This book explores the effects of global socio-economic forces on the domestic policies and administrative institutions of Japan and the United States, and it explains how these global factors have shifted power and authority downward from the national government to subnational governments.

This major comparative study comprises ten pairs of essays written by leading Japanese and American scholars on parallel public policy issues, institutional patterns, and intergovernmental relations in Japan and the United States, all set in the context of globalization and its impact on decentralization in each country. The twenty contributors and the editors provide new insights into the domestic consequences of global interdependence by examining emerging strategies for dealing with environmental concerns, urban problems, infrastructure investments, financial policies, and human services issues.

An important study of the changing global setting, Globalization and Decentralization emphasizes the innovative and adaptive roles played by Japanese and American state, provincial, regional, and local governments in responding to the dramatic economic and political power shifts created by the new world order.

Deepening disaffection with conventional public schools has inspired flight to private schools, home schooling, and new alternatives, such as charter schools. Barely a decade old, the charter school movement has attracted a colorful band of supporters, from presidential candidates, to ethnic activists, to the religious Right. At present there are about 1,700 charter schools, with total enrollment estimated to reach one million early in the century. Yet, until now, little has been known about the inner workings of these small, inventive schools that rely on public money but are largely independent of local school boards.

Inside Charter Schools takes readers into six strikingly different schools, from an evangelical home-schooling charter in California to a back-to-basics charter in a black neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan. With a keen eye for human aspirations and dilemmas, the authors provide incisive analysis of the challenges and problems facing this young movement.

Do charter schools really spur innovation, or do they simply exacerbate tribal forms of American pluralism? Inside Charter Schools provides shrewd and illuminating studies of the struggles and achievements of these new schools, and offers practical lessons for educators, scholars, policymakers, and parents.

Cuba has long been a social policy pioneer in Latin America. Since the 1959 revolution, its government has developed ambitious social policies to address health care, higher education, employment, the environment, and broad social inequalities, among other priorities. Cuban strategies emphasized universal rights and benefits, provided free of financial cost to users, and implemented under centralized and unitary policy design.

Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, funds for these policies came under strain, although systematic efforts have been made to sustain them. Poverty rates and inequality have risen. Access to higher education has become more difficult. Access to health care has become less reliable. Environmental policies are both more salient and more difficult to sustain. The government has resisted privatization policies, but has sought to decentralize the implementation of various policies, fostering non-state cooperatives as well. At the same time, many Latin American governments have experimented with new social policies that, in this century, reduced poverty rates significantly and in some countries somewhat reduced various inequalities.

Still facing severe economic challenges, Cuba may look to learn from the policies of its Latin American neighbors, in some instances for the first time ever. This book analyzes these issues comparatively and in depth.