The discovery of petroleum wealth in the middle of the last century completely reconfigured the political economy of Qatar. Small local population size and low levels of labor force participation pushed Qatar to seek alternate sources of labor to meet burgeoning labor demands.

Chinese cities are getting bigger and are also growing into each other. To ensure that the rapidly increasing number of urban residents have access to adequate transportation not only requires increased investment in transportation, but also careful deliberation to allow an optimal tradeoff between different modes of transport as well as a coordinated approach to land development and transport development.

The " Swedish Model " of labor immigration management came to a turning point with the 2008 reform. This major reform consisted in a deregulation of the labor market, which until then had only opened a limited number of positions to migrants. However, what consequences can be expected from such a political shift: the benefits of a productive competitiveness or the threat of exploitation and social dumping?

This analysis examines the current ambiguities, priorities and approaches of Chinese foreign policy from a practitioner’s perspective, taking into account experiences of Beijing-based diplomats (interviews conducted in 2011 and 2012), in addition to recent Chinese foreign policy positions and official communications.
It leads to the following conclusions:

Concerns over becoming marginalized in the course of East Asian economic integration are driving a proactive regional trade agreement (RTA) strategy on the part of Taiwan. Three factors explain this concern: Competing visions of economic integration in the region from both the United States and China, the success of Korea in concluding a large number of important RTAs, and the increasing number of overlapping agreements that crowd out countries and economies such as Taiwan that do not have proactive RTA strategies.