior surfaces). Because of the difficulties associated with sampling and analysis of SVOCs, only a few chamber studies quantifying their emissions from building materials and consumer products are available. To more rigorously validate the SVOCs emission model and more completely understand the mechanisms governing the release of phthalate from polymeric building materials, the emission of DEHP from vinyl flooring was studied for up to 140 days in a specially-designed stainless steel chamber. In the duplicate chamber study, the gas-phase concentration in the chamber increased slowly and reached a steady state level of 0.9 µg/m3 after 30 days. By increasing the area of vinyl flooring and decreasing that of the stainless steel surface in the chamber, the time to reach steady state was significantly reduced, compared to the previous study (1 month vs. 5 months). The adsorption isotherm of DEHP on the interior stainless steel chamber surface was explicitly measured using two different methods (solvent extraction and thermal desorption). Strong adsorption of DEHP onto the stainless steel surface was observed and found to follow a simple linear relationship. In addition, parameters measured in the experiments were then applied in the fundamental SVOCs emission model. Good agreement was obtained between the predictions of the model and the gas-phase DEHP chamber concentrations, without resorting to fitting of model parameters. These chamber studies have shown that the tendency of SVOCs to adsorb strongly to interior surfaces has a very strong influence on the emission rate. Compared to the experimental chamber systems, however, the real indoor environment has many other types of surface that will adsorb phthalates to different extents. The emission rate measured in a test chamber may therefore be quite different to the emission rate from the same material in the indoor environment. For this reason, both a two-room model and a more representative three-compartment model were developed successively to estimate the emission rate of DEHP from vinyl flooring, the evolving gas-phase and adsorbed surface concentrations, and human exposures (via inhalation, dermal absorption and oral ingestion of dust) in a realistic indoor environment. Adsorption isotherms for phthalates and plasticizers on interior surfaces, such as carpet, wood, dust and human skin, were derived from previous field and laboratory studies. A subsequent sensitivity analysis revealed that the vinyl flooring source characteristics, as well as mass-transfer coefficients and ventilation rates, are important variables influencing the steady-state DEHP concentration and resulting exposures. A simple uncertainty analysis suggested that residential exposure to DEHP originating from vinyl flooring may fall somewhere between about 5 µg/kg/d and 180 µg/kg/d. The roughly 40-fold range in exposure reveals the inherent difficulty in using biomonitoring results to identify specific sources of exposure in the general population. This research represents the first attempt to explicitly elucidate the fundamental mechanisms governing the release of phthalates from polymeric building materials as well as their subsequent interaction with interior surfaces. The mechanistic models developed can most likely be extended to predict concentration and exposure arising from other sources of phthalates, other sources of other semi-volatile organic compounds (such as biocides and flame retardants), as well as emissions into other environmental media (food, water, saliva, and even blood). The results will be of value to architects, governments, manufacturers, and engineers who wish to specify low-emitting green materials for healthy buildings. It will permit health professionals to identify and control health risks associated with many of the SVOCs used in indoor materials and consumer products in a relatively inexpensive way. ; Ph. D.