Xun Wu

Xun Wu
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology | UST · Division of Public Policy, Division of Social Science and Division of Environment and Sustainability

PhD, Public Policy Analysis

About

93
Publications
86,485
Reads
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3,364
Citations
Additional affiliations
August 2001 - October 2015
National University of Singapore
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
May 2000 - August 2001
World Bank
Position
  • Survey specialist/Econometrician

Publications

Publications (93)
Conference Paper
Derived from a doctoral thesis, the paper seeks to compare Covid-19 crisis management by the Hong Kong government and Singaporean government, via lenses of policy capacity evaluation using a comparative approach, based on archival data. The findings suggest that the differences of policy capacity of the two cities could be illustrated and traced to...
Conference Paper
A deriviative from a doctoral thesis, the paper closely examines the crisis management practices of the Hong Kong government from lenses of policy capacity evaluation, taking a comparative process tracing approach based on mostly qualitative archival data. The findings confirm the primary role of political capacity in effective crisis management, a...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Public research universities in Hong Kong have the potential to play a vital role in accelerating the development of innovation and technology (I&T) in Hong Kong. They are the major actors in technology transfer, university-industry collaboration, and entrepreneurship education. Nevertheless, the extent to which these activities have originated fro...
Article
Full-text available
Cross-border regional innovation systems (CBRIS) have emerged as a key concept in innovation studies, but there have been few successful CBRIS in practice. In this paper we focus on asymmetry in the distribution of benefits as a potential barrier for the development of CBRIS based on an in-depth analysis of collaborative activities in the developme...
Chapter
Bureaucracy is one of the oldest institutions of a government system. Its role and importance have grown immensely in modern government systems. Bureaucrats or public administrators are indispensable in the policy decision making process in the 21st century. From the early conception as a branch of government responsible for the implementation of p...
Article
Full-text available
China has emerged as one of the world’s most active markets for public–private partnerships (PPP) in the water sector, while the pace of such development globally has slowed in recent years. This article investigates the dynamics of the development of PPP projects in the Chinese water sector through comparative case studies. Our findings suggest th...
Article
Despite being politically sensitive, water tariffs are frequently administered without information about households' preferences for tariff structures. In this paper we examine the tariff preferences of 1,500 households in Kathmandu, Nepal. We first use a bivariate probit model to examine stated preferences for (1) an increasing block tariff (IBT)...
Article
To date, there has been limited empirical research on the structure of informal water vending markets in developing countries. From fieldwork conducted in Kathmandu in 2014, including a survey of different types of water vendors, household interviews, and in-depth interviews with key informants, we provide a detailed description of the activities o...
Article
Full-text available
While moving towards unified social health insurance (SHI) is often a politically popular policy reform in countries where rapid expansion in health insurance coverage has given rise to the segmentation of SHI systems as different SHI schemes were rolled out to serve different populations, the potential impacts of reform on service utilisation and...
Chapter
Although policy capacity is among the most fundamental concepts in studying public policy, there are considerable disagreements on its conceptual definitions and few systematic efforts to operationalize and measure it. This chapter presents a conceptual framework for analyzing and measuring policy capacity under which policy capacity refers to the...
Book
This book provides unique insights into the role of policy capacity in policymaking and policy change, as it is being uncovered at the research frontier in contemporary policy studies. The book is structured into a series of sections on policy capacity in theory and practice, each focusing on a specific aspect of policy capacity and its influence o...
Article
The two main approaches to economic regulation—regulation by contract and regulation by agency—may both encounter significant challenges in regulating public-private partnerships when institutions are weak. As a result, the hybrid model, a mixture of elements from both systems, is widespread. This paper considers hybrid regulation as a distinct reg...
Article
Full-text available
In 2001, we conducted a survey of 1500 randomly sampled households in Kathmandu to determine the costs people were incurring to cope with Kathmandu's poor quality, unreliable piped water supply system. From 2001 until 2014, there was little additional public investment in the municipal water supply system. In the summer of 2014, we attempted to rei...
Article
Full-text available
Decentralization reforms rarely live up to the high hopes and expectations of the reformers for a variety of reasons rooted in actions and omissions of the governments pursuing it or in the context in which it is undertaken. The paper examines the experience of Zhejiang Province where decentralization was successful in achieving and indeed exceedin...
Article
Full-text available
This article employs a hydro-economic optimization model to analyze the effects of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the distribution and magnitude of benefits in the Eastern Nile. Scenarios are considered based on plausible institutional arrangements that span varying levels of cooperation, as well as changes in hydrological conditions (water...
Book
This book focuses on governance and management issues in the much publicized ‘Ganga Rejuvenation Project’, led by the Indian Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi. Attempts over the past three decades to clean up and rejuvenate one of the world’s greatest rivers have proved futile. The major reasons for the lack of success are absence of long-term plann...
Article
Full-text available
Since the 1990s China has emerged as one of the world’s most active markets for public-private partnerships (PPPs) in water and sanitation, while the private sector has played a rather limited role in the water sector in India. From 2001 to 2012, there were 237 PPP projects in water and sanitation in China, accounting for 40% of the total number of...
Article
Full-text available
Rapid worldwide growth in public policy education now offers excellent opportunities to assess the development of the field from a comparative perspective. Our analysis, which examines recent trends in public policy education by comparing public policy analysis courses taught in professional degree programs in China and in the United States, reveal...
Article
Full-text available
Severe water pollution is among the top policy priorities in both China and India. This paper undertakes a comparative case analysis to examine efforts in combating river pollution in two major rivers – the Yangtze in China and the Ganga in India. Our analysis suggests that efforts in combating river pollution in the two Asian giants have encounter...
Article
Full-text available
While it is widely agreed that local governments played a critical role in infrastructure building and industrial development in China—the key factors in its “economic miracle”—the relationship between local government entrepreneurship and the development of specialised markets through which products made in China are marketed to buyers worldwide i...
Article
Full-text available
While local government entrepreneurship has long been regarded as one of the main drivers of China’s economic growth, it has increasingly been recognised as a potential source of a set of harmful policy consequences in recent years, such as rising government debt crises, pervasive corruption and environmental degradation. These criticisms have prom...
Article
Recent research on policy-making under uncertainty in the water sector has contributed to our understanding of types and sources of uncertainty as well as to the development of tools and approaches to manage uncertainty. This paper reviews the literature and identifies several strands of systematic bias, notably an emphasis on natural sources of un...
Article
Full-text available
In water resources, there is a long tradition of utilization of methods to address hydrological and economic uncertainty. Less frequently considered, however, is how uncertainty rooted in political factors such as power asymmetry, the strength of institutions, and the interests of stakeholders, contributes to decision-making. This paper explores po...
Chapter
Corporate sector, often portrayed as the victim of corruption, is an important source of rampant corruption problems in many developing countries due to a vicious cycle of bribery practices and corruption. This vicious cycle starts when firms are forced into bribery practices because of a high level of corruption in their operating environment, but...
Article
Full-text available
The paper investigates the determinants of bribery in sub-Saharan Africa by using probit models and data from the World Bank's Enterprise Survey of 10,457 firms in 30 countries in sub-Saharan Africa from 2009 to 2013. By doing so we find that securing a government contract is the most significant motivation for bribery and that overall, the propens...
Article
This paper proposes to integrate disparate notions of governance capacity by adopting a resource-based view of capacity. Governance capacity can be defined as the set of organizational and systemic resources necessary to make sound policy choices and implement them effectively. Adopting this definition allows for a more nuanced conceptualization of...
Article
Full-text available
Although policy capacity is among the most fundamental concepts in public policy, there is considerable disagreement over its definition and very few systematic efforts try to operationalize and measure it. This article presents a conceptual framework for analysing and measuring policy capacity under which policy capacity refers to the competencies...
Article
Full-text available
The persistence of policy failures is a recognized but not well-understood phenomenon in the literature of the policy sciences. Existing studies offer only limited insights into the persistence of policy failures as much of the literature on the subject to date has focused on conceptualizing the topic and differentiating between different types of...
Article
Full-text available
The objective of the paper is to assess the usefulness of conceptions of different modes of governance for understanding policy outcomes by studying the experience with hierarchical and non-hierarchical governance modes in the health care sector in China, India, and Thailand. The paper shows their experience with non-hierarchical modes to have been...
Chapter
“Anything but the government” has been a popular sentiment in public policy circles for at least two decades. Initially, the sentiment favoured transitions from governments to market-based governance regimes but the tilt has shifted towards transition from governments to network governance in recent years (for discussion of the key relevant concept...
Article
Full-text available
Proper roles for government and market in addressing policy problems may be assessed by considering the duality between market imperfections and government imperfections. The potential of government interventions or market mechanisms as core policy instruments can be eroded by fundamental deficiencies deeply rooted in either government or market as...
Article
Full-text available
China's New Co-operative Medical Scheme (NCMS), a government-subsidized health insurance programme, was launched in 2003 in response to deterioration in access to health services in rural areas. Initially designed to cover inpatient care, it has begun to expand its benefit package to cover outpatient care since 2007. The impacts of this initiative...
Article
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It is often argued that the true benefits of water resource development in international river basins are undermined by a lack of consideration of interdependence in water resource planning. Yet it has not been adequately recognized in the water resources planning literature that overestimation of interdependence may also contribute to lack of prog...
Article
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This paper summarizes the results of the Ganges Strategic Basin Assessment (SBA), a 3-year, multi-disciplinary effort undertaken by a World Bank team in cooperation with several leading regional research institutions in South Asia. It begins to fill a crucial knowledge gap, providing an initial integrated systems perspective on the major water reso...
Article
Public Administration (PA) as a field of study in China has made tremendous strides over the last three decades. This paper provides an overview of PA research in China from a sample of 2,877 articles published in six top PA journals in mainland China and Taiwan between 1998 and 2008. Our analysis based on these journal publications reveals several...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the growing need for private sector participation (PSP) in the water sector, private sector investments in the water sector have experienced a downturn in recent years, especially concession projects, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of all PSP projects in urban water utilities from 1990 to 2005. This paper traces the concession to its...
Article
Full-text available
This article examines the role of health governance in shaping the outcomes of healthcare reforms in China. The analysis shows that the failure of reforms during the 1980s and 1990s was in part due to inadequate attention to key aspects in health governance, such as strategic interactions among government, providers and users, as well as incentive...
Article
This short guide provides a concise and accessible overview of the entire policy cycle taking the reader through the various stages of agenda setting, policy formulation, decision making, policy implementation and policy evaluation.
Article
Full-text available
Public policy courses have increasingly become an indispensible part in professional training programs in public affairs in East Asia in response to rapid changes in political, social and economic environment in the region. In this paper, we examine the current trends in public policy education in East Asia through the lens of syllabi of public pol...
Book
Regulation of public infrastructure has been a topic of interest for more than a century. Providing public goods, securing their financing, maintenance, and improving the efficiency of their delivery, has generated a voluminous literature and series of debates. More recently, these issues have again become a central concern, as new public managemen...
Chapter
Two intrinsic conflicts are present in the regulation of privatized water utilities under concession agreements, the leading form of private sector participation (PSP) in urban water utilities in developing countries. First, although concession agreements constrain the discretionary power of regulatory agencies, contract incompleteness, widespread...
Article
In this paper we develop a simple framework in macroeconomics for evaluating environmental investments that bear national significance. The framework rests on the concept of fiscal balance and the premise that environmental taxes must be returned towards restoring and/or enhancing environmental capital investments. We further illustrate that tradit...
Article
Full-text available
The decline in popularity of New Public Management worldwide reinvigorated the search for a new paradigm in the field of public administration. Several alternatives to New Public Management, such as the New Governance and Public Value paradigms, have gained prominence in recent years. Despite tensions among these paradigms, exceptional challenges f...
Article
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The literature on environmental taxation is justifiably dominated by the search for effective means of taxation to safeguard environmental sinks. The criteria for effectiveness include: compliance with pre-specified environmental standards – pollution caps and discharge loads institutional capabilities—the efficacy of monitoring and enforcing the c...
Article
Declining access to health care and rapidly rising health expenditures are a matter of grave public concern in China. After decades of efforts to reduce its involvement, the Chinese government is currently in the process of reforming the sector through increase in public expenditures and expansion of health insurance. The objective of this paper is...
Article
Full-text available
While it is widely believed that bribery is ubiquitous among Asian firms, few studies have offered systematic evidence of such activities, and the dynamics of bribery in Asian firms have not been well understood. The research reported here used World Business Environment Survey data to examine some distinct characteristics of bribery in Asian firms...
Article
ABSTRACT Market-oriented reforms in the health sector continue to dominate health policy agendas in many developing countries despite growing evidence of their negative impacts. This article critically examines eight key arguments that are used to justify market-oriented reforms and that continue to hold widespread appeal among policy makers and an...
Article
Full-text available
This article examines the impacts of firms' political environment on the quality of their accounting practices. In specific, we hypothesize that the quality of political institutions is among the determinants of firms' decisions regarding accounting practices, and test the hypothesis with a unique cross-country firm-level data set. Our results show...
Article
Full-text available
We study how bribe behaviour by firms varies with ownership structure in the framework of agency theory. Firms with owner- or shareholder-managers have a lower propensity than professionally managed firms to bribe corrupt officials to obtain illegal gains in the cases of legal or regulatory violation, but when they do bribe, owner- or shareholder-m...
Article
Full-text available
This paper compares health policy trends in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand with the purpose of drawing usable lessons in reform. The study finds that governments in the region are rapidly privatizing the provision of healthcare at the same time as they are expanding the government's role in financ-ing. The paper argues that expan...
Article
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In February 1997, Maynilad Water Services, Inc. and the Manila Water Company, Inc. were awarded concession contracts from Manila's Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) and split between them the service areas in Metro Manila. In the years thereafter, the paths taken by the two concessionaires diverged dramatically: Maynilad became ban...
Article
In February 1997, Maynilad Water Services, Inc. and the Manila Water Company, Inc. were awarded concession contracts from Manila's Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) and split between them the service areas in Metro Manila. In the years thereafter, the paths taken by the two concessionaires diverged dramatically: Maynilad became ban...
Article
Full-text available
China has been heralded as the fastest growing economy in the world. However, this growth has been achieved significantly at the expense of its environment. Conventional measures of economic performance such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) do not take into account environmental damages, and thus may be biased towards an unsustainable development pa...
Article
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1] Nation-states rarely go to war over water, but it is equally rare that water conflicts in an international river basin are resolved through cooperation among the riparian countries that use the shared resources. Gains from cooperation will mean little to individual riparians unless the required cooperative behaviors are incentive compatible. Coo...
Article
Despite rapid economic growth and assiduous efforts in anti-corruption campaigns, many Asian economies continue to be plagued with rampant corruption problems; and in a number of countries, the progress towards corruption reduction has stagnated over the last decade as measured by corruption perception indices. This paper focuses on the corporate s...
Article
Full-text available
Since 1999 a multilateral effort termed the Nile Basin Initiative has been underway among the Nile riparians to explore opportunities for maximizing the benefits of the river's waters through cooperative development and management of the basin. However, to date there has been virtually no explicit discussion of the economic value of cooperative wat...
Article
Because the empirical literature on the causes of corruption has focused primarily on the demand side of corruption, that is, the corrupt officials who receive bribe payments, the role of the private sector as the supply side of corruption has not been examined thoroughly in this literature. In this article, it is argued that corporate governance i...
Article
Full-text available
While the weak corporate governance has been identified as among the leading contributing factors that led to the Asian financial crisis, the progress in restructuring corporate governance has been rather modest in Southeast Asia following the crisis. Some common features of corporate governance in Southeast Asian countries, such as high concentrat...
Article
While providing affordable warmth to the urban poor is among the main challenges facing many developing countries, so far there has been no empirical work on the demand for space heating for the urban poor in developing countries. One explanation for this gap in the literature is that the urban poor often use a mix of fuels and it is virtually impo...
Article
While providing affordable warmth to the urban poor is among the main challenges facing many developing countries, so far there has been no empirical work on the demand for space heating for the urban poor in developing countries. One explanation for this gap in the literature is that the urban poor often use a mix of fuels and it is virtually impo...
Article
Integrated assessment is rapidly developing in the scientific as well as policy community. Different methods, techniques and procedures (i.e., tools) are used in these assessments. Often, the choice for using certain tools in an assessment is not well founded. This paper presents a framework that scientifically underpins the role of, and thus choic...
Article
During the last two decades, fundamental changes have taken place in power sector around world, and many countries have adopted market-oriented reforms to introduce more competition into the sector. However, while the case for restructuring from economic and technical perspectives might be unambiguously strong, the performance of such reform effort...
Article
Full-text available
The authors address the question of infrastructure reforms in a novel way by focusing on the impact which they can have on consumers through the prices paid by different groups and on their access to the networks. They analyse original material from four Latin American countries – Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru – and two European countries –...
Article
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The authors use the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) surveys from 15 countries (covering more than 55,500 households) to examine the relationship between infrastructure coverage and household income. The results show that throughout the world all income groups have much higher levels of coverage for electricity than for other...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper the authors use the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) surveys from fifteen countries (more than 55,500 households) to examine the relationship between infrastructure coverage and household income. The results show that all income groups throughout the world have much higher levels of coverage for electricity than...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents a global perspective on infrastructure coverage and the poor that many people will think they have seen before but they have not. In this paper they introduce a new data source for infrastructure statistics, the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS). [Discussion Paper No. 2001/15]
Article
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In the early 1990s power shortages in a number of Southeast Asian countries prompted governments in these countries to open up their power sector to private investors, resulting in a wave of independent power producer (IPP) projects. Much of the promised gains for IPP, however, remain elusive more than a decade after IPP model was introduced. The s...
Article
Full-text available
A comparison of the economic performance as measured by GDP against a measure of sustainable GDP indicates that China's performance may not be as remarkable as commonly perceived. Sustainable GDP is estimated here by adjusting GDP for the depreciation of air, soil and water resources. Some policy options for raising sustainable GDP by recourse to e...