This chapter traces developments in the energy sector from the systemic crisis under Gorbachev, through Russia’s difficult start after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the consolidation of Russia under Putin.

This chapter considers public decision-making and children’s rights. Government action is essential to providing the legal, social and economic conditions in which children are protected from violations of their rights and provided with the environment in which they can thrive. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain in creating and securing consistent and practically effective protection for children’s rights in public law. The privatisation of many public services that affect children can create an accountability gap in which responsibility for children is fragmented. Further, any of the rights that are most important to children have a clear basis in international law, but a more uncertain foundation in domestic law. Finally, consideration of children’s interests in public decision-making and legislating is patchy, with no systematic means of reviewing policy or legislation for compatibility with children’s rights. This chapter considers these challenges before looking specifically at the issue of child poverty.

The chapter examines what gets lost analytically when governments move from thinking empirically about complex interdependent systems to relying instead on decision-making models that assume an unchanging mode of human rationality and fixed economic laws. Having set out the neoclassical theory behind outsourcing, privatisation and agencification, the chapter investigates how these policies have played out in practice. It demonstrates that although more critical i.e. ‘second best world’ neoclassical economic theories help us understand the chronic contractual, regulatory and oversight problems that prevail at the microeconomic level, it is the lessons of Soviet enterprise planning that tell us more about the systemic failures of these policies. Soviet planning failures illuminate why these reforms induce bargaining games between firms and ‘firm-like’ state agencies that the state cannot win, and why government attempts to solve chronic policy failures with remedial regulations that conform to orthodoxy create an ever more rigid bureaucracy over time, and in the case of outsourcing, increasingly informal relations prone to corruption, exactly as they did in the USSR.

Discusses alternatives to traditional economic regulation, including competition for the market, contestability, state ownership, reliance on competition law, deregulation and negotiated agreements

Describes the rationale for, and approach to, regulation of the rail industry. Considers the effects of restructuring, horizontal and vertical separation policies, and the experience of Ramsey pricing

Chapter 2 traces the contours of China’s SOE reform since 1978. We divided the reform into five phases, where the first two phases focused on ensuring the survival of SOEs by granting them operational autonomies, first at the firm level and then at the managerial level. The third phase saw the adoption of corporatisation strategies for the ones deemed promising and privatisation of the ones deemed unviable. The fourth phase covered the first decade after China’s accession to the WTO, where the earlier trajectories continued, as we can see in the efforts to continue the market-oriented reform for SOEs with plans of commercialisation and modernisation. At the same time, a worrying trend also started to emerge when the government launched various campaigns to create national champions. This trend continued in the fifth phase as we entered the new era of ’Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, where SOEs, strengthened by the previous rounds of reforms, started to squeeze out private firms in various forms. At the same time, the CPC also stepped up its efforts to enhance its influence in the SOEs by launching aggressive drives to build Party cells in these entities.

This chapter probes the borders of the public supervisory jurisdiction by looking at a parallel private law supervisory jurisdiction under which the courts judicially review decisions by "domestic tribunals". This comparative exercise gives pause for reflection on the deeper conceptual and normative foundations of judicial review, especially for questions of amenability to review. In the modern administrative state, many apparently "public" functions are performed by private, profit-oriented or charitable bodies and the review of these bodies has been an important testing ground in which theories of judicial review have been formulated and defended. Stopping short of suggesting a grand, unified theory of all the supervisory jurisdictions, I argue that an appreciation of the deep, structural parallels helps us to understand the common law roots of judicial review and that office could provide some intellectual resources to advance the province of administrative law judicial review in a principled fashion.

The chapter focuses on education as a social variable. It critically reviews classical approaches and suggests news ways of integrating education as a variable in sociolinguistic research in Arabic. These approaches are illustrated by examples from qualitative and quatitative studies.

This chapter examines public responses to new urban shopping spaces and interrogates the idea of voracious consumer demand which underpinned major retail developments. I show that the projections of ‘demand’ which were put together in support of redevelopment were not borne out by the poor trading experience of many new shopping facilities after opening. The politically embarrassing failures of high-profile ‘white elephants’ prompted both government and the development industry to take much more seriously the complexities and limits of ‘demand’ in the affluent society. The chapter also probes some broader questions about the nature of Britain’s post-war affluent society. By the later 1960s, it was already clear that projections of inexorably expanding prosperity were misjudged, and the installation of expensive new shopping facilities at the heart of British urban life began to look somewhat misplaced. I highlight the rising currents of protest against the commercially driven course of urban transformation which became increasingly pronounced at this time. Citizens, activists and academics began to critique the encroachment of the retail economy over ever more of the city’s shared spaces. The chapter also considers the political implications of the widespread installation of enclosed, privately owned shopping spaces across the urban centres of post-war Britain.

Economics takes the view from the present. But as people become affluent, they care more for the future, which is what government provides for. In the twentieth century, government has grown faster than the economy, and even Conservative governments have failed to wind it down. The reason is that markets take the short view and cannot provide for the future on their own. Before the nineteenth century, interest was seen as usury, rent as parasitical, and profit as exploitation. In response, the neoclassical economics of the 1870s came to the defence of privilege: property was legitimate, interest and profit were the cost of patience, the reward for capitalist energy and enterprise. Markets were the natural order, government and taxes parasitical. Since the 1980s governments have embraced markets as enterprising, innovative, efficient, superior. But privatisation, deregulation, and outsourcing have not fulfilled their promise. Government has not gone away. An outline of the book concludes.

The final chapter discusses the main findings of the previous chapters. It draws a continuous line between the different phenomena presented in the book and explains how they constitute a gradual process of privatization. It summarizes the different national and private interests in the development of the area along the Trans-Israel Highway and explains how this influence was manifested in the local built environment and in residents’ everyday lives. Using the case studies presented in the book, the chapter concludes by presenting a new theoretical framework that explains the relations between the state, the market. and the individual, and how these shape the built environment and the everyday lives of those living in it.

The Suburban Settlement phenomenon is an integral part of the economic and cultural changes that Israel underwent during the 1970s, including the formation of a local upper-middle class and significant modifications in popular culture. With the liberalization and privatization processes in the Israeli economy, the existing hegemonic cultural elite was able to use its political strength and connections to preserve its status and transform its cultural capital into financial capital, eventually becoming an economic upper-middle class. This process was accompanied by a transition toward a more individualistic and consumerist culture, referred to as the bourgeoisification of Israeli society. Suburban Settlements were larger and more homogeneously planned than Community Settlements. They were usually built by well-connected developers and designated for specific families who were affiliated with leading political parties or key national establishments like the military, defense-affiliated industries and other strategic institutions. This chapter focuses on Kochav Yair, Alfei Menashe, Oranit, and Reut. Analyzing the method of their construction, as well as their urban and architectural characteristics, the chapter illustrates how changes in the settlement development mechanism led to changes in living patterns and transformed the local built environment.