Housing Reform in Kolkata: Changes and Challenges

Since 1991 the housing sector in Kolkata has been the subject of significant reforms based on profound changes in the political economy of the State of West Bengal. The paper reviews four reform initiatives: public-private partnership, privatisation of public rental housing, development of New Towns, and the finance sector deregulation in Kolkata and discusses their relevance to the urban context of the city. It is observed that the new reform measures have been successful in reviving the housing market by attracting private and foreign investment and producing housing for the middle- and upper-income population, but have led to the loss of safety nets, and ignored the informal urban context of the city, resulting in the exclusion of about a third of the city population who live in slums and bustees. As a result, the benefits of housing market growth have been offset by the failure to meet the broader social agenda. While a general consensus in favour of the reform is evident, there is growing concern that the broader ideology of housing the poor is being discounted in favour of capital-driven development fuelled by globalisation and privatisation.     

Housing Maintenance and Management in Russia during the Reforms

The primary objectives of the housing reforms in the Russian Federation were to reduce the balance of the state housing stock by privatisation and to raise rental payments in order to permit the market to achieve a more efficient utilisation of the housing stock by allocating available housing to those with effective housing demand. Part of these objectives also included improving the quality of maintenance in state housing by breaking up the monopolies of state maintenance firms and replacing them with private firms procured through competitive bidding procedures. Moscow, in particular, has been a forerunner in implementing housing reform policies, including shifting from state maintenance firms to contracted private ones. Using Moscow and other Russian cities as illustrations for reforms in maintenance and managementbrings to light the benefits of private maintenance and also problems which must be overcome, not only throughout Russia but in nearly all the countries of the formerSoviet bloc. This paper evaluates the institutional changes of maintenance and sources of funding for maintenance in Moscow during the reforms; it shows evidence of improved quality of housing maintenance through the use of contracted private firms; and providesa general overview of competitive maintenance and condominium formation throughout Russia.     

China's Urban Housing Reform: Recent Achievements and New Inequities

China's urban housing reform started in the early 1980s, as a part of comprehensive economic reform. The old system was dominated by work units that provided substantial in-kind services to their employees, including heavily subsidised housing. It brought three serious problems: housing shortages, corruption and inequities. The goals of housing reform were to solve these problems through urban housing privatisation, commercialisation and socialisation. This study examines China's urban housing reform through a case study of the city of Jinan. It first reviews the history of housing development in Jinan from the 1950s to the 1980s, and then analyses Jinan's reform practices in the 1990s. Its finding is that, after many years' efforts, housing reform in Jinan has made substantial progress, but mostly with respect to privatisation. The problem of housing shortages has been addressed and crowding has lessened considerably. Anecdotal evidence suggests that corruption is less widespread than in the past. The other important housing problem, inequity, still exists and, in some respects, has even worsened. In particular, a new form of horizontal inequity has arisen due to the persistent role of work units in housing provision. This paper suggests that, in the future, the government should take a more positive role rather than leaving the market alone to deal with the problem of housing inequity.     

Rethinking water reform policies as a ‘wicked problem’ the case of urban water supply in Ghana

Based on the theory of ‘wicked problem’ this paper investigates the causes of unsuccessful reform of urban water utilities in Accra, Ghana. The authors of this paper argue that reforms based only on managerial perspectives are not enough. Taking into account institutional and social issues is a key for the success of such reforms. Donors and international agencies lack such outlook and therefore fail to develop effective water policy reforms in developing countries generally. The paper discusses inter-twined and multi-dimensional institutional constraints that hinder the development of an appropriate approach to water utility reform in Accra.     

China's textbook approach to regulatory reform of the natural gas market

Natural gas, as a transition fuel, is considered essential for China's decarbonization and local air protection policy, yet the regulatory structure China relies on to promote gas use remains under-researched. China's central government recognizes the need for market-based reforms of the gas sector, but what regulatory and policy adjustments are necessary to reorganize gas supply on a market basis? The textbook approach to energy market reform, and its implementation in the European Union, provides important guidance on how to create a regulatory basis to support competition in gas supply, provided national institutional characteristics are taken into account. This article engages in a comparative analysis of China's gas market reform policies and their implementation at the provincial level, focusing on Guangdong, a laboratory of economic reforms in China. The analysis demonstrates that reforms in 2019–2021 integrated key aspects of the textbook model in China's gas regulations, including third-party access, price deregulation and ownership unbundling. However, the textbook is of limited use to address remaining institutional barriers to reform, including resistance of distribution monopolies to competition from state-owned enterprises. Guangdong's experience shows that reform is possible, but only if accompanied by institutional and pricing adjustments reconciling vested interests with competition.     

Housing policy in the emergent socialist mixed economy of Eastern Europe

The late 1980s signal a qualitatively new stage in the development of socialist economies. Earlier reforms attempted to move away from a monolithic, centrally planned system, to find more effective mechanisms of economic management, in particular to reduce the role of planning and increase the role of the market within the statist economy. But during the last two or three years a significant change has occurred in the reform discourse. The debate over ‘how much plan and how much market’ has come to be replaced by a call for a reform of ownership (Bauer, 1988). A ‘socialist mixed economy’, with a statist sector complemented by a private sector seems to be in the making.

This paper has two aims.

In the first part I present the trend towards a socialist mixed economy. I will explain the forces pointing in this direction, the likely functioning of a socialist mixed economy, and finally, how different a socialist mixed economy might be from a capitalist one.

In the second part I look at the housing economy, and explore how housing policy may change as the national economy becomes increasingly mixed. Re‐privatisation of housing preceded re‐privatisation or deregulation in other sectors. From the late 1960s onwards the state began to withdraw from housing construction in many countries (Ciechocinska, 1988; Daniel and Temesi, 1984; Tosics, 1987). By the late 1980s a significant proportion of new housing was built which was the individual property of the occupants. Is the housing system therefore already a mixed economy? In my view, the answer to this question is no. The main purpose of the second section of my paper is to show that this ‘re‐privatisation’ or ‘marketisation’ of the housing economy has been highly restricted. As far as the system of production is concerned there has been no private (profit orientated) sector in the housing economy; market‐like forces only regulated the distribution of housing. The task of this paper is to show that the transformation of the national economy into a socialist mixed economy is therefore likely to have far‐reaching consequences for the housing system. I will also try to show, in some detail, what these consequences are likely to be.     

Part Hare, Part Tortoise – Explaining patterns in Norwegian public utilities reforms 1990–2010

In this article we compare four Norwegian public utilities sectors: the electricity industry, the e-com industry, the railway and the postal service. All sectors have been subject to public policy reforms since the 1980s, though reform content and degree varies. In the electricity industry Norway is a liberalization forerunner - a virtual reform “hare”, to borrow from Olsen’s (1996) Aesop’s fable metaphor. In other network industries such as the railway Norway is a reform “tortoise”. We seek to answer the question: How and why has governance of the four industries been reformed? We explore four possible explanations for similarities and differences across sectors: technological change, market conditions, agency and European Union (EU) regulation. We cannot identify a national model for reforms across these sectors. We find single factors standing out in the explanation of the reforms in the various sectors. The puzzle is that it is different factors in different sectors.     

Structural and regulatory reform in Turkey: Lessons form public utilities

Turkey is one of the countries that recently initiated regulatory reform in public utilities. Although Turkey tried to introduce competition to many industries through a liberalization movement that started in the 1980s, utilities remained as monopolies until the early 2000s. In the beginning of the 2000s, reforms restructured the utilities through deregulation and competition policies and established independent regulatory agencies. Whereas the reforms have been successful in some aspects, they remain insufficient in others. This paper anecdotally investigates the effects of (de)regulation on selected public utility industries and analyzes the pros and cons of the reform process. Also, it presents a comparative analysis to better understand the current institutional and governmental issues in the reform process. The findings suggest that the recently changing stance of government towards the (de)regulatory process could thwart the success of reform.     

Plans, timetables, and delays: progress with railway reform in transition economies

This paper describes the extent of railway reform in a selection of representative transition economies and discusses some of the factors that will influence the success of the reforms in the future. Railways in the European Union’s area of influence, such as those in Poland and Romania, which are financially weak and losing market share to road transport, have advanced on the railway reform path more than those in Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. The latter are financially strong and enjoy a dominant share of the freight market. Railway reform agendas are ambitious on paper but suffer from implementation delays. The combination of favourable financial conditions, weak inter-modal competition, and politicised decision-making slows down reform. The success of railway reform depends not only on building institutional capacity to make the railways market-oriented and adequately regulated, but also on promoting wider reforms in the economy, such as enterprise restructuring and financial sector development.     

Utility reforms in developing countries: Learning from the experiences of Delhi

The power sector reforms of Delhi, the capital of India presents an interesting case in the evolution of power sector reforms in India, targeting improvements in distribution side. The Delhi reform design has benefitted from the experience of an earlier partially successful experiment in the state of Orissa. The reform format has tried many new ideas such as defining Aggregate Technical and Commercial (AT&C) losses, auctioning of Discoms based on highest AT&C loss reduction, direct privatization and transitory support provision. In the span of a little more than a decade from the year 2002, there has been tangible progress on many fronts. Other utilities planning the reforms may benefit from this experience. However, newer challenges such as an unexpected increase in power purchase costs with limited scope of passing these costs to the end customers seem to have emerged in the recent years. The paper ends with a cautionary note that for any utility not having access to lower cost power, the distribution reforms will reach a dead-end unless a competitive market is created at the generation side too.     

Electricity market reform in Argentina: assessing the impact for the poor in Buenos Aires

Following an economic crisis in the late 1980s, Argentina became one of the first developing countries to fully implement policies of the ‘Washington Consensus’, including the liberalisation and privatisation of public utilities. However, the reform and economic growth that followed in the 1990s was eventually undermined by long-term recession and an economic collapse in late 2001, marked by national debt default and currency devaluation in early 2002. In the context of urban poverty and poverty reduction, this paper examines electricity market reform in Argentina, analysing the strengths, weaknesses and distributional impacts. The article raises some of the concerns local actors have of reform, including disproportionate costs to low-income consumers, and the legitimacy of the process itself as a possible barrier to the delivery of more equitable social benefits.     

Multi-criteria decision analysis for infrastructure privatisation using conflict resolution

A decision support system (DSS) is introduced for evaluating and comparing a wide range of privatisation schemes for infrastructure facilities. The methodology identifies the preferences of the main stakeholders involved, along with all the environmental, political, technical and economic criteria that need to be considered in privatisation decisions. A DSS is then developed and tested on a case study involving the privatisation of a wastewater project. The system provides decision support through three steps: (1) screening of infeasible decisions using the elimination method of multiple criteria decision analysis; (2) determining the most stable decision by analysing the actions and counteractions of the stakeholders using conflict resolution and stability analysis; and (3) evaluating the robustness of decisions under varying levels of uncertainty using information gap theory. The DSS is useful for practitioners involved in infrastructure privatisation decisions for a variety of infrastructure systems such as transportation, water and energy.     

Turkish electricity reform

Turkish electricity reform has progressed slowly due to internal resistance against privatisation, and gained momentum after Electricity Market Law of 2001, prepared in line with EU Energy Acquis and established required institutional and legal framework. Although the eligibility threshold has reached 39% market opening rate, the dominant position of public both as owner and decision-maker is still the major problem in the sector. Currently Turkey is self-sufficient in electricity, but likely to face shortages in 10 years if the growing demand is not met by either speeding the liberalisation process, or joining the South East Europe Electricity Market.     

Favoured Owners,Neglected Tenants: Privatisation of State Owned Housing in Hanoi

This paper presents selected findings from the project ‘Privatisation of public housing in Hanoi, the impacts on housing quality and social equality’ which was financed by the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA). The project analyses the consequences of privatisation on the housing conditions of those tenants and owners who live in privatised and partly privatised multi-family apartment buildings. This paper focuses on the consequences of privatisation on the housing and living conditions of tenants compared to those of owners, and presents findings. The paper concludes that privatisation actually helps to strengthen the existing inequity between different social groups, in the sense that the privatisation policy supports senior government officials, many of whom are well situated both financially and socially, and ignores poor and low-income households. Privatisation also contributes to enhancing the inequality between better-off housing areas and poorer ones. Mixed ownership, and the lack of regulations about the duties and rights of owners and tenants after privatisation, also lead to serious degradation of common areas in all residential blocks.     

Towards an Understanding the Outcomes of Housing Privatisation in South Africa

Housing privatisation is commonly understood in political economic terms. The proponents of privatisation argue that the provision of ownership enables households to have security of tenure, which in turn leads to increased housing investment, the development of a secondary housing market and a source of income for the local authority by means of land tax. On the other hand, critics of housing privatisation suggest that such processes lead to landlordism and an increased dependence on mortgage finance. This paper uses historical methodology to trace the historical lack of secure tenure for urban black South Africans. The data consists of 395 structured questionnaires conducted in the case study area of Mangaung, the former black township of Bloemfontein. The results suggest that housing privatisation processes in South Africa cannot be viewed only through a political economic lens.     

PROGRESSIVE AND SUSTAINED SCHOOL REFORMS: FRAMING AND COALITION BUILDING IN SWISS CITIES

ABSTRACT: Urban politics in the early 21st century is structured by conflicts over social cohesion and economic competitiveness. Education policy takes center stage in this struggle as schools are institutions of both social and economic reproduction. I draw on arguments of urban regime and policy frame analysis to examine the politics of urban school reform in two Swiss cities. Empirically, I analyze neighborhood‐embedded bottom‐up school reforms committed to social cohesion. The paths these reforms eventually take were shaped by different coalitions geared around specific school policy frames. Frames indeed play a crucial role in building a coalition toward progressive school reforms. In addition, their sustainability in a political environment, increasingly shifting toward development policies, hinges on the dominant frame underlying the reforms as well as the properties of the network advancing them.     

基于土地制度视角的我国城市蔓延的形成与控制研究

2003年以来,为了有效遏止"圈地型"城市蔓延,我国相关部门对土地制度进行了改革,但从理论上分析,土地制度改革还应对以下方面进行完善:只涉及了土地管理制度,基本没有考虑土地产权制度的改革;强化集权的土地管理制度不可能正确、及时地反映各个地区土地的供需关系;忽视了政策措施的多样性与综合性,对规划与税收制度改革也处于初步探索的阶段.     

The emerging Danish government reform – centralised decentralisation

Across Western Europe, a number of governmental reforms have been implemented and more recently many have been rejected. These reforms are considered to be examples of adaptation to new global conditions; however, not all shifts in governmental systems and organisation are a result of the logic of globalisation. The current implementation of a new local government reform in Denmark can be considered to be one such example. In each case, the specific circumstances and history of a country play a major role; there is no universal model for the transition to neoliberal state reforms. To many observers, the nation state is being ‘hollowed out’ – simply squeezed from both the international and the subnational level as a result of globalisation and related processes. The Danish local government reform does not strengthen the metropolitan Copenhagen vis-à-vis other North European metropoles. Rather, the reform seems to reduce the room for manoeuvre and in fact dismantles major parts of the city's strategic capacity and institutions. On the other hand, the Danish case of increased pressure for local adaptation to global economic challenges and financial control from central government represents a special version of the neoliberal competitive state.     

Rent Reform-Issues for the Countries of Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States

The transitional economies share common, serious problems in their public sector housing stocks, including poor condition and repair, and low rents which neither cover the maintenance and managementcosts, nor reflect the market exchange value of the houses. The paper begins by looking at the general background of rental policy and alternative approachesto rent reforms in the East-Central European transitional countries, and then goes on to consider the restructuring of the public rental sector, taking into account price structure changes and price increases in relation to income changes, and affordability. Current trends and problems in regulating rent policy at central and local levels are then considered, including factors influencing the restructuring of the public rental sector, the level of rents and utility prices, and rent reforms in relation to other institutional changes. The paper concludes that no wholly satisfactory reform model has been developed,mainly because each aspect of necessary reform conflicts with the short-term interest of some key actors. However,reform is argued to be essential, as the only plausible route to creating a functioning rental sector in these economies.     

Having it All? Housing Reform Under Devolution

This paper aims to make an assessment of housing reform in Scotland since devolution in 1999. It is not concerned with a detailed analysis of any one particular policy but instead looks at whether housing reform is likely to contribute successfully to its own high level goals, which are identified as social justice, social cohesion, economic competitiveness and the empowerment of citizens and communities. It proceeds by examining those goals and the context for their development, and examining how they have been pursued, mainly through legislative change but also by administrative reform and financial inducement. The paper contends that in respect of some goals, especially achieving greater social justice, the reforms are likely to make considerable inroads. However, it also notes that the goals open up areas of conflict that are not fully acknowledged and are not resolved by the reforms.