MENDING RIFTS

How far can the Biden administration go to rebuild trust with China?There is a great deal of speculation regarding a Joe Biden presidency,including whether it will soothe the existing toxic relationship between the U.S.and China.While many credit Donald Trump with"standing up to China"and question whether Biden will do the same.     

Unemployment,living standards,and the working-class family in urban Canada in 1901

This article addresses a problem faced by many historians of living standards: what was the effect of unemployment on the real incomes of working-class families during industrialization? The 1901 Census of Canada offers a rare opportunity to answer this question, and to measure both unemployment and living standards while taking into account the contributions of all family wage-earners. The conclusion is that average weekly or monthly wages were more important than work duration in determining the living standards of poor families.     

Global poverty and inequality: are the revised estimates open to an alternative interpretation?

The level of, and trends in, global inequality and global poverty are indicative assessments of who has benefited from economic growth. The revision of price data has led to a reassessment of those estimates. Through an extensive overview of the implications, we argue that the data can be read in different ways. Official estimates show global extreme poverty and global inequality are considerably lower than previously thought. We argue that these changes are much less significant than they at first appear, and we present a more nuanced alternative interpretation by exploring changes across the entire global distribution.     

Management strategies in response to an institutional crisis: The case of earthquakes in the Netherlands

When a policy sector is confronted with a relatively strong and steep decline in legitimacy, we speak of an institutional crisis. We know little about the causes or consequences of these crises. This article explores how institutional crises are managed. It focuses on the effects of management strategies observed in a case study of an institutional crisis in the Netherlands. While we found that policy elites displayed a tendency to maintain the status quo of a policy sector, we also found that the effectiveness of their response strategies was negated by the counter‐response it evoked among freshly energized interest, advocacy and citizen groups. We conclude that the resolution of an institutional crisis is inherently contested. Based on our case study, we develop a theoretical model and formulate propositions that may help to improve our understanding of institutional crisis management.     

Old (Molotov) cocktails in new bottles? “Price-tag” and settler violence in Israel and the West Bank

In the early morning of July 31, 2015, masked attackers threw firebombs into two Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Duma, south of Nablus, killing three Palestinian civilians. Contrary to claims by Israeli and Palestinian politicians, this attack was neither an isolated anomaly nor just another incident of settler violence. Instead, it was the latest attack in an important but largely unknown phenomenon called “price-tag,” in which a loosely connected group of young Israelis called “hilltop youth” burn Palestinian mosques and destroy property in hundreds of attacks accompanied by threatening graffiti that references Israeli settlers, outposts, and anti-Arab slogans. Using an original dataset of price-tag incidents and interviews with key actors, we demonstrate that the perpetrators, targets, and strategies of price-tag are different than previous patterns of settler violence. Whereas previous settlers saw the Israeli state as legitimate and largely decided to cooperate with it, the hilltop youth have decided to confront it by using price-tag attacks to deter settlement withdrawals and chain-gang the state into a conflict with the Palestinians. This analysis of the strategic logic of price-tag reveals its potential to shift the political landscape within and between Israelis and Palestinians.     

Fiscal rules in the Canadian provinces: Abject failure or qualified success?

Most Canadian provinces have introduced legislation to require politicians of all ideological stripes to meet annual balanced budget (BB) targets. Critics of this type of legislation argue that it is unnecessary, confining, and subject to manipulation. We examine provincial balanced budget legislation before and after the Great Recession and argue that the response of provinces needs to be evaluated taking into account the multiple objectives of fiscal policy and the behavioural changes that the rules introduce, including creative non‐compliance. Rules should be evaluated on their ability to contribute to good fiscal governance rather than on their stringency.