Search results for "Development economic"
showing 10 items of 246 documents
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…
Exploring wider well-being in the EU-15 countries: an empirical application of the Stiglitz Report
2012
We draw on the recommendations of the Stiglitz Report to select a set of economic and social variables that can be used to make cross-country comparisons of wider well-being. Using data for the EU-15 countries for 1999 and 2005, we show how three-way analysis can be used to extract synthetic information from a large data set to determine the main latent explanatory factors. In our case, we identify one dominant factor that we term the development profile, which is positively associated with the level of education outputs, technological progress and female labour market participation and negatively associated with the level of pollution. We rank the countries according to this factor and com…
Crowdfunding Prospects in New Emerging Markets: The Cases of India and Bangladesh
2020
AbstractCrowdfunding is a viable approach to financing start-ups and supporting social causes in advanced economies. The World Bank estimates a vast potential for crowdfunding also in emerging markets. The South Asia region consists of predominantly collectivist societies where helping others through donations is an integral part of prevailing religious obligations and societal norms. Thus, these countries share certain cultural and religious traits that are highly consistent with the principles of crowdfunding. In the current chapter, we explore the history, ongoing activity, and future prospects of crowdfunding in new emerging markets, specifically, India and Bangladesh. We observe that I…
Understanding Economic Growth in Ghana in Comparative Perspective
2019
Ghana has experienced a decade of solid and exceptionally high growth. Between 2005 and 2015, income nearly doubled. This paper analyzes the factors driving this impressive growth performance, using tools such as structural change decompositions and growth regressions. For the comparative perspective, the paper compares Ghana with its structural and aspirational peers. The paper finds that the contribution of structural change to growth has been limited and attributes this to labor that was freed up in agriculture not being absorbed by high-productivity sectors. Looking at factors that drove growth since 2000, financial development and infrastructure had the most important impacts. A benchm…
Latvia: Both Sides of the Economic Recovery Success Story
2016
Latvian social policy is close to the neoliberal model of the welfare state based on macroeconomic indicators of low welfare state spending, high income inequality, low minimum wage and low degree of decommodification. Latvia was among the first countries to be stung by the crisis in 2008. Key words became: austerity, fiscal consolidation and structural adjustment measures. A minimum social safety network was introduced to improve targeted social support. Funding from the European Social Fund was instrumental in mitigating unemployment, facilitating a large temporary works programme. Latvia joined the Euro zone in 2014 and is quite successfully returning loans. Such is one side of the succe…
Conclusion: Towards Sustainable Development in the Philippines?
2017
For many years, the Philippine archipelago, as we hope to have shown throughout this book, has suffered from many ills, some related to its geography and natural environment, some to its major demographic trends, many also from its social, economic and political structures and choices and its early insertion within a globalized economy. Resources have been depleted or severely damaged (forests, soils, water, coral reefs, mangroves, fisheries). Environmental losses may be linked to extensive factors (economic and population growth) as well as intensive factors (unequal distribution and access to market resources) (Montes and Lim 1996). Everything is linked, such as climate change and poverty…
Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Social Development and its Implications for the Transition to Sustainable Development
2021
Abstract The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the vulnerability of people, societies and economies and has forced a rethinking of the economic and social activities of an organization. The crisis requires strong responses based on solidarity, cooperation and responsibility. Socio-economic organizations (associations, cooperatives, alliances, and social enterprises) whose business models are based on these principles can help reshape economies and societies after the crisis.
Social Disparities in Education in Sub-Saharan African Countries
2007
In this paper we have two complementary objectives: the first is to describe the magnitude of social disparities that exist in the systems of education of sub-Saharan African countries; we focus on recent data but we also put these data in a time perspective. The second objective is to identify some of the factors that may explain these disparities and the impact of policies aimed at their reduction.
Culture and current account balances
2014
This article contributes to the literature of current account balances by introducing cultural variables that until now have been omitted. The World Values Survey indicates that the Roman Catholics do not consider thrift as important as others. We propose that Catholic countries tend to run current account deficits. This result remains robust even if we control for close to all of the determinants that have been included in previous studies. We find evidence that the inclination of Catholic countries to have high levels of uncertainty avoidance goes to a great length in explaining the result. peerReviewed