Rebecca Ray and Rohini Kamal, "Can South-South Cooperation Compete? The Development Bank of Latin America and the Islamic Development Bank," Development and Change, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp. 191-220 (2019).
ABSTRACT: Southern‐led multilateral development banks (MDBs) play a key role in harnessing global capital to finance the sectors most important to borrowers, especially infrastructure. Two prominent Southern MDBs, the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF) and the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), have become crucial drivers of regional infrastructure growth. This article explores whether their performance has lived up to their goals of establishing borrower control over bank governance without sacrificing financial dynamism. Using power‐weighted voting indices for member representation on bank boards, the authors determine that these banks offer borrowers much more representation on their boards than do their Northern‐based counterparts, the Inter‐American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The article also analyses bank operations to determine whether their governance structure impacts their internal performance, as reflected on balance sheets, and external performance — gaining relevance in development finance and particularly in infrastructure lending, including the burgeoning sector of sustainable (climate‐resilient) infrastructure. The authors find that the CAF and IsDB have become major players in development finance, including in sustainable infrastructure. However, important issues remain in relation to their continued internal capacity development, especially with regard to the environmental and social safeguards necessary to oversee lending.
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Danish Khan and Anirban Karak, "Urban Development by Dispossession: Planetary Urbanization and Primitive Accumulation," Studies in Political Economy (2019).
ABSTRACT: Structural changes in capitalism over the last four decades have facilitated the emergence of globalized sociospatial processes such as urbanization. Meanwhile, the scale of uneven sociospatial development has also been dramatically accentuated. We explore these issues by conceptualizing contemporary urbanization as a “planetary” process, but we also add mediating concepts to study changes on the ground. We illustrate how linkages between dispossession and urbanization can be discerned in countries of both the global North and South. We also show that the oft-made claims to overall efficiency gains from urbanization are a myth. Capitalist urbanization has two dialectically interrelated dimensions: “development” and “dispossession,” and this process cannot be adequately grasped to be an outcome of rural–urban migration leading to efficiency gains. JEL Classification: O18, R00, B51
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Zhandos Ybrayev, "Monetary Policy under Financial Dollarization: The Case of Eurasian Economic Union." Chapter in The Political Economy of International Finance in An Age of Inequality: Soft Currencies, Hard Landings, Gerald Epstein, Ed. Edward Elgar Publishing (2018).
ABSTRACT: A substantial amount of the population in emerging market economies still save and borrow in foreign denominated currencies. There are reasons to believe that high degree of financial dollarization might impose difficulties in both the transmission capacity of monetary policy and the overall functioning of the financial sector. Correspondingly, the case of a typical developing economy, where external debts are denominated in foreign currency, whereas domestic firms heavily rely on receipts in national currency, potentially causes a higher vulnerability in the domestic banking sector due to currency mismatch issues and large fluctuations in the exchange rates, which is also one of the features of Inflation Targeting monetary policy. The aim of this paper is to investigate various features of high level of financial dollarization, its challenges for conducting Inflation Targeting monetary policy, and formulate a number of relevant policy recommendations and implications.
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Fusheng Xie and Junshang Liang, "Is There Such a Thing as a Non-Alienated “Creatosphere”?" Science & Society 81.1 (2017): 136-144.
ABSTRACT: This is a correspondence article commenting on Aleksandr Buzgalin and Andrey Kolganov's paper “The Anatomy of Twenty-First Century Exploitation: From Traditional Extraction of Surplus Value to Exploitation of Creative Activity” (Science & Society, October 2013). In this article, we argue that Aleksandr Buzgalin and Andrey Kolganov, lacking an overall perspective on the general labor process, fail to identify the source of intellectual rents, which are actually surplus value transferred from productive activities. They then commit the error of mistaking the part for the whole, by overstating the non-alienated aspects of cognitive labor while turning a blind eye to the extreme alienation of productive labor. They also fail to see that the cognitive labor process is also being alienated, subject to capitalist control and employment insecurity. There is no such thing as a non-alienated “creatosphere.” The prevalence of creative labor is merely a result of the evolution of the general labor process, rather than evidence that predicts, as they conceive of this, the liberation of the working class..
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Rebecca Ray and Kevin Gallagher. “China in Latin America: Social and Environmental Lessons for Institutions in a Commodity Boom.” Chapter in Why Latin American Nations Fail, Esteban Pérez Caldentey and Matías Vernengo, Eds. University of California Press (2017).
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Rebecca Ray, "The Panda’s Pawprint: The Environmental Impact of the China-Led Re-Primarization in Latin America and the Caribbean," Ecological Economics, 134, 150-159 (2017).
ABSTRACT: China’s meteoric rise as an economic partner for LAC economies is well documented: it is now the largest export market for South American goods and the second-largest market for LAC overall. But China’s demand for LAC exports and Chinese investments in LAC are concentrated in primary commodities, driving LAC away from industrial production and spurring “re-primarization.” This creates a conundrum for environmental economists, as the traditional “pollution haven” literature cannot adequately describe a situation of south-south investment relationships. In contrast “environmental Kuznets curve” literature anticipates that for middle-income countries such as those in Latin America, primary production is environmentally less sensitive than manufacturing; these hypotheses suggest that re-primarization would be environmentally beneficial for LAC. This paper tests these hypotheses against the evidence from the last ten years of LAC exports. It finds that primary production is more environmentally intensive than manufacturing in LAC, measured through net greenhouse gas emissions and water footprints.
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Selin Secil Akin and Isil Sirin Selcuk, "Mechanization experience in agriculture in Turkey: The Pomegranate on the Knoll," Chapter 12 in Economics and Literature: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach, Cinla Akdere and Christine Baron (eds.) Routledge, 2018. JEL Classification: B49, N54, N34, Z11.
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Zhandos Ybrayev, "The Prospect of Inflation Targeting in Kazakhstan," Eurasian Journal of Economics and Finance, 5(1), 33-48 (2017).
ABSTRACT: Over the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in the number of countries that began to pursue an Inflation Targeting monetary policy framework. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, each of the fifteen newly created independent countries started to develop and run their own autonomous monetary policies. Kazakhstan announced the implementation of an Inflation Targeting policy in August 2015. At the same time, a number of researches show that Inflation Targeting might not work as well for developing countries as it does for developed ones due to certain fundamental differences and preconditions that must be met before the implementation phase. Thus, this paper discusses the case of Kazakhstan as a typical emerging market economy example, examines its ability to respond to various external shocks and identifies the main transmission channels in order to contribute to the knowledge in this particular area. Identification assumptions generate contemporaneous monetary shocks on domestic inflation behavior, which also take into account various features of the small open economy as well as indicate different important transitory and persistent effects. The results show, based on the interpretation of impulse response functions, a positive interest rate shock has an uncertain inflationary impact, which raises questions about the effectiveness of interest rate manipulation in keeping inflation within the given band. In addition, a positive exchange rate shock leads to a stronger upward pressure in inflation rates. Finally, inflation inertia explains a substantial increase in future inflation rates. JEL Classification: E31, E47, E52
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Simon Sturn, "Do Minimum Wages Lead to Job Losses? Evidence from OECD Countries on Low-Skilled and Youth Employment," ILR Review (forthcoming).
ABSTRACT: The author investigates effects of minimum wage rates on low-skilled, female low-skilled, and youth employment. The sample consists of 19 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1997 to 2013 for low-skilled workers and from 1983 to 2013 for young workers. Six different static or dynamic estimation approaches are applied on different versions of the specifications, controlling for up to quadratic time trends. The author further investigates the effects over the long run and over the business cycle as well as the effects of high minimum wages and of institutional complementarities. The findings provide little evidence of substantial disemployment effects for low-skilled, female low-skilled, or young workers. The estimated employment elasticities are small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. The author then considers why his results on youth employment differ from those of Neumark and Wascher (2004), showing that they overstate precision and that small changes in their specifications lead to minimum wage effects close to zero. JEL Classification: J20, J38, J48, J50, J58, J88
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Wonmongo Lacina Soro, Yiwei Zhou & Didier Wayoro, “Crash rates analysis in China using a spatial panel model,” IATSS Research 41: 123–128 (2017).
ABSTRACT: The consideration of spatial externalities in traffic safety analysis is of paramount importance for the success of road safety policies. Yet, the quasi-totality of spatial dependence studies on crash rates is performed within the framework of single-equation spatial cross-sectional studies. The present study extends the spatial cross-sectional scheme to a spatial fixed-effects panel model estimated using the maximum likelihood method. The spatial units are the 31 administrative regions of mainland China over the period 2004–2013. The presence of neighborhood effects is evidenced through the Moran's I statistic. Consistent with previous studies, the analysis reveals that omitting the spatial effects in traffic safety analysis is likely to bias the estimation results. The spatial and error lags are all positive and statistically significant suggesting similarities of crash rates pattern in neighboring regions. Some other explanatory variables, such as freight traffic, the length of paved roads and the populations of age 65 and above are related to higher rates while the opposite trend is observed for the Gross Regional Product, the urban unemployment rate and passenger traffic.
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Wonmongo Lacina Soro & Didier Wayoro, “A Bayesian analysis of the impact of post-crash care on road mortality in Sub-Saharan African countries,” IATSS Research 41: 140–146 (2017).
ABSTRACT: Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing a disproportionate road tragedy compared to its motorization rate and road network density. Most of the road traffic deaths occur in the pre-hospital phase. Yet, more than half of the African countries do not possess formal pre-hospital care system. This study assesses the potential impact of post-crash care on road mortality in 23 Sub-Saharan African countries. A panel Bayesian normal linear regression with normally distributed non-informative priors is used to fit the data set covering the time period 2001–2010. The post-crash care system is proxied by the estimated share of seriously injured transported by ambulance, and three binary variables indicating the existence of emergency access telephone services and emergency training for doctors and nurses. The findings suggest a negative correlation between the road mortality rate and the estimated share of seriously injured transported by ambulance, the emergency access telephone services and the emergency training for doctors. A positive relation is unexpectedly observed for the emergency training for nurses. Other regressors such as the Gross Domestic Product per capita and populations in the age range 15–64 years are related to higher.
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Wonmongo Lacina Soro & Didier Wayoro, “A Mixed Effects Negative Binomial Analysis of Road Mortality Determinants in Sub-Saharan African Countries.” Transportation Research Part F: Psychology and Behaviour (Forthcoming).
ABSTRACT: This paper uses aggregate data for a panel of 23 Sub-Saharan African countries to explore the potential predictors of road traffic fatalities between 2001 and 2010. In addition to the Gross Domestic Product per capita, the set of covariates includes some demographic, safe driving behavior, health and infrastructure-related variables. Estimations from a mixed effects negative binomial regression suggest that the fraction of populations aged between 15 and 64 years, the size of the road network and seat belt laws significantly increase fatalities. However, populations of age 65 and above, hospital beds and physicians’ densities, and road audits significantly decrease these fatalities. Moreover, traffic fatalities are found to increase with the Gross Domestic Product per capita. The economic implications of this finding is not to lower the economic growth but to design policies and technologies that could prevent African countries from experiencing the same road tragedy observed in industrialized countries during their development process.
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Peter Bent, "Historical Perspectives on Precarious Work: The Cases of Egypt and India under British Imperialism," Global Labour Journal, 2017, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 3-16.
ABSTRACT: The concept of precarious work is used by social scientists to describe work that is “uncertain, unpredictable, and risky from the point of view of the worker” (Kalleberg, 2009: 2). This paper argues that such work can take a variety of forms, beyond those seen in the transition from the stable post-WWII era to the neo-liberal era in the West. Egypt and India offer instructive case studies. Industrialisation (or lack thereof) in Egypt and India has been thoroughly documented by others. The purpose of this paper is to argue that these developments can be seen as the emergence of precarious, industrial working arrangements. This framework is useful for demonstrating that precarious work has come along with industrial development in a range of countries during different time periods. In this light, the stable employment arrangements characteristic of the post-war West were an anomaly. The global economic and social history of industrialisation is characterised by precarious working arrangements, as seen in colonial-era Egypt and India.
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Danish Khan, "Political Economy of the US-Pakistan Relations: Reformulating the Patron-Client Model," Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 51, Issue No. 30, 23 July, 2016.
ABSTRACT: Hamza Alavi, in this journal, offered the most pronounced presentation of US-Pakistan relations in terms of a patron-client model. In an attempt to further the understanding, it is noted that Alavi discounted the role of the internal political economy of Pakistan. The canonical patron-client formulation is scrutinised to reformulate the role of Pakistan as an "estranged client." The attempt is to internalise the interplay of the geostrategic and political-economy interests of the Pakistani military in US-Pakistan relations. JEL Classification: F54, F55, B14, B15
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Hasan Comert and Esra Nur Ugurlu, "The Impacts of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis on Developing Countries: The Case of the 15 Most Affected Countries." In The Global South after the Crisis, Growth, Inequality and Development in the Aftermath of the Great Recession, Hasan Comert and Rex A. McKenzie (eds). Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016.
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Anirban Karak, "Accumulation by Dispossession: A Marxist History of the Formation of the English Premier League," Review of Radical Political Economics, 0486613416635039, first published on March 31, 2016 doi:10.1177/0486613416635039
ABSTRACT: The decade of the 1980s witnessed massive changes in the internal structure and functioning of English football. Several rules, instituted during the infancy of the professional game to limit profit-making, were overturned with remarkable rapidity within the space of a few years, culminating in the formation of the English Premier League (EPL) in 1992. In this paper, I engage with two questions. One, why and how was the century-old structure of English football so rapidly transformed and what were the consequences? Two, what sort of Marxian theoretical framework can we use to understand the historical trajectory of English football? With respect to the former, I follow David Harvey's analysis of neoliberal strategies used to restore upper-class dominance to argue that the formation of the EPL can be interpreted as another instance of accumulation by dispossession, one among myriad attempts to solve the profitability crisis of the 1970s by creating an avenue for financial speculation in football clubs. Together with the deregulation of television, it converted football from a domain formerly regarded as "off-limits to the calculus of profitability" into a "business proper." In terms of a theoretical framework, I propose that it is useful to think of football as serving global capitalism in a dual manner: as an avenue for accumulation (the accumulation function) and as a tool for legitimizing capitalist rule by producing alienated consciousness in society (the legitimation function). JEL Classification: B51, Z00
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Peter Bent, "The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Protectionism in Turn of the Century America," Economic Thought, vol. 4, No.2, 2015.
ABSTRACT: One of the main economic debates taking place in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America was between supporters of protectionism and advocates of free-trade policies. Protectionists won this debate, as the 1897 Dingley Tariff raised tariff rates to record highs. An analysis of this outcome highlights the overlapping interests of Republican politicians and business groups. Both of these groups endorsed particular economic arguments in favour of protectionism. Contemporary studies by academic economists informed the debates surrounding protectionist policies at this time, and also analysed the impacts of these policies. Evidence from politicians, business owners, and economists provides a broad view of who favored protectionist policies in turn-of-the-century America. This analysis also focuses on how the impacts of these policies were studied and presented in contemporary academic and public discourse.
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Jingjing Yang and Sana Khalil, "Do Innovation Dimensions matter in China's Cross-regional Income Differences?" Journal of Chinese Economics and Business Studies.
ABSTRACT: This paper studies the interlinks between innovation inputs and outputs and between innovation outputs and economic development. Using a panel data-set from 31 regions of China, we show that the difference in regional innovation output can be significantly explained by R&D manpower and expenditure, highly educated students, and public education spending, while GDP is linked to patent, high-tech export share, and new product sales. Our findings provide support for the use of government R&D subsidies and education rebate.
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Rebecca Ray, Kevin Gallagher, Andrés López, Cynthia Sanborn, "China in Latin America: Lessons for South-South Cooperation and Sustainable Development.," Rebecca Ray, Kevin Gallagher, Andrés López, and Cynthia Sanborn, Eds., China in Latin America: Seeking a Path for Sustainable Development, London: Anthem Press, Forthcoming 2016.
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Rebecca Ray and Adam Chimienti, "A Line in the Equatorial Forests: Chinese Investment and the Environmental and Social Impacts of Extractive Industries in Ecuador," Rebecca Ray, Kevin Gallagher, Andrés López, and Cynthia Sanborn, Eds., China in Latin America: Seeking a Path for Sustainable Development, London: Anthem Press, Forthcoming 2016.
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Rebecca Ray, "China in Latin America," ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America. Fall 2015: 20-22.
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Rebecca Ray, "Latin America’s Risky China Boom," NACLA Report on the Americas. Fall 2014: 19-23.
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Deepankar Basu and Kartik Misra, "BJP's Youth Vote Dividend," Economic and Political Weekly 50, no. 3 (2015): 69.
ABSTRACT: An examination of age-wise voting and preferences in the 2014 elections reveals that the Bharatiya Janata Party benefited from youth and first-time voters showing a high preference for the party relative to other age groups.
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Mwangi wa Gıthınji, Charalampos Konstantinidis and Andrew Barenberg, "Small and as Productive: Female Headed Households and the Inverse Relationship between Land Size and Output in Kenya," Feminist Economics (2014): 1-29.
ABSTRACT: The question of gender differences in agricultural productivity has received particular attention in the development literature. The stylized fact that women produce less than men, while on average occupying smaller farms, presents a quandary as it is also a stylized fact that smaller farms have higher yields per unit of area. Using data from the 2006 Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey, this study examines whether there is a gap in output per acre between men and women farmers in Kenya. Using ordinary and two-stage least-squares (OLS and 2SLS) analyses, it shows that when crop choice is taken into account, women are as productive as men. Specifically, the study finds that market-oriented crops are the source of differences. This suggests that further research into what determines crop choice is needed, in addition to policy that ensures that women have the same access as men to support for market-oriented crops.
JEL Codes: Q1 Agriculture, Q5 Environmental Economics, J16 Economics of Gender
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Andrew Barenberg, "Microfinance for water and sanitation: a case study from Tiruchirappalli, India." Included in Water, sanitation and hygiene: sustainable development and multiisectoral approaches. Proceedings of the 34th WEDC International Conference, United Nations Conference Centre, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 18-22 May 2009 2009 pp. 68-74
ABSTRACT: This paper looks at the development of a water and sanitation loan fund deployed through a network of women's self-help groups in Southern India. The success of the loan fund reduced barriers to credit from formal lending institutions and increased investment in water and sanitation facilities. Results from this case study indicate that microfinance principles can be successfully applied to the water and sanitation sector. The objectives of this case study are to summarize what is known about this loan program and explore the possibilities and limitations of this new financing model for the water and sanitation sector.
JEL Codes: I14 Health and Inequality, O16: Economic Development
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Zhongjin Li and Hao Qi, "The Labor Process and the Social Structure of Accumulation in China," Review of Radical Political Economics, volume 46 No. 4, December 2014, forthcoming.
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Simon Sturn, "Macroeconomic policy in recessions and unemployment hysteresis," Applied Economics Letters, Volume 21, Issue 13, 2014
ABSTRACT: I adopt Ball’s (1999) cross-sectional approach to test for unemployment hysteresis to panel data. Long-run unemployment is explained with standard institutional controls, and proxies for monetary and fiscal policy reactions in recessions. The sample consists of 20 OECD countries for the period 1985 to 2008. The results indicate that fiscal consolidation in recessions has long-lasting effects on unemployment. No significant impact of monetary policy is found. However, tentative evidence suggests that the effects of fiscal spending are stronger when accommodated by expansionary monetary policy.
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Leopoldo Gómez-Ramírez, "On Theories of a Democratic Planned Economy and the Coevolution of 'Pro-democratic Planning' Preferences," International Critical Thought, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2014.
ABSTRACT: The motivation problem is a common component of discussions about democratic planning. This paper focuses in particular on individuals' motivation to work hard and to engage in the scrutiny of public affairs, both necessary traits for the success of a planned economy. The analysis draws on tools from the evolutionary game theory literature to consider whether the models of Pat Devine (Negotiated Coordination Economy, or NCE) and Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel (Participatory Economics, or Parecon) offer convincing solutions. I argue the proliferation of those traits would not naturally occur at the outset of democratic planning. I discuss selection mechanisms that increase the likelihood of successful proliferation of individually costly traits: segmentation, conformism, and group-level interactions. However, I argue that, under the impact of the defining institutions of NCE/Parecon, segmentation or conformism would not achieve the desired proliferation. The central conclusion of this paper is, then, that more sanctions and incentives at the group-level should be incorporated to the institutional design of these models.