Is More Violent Better? The Impact of Group Participation in Violence on Group Longevity for Far-Right Extremist Groups

Recent research has begun to explore the causes of organizational death for domestic far-right extremist groups. An important aspect that has not been examined is whether or not a group's participation in violence influences its longevity. This study addresses this gap in the literature by examining over 400 domestic far-right extremist groups that persisted for varying lengths of time to determine whether or not group participation in violence influences their longevity. Additionally, this study also examines whether a variety of external (environmental) and internal correlates influence the longevity of violent and nonviolent groups differently.     

Distributional Consequences of Globalisation: Empirical Evidence from Panel Data

This paper investigates the impact of globalisation on cross-country inequality using a large panel dataset. The findings reveal that location and capital are the main determinants of inequality; trade intensity and foreign direct investment make only a small contribution (approximately 4%). The relative contributions of trade and foreign direct investment to inequality have changed little over time and have certainly not increased at the same rate as the rise in global trade and investment activity. Hence, globalisation does not emerge as a significant factor in driving cross-country inequality. Differences emerge when countries are grouped by relative income, but the main findings persist.     

Does Changing Economic Well-Being Shape Resentment About Inequality in China?

The political consequences of income inequality in China have attracted increasing attention among researchers, and conventional wisdom states that economic development can mitigate negative views on inequality. I investigate the effects of subjective and objective changes in economic well-being on public opinion concerning income inequality based on a 2004 Chinese national survey. On the one hand, I find weak evidence of a negative correlation between perceived better economic well-being and negative opinion about inequality in China. On the other hand, I identify consistent evidence of a negative correlation between objective intergenerational upward mobility and negative views about inequality. It is worth noting that while the effect of intergenerational upward mobility is large, it is unable to completely reverse negative views about inequality among Chinese citizens. Hence, I suggest that economic development plays only a limited role in mitigating anger about inequality in China.     

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.     

Global inequality: Bringing politics back in

Data on contemporary global inequality are dramatic, widely known and a new conventional backdrop. In research and policy economists lead the way and the emphasis is on global poverty rather than inequality. Within nations poverty is a challenge, while inequality is not; on a world scale, arguably it is the other way round. The international policy focus on poverty alleviation coexists with neoliberal policies that widen inequality domestically and internationally. A strategic question is where the data depart from the conventional wisdom. Thus a general assumption is that inequality within countries is largest in poor countries; the widest inequality, however, is found within the USA and UK. The conventional assumption is that neoliberal policies and free trade lift all tides; those countries and periods, however, where this policy has been most consistently implemented show the steepest increase in inequality. Global inequality helps sustain domestic privilege. The belief that the risks that global inequality poses can be contained in the global margins is contradicted by the cross-border effects of environmental degradation, migration, transnational crime and terrorism. In explaining global inequality, economic accounts ignore inequal relations of power. The combined policies of developmental discipline, global integration, and marginalisation and containment may be viewed as part of a single process of hierarchical integration, which has turbulence built in.     

Risks and Opportunities in Gender Gaps to Access Shelter: A Platform for Intervention

In the context of the current global trends such as polarization of social groups and intensified poverty, there is a serious risk that gender gaps in access to shelter widen among the poor to the detriment of women's social, economic, and personal well-being. Paradoxically, these conditions also provide certain opportunities for women, including their greater community-based mobilization and leadership role. This paper examines these risks and the opportunities they bear upon and stresses the need for intervention in four areas of rights, access, security, and empowerment. The paper draws on a participatory research project carried out by the United Nations Gender and Habitat program in 1992 to 1999 in low-income settlements of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.     

Is global inequality getting better or worse? A critique of the World Bank’s convergence narrative

The dominant narrative of global income inequality is one of convergence. Recent high-profile publications by Branko Milanovic and the World Bank claim that the global Gini coefficient has declined since 1988, and that inter-country inequality has declined since 1960. But the convergence narrative relies on a misleading presentation of the data. It obscures the fact that convergence is driven mostly by China; it fails to acknowledge rising absolute inequality; and it ignores divergence between geopolitical regions. This paper suggests alternative measures that bring geopolitics back in by looking at the gap between the core and periphery of the world system. From this perspective, global inequality has tripled since 1960.     

Income Inequality and Redistributive Spending: Evidence from Panel Data of Texas Counties

Abstract

The relationship between redistributive spending and income inequality has been of interest to researchers for several decades. Existing literature has largely focused on country-level studies and may be broadly divided into two groups: studies that find a positive relationship between the two and studies that find a negative relationship. The positive association is usually explained through the median voter theory and the negative association through the social insurance theory.

This study offers a test of the median voter and social insurance hypotheses by examining the relationship between economic inequality, voter turnout and redistributive spending at the sub-national level among the 50 largest counties in Texas over years 2006 to 2012. One of the advantages of using a regional sample is that counties are relatively more homogeneous and allow for the collection of better records across time. Random effects models suggest that income inequality is positively associated with redistributive spending. The study improves our understanding of the patterns of redistribution at the sub-national level and highlights the importance of careful inter-temporal modelling of relationships between redistributive spending and inequality.     

Accounting for Changing Earnings Inequality in Costa Rica, 1980–99

After declining from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, inequality in monthly earnings in Costa Rica stabilised from 1987 to 1992 and then increased from 1992 to 1999. In this article, we use recently developed techniques to measure the extent to which these changes in earnings inequality were the result of changes associated with the distributions of personal and workplace characteristics of workers or the earnings differences associated with those characteristics. We present evidence that the most important cause of the fall in inequality prior to 1987 was a decline in returns to education. Inequality stopped falling in Costa Rica in the 1990s in part because returns to education stopped falling. The most important cause of rising inequality in monthly earnings in the 1990s was an increase in the proportion of workers working a non-standard work week (part-time or over-time).     

What Difference Do Polarisation Measures Make? An Application to China

In recent years there has been much discussion of the difference between inequality and polarisation. The vast literature on inequality is held to miss out key features of distributional change, which are better described as changes in polarisation. Axioms have been proposed which capture some of these differences, and measures of polarisation, as distinct from inequality, have been suggested. The theoretical distinctions proposed in this literature are indeed interesting. But do the newly proposed measures of polarisation give different results in comparing societies over time? We address these questions for China, where dramatic increases in inequality and polarisation have been much discussed in the literature. We find that, contrary to theoretical expectation, the new measures of polarisation do not generate very different results from the standard measures of inequality. The paper ends by considering a different approach to polarisation which might better conform to the policy concerns expressed in the specific context of China.     

Introduction: rising powers and the future of global governance

There has been much debate over the extent to which the rising powers of the global South are challenging contemporary global political and economic governance. While some observers see an emancipatory potential in the redistribution of power among states, others see the rising powers as firmly located within the Western-centred neoliberal world order. This collection of papers seeks to go beyond the state-centrism of existing approaches by examining how challenges to global governance by rising powers are rooted in specific state–society configurations. Through studies of Brazil, India, China and other important developing countries within their respective regions, such as Turkey and South Africa, the papers examine the way domestic structures, arrangements, actors and dynamics influence the nature of the international interventions and behaviour of rising powers. They ask how their increased political and economic enmeshment in the international system impacts upon their own internal societal cohesion and development. By examining these issues, the papers raise the question of whether the challenge posed by the rising powers to global governance is likely to lead to an increase in democracy and social justice for the majority of the world’s peoples.     

Conservative Christianity,the Global South and the Battle over Sexual Orientation

This article explores conservative Christian contributions to debates over sexual orientation, focusing in particular on the way in which Northern Christians struggling to win their battles at home look to the global South for allies and support. This is made easier by the fact that global Christianity is once more overwhelmingly a Southern religion that generally adheres to traditionalist understandings in the sphere of sexual relations. The article looks at how this has played out at church, state and international levels by examining the conflicts over sexuality within the Anglican Communion, the domestic and international debates about the controversial Ugandan draft law on homosexuality, and discussions about sexual orientation in UN institutions. It concludes by rejecting simplistic suggestions that these are part of a one-way process, in which Northern conservatives use their counterparts in the global South to promote their own agendas.     

Exploring income inequality in rural,coastal Viet Nam

Income inequality has been rising in parallel with the economic liberalisation process in the former centrally planned economies. The opportunities for non‐agricultural income associated with the market liberalisation process in former centrally planned economies would seem to be important in determining inequality within the rural sector. This article reviews the trends in inequality in Viet Nam examining differential trends and hypothesised causes. Inequality is important because of its relationship to other factors in the evolution of the agricultural economy such as the incidence of poverty and the sustainability of emerging income sources. This article analyses income inequality based on data collected by the author in two Districts in coastal northern Viet Nam. The results demonstrate that non‐agricultural income sources, specifically aquaculture and wage and remittance, contribute more to present inequality than any other income source. Simulation shows that the emergence of aquaculture since the late 1980s has been driving the inequality increase in that period. Hence the analysis provides evidence that non‐agricultural income increases inequality even without asset concentration. This concentration of income is important in the north Viet Nam context since it is concurrent with present‐day land allocation and will affect the structure of future income growth.     

Beck's cosmopolitan politics

This article evaluates Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitan global politics. I argue that areas where Beck sees bases for communal and cosmopolitan politics are structured by power, inequality and conflict. Beck has a conflict perspective on local responses to globalization but this is not carried through to his global politics. There are issues that need to be tackled at a global level but I argue that this will have to be done on the basis of conflicting interests, power and nation-states as much as through global cosmopolitanism and co-operation.     

Global governance,development and human security: exploring the links

This article draws attention to the convergence of the global development and security agendas at the beginning of the new millennium. It explores the links between global governance, development and human security. It argues that material sufficiency lies at the core of human security. Hence, the problems of poverty and deepening inequality are central concerns, and the unfolding of these problems in the 1980s and 1990s is highlighted. During the closing decades of the 20th century, a neoliberal vision dominated the global development policy agenda, while these problems of inequality deepened. The policy was developed, championed and implemented by a range of global governance institutions, working through state governments. The idea and the institutions of global governance are examined critically, with a view to establishing in whose interest global governance and its associated development policies may be operating, and whether this is in support of human security.     

Civil war and the coalition government of democratic Kampuchea

This article explores the relationship between the politics of international development and the reproduction of global inequality. I argue that contemporary discourses about— and the practices of—‘development for developing countries’ represent an attempt to reconstitute the political utility of the ‘Third World’. In an era of globalisation the deployment of the notion of a Third World of ‘developing countries’ which require immediate, systemic attention through the discourse and practice of international development continues to provide a way of both disciplining and displacing the global dimension of social and political struggle. I refer to this dynamic in terms of the political utility of the Third World, which, I argue, has been conducive to the organisation of global capitalism and the management of social and political contradictions of inequality and poverty. I develop this argument by drawing on the historical implications and legacy of ‘international development’ as practised in and on the Third World and through a critical analysis of the methodological premises that constitute international development. I illustrate this by drawing on a key strategy aimed ostensibly at development: the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsp) approach, promulgated by the World Bank and the imf, which I discuss in relation to the ‘development agenda’ inaugurated during the 1999 wto meeting in Doha (Qatar). I argue that the ideology and practice of the global politics of international development reinforce the conditions of global inequality, and must be transcended as both an analytical framework and an organising principle of world politics. While the prsp and related approaches are currently presented as key elements in the building of the ‘architecture for (international) development’, what is emerging is a form of governance that attempts to foreclose social and political alternatives.     

Income inequality and level of corruption in post-communist European countries between 1995 and 2014

This paper analyses the relationships between income inequality and corruption in Europe and looks specifically at post-communist European countries. The scientific community agrees that there is important relationship between income inequality and corruption and many authors believe that low income inequality is connected to low corruption. According to empirical papers, this is true not only on the European scale, but also on a global scale. In this paper, I test this claim by conducting a multilevel analysis on 39 European countries in the period of 1995–2014. This model ascertains that there are immense differences between post-communist countries and the rest of European countries. The effects of income inequality on the level of corruption are discussed.     

Putting gender into health and globalisation debates: New perspectives and old challenges

Debates continue about the impact of globalisation on human well-being. However, they are often based on little empirical evidence. This is not surprising, given the contested nature of the term 'globalisation' itself, the different ways in which health and well-being can be measured and the diversity of globalising trends in different parts of the world. The aim of this paper is to clarify some of these issues by looking at the recent experiences of women across a variety of social settings. It will begin with the development of a gender-neutral framework for analysing the links between globalisation and health. This will be followed by a more detailed examination of how sex and gender have shaped women's experiences of global change in ways that have been hazardous to the health of many of the most vulnerable. It will go on to identify the opportunities for improvement that these same changes have opened up and will conclude by discussing the ways in which many women are using these opportunities to reshape their lives in healthier ways.     

Testing The Limits of Incrementalism: An Empirical Analysis of Expenditure Decisions by English Local Authorities, 1981–1996

Studies of budgetary outputs in public organizations are dominated by the theory of incrementalism. This perspective suggests that expenditure decisions are based on simple rules of thumb. We evaluate the validity of incrementalism by examining the annual spending decisions of 403 English local authorities over 15 budgetary cycles. Two budgetary norms are tested empirically: protect the real level of service provision, and follow central expenditure guidelines. Each of these norms is translated into two decision rules: marginality, or the size of deviations from the norm, and regularity, which refers to the consistency of such deviations over time. Few of the statistical results support the hypothesis that local expenditure decisions are dominated by general budgetary norms or specific decision rules. Our evidence therefore casts doubt on the validity of incrementalism as a theory of local budgetary outputs, and as an explanation of spending decisions in the public sector as a whole.     

Millennium Development Goal 1: poverty, hunger and decent work in Southeast Asia

This article considers three questions: 1) what progress has been made in achieving MDG1 targets?; 2) what challenges remain?; and 3) what more could and should be done? To examine these questions, the article assesses the progress of Southeast Asia in seeking to achieve MDG1. It argues that the region is 'on track' to achieve MDG 1 targets, although significant challenges such as inequality remain. Economic growth, significant structural change and incorporation into global value chains have contributed to MDG progress. However, this is a double-edged sword as exposure to global economic turbulence can increase. The longer-term reduction of poverty, inequality and social exclusion is a question of empowerment of local producers within value chains-a shift in economic power and control through pro-poor strategies strong enough to effect substantive structural change. The article outlines key concepts; identifies the main characteristics of Southeast Asian poverty; outlines what more needs to be done; and concludes by reprising the article's findings and weighing the prospects for 2010-15 and beyond.