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Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

A Spatial Analysis Of The Xiii Italian Legislature, Massimiliano Landi, Riccardo Pelizzo Nov 2005

A Spatial Analysis Of The Xiii Italian Legislature, Massimiliano Landi, Riccardo Pelizzo

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We present a spatial map of the Italian House of Deputies during the XIII Legislature obtained by applying the Poole and Rosenthal methodology to roll call data. We estimate coordinates for almost all the 650 Deputies that were on the House’s floor at the time, and we aggregate them according to parties. We find that voting patters generate basically a two dimensional political space. The first dimension represents loyalty to either the ruling coalition or the opposing one. The second dimension is represented by the European Union. These findings are consistent with the exceptional case of the party Northern League, …


Growth Is Good For Whom, When, How?, John A. Donaldson Oct 2005

Growth Is Good For Whom, When, How?, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Economic growth often helps the poor, but what about the many cases when it does not? The consensus that economic growth reduces poverty, encapsulated by two World Bank economists in the above-quoted article entitled Growth is Good for the Poor, leaves many important questions unanswered. What help does the knowledge that economic growth can reduce poverty provide for economies with few realistic prospects for robust, sustained growth? What hope does the understanding that growth reduces poverty on average provide for poor families that are excluded from prosperity? How should we respond when economic growth undermines the market positions of the …


The State, The Market, Economic Growth And Poverty In China, John A. Donaldson Oct 2005

The State, The Market, Economic Growth And Poverty In China, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The People’s Republic of China is often cited as an unprecedented success story as far as rural poverty is concerned. Despite recent reports of sometimes violent protests in rural areas over illicit land seizures and pollution, since implementing reforms in 1978, China has seen rural poverty rates fall from xxx to yyy, as economic growth increased zzz on average each year, according to World Bank estimates. Some have ascribed liberal policy prescriptions based on open markets and pro-market government policies as are largely responsible, even as they forwent expensive, large-scale mass welfare programs. Starting with their initial round of fundamental …


Cultural Economy: A Critical Review, Chris Gibson, Lily Kong Oct 2005

Cultural Economy: A Critical Review, Chris Gibson, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article reviews work on 'cultural economy', particularly from within geography, and from other disciplines, where there are links to overtly geographical debates. We seek to clarify different interpretations of the term and to steer a course through this multivalency to suggest productive new research agendas. We review and critique work on cultural economy that represents a relatively straightforward economic geography, based on empirical observation while theoretically informed and driven by debates about Fordism and post-Fordism, agglomeration and cluster theory. Some of these ideas about cultural economy have proven attractive to policy-makers and we map a normative script of cultural …


Religious Schools: For Spirit, (F)Or Nation, Lily Kong Aug 2005

Religious Schools: For Spirit, (F)Or Nation, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this paper I draw attention to the study of 'unofficially sacred' sites in geographies of religion, which provide significant insights into the construction of religious identity and community, and the intersections of sacred and secular. I show that such sites deserve as much attention as places of worship (the more conventional focus in the geographical study of religion) in our understanding of the place of religion in contemporary urban society. In particular, using the case of Islamic religious schools in Singapore, I examine how Muslim identities and community are negotiated within multicultural and multireligious contexts, and particularly within one …


Social And Cultural Geographies Of South-East Asia, Tim Bunnell, Lily Kong, Lisa Law Feb 2005

Social And Cultural Geographies Of South-East Asia, Tim Bunnell, Lily Kong, Lisa Law

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The paper is an overview of English language publications that discuss what might be considered 'social' and 'cultural' geographies in Southeast Asia over the past two decades. We have strategically chosen two major themes that help us shape the mass of material into digestible strands: (1) the politics of social and cultural change; and (2) constructing identities. The former addresses various politics: the politics of nationhood; the politics of national development; the politics of cultural sites; the politics of urban change; and the politics of the global-local.


Religious Processions: Urban Politics And Poetics, Lily Kong Jan 2005

Religious Processions: Urban Politics And Poetics, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this paper, I will explore the ways in which processions, by their very visibility, foreground the relationships between the secular and the sacred, while contributing to a construction of identity and community, and simultaneously surfacing fractures therein. Using the example of multireligious yet secular Singapore, I will examine (a) the state's management of religious processions, including the regulation of time and space for such events, as well as regulations over noise production; (b) the tactics of adaptation, negotiation and resistance that participants engage in at an everyday level in response to the state's ideologies, policies, laws and strategies; (c) …