Latin America: Looking North or South?: Globalization From Below

HugoChavez, the controversial president of Venezuela, has been called Fidel with oil. Before he ran for office and was elected in 1998, Chavez had been imprisoned for two years after leading an attempted coup in February 1992 when he was an army colonel.
In late September, OPEC held its first summit in 20 years in Caracas. NPQ editor Nathan Gardels spoke then with Chavez.     

Latin America: Looking North or South?: Erasing the Border of Time

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes' newest book is Laura Diaz. He spoke with NPQ is late November.     

Latin America: Looking North or South?: The United States and Latin America at Century's Turn

This article is adapted from a longer essay prepared at the invitation of Politica Externa in Rio de Janeiro and draws on the Astor Lecture Dr. Lowenthal delivered at St. Anthony's College, Oxford.     

Latin America: Looking North or South?: Mexico's Future—So Close to God,So Close to the United States

Vincente Fox, the new president of Mexico, was inaugurated on Dec. 1. He spoke with NPQ Editor Nathan Gardels in Mexico City     

Policy Coherence for Development and Securitisation: competing paradigms or stabilising North–South hierarchies?

Often treated as separate paradigms, the security-development nexus and the aid effectiveness agenda are analysed here instead as a continuum of aid policy responses that attempt to stabilise power relations in a contested and unstable international arena These responses are informed by a common commitment by western donor governments to neoliberal logic since the early 1980s. The article focuses on the discourse of policy coherence for development promoted by the DAC (Development Assistance Committee) of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), analysing it as the common vector of the two dimensions – effectiveness and security - of donor aid policy. By examining the emergence and transformations of the concept of coherence over the past two decades, it underlines the predominance of continuity over rupture in three successive phases of stabilisation (economic, political, security).     

The Political Economy of Village Sanitation in South India: Capture or Poor Information?

Despite efforts to mandate and finance local governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, outcomes remain poor in the villages surveyed in the four South Indian states. The analysis indicates some key issues that appear to hinder improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend to capture sanitary infrastructure and cleaning services for themselves, while also keeping major village roads reasonably well-served. Their decisions suggest, however, that they neither understand the health benefits of sanitation, nor the negative externalities to their own health if surrounding areas are poorly served. Our findings suggest that improving sanitary outcomes requires disseminating information on the public goods nature of their health benefits, as well as on the local government's responsibilities. It also requires putting public health regulations in place, along with measures to enable accountability in service provision.     

North Korea’s Shadow Economy: A Force for Authoritarian Resilience or Corrosion?

An unofficial or ‘shadow’ economy like that in contemporary North Korea generates countervailing pressures for a socialist regime. It can buttress the regime by facilitating the cynical use of anti-market laws, alleviating shortages, helping the official economy to function, and creating vested interests in the status quo. On the other hand, the shadow economy can corrode the regime’s power by diminishing its control over society, encouraging scepticism about collective ideologies, and providing networks and material that can be used for opposition to the state. This article analyses these tensions in the DPRK, by drawing on 35 semi-structured interviews with North Korean defectors.     

North–South,Commemorating the First Brandt Report: searching for the contemporary spatial picture of the global rift

The main purpose of this article is to conduct a concise critical analysis of the division of the world into highly developed countries (the rich North) and underdeveloped countries (the poor South) at the beginning of the 21st century. The criteria used at the end of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries to define the boundary between the highly developed and the underdeveloped world, while valid in the past, are no longer applicable. The new criterion for this boundary is quality of life, which combines the socioeconomic element (constituted by such factors as consumption, level of health care and education) and the political (which is reflected in the degree to which political rights and civil liberties are observed). Therefore, the dividing line between the rich North and the poor South at the beginning of the 21st century differs from the well-known Brandt line.     

American Police Unions: A Hindrance or Help to Innovation?

In response to the crises of the 1960s, police departments in the United States embarked upon great change in their policies, operations, and programs. This literature, however, has largely neglected the duality of the role of police unions in the adoption of new programs and practices. Learning about the key actors in the innovations process, however, is crucial to understanding how organizational change emerges. This article builds upon previous research to understand the effects of police unions on the adoption of innovation. Findings indicate that police unions may actually promote rather than hinder the implementation of new innovation.     

A Soviet Humanitarian Action?: Centre,Periphery and the Evacuation of Refugees to the North Caucasus, 1941–1942

In the first year of the Soviet–German war, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were evacuated to the North Caucasus. Many of them were Jewish women, children and old men who arrived independently in the region. Their evacuation created serious frictions with the local authorities and population with the newcomers often being protected by the central Soviet government. The latter came to welcome the arrival of these refugees in the North Caucasus, despite its initial reluctance to promote the evacuation of those whose contribution to the country's war effort was not direct.     

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.     

New Public Management and Democratic Participation: Complementary or Competing Reforms? A South African Study

Abstract

Administrative and participatory reforms are common in developing countries, often introduced together and expected to complement each other. Some observers question whether the reforms do complement each other, however, specifically suggesting that the two types reflect different relational and governance patterns. Based on such thought, a “differential relationship influence hypothesis” is presented and tested, investigating whether new public management (NPM) reforms complement or compete with democratic‐participatory reforms. Econometric analysis of survey data shows that South African municipalities adopt NPM reforms more readily when influenced by top–down intergovernmental relationships but adopt participatory reforms more readily when faced with bottom–up civic influences. This evidence supports the hypothesis and indicates that administrative and participatory reforms may not complement each other. The study also indicates a common administrative culture effect on both types of reform adoption—differential relational influences can be tempered by experimental and change‐minded administrators in local governments.     

Bosnia's Muslim/Croat federation: A step in the right direction or another recipe for disaster?

A functioning Muslim/Croat Federation in Bosnia‐Hercegovina has been identified as central to the successful implementation of the Dayton Peace Plan. However, since this arrangement was first outlined in the Washington Agreement of March 1994, neither side has given the project its full support. It now remains to be seen whether both parties can bury their differences and work together towards a lasting peace and a better future.     

Curse or Blessing? Has the Impact of Debt Relief Lived up to Expectations? A Review of the Effects of the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiatives for Low-Income Countries

As the multilateral debt relief initiatives draw to a close, this article reviews the impacts of debt relief to low-income countries (LICs) building on both the theoretical and empirical literature of past decades. We show that, while the pioneering studies of the early 2000s are inconclusive, the most recent analyses overcome certain methodological impediments to highlight significant multilateral debt relief initiative effects. These analyses hence suggest that these large-scale programmes may well have met expectations, at least in part.     

The Political Economy of Improving Health Care for the Poor in Rural Africa: Institutional Solutions to the Principal–Agent Problem

Both governments and private for-profit markets have been disappointing in meeting the needs of the African poor for health care. NGO services provide a much more attractive alternative for this clientele, despite the fees they charge. They do so because they represent an institutional solution to the ‘imperfect information’ problem in health care. Through simulations based on data from Cameroon, we demonstrate that if fee-charging NGOs replace the highly subsidised but poorly managed facilities operated by African governments the poor would be better off. Those NGOs that are decentralised in their financial and personnel management are most effective. The politics of making the recommended changes are assessed.     

Prohibitive tariffs on used vehicles: Aid or obstacle to the development process?

One of the protective devices used by less developed nations to stimulate their automotive industries is a prohibitive tariff on used vehicles. The purpose of this note is to demonstrate that this restriction, via adjustments in the stock and age composition of vehicles, might reduce employment in the tariff levying nation's automotive industry, might increase that nation's demand for foreign exchange, and will violate stated (egalitarian) income distribution goals.

The behaviour of the individual vehicle consumer will be analyzed first and market consumption adjustments brought about by various vehicle tariffs will be determined. Supply characteristics of the automotive industry are then presented, and the employment effects of a prohibitive tariff on used vehicles will be examined. Balance of payments and income redistribution effects are briefly considered.     

The Middle East: A region without regionalism or the end of exceptionalism?

In terms of regionalisation the Middle East appears to exemplify the region's status of being the 'exceptional' case, eternally out of step with history and immune to the trends affecting other parts of the world. This article will analyse whether recent trends of economic liberalisation might give an impulse to regionalisation. This is done by focusing on the 'double assignment' of the bourgeoisie: curbing state autonomy and acting as the 'championing social class' whose specific interests coincide with the prospect of a larger unified market. The article concludes that we can not expect Arab regional economic integration to be spurred on.