Search results for "Development Economics"
showing 10 items of 243 documents
The Social Policy Index: It's Applicability in Latin American Countries
2014
Social Policy is a tool employed by states to intervene in society with an aim of reducing the effects of poverty and inequality by meeting people's basic needs. The question is how do we measure social policy? In 2006, the United Nations Organization proposed a Social Policy Index (SPI), a methodological tool to measure social policy, with the aim of understanding the current regimes of economic and social structures in each country. The SPI suggests quantifying the elements of social policy, without focusing on their results, preferring to identify how the policy and the efforts of each government are materialized in some social indexes like social spending, social security, taxes, and in…
Rewards of reforms: Can economic freedom and reforms in developing countries reduce the brain drain?
2019
The objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of economic freedom on brain drain from developing countries to rich countries. Previous literature on brain drain has examined social, political and economic determinants. However, no study in the literature so far has studied this proposed relationship. We employ the Economic Freedom Index sourced from the Fraser Institute as a proxy for economic freedom and the rate of moderately skilled and highly skilled emigration functions as a proxy for brain drain. Our sample consists of 142 countries covering the period 1990–2010. We estimate the results using a two-way fixed effects regression estimator. The results show that an increase in…
“Splendid Isolation”: embracing islandness in a global pandemic
2022
Islandness is often considered to be a disadvantage. However, it has helped the residents of islands to delay, deter, and, in some cases, totally insulate themselves from COVID-19. While islanders have been quick to lock themselves down, this has had a tremendous impact on their connectivity and on tourism, which in many cases is their major economic sector. Yet, the association of islands with being safe, “COVID-19 free” zones has helped these spaces to be among the first destinations to restart the tourism economy once travel restrictions were lifted. After several weeks of lockdown, and with the COVID-19 threat still looming, social distancing remained the norm. Travellers we…
Monopolizing Asia: The politics of a metaphor
1997
Abstract The metaphor of Asia is frequently used nowadays as a concept for regional identity, but it is very problematical because geographic Asia contains such a large piece of humanity in all cultural, political and economic forms. Historically Asia also has negative connotations, and at times other regional concepts have been preferred over it. Pan‐Asianism, Greater East Asia, Asian‐African cooperation, Asian Socialism, Southeast Asia, Western Pacific, Asia Pacific, and East Asia are some of the regionalist permutations of the metaphor of Asia during this century, but thus far no strong institutional structures have emerged to fill the concepts with lasting and effective political power.
Lone mothers and the puzzles of daily life: do care regimes really matter?
2010
Kroger T. Lone mothers and the puzzles of daily life: do care regimes really matter? Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 390–401 © 2009 The Author, Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This article studies childcare patterns and day-to-day strategies of 111 working lone mothers from Finland, France, Italy, Portugal and the UK, and asks whether their arrangements are prescribed by care regimes. Lone mothers' arrangements are grouped into five based on the availability and use of different formal and informal childcare resources. The article argues that, even though lone mothers have a more favourable starting point in Finland and France…
Local Powers and a Distant State in Rural Central African Republic
1997
‘The State Stops at PK 12’ – i.e. 12 kilometres from the capital, Bangui.The situation described by this statement, often heard in the Central African Republic, seems to conform to the objectives of the currently fashionable policies of decentralisation and structural adjustment – for example, to end ‘too much state’. However, the absence of the state in the rural areas of the CAR is so striking that the position in certain respects has almost reached the level of caricature. It also reflects the more general situation in other parts of the continent where the excesses of a centralised, over-staffed post-colonial regime can coexist perfectly with the pronounced absence in the rural areas of…
From fringe to fringe: the shift from the clericalist League of Polish Families to the anticlericalist Palikot Movement 2001–2015
2017
The period between 2001 and 2015 brought two events in Poland that deserve to be called phenomena. In 2001 the rightist, clericalist League of Polish Families entered the Sejm. Ten years later, the leftist, anticlericalist Palikot Movement achieved spectacular success in the 2011 elections. These events give a picture of a radical shift in the Polish political scene: a rightist clericalist party disappeared from the right flank of the political scene, while a new, leftist-anticlericalist formation appeared. The article makes reference to a set of five explanations on both the causes and consequences (and permanence) of the observed changes. I argue that only a concurrence of a number of com…
Reflections on conspicuous sustainability: Creating Small Island Dependent States (SIDS) through Ostentatious Development Assistance (ODA)?
2020
Abstract It is frequently noted that small islands, including Small Island Developing States (SIDS), receive hugely disproportionate levels of aid or official development assistance (ODA) relative to other states and territories. However, the precise relationship between 'islandness' and aid remains underexamined. This paper uses the concept of 'conspicuous sustainability' as a framework for understanding the propensity for aid to be directed toward small island territories. We argue (1) that aid donors have reasons for preferring engagement in development projects that are particularly conspicuous, irrespective of actual development outcomes and (2) that small island territories are except…
National identity and Europeanization in post-communist Romania. The meaning of citizenship in Sibiu: European Capital of Culture 2007
2008
The structure of the requirements for citizenship in a Romanian city differs by and large from the structure of the same requirements in other European cities. The peculiarity lies in the lack of distinctiveness between the origin, the ethnic aspect and the civic aspect of citizenship and also in the emphasis on the language requirements for citizenship. The explanations could be traced back to the previous century and to the cultural and political project of state and nation-building. But the importance assigned to the national identity and national sovereignty issues in Romania may affect the European integration by hindering the feelings of European belonging and solidarity.
The local appropriation of democracy: an analysis of the municipal elections in Parakou, Republic of Benin, 2002–03
2006
Ever since the ‘democratic renewal’ of 1989–90, Benin has been regarded as a model democracy in the African context. The holding of local elections in 2002–03 can be seen as the culmination of this turn to democracy. Donors attach high expectations to decentralisation and local democracy. Based on an empirical analysis of municipal elections in Parakou, the country's third-largest city, the paper tries to gauge whether these expectations have been realised. The paper argues that while multi-party democracy has been instituted under considerable pressure from the outside, the particular form it has taken derives instead from rationales of national and local politics which go back to the late…