The contradictions of class and ideology among argentine laborers and employees

This article compares Argentine trade union laborers' and employees' notions of class and ideology. The research findings were based on one-to-one structured, but openended interviews with 110 rank and file workers of Greater Buenos Aires between 1985 and 1986. Rather than a study of union structure or labor leadership, it fleshes out workers' views beyond the factory walls and office windows. The research depicts the complex, seemingly contradictory, variety of social-democratic, liberal, and conservative values and attitudes carried by the Argentine working class. Peronism remains the ideological anchor of many workers who, nevertheless, consider themselves centrist, left or right. They are centrist in their support of a liberal-capitalist economy, left in their espousal of markedly better income distribution for workers, and right in the defense of their communities and neighborhoods. Workers' historical connections, cultural outlooks, and educational levels impact heavily upon their views of democracy and sense of class. Peter Ranis is a professor of political science at York College and the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York. He has completedArgentine Workers: Peronism and Class Consciousness, to be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1992. The research for this article was made possible by a Fulbright Senior Research Grant and several PSC/ CUNY awards between 1986 and 1990. My thanks also go to the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella of Buenos Aries and the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales Sabre el Estado y la Administracíon (CISEA) for respectively making their facilities available to me in July and August of 1987 and 1990.     

Heterogeneous Effects of Urban Land Titling: A Replication of ‘Property Rights for the Poor’

We replicate the analysis of Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Shargrodsky’s (GS) influential 2010 article ‘Property rights for the poor: effects of land titling’. GS use a natural experiment in a poor urban area of Buenos Aires to find that land titling increases housing investment, reduces household size, and increases child education, but does not do so through increased use of credit. The original questionnaires and raw data are not available and the existing variables provided by GS allow only a limited replication analysis. Despite these limitations, we successfully reproduce the original findings published by GS, and find these results are robust to alternative specifications. We also find heterogeneous effects regarding gender and education level of the original squatter.     

An Analysis of Race Equality Policy and Practice in the City of Birmingham,UK

The city of Birmingham is home to a significant number of ethnic minorities. In 2004 it is estimated that almost a third of the city's one million people are of ethnic minority origin. How the city's institutions have responded to race equality issues is analysed in the light of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report (1999) and the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. Based on secondary analysis of documentary evidence and interviews with key actors, it is shown that ethnic minorities are disadvantaged in education, the labour market, and in relation to health and housing. It is argued that the local authority has made some genuine efforts to ensure that all its citizens are provided equality of opportunity; however, given the diversity and socio-economic polarity of the ethnic minorities in Birmingham, we conclude that race equality policies remain ineffective and a great deal more is required to ensure that ethnic minorities are treated equally as full British citizens.     

China's Engagement with Neo-liberalism: Path Dependency,Geography and Party Self-Reinvention

China's post-Mao market reform, even after the Asian crisis, does not conform to the standard IMF/World Bank model and the state continues to mediate market reform. Three principal factors have influenced how the state mediates China's market reform: path dependency, a result of China's communist and nationalist revolution; China's geography, which favours developmental-state-type industrialisation; and most important of all, the Chinese Communist Party's successful post-Mao self-reinvention that has enabled it to remain in power as a monopolistic party. These factors determine that China's engagement with neo-liberalism will be a loose hug rather than an intimate embrace.     

Post-Cold War Vietnam: stay low,learn, adapt and try to have fun – but what about the party?†

The paper compares political ideas and acts in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in Communist Vietnam. It argues that the Gorbachev group, committed to progressive change, concluded that power granted to them by their position in the Soviet system needed to be eliminated, creating a ‘boot strap’ problem. To secure progressive change they had first to destroy their own power base. By contrast, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) attempted, in the two decades after the emergence of a market economy in 1989–1991, to rule an increasingly open society through Soviet political institutions. By the late ‘noughties’ Vietnam faced a crisis of domestic sovereignty, with politics largely a matter of spoils, with policy largely irrelevant and unimplementable, and usually blocked by powerful interests. The paper argues that Hinsley's notion of the sovereignty issue makes this situation far easier to analyse. It argues that the Gorbachev group's analysis would have led to them predicting that the VCP's attempt to use Soviet institutions to rule over a globalising and increasingly open society with a market economy would lead to a crisis of political authority, and that they would have been correct. This leads to the counter-intuitive position that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a success ? in that it managed to solve a serious political problem, i.e. how to create the preconditions for a political system suited to a market economy in a relatively open society – and the VCP a failure.     

The New Metropolitan Police of Buenos Aires: Officers’ Shared Perceptions on Community Policing and Organizational Practices

This exploratory research surveys police officers of the city of Buenos Aires who have joined the metropolitan police force. Specifically, it examines the officers’ perceptions of community policing, reasons for joining the forces, and their beliefs concerning the integration of female police officers. Police officers reported solid knowledge about community policing and their role as its instruments. They expressed some doubt that the values of community policing are permeating throughout the organization, and that there was not enough time for officers to actually engage communities. The leadership of the department should focus efforts to ensure that community policing values are instilled throughout the organization, and providing officers with the time needed to develop community relations with the public.     

Inside chinese bureaucracy: Civil service reform in the ministry of light industry

Since 1987, mainland Chinese ministries have been experimenting with a western style civil service system. The provisional guidelines published in that year called for the creation of a professional administrative class to be hired by open recruitment at the central and provisional levels of leading state ministries. The article is a micro-analysis of civil service reform in the Ministry of Light Industry and evaluates the first two years of reform in this ministry, which is responsible for supervising roughly twenty percent of China's production of durable consumer goods. The reform process has been gradual and incremental. The reforms were stimulated by the need to modernize China's state-run ministries in order to make them economically competitive with the mainland's growing private market sector. However, the article concludes that the reforms are too limited to make a substantial contribution to this goal.     

Afro-Porteños at the end of the nineteenth century: discussing the nation

Argentina is a country that, even today, identifies itself as a modern, white, and European nation. This representation began to be projected in the last decades of the nineteenth century, framed in the state-consolidation and nation-building processes, which will be the historical context for this paper. It was also the time when a certain notion became broadly accepted: that Afro-Argentines, the descendants of formerly enslaved African people, had ‘disappeared’. By contrast, in that same period, Afro-Porteños (Porteños are citizens of Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina) had not disappeared but constituted an important community, which produced numerous newspapers. Through the analysis of Afro-Porteño newspapers, their self-representations and discourses, some of the ways they negotiated with the ideology of modernity and Europeanism (that implied whiteness) will be discussed. The agency of Afro-Porteños will be examined as we analyze how Afro-Porteño intellectuals promoted state values to their group and at the same time defended their community against discrimination.     

Transfer payments,mothers' income and child health in ecuador

We evaluate the impact of the Bono Solidario, a transfer payment scheme in Ecuador, on children's nutritional status. In addition to testing for pure income effects, because the programme transferred money to mothers of young children, we test whether mother's income has a stronger effect on children's heights and weights than ordinary household income. We draw two main conclusions: that the Bono Solidario transfer payment scheme has had a statistically significant but quite modest impact on children's nutritional status, and that this impact is no different than any other income effect on height and weight. In particular, the fact that the Bono is transferred to mothers has not made it more efficacious at reducing malnutrition than other household income.     

Another final battle on the stage of history

Abstract

Taking its point of departure in remarks made by Ulrike Meinhof during the 1972 trial in West Germany of Horst Mahler, this paper goes on to examine some of the ideas and assumptions of the members of the terrorist group to which he belonged. Meinhof's as well as Mahler's views of the Jews in Germany and their fate, including their charge of a conspiracy on the part of the malevolent powers, are quoted and make it clear that as terrorists they conformed to a grandiose millenarian tradition. This millenarian tradition has had a long history in Germany, comprising anarchic, egalitarian, and communistic elements. Examples are the followers of John Hus and Thomas Müntzer. The need for group identification is also strong in the millenarians of the present day who believe in and act unquestioningly upon tenets such as those of terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction which, fortunately, has not gained the following of such predecessors as Hitler's Third Reich.     

Legitimacy dilemmas: the IMF's pursuit of country ownership

There can be little doubt that the International Monetary Fund is currently facing a serious challenge to its legitimacy. Such criticisms echo similar debates that have surrounded other international organisations, including the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. As these different institutions seek to respond to this challenge, the Fund's efforts to respond to its critics provide a number of interesting lessons and warnings. In this article I examine the Fund's response to challenges to its legitimacy by focusing on one of the often overlooked aspects the institution's recent reforms: the IMF's efforts to change its relationship with borrowing countries by revising its conditionality guidelines and pursuing greater domestic ‘ownership’ over the reforms that it requires. While this response helps to resolve a number of legitimacy gaps that have emerged in the past decades, this strategy has also produced a number of new legitimacy dilemmas that raise questions about the sustainability of the IMF's current reform efforts. Chief among them is the limit to the Fund's ability to obtain the deeper political legitimacy that it seeks by using the same narrowly technical economic strategies that it has relied on in the past.     

Agency conflict and the signalling snafu in the mexican peso crisis of 1994

In this paper I explore the role of signalling in the agency conflict that pits national governments against international lenders in the Mexican peso crisis of 1994. (The term international lenders includes domestic residents with the capacity to invest abroad.) I give evidence for the conventional conclusion that Mexico's underlying economic and financial situation did not warrant the humiliating treatment inflicted on it by the international financial markets. The humiliating treatment, however, was not a mindless overreaction to suddenly perceived changes in the country's political fragility. On the contrary, I show that the country's evolving political fiagility was recognized and compensated for as far back as 1991. It was rather the result of a rational reevaluation of the costs of the agency conflict that is inherent in the relationship between national governments and international lenders and the power of national governments through moratoriums, repudiation, or default to subordinate the claims of international lenders to those of domestic agents. I model the conflict as a government held option to default and introduce signalling by assuming that the Mexican government had monopolistic information on the economy's true situation. I then give evidence that the agency costs were reevaluated when it became clear that the Mexican government had been sending false signals to the international investment community and that these false signals had made it possible for Mexico to borrow close to or beyond the point where default was the optimal financial strategy.     

Responsibility and National Memory: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem

How are Israelis to incorporate the Palestinian refugee problem in their national memory? Scholarly historical accounts of the 1948 period can play an important role in this regard. Benny Morris's account allows them to take responsibility while maintaining the integrity of their national identity. Shabtai Teveth's account allows them to avoid responsibility, but at the cost of ignoring mountains of evidence. Nur Masalha's account in contrast, burdens them with a responsibility that jeopardizes their national bond. It is reasonable to expect them to adopt the first and reject the second, but it is unreasonable to expect them to adopt the third, irrespective of its scholarly merits.     

Dependency,the state and class in the neoliberal transition of Taiwan

The remarkable economic growth in Taiwan has served as a model of the developmental state as well as a source of scepticism about neoliberal policy for many less developed countries. However, since the mid-1980s Taiwan has gravitated from its previous statist model to the universally embraced 'market-orientated' restructuring. This study seeks to explain this neoliberal transition. A disaggregated approach is employed to break neoliberalism down into three distinct dimensions: market openness, fiscal austerity, and privatisation of public sector enterprises. The analysis results confirm that: (1) Taiwan's trade dependency on the USA constituted a decisive factor in the state opening its domestic market; (2) distributional politics was forged in a new but weak democracy to incorporate more interest groups in the fiscal expansion of the post-authoritarian era; and (3) the slow but increasingly steady progress of privatisation plans was influenced not by a 'back-to-the-market' idea but by the statist legacy with which bureaucrats attempted to manage public sector enterprises even after they became de jure private firms. The theoretical implications of this transition are discussed in the conclusion.     

Understanding 'political stability': Party action and political discourse in West Bengal

In contrast to the party political turmoil that plagued New Delhi during the 1990s, West Bengal is an Indian state that has demonstrated remarkable stability. Atul Kohli has made much of this contrast, arguing that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has held power in West Bengal since 1977 through the combination of its organisational and ideological coherence. His wider conclusion is that the institutionalisation of political parties is essential in staving off the 'crises of governability' faced by many democracies in developing countries. At a time when 'good governance' is a major theme within development studies, Kohli's thesis deserves close attention. This paper critically examines his work in two ways. Empirically, it questions elements of his portrayal of the CPI(M), and West Bengal's politics more generally, as 'exceptional'. In theoretical terms, it questions Kohli's treatment of political institutions, arguing that more attention should be given to institutional culture and political discourses.     

Management of the kidnap risk

Abstract

Paradoxically, Britain, where kidnapping is rare, has been a pioneer in kidnap insurance, prevention, and negotiation, largely due to the experience of Lloyd's of London in underwriting every kind of risk worldwide. The premium income of Lloyd's for kidnap insurance has grown from $150,000 in 1970 to $50 million in 1976. As with fire risks, with kidnap risks Lloyd's found that it saved money both for the underwriters and their clients if they sent specialist consultants to advise on reducing the risk and, in the event of a kidnap, to advise on negotiation. A firm at Lloyd's founded such a consultancy (Control Risks Ltd.) which has now expanded to meet a rising demand, not only from insured clients, but also from an increasing number of uninsured clients who engage them on a consultancy fee basis. This article examines the growing attractiveness of kidnapping as a high‐yield low‐risk crime (whether for political dividends or criminal gain); describes how kidnaps are organized; advises on the various means of protection against it; and discusses the acts of contingency planning and crisis management if a kidnap occurs.     

The mexican financial crisis

In the period 1990-93 Mexico's economy experienced expansion and structural change. This was associated with economic opening, market deregulation, and large inflows of foreign capital. Mexico had dealt with the external debt problem through a Brady debt restructuring. This restructuring lowered the financial requirements of the public sector, improved market expectations, and set the stage for a decline in domestic interest rates.

In the early 1990s Mexico attracted fully one-fifth of all capital flows directed into developing countries. These inflows more than financed the current account deficit, and permitted Mexico to expand its official reserve holdings. The portfolio capital inflow bolstered the stock market, which appreciated in value. Mexico's entry into NAFTA provided another reason to be optimistic concerning economic and business prospects.

However, Mexico's external payments position was falling deeper into deficit. By mid-1994 it was possible to observe that the current account in Mexico's balance of payments had shifted further into deficit, and that the high unsustainable level of capital inflow was diminishing. Political violence and assassinations in 1994 caused foreign investors to look more carefully at investment prospects, and steadily rising interest rates in the United States created incentives favoring dollar rather than peso financial instruments. As peso interest rates began to rise, the Mexican government and commercial banks turned to dollar-indexed or outright dollar borrowing. By December 1994 this increased dollar liability position together with a runoff in foreign exchange reserves left Mexico in a difficult liquidity position. The December 20, 1994 devaluation failed to renew confidence in the viability of Mexico's payments position, and two days later the peso was floated. In the early weeks of 1995 a massive Mexican financial assistance package was provided by the United States, the International Monetary Fund, and others.

An analysis of the components of Mexico's GDP and balance of payments suggests that the financial disequilibrium was clearly evident by mid- 1994. Over the period 1993-94 domestic absorption had increased beyond the ability of the economy to sustain it. Parallel to this, the current account deficit had increased beyond the ability of foreign exchange resources to support this deficit. Failure by the government and central bank to take action in the third quarter of 1994 resulted in a runoff of foreign exchange reserves, speculative trading in the financial markets, growing skepticism concerning the viability of existing arrangements. Fiscal and monetary tightening early in 1995 produced an improved financial equilibrium, suggesting that similar action at mid-1994 might have avoided the near debt crisis that manifested itself in December 1994 jand the following weeks.