Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1991

Outstanding CUHK Alumni Receive Prestigious Academic Awards Two alumni of this university recently won important international awards for their outstanding academicperformances. One of them is teaching in an overseas university and the other oneis undergoing professional training at the Prince of Wales Hospital Both are appreciative of the good training theyreceivedfrom their Alma Mater. Dr. Tang Shui Yan Produces the Best American Doctoral Dissertation in Public Administration Dr. Tang Shui Yan, a 1982 graduate of the University, was recently awarded the 1990 Leonard D. White prize for the best American doctoral dissertation in public administration. He is the first ever Chinese recipient of the award since its inauguration in 1959. Dr. Tang, who received both his B.S.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees from The Chinese University, took the prize for his dissertation, 'Institutions and Collective Action in Irrigation Systems', completed at Indiana University. Tang is now assistant professor at the School of Public Administration of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 'The message I would like to give to today's students is that a degree from The Chinese University is sufficient for them to be competitive in pursuing further studies in the United States,' he said in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles. ‘I got very good background training from The Chinese University.' The Leonard D. White Award is granted annually by the American Political Science Association. According to the award committee, Dr. Tang's dissertation combines sophisticated theorizing with careful attention to empirical detail in an impressive effort to explain the real-world consequences of using different ways of solving problems of collective choice. His findings provide valuable lessons for both academic theorists and governments making policy decisions, two qualities that would have commended this dissertation to Leonard White. In his dissertation, Tang examines how institutional arrangements, physical attributes, and communal environments of large-scale irrigation systems affect attempts to coordinate the behaviour of cultivators drawing water from the systems. He uses organization theory and transaction-cost economics to predict how the incentives created by different arrangements affect the participants' willingness to follow rules and maintain the system. He then tests his predictions using data from 47 irrigation systems running in several different countries. While no single set of operational rules is optimal across the wide range of different situations in which these systems exist, most of the differences in rules and behaviour can be reduced to one of two system types — decentralized community systems ALUMNI 24 -