Politics or Technical Criteria? The Determinants of Infrastructure Investments in Brazil

To what extent do public infrastructure projects respond to political pressures or developmental imperatives? Do these projects reflect a technical strategy aimed at upgrading economic productivity or the political distribution of public goods that rewards certain voters or political actors? This paper analyses the Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC), an $817 billion-dollar Brazilian infrastructure programme with a multi-method research design pairing in-country interviews and analysis of an original, municipal-level dataset. I conclude that my case study reflects a mixture of political and technical factors, which mirrors the competing influence of technocratic bureaucrats and politically-driven politicians during the project selection process. Despite explicitly targeting larger municipalities with infrastructure deficiencies, the programme still rewarded core-voting districts supporting the winning PT (Workers Party/Partido dos Trabalhadores) presidential candidates. A secondary result finds older municipalities with greater bureaucratic capacity were better positioned to successfully submit projects for federal funding.     

Remittances in Nepal: Boon or Bane?

Nepal is one of the highest recipients of remittances (percentage of GDP) in the world. For a small land-locked economy battered by a decade-long Maoist insurgency (1996–2006), prolonged political instability, slow growth rate and large exodus of youths for employment overseas, high inflow of remittances bears a huge significance both at micro and macro levels. Exploring various facets of high migration and remittances, this article shows remittance-induced Dutch disease effects and policy laxity to improve investment climate in Nepal. Since it is costly to sterilise the impact of remittances each year, it might be prudent to learn to live with it and gradually channel remittances to productive usages with a goal to boost productivity.     

Small Retailers in Brazil: Are Formal Firms Really More Productive?

This paper examines the productivity of formal and informal retailers in Brazil by simultaneously estimating a stochastic production frontier and an efficiency model for a cross-section of some 11,000 retail firms with, at most, five workers. Results show that the efficiency of firms is positively related with ICT adoption, managerial ability, technical assistance and participation in a guild. Formal retailers are more productive than informal retailers, even after controlling for self-selection and firm, industry, and firm-owner characteristics.     

Demobilization of Paramilitaries in Colombia: Transformation or Transition?

Historically, Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reinsertion (DDR) has provided a useful means to terminate conflicts. Since being catapulted to office in August 2002 with 53 percent of the vote of 46.45 percent of the voters, ¹ 1. IFES Election Guide, available at (http://www.electionguide.org/results.php?ID=1011). Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has vigorously pursued a demobilization program, both individual and collective. However, despite the fact that over 40,000 combatants have demobilized under these programs, evidence is growing that this latest round of Colombian DDR is merely transitioning, rather than terminating, violence in that Andean country.     

Modalities of Violence in Development: structural or contingent,mythic or divine?

This paper examines the relationship between violence and development. It explores whether violence is an intrinsic (structural) part of development, or a contingent result of poor or mistaken policies and practices that might be corrected. The issue of how far an element of violence might be desirable for development is also considered. These two issues are debated in the context of a variety of approaches to development and in light of various accounts of violence offered by analysts such as Fanon, Benjamin, Critchley and Zizek. In conclusion it is argued that an emancipatory conception of development may be reconciled with Benjamin’s idea of divine violence in the form of a Badiouan event—with the proviso that the Derridian conception of the economy of violence is also applied in such a way as to minimise, or at least limit violence.     

Vivir bien governance in Bolivia: chimera or attainable utopia?

The notion of vivir bien – a complex set of ideas, worldviews, and knowledge deriving from indigenous movements, activist groups, and scholars of indigeneity – has become an overarching principle for policy-making and state transformation processes in Andean countries. This article analyses the contradiction between the principle of vivir bien as an egalitarian utopian category and its bureaucratic application in Bolivia to state formation processes and power dynamics involving social movements. It argues that while discursively grounded on such egalitarian principles as reciprocity and rotating authority, its implementation entails bureaucratic propensities to centralise power and authority. Instead of decolonising the state, it is used to discipline the masses.     

Women's rights in the muslim world: reform or reconstruction?

The issue of gender inequality is an acute problem in countries where women's lives are governed by laws, and configured by customs and traditions, said to derive from Islam. In the second half of the 20th century, two Muslim feminist paradigms have emerged in response to this malaise. Islamic feminists aim to establish women's rights within the Islamic framework by re-interpreting Islam's holy sources. In contrast, secular feminists challenge the particularistic nature of the Islamic framework and advocate the application of a set of standard universal rights for Muslim and non-Muslim women. This article focuses on the writings of the Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi, tracing her evolution from advocating secular reconstruction of Muslim societies to a position that resembles Islamic reformism.     

Social Impact Bonds: Blockbuster or Flash in a Pan?

Despite the general hype, Social Impact Bonds’ (SIB) rate of adoption is still modest. The mismatch between widespread interest and actual adoption raises interesting questions as to whether we are still in the early adoption phase of SIBs and massive diffusion is yet to come, or we are observing a marginal phenomenon. In order to shed some light on this issue, the paper provides a review of the cases in which the SIB model has been already applied, exploring the specific configuration employed, with the purpose to identify regular configuration patterns and their deviation from a prototypical structure.     

Freedom of information in local government: rhetoric or reality?

The aim of this paper is to analyse the level of implementation by Spanish local authorities of the Transparency Act (19/2013), and their voluntary information disclosure in areas where such disclosure is obligatory in other EU countries. We identify the main factors that may influence the implementation of this Act and the self-regulation policies adopted. Our analysis highlights the existence of delays among some local authorities, with notable differences between municipalities with larger and smaller populations, in implementing the Act, and also the fact that many municipalities are committed to achieving transparency, often going beyond minimum legal requirements. Factors such as population size, the political ideology of the governing party and the education level and economic capacity of the population are related to the level of implementation of transparency and self-regulatory policies in this respect by local authorities. We acknowledge that the 2013 Act was still being implemented during the period analysed.     

What Explains the Job Creating Potential of Industrialisation in the Developing World?

This paper examines why job creation in the manufacturing sector has differed widely across developing countries, using a modified Lewis model that captures the scale, composition and labour intensity effects of industrialisation on job creation. We show that while the scale effect has been mostly positive, labour intensity and composition effects have been mostly negative. Trade integration has a positive impact on manufacturing employment via the scale and composition effects, but a negative impact via the labour intensity effect. Human capital has a positive effect via the labour intensity effect. Labour regulations have no impact through any of the effects.     

Student movements in Kosova (1981): academic or nationalist?

The 1980s caught Albanians in Kosova in interesting social, political, and psychological circumstances. Two diametrically opposed dogmatic dilemmas took shape: “illegal groups” – considerably supported by students – demanded the proclamation of the Republic of Kosova and/or Kosova’s unification with Albania. On the other side of the spectrum, “modernists” – gathering, among others, the political and academic elites – pushed for the improvement of rights of Kosovars guaranteed under the “brotherhood and unity” concept advocated within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). This paper outlines the nature of demonstrations that took place in March and April 1981 and the corresponding responses of political and academic elites. Stretching beyond symbolic academic reasons – demands for better food and dormitory conditions – the study points to the intense commitment of the students to their demands, often articulated in nationalistic terms. Was it inevitable that the structure of the SFRY would lead to those living in Kosova as a non-Slavic majority in a federation of “Southern Slavs” to articulate demands for national self-rule? It is necessary to highlight these political and social complexities through analytical approaches in order to track the students’ goals and to reexamine assumptions behind the “modernist” agenda. In that vein, the paper analyzes the conceptual connections and differences between student reactions and modernists’ positions during the historical period under discussion here.     

Governance of Education in the United Kingdom: Convergence or Divergence?

Abstract

This article considers how structures and processes of governance in education have changed in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland over recent years, setting this discussion within the context of debates about the nature of governance and governing in public services more generally. It is argued, firstly, that governance needs to be considered as a comprehensive concept that encompasses both the role of the state and the range of other actors and processes through which educational provision is steered; and secondly, that governance is essentially about power: its distribution and its use. The article draws on these key ideas to explore the similarities and differences between the experiences of the four constituent jurisdictions of the United Kingdom over recent years. It considers whether the approaches in the jurisdictions are converging or diverging, the reasons underlying this, and prospects for the future. It is concluded that, while national histories and cultures have served to maintain very distinctive governance identities among the jurisdictions, international trends, and the ways in which governments respond to these, are putting these identities under considerable pressure.     

Population: malady or symptom?

The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) opened the dawn of a new era in discourse over population. A newfound consensus was reached between North and South which was not there during the two previous world population conferences in Bucharest and Mexico. While consensus was reached at the 1994 ICPD on the need for action, however, debate over population is far from settled. Causes of population growth, the links between population growth and economic development, and environmental degradation remain controversial topics. The authors analyze the basis of the ICPD consensus at the local, national, and global levels. They also compare the development discourse to the political discourse over population. Both discourses emphasize different aspects of a far more complex reality. The question is which discourse to choose as a basis for drawing policy recommendations. The emerging view on the way to Cairo was that consensus would be achieved on the basis of development discourse. Success on the action plan rests upon the belief that more contraceptives, more health services, and more schools will be enough to reduce fertility rates. The political discourse, however, is better than the development discourse as a basis for policy making because it stresses the need for integration rather than running the risk of exclusion. The political discourse is also more demanding.