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Peruvian statistics were examined to see if construction remained labour‐intensive during 1955–67. Data on output, employment, capital, and materials consumption were either lacking or had defects that made a direct comparison of trends impossible. But conclusions could be drawn from relative price and wage trends. If materials and capital had not been substituted for labour, average construction costs would have risen substantially more than they did. Our estimate was that by 1967 they would have been 25 per cent higher.

Evidence from a sample of firms, however, suggested that adoption of labour‐saving techniques cannot be tied simply to changes in wages compared with other costs. All eleven innovations studied, it is true, were markedly labour‐saving; but the rate of adoption did not closely follow wage changes. Adoption came most often during those less tense years when builders were neither overstrained with orders nor lacking credit and clients. One must conclude that both rising wages and innovations can limit employment expansion in relatively poor countries.

Since both agriculture and manufacturing have been unable to absorb the growing labour force of poor countries, economists have turned their attention to other sectors for supplementary employment expansion. One of these is construction. The construction sector creates not only jobs but builds capital goods with a desirable low import content. In association with carefully structured financial institutions, it may even generate savings. How much employment a given expansion of construction will provide depends on the production functions of the sector: their slopes and their potential shifts. One must find the changes in labour productivity that go with likely changes in volume, capital accumulation, trends in material supplies, and alternate technologies.

All these questions will get imprecise answers without good statistics on output, labour, capital, and materials, both unit prices and volume. If output varies in composition and in the relative quality of components, problems of weighting and aggregating arise. Because of the sector's ? instability and footloose nature, data on construction remain inferior compared with other sectors even in the most advanced and statistics‐rich countries. Can one make anything of the sorts of data available in poor countries where the sector must play its most crucial role?

In this article, using rather limited data, we note with considerable alarm that steady labour intensity and corresponding employment expansion cannot be taken for granted. Where daily wages are but a fraction of hourly American wages, and where interest rates are a multiple of American rates, the more lavish use of materials and machinery compared with labour can nevertheless begin early.

Peru is the country selected for our study. During 1955–67 Peru had a relatively high national output growth rate of 5.6 per cent together with a moderate rate of inflation of about 9 per cent. Except for the devaluation years of 1958 and 1967, flourishing exports of fishmeal, copper, cotton, and sugar helped carry this rate of growth. Lima was one of the continent's fastest‐growing cities in population and building, particularly in squatter barriadas. But in the 1960s commercial conduction also grew at more than a 15 per cent compound rate, measured in square metres built, according to some estimates.1 During 1964–68, construction had high priority under President Fernando Belaunde, a professional architect. More U.S. foreign aid for housing (direct and guaranteed private loans) went to Peru in absolute terms during this period than to any other country. We shall analyse the consequences by examining (1) trends in relative costs, (2) relative output and import trends, and (3) data about receptivity to innovations in a sample of firms.  相似文献   

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Episodes of contentious collective action involving laid-off workers have erupted throughout China in recent years. With few exceptions, studies of Chinese laid-off workers’ contention have attempted to generalize from field research in very few⦓r even single⤜ocalities. This limitation has led to several debates that can frequently be addressed by examining differences in political economy among China’s industrial regions. Based on 19 months of fieldwork and over 100 in-depth interviews with workers, managers, and officials in nine Chinese cities, this article offers a systematic, sub-national comparative analysis of laid-off workers’ contention. The article also addresses broader issues in the analysis of social movements and contentious politics, a field that has too often failed to take such regional differences into account. William Hurst is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is completing a dissertation on the politics of China’s state-sector lay-offs. His previous publications include “Analysis in Limbo: Contemporary Chinese Politics Amid the Maturation of Reform” (with Lowell Dittmer;Issues & Studies, December 2002/March 2003), and China’s Contentious Pensioners” (with Kevin O’Brien;The China Quarterly, June 2002). This article benefited from the assistance of many Chinese friends and colleagues in Beijing, Benxi, Chongqing, Datong, Harbin, Luoyang, Shanghai, Shenyang, and Zhengzhou. Kiren Chaudhry, Calvin Chen, Ruth B. Collier, Kenneth Foster, Mark W. Frazier, Douglas Fuller, Mary E. Gallagher, thomas B. Gold, Kun-chin Lin, Chung-in Moon, Kevin O’Brien, Dorothy Solinger, Jaeyoun Won, as well as Judy Gruber and all the participants in her Spring 2003 seminar, and two anonymous reviewers offered extremely helpful comments. For their generous financial support during various stages of my research and writing, I wish to thank: the Fulbright Institute of International Education Program, the National Security Education Program, the Yanjing Institute at Harvard University, the University of Hawaii, Beijing University, the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at SUNY-Albany, the University, of California Institute for Labor and Employment, as well as the Graduate Division, the Institute for International Studies, the Institute for East Asian Studies, and the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California-Berkeley.  相似文献   

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Understanding Belarus: economy and political landscape   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
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This article discusses the attempt undertaken by several development aid agencies since the turn of the century to integrate political economy assessments into their decision making on development assistance. The article discusses three such attempts: the Drivers of Change adopted by the UK's Department for International Development, the Strategic Governance and Corruption Analysis (sgaca) developed by the Dutch Directorate General for International Cooperation and the new thinking on political economy analysis, policy reform and political risk advanced by the World Bank. On the basis of a political-economic interpretation of development agencies, two main factors are found to hinder the successful application of political economy assessment. In the first place, the agencies' professional outlook leads them to see development in primarily technical terms. In the second place, the nature of incentives for development professionals leads them to resist the implementation of political economy analyses.  相似文献   

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This paper employs a 'political economy of conflict' approach to explore the recent deterioration in the governance of Zimbabwe. It argues that this analytical approach, which has been applied by scholars such as William Reno to highly dysfunctional and/or collapsed states like Liberia and Sierra Leone, is appropriate for understanding the current actions of the Zimbabwean government as well, and especially their relation to the military's unpopular intervention in the recent conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While Zimbabwe's current crisis has been aptly described by various scholars as a failure of leadership, this paper argues that such failures of national governments in Africa need to be understood within the broader context of international political economy. Zimbabwe's lapses in governance extend beyond the state and the national border to features that have non-state and informal as well as international and transnational dimensions.  相似文献   

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《Communist and Post》2004,37(1):111-120
The author argues that international political economy (IPE), however prominent in the West, has not been established in Russia as an academic discipline. In the Russian policy community, the main debate is between liberal institutionalists, who advocate the country’s integration into the global economy, and the so-called dirigists, who promote relative economic autonomy. These two schools, however, only now begin to find their way in academia. Three main problems impede IPE development in Russia—the excessive separation of political science from economics, the deficit of theoretical generalization, and the weakness of educational curricula.  相似文献   

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This article attempts to build a bridge between contemporary studies of global firms from emerging economies and existing theories in comparative political economy. It argues that given the primacy of the state as an economic actor in developing countries, the variety of capitalism literature could provide a theoretical foundation for firm-level analyses of emerging market multinationals. For example, the authors suggest that China and India may be moving towards a ‘hybrid market economy’. They also offer a typology of Indian and Chinese corporates to demonstrate an empirical approach to analysing domestic business–government relationships and the ways in which these firms are shaped by the peculiarities of their respective institutional setting. Finally, they identify some of the likely pitfalls of doing cross-national comparisons of emerging market multinationals, particularly with respect to the reliability of corporate data.  相似文献   

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The Chinese Peasant Economy: Agricultural Development in Hopei and Shantung. 1890–1914. By Ramon H. Myers. Harvard: Harvard University Press and London: Oxford University Press, 1971. Pp. xix, 394. Index. £6.75.  相似文献   

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This paper presents a critique of the essentialist notions of any community as a pacifist or militant community by examining the long history of the cycles of violence and non-violence in the evolution of the Sikh community in the Indian subcontinent. The theoretical premise of the paper is that communities' resort to violence and non-violence is determined by their strategic perspectives to achieve their politico-economic goals and not from any doctrinal adherence to violence or non-violence. The paper attempts a panoramic view of over 500 years of Sikh history (1469 – 2006) and offers a reinterpretation of that history by locating cycles of violence and non-violence in their historical context. It then provides a politico-economic perspective on violence and non-violence in their struggle for identity and political power. It focuses more on an analysis of the recent political conflict between Sikh militants and the Indian state, and concludes by drawing out the policy implications of that analysis for the politics of the modern Indian state regarding the Sikhs of Punjab. It identifies federal arrangements and human rights as issues of key importance in the political economy of this relationship.  相似文献   

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For all the rhetoric surrounding globalisation, its meaning remains both vague and elusive and symbolises a host of different things to different people. In the main, however, most studies are marked by a restricted theoretical and empirical base, which precludes such studies from being truly global. They are generally predicated on selected examples from the core, with an occasional nod in the direction of experiences outside the familiar. While there are sporadic references to Asia and Latin America (invariably in the context of collapsing currencies and capital flight) there is almost no mention at all of Africa, South Asia, the Pacific region or Central Asia. That this neglect impoverishes the discipline of International Political Economy (ipe) is self-evident. It is argued that an ipe that is comparative by nature and takes into account the multi-variegated nature by which globalisation affects the global political economy, in particular recognising that the developing world has been, to a large extent, left out of the debate, is required if we are to make ipe truly global in scope.  相似文献   

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