Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 26 of 26

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Fiscal Policy, Conflict, And Reconstruction In Burundi And Rwanda, Léonce Ndikumana Aug 2001

Fiscal Policy, Conflict, And Reconstruction In Burundi And Rwanda, Léonce Ndikumana

Léonce Ndikumana

The ethnic conflicts in Burundi and Rwanda have severely weakened the economies and worsened the structural fiscal imbalances of these countries. Government revenue has declined due to the erosion of the tax base and tax administration capacity. At the same time, governments have shifted the allocation of resources from capital and social expenditures to military and security spending. This paper argues that there is a strong connection between a military-intensive fiscal policy stance and the lack of political legitimacy. A narrow-based regime tends to increase spending on security to increase its chances of survival. This strategy has dire social and …


Overcoming The Fiscal Crisis Of The African State, Tony Addison, Léonce Ndikumana Jun 2001

Overcoming The Fiscal Crisis Of The African State, Tony Addison, Léonce Ndikumana

Léonce Ndikumana

A critical task is to construct a development state---a set of democratically-accountable institutions capable of effective policy design and implementation. The new state agenda is ambitious and resource intensive. It cannot therefore be achieved unless the fiscal crisis of the African state is resolved, especially low and distorted spending on pro-poor services, weak budgetary institutions, distortions in civil-service expenditure, and the weakness of customs and taxation institutions in raising much-needed revenue. These problems are common across SSA but they are severe in the conflict/post-conflict country group. Reform is therefore urgent, and this issue illustrates how reform---if it is well designed---can …


The Role Of Product Attributes In The Agricultural Negotiations, Julie Caswell May 2001

The Role Of Product Attributes In The Agricultural Negotiations, Julie Caswell

Julie Caswell

No abstract provided.


To Honor And Obey: Efficiency, Inequality And Patriarchal Property Rights, Nancy Folbre, Elissa Bruanstein Mar 2001

To Honor And Obey: Efficiency, Inequality And Patriarchal Property Rights, Nancy Folbre, Elissa Bruanstein

Nancy Folbre

No abstract provided.


Can Advocacy-Led Certification Systems Transform Global Corporate Practices? Evidence And Some Theory, Michael E. Conroy Jan 2001

Can Advocacy-Led Certification Systems Transform Global Corporate Practices? Evidence And Some Theory, Michael E. Conroy

PERI Working Papers

There is emerging evidence that globalization is beginning to provide new opportunities for global coalitions of advocacy groups to bring market-based pressures to bear upon major transnational firms in a way that promotes higher standards of social and environmental responsibility in production processes and trade relations. This can be seen as successful citizen-led attention to the “production and process methods” which the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations explicitly chose to omit. More broadly it may reflect the increased importance of global branding, improved awareness in both consumer and financial markets of the social and environmental practices of firms, and collaboration …


Defending The Public Domain: Pollution, Subsidies And Poverty, Paul H. Templet Jan 2001

Defending The Public Domain: Pollution, Subsidies And Poverty, Paul H. Templet

PERI Working Papers

In recent decades, industry has come under criticism for failing to cover the environmental costs of doing businesses. When companies are allowed to pollute, or to use natural resources without paying their full price, they are in effect appropriating natural capital – land, air, and water – without compensation to society at large.


Empowerment Through Risk-Related Information: Epa's Risk Screening Environmental Indicators Project, Nicolaas Bouwes, Steven M. Hassur, Mark D. Shapiro Jan 2001

Empowerment Through Risk-Related Information: Epa's Risk Screening Environmental Indicators Project, Nicolaas Bouwes, Steven M. Hassur, Mark D. Shapiro

PERI Working Papers

Public access to information can drive change more effectively than regulations alone. Some regulatory agencies are now taking such an approach to advance their objectives. Right-to-know legislation, such as the Emergency Planning and Community Right-toKnow Act of 1986 (EPCRA), provides the basis for many of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) information disclosure initiatives. By requiring that the public be informed about releases of toxic chemicals in their communities, EPCRA— through its Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) in particular—can help to empower community residents, heighten industry accountability to the citizenry, and support efforts to ensure environmental justice.


China's Urban Unemployement: Exposed "Disguised Unemployment" Or Insufficient Aggregate Demand?, Minqi Li Jan 2001

China's Urban Unemployement: Exposed "Disguised Unemployment" Or Insufficient Aggregate Demand?, Minqi Li

PERI Working Papers

China’s enterprise reform has resulted in large-scale layoff of workers from state and collective owned enterprises. Mainstream Chinese economists argue that many of the workers in these enterprises are “disguisedly unemployed” and have to be laid off to achieve better economic performance. In this paper, I argue that the productivity of state and collective owned enterprises to a large extent depends on capacity utilization and the level of aggregated demand. If the government undertakes active aggregate demand policy, the performance of state and collective owned enterprises can be substantially improved without large number of workers being laid off.


Building Social Capital To Protect Natural Capital: The Quest For Environmental Justice, Manuel Pastor Jan 2001

Building Social Capital To Protect Natural Capital: The Quest For Environmental Justice, Manuel Pastor

PERI Working Papers

Across the United States, the concept of environmental justice has been gaining ground. Initially defined in the negative – a reduction in the disproportionate exposure of minority residents to various hazards – environmental justice advocates often took as a first task raising awareness of environmental disparities both nationally and locally. In this effort, activists have had success at changing policies as well as projects. In 1994, for example, President Clinton acknowledged the issue in a Presidential Executive Order directing all federal agencies to take into account the potentially disproportionate burdens on U.S. minority communities of pollution or hazard siting. In …


Threat Effects And The Internationalization Of Production, James Burke, Gerald Epstein Jan 2001

Threat Effects And The Internationalization Of Production, James Burke, Gerald Epstein

PERI Working Papers

Multinational corporations (MNCs) have become an increasingly important force in the dynamics of the global economy. For example, according to the United Nations, during the last 20 years, the gross product of the foreign affiliates of multinational corporations increased faster than global GDP while foreign affiliate sales increased faster than global exports. Sales of foreign affiliates worldwide ($14 trillion in 1999 versus just $3 trillion in 1980) are now nearly twice as large as global exports. And the ratio of world FDI stock to world GDP increased from 5% to 16% during the last twenty years. Taking into account both …


Shifting From The Home To The Market: Accounting For Women's Work In Taiwan, 1965-95, Elissa Braunstein Jan 2001

Shifting From The Home To The Market: Accounting For Women's Work In Taiwan, 1965-95, Elissa Braunstein

PERI Working Papers

If one accounts for the shift of women’s work from the household to the market during the course of economic development, what does the trajectory of growth and structural change look like? In this paper, I present an accounting of one such shift by looking at the role of women in Taiwanese growth between 1965 and 1995, a thirty-year stretch when an enviable per capita market growth rate of 6.9 percent, which later came to be called the “East Asian miracle,” was accompanied by large increases in female labor force participation.


Threat Effect Of Foreign Direct Investment On Labor Union Wage Premium, Minsik Choi Jan 2001

Threat Effect Of Foreign Direct Investment On Labor Union Wage Premium, Minsik Choi

PERI Working Papers

This paper explores the impact of “threat effects” of foreign direct investment on labor markets in the United States. In this context, the term “threat effect” refers to the use by employers of the implicit or explicit threat that they will move all or part of their production to a different location, even if they do not actually do so. In this paper, I construct a unique industry level panel data set and I show that the union wage premium has been negatively associated with the stock of outward FDI in the U.S. manufacturing sector for the period of 1983-1996. …


Economic Performance In Post-Crisis Korea: A Critical Perspective On Neoliberal Restructuring, James Crotty, Kang-Kook Lee Jan 2001

Economic Performance In Post-Crisis Korea: A Critical Perspective On Neoliberal Restructuring, James Crotty, Kang-Kook Lee

PERI Working Papers

This paper evaluates the neoliberal economic restructuring process implemented in Korea following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. We first argue that the austerity macroeconomic policy of late 1997 and early 1998 was the main cause of the economic collapse in 1998, and that the decision of the IMF and President Kim Dae Jung to impose a radical neoliberal transformation of financial markets and large industrial firms in the depressed conditions of 1998, though defensible on political grounds, made the failure of these reforms virtually inevitable. A detailed analysis of the macro economy, labor markets, financial markets, and nonfinancial firms in …


Two Different Export-Oriented Growth Strategies Under A Wage-Led Accumulation Regime, Özlem Onaran, Engelbert Stockhammer Jan 2001

Two Different Export-Oriented Growth Strategies Under A Wage-Led Accumulation Regime, Özlem Onaran, Engelbert Stockhammer

PERI Working Papers

The aim of the paper is to compare the relationship between distribution, growth, accumulation and employment in Turkey and South Korea. These countries represent two different export-oriented growth experiences. Thereby they provide examples for comparing different economic policies. The paper tests whether accumulation and employment are wage-led in these two countries by means of a post-Keynesian open economy model. The model, in addition to the goods market, includes a demand-driven labor market and a reserve army effect in the Marxian sense. The model is estimated in a structural vector autoregression form. The results show that decreasing the wage share does …


Connecticut River Economic Adjustment Project, Umass Amherst Center Economic Development Jan 2001

Connecticut River Economic Adjustment Project, Umass Amherst Center Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

The purpose of this study was to inventory various environmental and economic criteria for the region. In the second phase the data was analyzed for implications for development potential. In phase three the Net Available Land Analysis methodology will be allied on the town level to two towns that meet one or more of the three Economic Development Administration criteria. The region chosen was Enfield, Connecticut and Holyoke, Massachusetts.


Economic Development And Planning Report, Umass Amherst Center Economic Development Jan 2001

Economic Development And Planning Report, Umass Amherst Center Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

This report identifies the planning and economic development needs of the tristate region between the Blackstone River Valley and Quinebaug-Shetucket Rivers Valley National Heritage Corridors in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.


The Economic Impact Of Housing Investment Through The Community Preservation Act In Boston, Umass Amherst Center Economic Development Jan 2001

The Economic Impact Of Housing Investment Through The Community Preservation Act In Boston, Umass Amherst Center Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

This report attempts to look at the need for affordable housing and economic impacts of housing in the city of Boston, Massachusetts. Its premise is that the economic impact of housing is significant and involves a multitude of factors, from the monetary effects of the construction process to the impact of personal income on the local economy.


Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy For Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Umass Amherst Center Economic Development Jan 2001

Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy For Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Umass Amherst Center Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

The purpose of this report was to establish the goals and objectives that would guide the Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) of Berkshire County, Massachusetts. These goals and objects were the result of deliberations of the countywide CEDs Coordinating Committee.


Quantifying Regulatory Barriers To Asian–U.S. Food Trade, Julie Caswell Jan 2001

Quantifying Regulatory Barriers To Asian–U.S. Food Trade, Julie Caswell

Julie Caswell

Data on U.S. Food and Drug Administration import detentions and alerts are used to quantify regulatory barriers experienced by Asian food products entering the United States. These data offer the only comprehensive means of assessing regulatory barriers without relying on expert opinion, although they fall short of placing a dollar value on the volume of trade affected. The data show that meeting food regulations is a significant barrier to Asian food products entering the United States, especially for products originating in developing and newly industrialized countries.


Economic Explanation, Ordinality And The Adequacy Of Analytic Specification, Peter Skott, Donald Katzner Jan 2001

Economic Explanation, Ordinality And The Adequacy Of Analytic Specification, Peter Skott, Donald Katzner

Peter Skott

This paper examines the implicit links between models containing ordinal variables and their underlying unquantified counterparts that are necessary to make the former viable theoretical constructions. It is argued that when the underlying unquantified structure is unknown, the permissible transformations of scale applicable to the ordinal variables have to be restricted beyond that which is permitted by dint of the ordinality itself. The possibility of an underlying structure being known but unspecified is also considered. In the case of the efficiency wage model, the only usable transformations of the ordinal effort scale are those which are multiples of each other.


Korea's Neoliberal Restructuring: Miracle Or Disaster?, James Crotty Jan 2001

Korea's Neoliberal Restructuring: Miracle Or Disaster?, James Crotty

James Crotty

No abstract provided.


International Cartel Enforcement: Lessons From The 1990s, Simon J. Evenett, Margaret C. Levenstein, Valerie Y. Suslow Jan 2001

International Cartel Enforcement: Lessons From The 1990s, Simon J. Evenett, Margaret C. Levenstein, Valerie Y. Suslow

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The enforcement record of the 1990s has demonstrated that private international cartels are neither relics of the past nor do they always fall quickly under the weight of their own incentive problems. Of a sample of forty such cartels prosecuted by the United States and European Union in the 1990s, twenty-four lasted at least four years. And for the twenty cartels in this sample where sales data are available, the annual worldwide turnover in the affected products exceeded US$30billion. Prevailing national competition policies are oriented towards addressing harm done in domestic markets, and in some cases merely prohibit cartels without …


Financial Markets And Economic Development In Africa, Léonce Ndikumana Jan 2001

Financial Markets And Economic Development In Africa, Léonce Ndikumana

PERI Working Papers

The role of financial markets in economic development continues to attract increasing attention both in academia and among policy-makers.1 Evidence from recent empirical studies suggests that deeper, broader, and better functioning financial markets can stimulate higher economic growth (Levine, Loayza and Beck 2000; Beck, Levine, and Loayza 1999; King and Levine 1993a, 1993b). Although evidence on Africa is still limited, the results from existing empirical work supports the view that financial development has a positive effect on economic growth in African countries (Ndikumana 2000; Allen and Ndikumana 2000; Gelbard and Leite 1999; Odedokun 1996; Spears 1992). The discussion of strategies …


Democratizing Global Economic Governance: A Peri Symposium, Jane D'Arista, Keith Griffin, Lisa Jordan, James Crotty, Eva Paus, J. Mohan Rao Jan 2001

Democratizing Global Economic Governance: A Peri Symposium, Jane D'Arista, Keith Griffin, Lisa Jordan, James Crotty, Eva Paus, J. Mohan Rao

PERI Working Papers

This working paper is the fruit of a symposium on Democratizing Global Economic Governance held at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) on October 20, 2000, an event co-sponsored by the Five-College Peace and World Security Studies program. The speakers were asked not only to critique briefly the principal institutions of global economic governance – the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank – but also to suggest progressive alternatives. In other words, they were asked for their views on not only what progressives should be against, but also what they should be for.


Globalization And The Fiscal Autonomy Of The State, J. Mohan Rao Jan 2001

Globalization And The Fiscal Autonomy Of The State, J. Mohan Rao

PERI Working Papers

Public finance in less developed countries is the focal point - both as source and destination - of many of the dilemmas and conflicts posed by development. Revenue mobilization for the allocative, distributive and stabilization functions of the state is severely constrained by the narrowness and instability of the tax base. The latter, in turn, is the result of political constraints rooted in socioeconomic inequalities, economic constraints arising from the structures of production and trade, and administrative constraints reflecting a weakly developed state apparatus. As a consequence, public infrastructure and human development expenditures, which are among the most effective vehicles …


The Sanctity Of Property Rights In American History, Gerald Friedman Jan 2001

The Sanctity Of Property Rights In American History, Gerald Friedman

PERI Working Papers

Society makes property. Economic systems are defined by what they allow to become property, and the extent of property varies enormously. Some allow property claims to fixed objects, such as land and trees, sometimes including the ephemeral, such as wildlife or flowing water. Some extend property to include ideas (patents); a few include human beings themselves as chattel slaves.