Economic crisis,families, and family policy in the Baltic states, 2009–2014

ABSTRACT

The three Baltic countries experienced the most rapid population decline throughout the 1990s and 2000s in Europe. The resulting critical demographic situation motivated the governments of the Baltic states to pay more political attention to family policy issues than in the rest of Europe. The aim of the paper is to analyze the development of family policy in Baltic countries and factors that influenced it during the 2009 economic crisis. Also, the outcomes in terms of child poverty and fertility are highlighted. Results show that the economic resources and fertility level had an essential impact on family policy in the Baltic states. Economic support to families, in turn, directly alleviate the poverty level of families and indirectly influence fertility.     

日本农业发展的困境及政策调整

日本农业发展一直以高关税、高补贴著称,尽管政权更迭,这一政策取向基本保持不变。但是随着国内外政治经济环境的变化,其农业政策也在不断进行调整、修正和补充。近年来,日本出生率下降、人口老龄化问题日益严重,农业劳动力减少,加之耕地面积降低,以及跨太平洋战略经济伙伴关系(TPP)协议对农业影响的不确定性,日本农业政策亟需调整。2015年日本出台了新的《食品、农业与农村地区基本规划》,对今后5~10年的农业发展进行了规划。文章将以此为基础分析日本农业发展面临的困境,并简要介绍日本新的农业政策。     

Ethnic conflicts and environmental degradation in Central Asia. The Ferghana valley and northern Kazakhstan

This work seeks to demonstrate that the combination of ecological degradation, demographic pressure, and ethnic heterogeneity in Central Asia constitute a serious threat to the future stability of the region. The predominantly rural Ferghana Valley and Northern Kazakhstan suffer from shortages of water and land and from unemployment that leads to extensive out-migration to cities suffering from decline in their Soviet-era industries. The problem in the Ferghana Valley began with Tsarist conquest of the valley in 1876 and the subsequent imposition of cotton cultivation, which was greatly expanded by the Soviet Union. The Ferghana Valley, despite being a natural unit, was divided between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan in the 1920s and 1930s, and remains divided between the independent states. The current population of 11 million is ethnically diverse, with Uzbeks in the majority and increasing most rapidly. Immigration from the Caucasus since 1950 added to the tension. Future peace will depend on such factors as whether the neo-Communist political regime chooses to incite ethnic hostilities, the manner in which land is redistributed, and the outcome of struggles for control of the flourishing narcotics trade. The northern Kazakhstan region was designated a pioneer wheat-growing region by Soviet planners in 1954. Russian and Ukrainian migrants established between 1954 and 1956 are today the predominant population sector, but feel their privileged position threatened by nationalist policies making Kazakh the official language and giving preference in employment to Kazakhs. Resettlement of Kazakhs from Mongolia, China, and Afghanistan in the region and the high Kazakh birth rate increase tensions. Grain production initially grew rapidly, but the mediocre soil and erosion-inducing constant dry winds have caused production to stagnate or decline. Regional disputes within Kazakhstan complicate the situation. Northern Kazakhstan, with its industrial development, is integrated more with the Urals and Western Siberia than with the rest of Kazakhstan. Serious ethnic conflicts in either Kazakhstan or the Ferghana Valley are likely to spill far beyond their local boundaries, embroiling much of the area in hostilities.     

Japanese Demographic Crisis in View of Marx’s Capitalist Law of Population

ABSTRACT

In more than four decades, Japanese society has rapidly intensified a tendency towards a very low fertility rate with a smaller number of children. It is generally confirmed that a society needs a total fertility rate of at least 2.1 in order to avoid a decline in its total population. The total fertility rate in Japan was still 2.14 in 1973, when the period of high economic growth in the post-World War II ended. It continued to decline to 1.26 in 2005. It then recovered somewhat in 2015, as the post-war “junior” baby-boom generation reacted to its last chance to have children. However, the recovery is temporary, and the Japanese total fertility rate is estimated to slide again in the 2020s. This article examines this transition through a re-examination of Marx’s capitalist law of population. This approach rejects the naturalist theory of population and directs attention to Japan’s demographic decline in the context of neo-liberal policies in contemporary capitalism.     

Piecing Together the ‘Turkish Puzzle’ on Female Labour Force Participation: Comparative Insights from Southern Europe

Southern Europe has seen remarkable turnarounds in female labour force participation (FLFP) over the past four decades. In Turkey, however, scores of women have yet to join the labour force. To address this ‘Turkish puzzle’, we present comparative data on women’s work in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece (SE-4) and Turkey. Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we identify the factors behind rising FLFP in Southern Europe to explore the prospects for a steeper rise of FLFP in Turkey. We reveal two causal pathways to rising FLFP: (i) left party rule, or (ii) combinations of higher levels of take-up of early education and care, higher levels of tertiary education among women and larger size of service sector employment.     

„Care“ leisten und „Care“ erhalten zwischen Individualisierung und Refamilialisierung<Superscript>1</Superscript>

In industrialized, capitalist welfare states, men could be de-familialized because they could also abandon their caring needs and obligations to women, who therefore remained bound to the family. The focus on women, and precisely on the reasons why they remained bound to the family, has increasingly highlighted that not only incomplete individualisation was at issue, but the overall issue of care. There is a need to reformulate the concept of autonomy in order to include the relationships of interdependence that develop around care giving and care receiving along the life course and to incorporate care giving and care receiving both conceptually and in practice in the structure of social rights and social citizenship themselves. The author discusses how different countries are addressing the issue of care following women’s increasing labour market participation and the ageing of the population, showing that there are contrasting trends both across and within countries.     

日本提高消费税增加公共年金收入研究

日本人口出生率的不断下降和老年人口的不断增加，使公共年金制度的可持续发展遇到巨大挑战。为此，日本政府想通过提高消费税来增加公共年金收入，维持其收支平衡。本文从公共年金的需求弹性特点出发，研究了日本提高消费税的必要性和可行性等，并得出了启示。     

Education and development; females’ education and fertility reduction in Africa: The case of Tigray,Ethiopia

The livelihood of the population in general, and females in particular, is affected by different socio-economic, demographic, environmental, cultural and other factors. the three main demographic variables: fertility, mortality and migration, which are also functions of some other variables, determine the quality of women’s lives. Some of the variables that are expected to determine the levels of fertility, mortality and migration may include literacy status, educational level, occupation, income, place of residence, marital status and other factors. Fertility is the most important variable in the population dynamics. A study was made in tigray, ethiopia, that included 2290 individuals. Of these, 1371 (60%) were females. the method of enumeration was used in order to collect the necessary information from the target population. the age structure, household composition, place of residence, educational level and other background variables were analysed. Results show that the literacy status and educational level were important variables that determined the age at first marriage, the use of family planning services, and antenatal and postnatal care. thus, it was concluded that female education is a key variable that enhances the participation of women in the development process by improving their status through the reduction of fertility.     

Gender and the academic profession in contemporary Tajikistan: challenges and opportunities expressed by women who remain

This article attempts to describe the deleterious impact of higher educational changes affecting female faculty members working in Tajik universities in the post-Soviet era. Over the past two decades, the social and economic position women gained during Soviet times has significantly eroded, bringing enormous challenges to education and higher education access, completion and staffing. The demographic and cultural marginalization of women here has negatively impacted university teaching opportunities and the status of women faculty members. Ethnographic interviews – along with relevant secondary data – reveal that despite various official gender-equity policies announced by the state, female participation issues remain prominent in the university. Our interviewees also report continued difficulty entering higher faculty ranks and leadership positions in university. However, significant numbers of women are still to be found there, and they report a workable compromise between being professional educators and trying to navigate a local culture that is becoming more ‘traditional’.     

Russia’s energy relations in Southeastern Europe: an analysis of motives in Bulgaria and Greece

Although officially Russian state-owned energy companies operate as independent entities, their actions often lead to suspicion that they are acting as a tool of Russian state foreign policy. Countries on the southeastern borders of Europe – Bulgaria and Greece – are prime examples of where this might be the case, since they not only have a central position in Russia’s plans to penetrate European markets through new transport infrastructure but are also part of competing plans for routing non-Russian gas to Western markets. The main focus of the present research is on the natural gas and oil sectors, as these are the traditional foundation of Russian energy exports to Europe. The aim of this paper is thus to provide an objective, evidence-based analysis of Russian activities in the natural gas and oil sectors of Greece and Bulgaria in order to establish whether its actions have been implicitly or explicitly politicized and have served to strengthen Russian influence in the region.     

Gender, Civil War and National Identity: Women Partisans during the Greek Civil War 1946–1949

This paper focuses on the recovery of the experience of partisan women who fought in the lines of the communist-led Greek Democratic Army (GDA) during the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). It is an extract from a research project which examines the extent to which the symbolism of Greek women in arms has informed the various waves of feminist discourse which have emerged since the founding of the modern Greek nation state. More specifically this work employs the image of the Greek woman warrior as an analytical category to investigate the relationship between militarism, nationalism and Greek feminist politics in relation to key nation-building conflicts of the modern Greek period. As such it belongs to the realm of scholarship informed by an understanding of 'gender' and 'nation' as constructed and contested relational systems of cultural and social meanings. Together the two systems not only shape the political culture in historically specific ways but also legitimate and limit the access of (groups of) people — women as well as men — to national movements as well as to the resources of the nation-state. This paper concentrates specifically on the heavily mythologised women of the GDA. It pays special attention to the historical association of their rebellion with national citizenship rights in post-war Greece.     

Explaining the (Lack of) Use of Radical Candidate Selection Methods by Australia's Major Parties

Australia's main parties have experienced rapid deterioration in levels of membership but most have been reluctant to follow the lead of many of their counterparts in Western Europe and embrace more radical, inclusive pre‐selection formats to arrest declining numbers. This paper offers a partial explanation of why the Liberal and Labor parties have been disinclined to look to reforming candidate selection as a strategy to combat their shrinking rank‐and‐file membership. It argues that compulsory voting in conjunction with high levels of party identification has reduced the imperative for Australia's major parties to resort to candidate selection reform as a device to stabilise their voter base. This study underscores the important role of the institutional setting in affecting the incentives for parties to use pre‐selection reform to combat a shrinking membership base.     

Cyprus and EU enlargement to the Western Balkans: a balancing act*

Abstract

Cyprus’ commitment to the European perspective of the Western Balkans is shaped by a range of factors. As well as balancing its national interests, it also aims to stand by a ‘position of principles’ on conflict issues. It equally seeks to be a reliable partner to the EU and move closer to its Western allies, while accommodating its Eastern ones. Nevertheless, over the last 10 years, Nicosia has Europeanised its policies and thinking. This has seen it reach out to Kosovo to try and build de facto relations. However, since the ‘national problem’ remains at the core of its foreign policy, relations with ‘motherland’ Greece are also key. This has in turn complicated dealings with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Overall, Cyprus remains more firmly focused on the Middle East, making it a rather peripheral actor in the Western Balkan countries’ EU integration process.     

Population crisis,marriage reform and the regulation of male sexuality in interwar Iran

Beginning in the early twentieth century, a discourse on population crisis emerged in the Iranian press. Iran, it was argued, suffered from a small and sickly population, and therefore was unable to fully exploit its natural riches and resources. One suggested solution to the problem was a reformation of the traditional model of marriage, making monogamous, age-appropriate marriage the new norm. This was to provide Iran with numerous robust future citizens, the result of healthy and suitable couples. The article presents the process in which fear of population decline led to a change in the perceptions of ‘proper’ male sexuality, of married life and of love in Iran. It shows how this process influenced gender relations and social relations, preserving women’s subjugation within companionate marriage and constructing men of social groups who practised polygamy and child marriage as corrupt and unpatriotic, unlike Western-educated elite men who adopted companionate marriage.     

Political mistrust in southern Europe since the Great Recession

The political effects of the Great Recession on southern Europe were substantial. The rapid economic deterioration of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain from 2008 onwards was accompanied by an increase in citizens’ dissatisfaction towards national political institutions. The sources of political mistrust in the southern periphery were of a political and economic nature. Using quantitative data from EU member states from 2000 to 2015, this paper evaluates the suitability of competing theories in explaining this shift in political attitudes in southern European countries. It first hypothesizes that political mistrust is explained by citizens’ rationalist evaluations of changing macroeconomic performance. It also hypothesizes that political mistrust changes according to institutional performance. The paper argues that economic crises act as an external shock that places politics, politicians and institutions in the spotlight as a result of citizens’ deteriorating performance of the economy. The findings suggest that unemployment, public debt and political corruption are key variables in understanding short-term changes in political mistrust.     

‘Fighting for the Right’: A Functionalist Oral-History Analysis of Conservative Brazilian Women from the Military Dictatorship (1964–1985) to Jair Bolsonaro's Presidency (2018–)

Conservative women in Brazil played a significant role in the 1964 military coup and Bolsonaro's 2018 election victory. Oral history interviews with conservative women who experienced these two significant political events indicate that they both occurred in a climate of heightened anxiety and anti-modern moral panic, where social order and traditional structures such as the family and the church were perceived to be under threat from feminism and Marxism. Although it is somewhat disregarded in contemporary studies, this article argues that functionalist ideology, which upholds the sanctity of the traditional family, serves to explain why Brazilian conservative women continue to fervently support the patriarchal status quo.     

Rein Taagepera: The vanguard of the Baltic thinking class

This article constructs a picture of change and stasis in cultures of gender in Latvia and theorizes the effect of these gender cultures on practices of family formation in the early post-communist period. Drawing in particular on women's perspectives, it offers an analysis grounded in gender and culture of the decline of marriage and the rise of non-marital births. The work argues that a narrative of male ‘marriageability’ has evolved as a component of feminine gender culture and offers one possible lens for analyzing post-communist demographic changes. While this research focuses on Latvia, the demographic trends noted have also characterized neighboring states.     

The current state of world population: A North-South contrast

While the world population continues to demonstrate explosive growth as a whole, the current state of population in developing regions, the so-called "South," is in sharp contrast with that of industrialized regions, the so-called "North." The South has a disproportionately high proportion of child population, as well as high overall population growth rates. Most governments in these areas have sought fertility decline to around the replacement level through family planning programs. The North is characterized by continuous population aging and will face population decline. In order to cope with stagnant low fertility, some governments have sought to raise fertility to around the replacement level by strengthening family policies. In this paper, Professor Makoto Atoh, Director General at the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Tokyo, contrasts the populations of the North and South and recommends possible policy options for the governments of developed countries, especially Japan.     

India and Vietnam compared: Family planning and everyda ylife

Abstract

In India and Vietnam, as in North America, the term “family planning” refers mainly to birth control. There is, however, a broader sense in which this term may be used, namely governmental planning for the welfare and happiness of families, and for democracy and social justice among their members. In this sense family planning is very prominent in Vietnam, but largely absent in India. It is in this sense that I prefer to use the term, although I will first discuss birth control in the overall context of planning for the size of families, as well as for the nation's population growth.