In the developing world, industrial and financial reform has sometimes been impressive by earlier standards, yet remains sadly inadequate in relation to what is actually required.

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So with the growth of industrial power and the Great Reform Act.

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This meant that much of what the government wanted to do reform Australia's archaic system of industrial relations, privatise Telstra, its telecoms monopolist, change its media laws was blocked, abandoned or never even started.

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From health reform, Hainan wants to put pensions and industrial and commercial insurance on the little cards with the ultimate goal of reducing the use of cash and checks to the bare minimum.

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Toward this end, the Old Guard has used the Russian central bank to undermine the Yeltsin economic reform program by printing trillions of rubles to feed these industrial dinosaurs.

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The string of measures was a strange mixture of well-meaning steps at social reform, half-baked schemes for quasi-socialist industrial planning, regulation to protect consumers, welfare programs to help the hardest hit, government support for the cartelization of industry, higher wages for some, lower wages for others, on the one hand government pump priming, on the other public economy.

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Immense though they are, from short-term issues of deflation and yuan devaluation to long-term ones of industrial and financial restructuring, these are in fact the main reasons why political reform looks necessary.

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The presumption in most quarters seems to be that the Russian military, its supporting industrial complex and the intelligence community have backed Yeltsin over the parliament out of a preference for democracy and free market reform with which the President has generally been associated.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Center For Security Policy