Structural adjustment with a human face — a comment on Adelman and Taylor

Development Strategy in Thailand. By Robert J. Muscat. The Pall Mall Press Ltd. 1966. Pp. xvi, 310. 105/‐.

Planning Without Facts: Lessons in Resource Allocation from Nigeria's Development. By Wolfgang F. Stolper. Harvard University Press &; Oxford University Press: London. 1967. Pp. xx, 321. Appendix. Index 64/‐.

Pan‐Africanism and East African Integration. By Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Oxford University Press, London and Nairobi. 1966. Pp. x, 307. Index. 45/‐.

International Aid to Thailand. The New Colonialism? By Ronald C. Nairn. Yale University Press: New Haven and London. 1966. Pp. 223. Index. 48/‐.     

The War on Drugs in Mexico: a failed state?

This article focuses on the continued attractiveness of ‘failed state’ strategic thinking that stretches across policy-making and academic circles and links it to the issue of the War on Drugs in Mexico. It does so in order to challenge, if not reject, caricatured representations of ‘failed states’. Moreover, it offers an alternative understanding of the War on Drugs and issues of state crisis in Mexico. Rather than assume that state power is rooted within clear and immobile boundaries, it is more fruitful to rethink transformations in state space that cannot be isolated from underlying historical patterns of development and political economy. A political economy approach to state space is therefore better able to draw attention to the twin geopolitical processes shaping the War on Drugs in Mexico: (1) the geographic restructuring of the trade in cocaine and (2) the coeval onset and consolidation of neoliberalism.     

From war on terror to war on weather? Rethinking humanitarianism in a new era of chronic emergencies

This special issue of Third World Quarterly makes a case for redirecting attention and resources away from the 'war on terror' and focussing as a matter of urgency on the causes and consequences of global climate change. Global climate change must be recognised as an issue of national and international security. Increased competition for scarce resources and migration are key factors in the propagation of many of today's chronic complex humanitarian emergencies. The relentless growth of megacities in natural disaster hotspots places unprecedented numbers of vulnerable people at risk of disease and death. The Earth's fragile ecosystem has reached a critical tipping point. Today's most urgent need is for a collective endeavour on the part of the international community to redirect resources, enterprise and creativity away from the war on terror and to earnestly redeploy these in seeking solutions to the far greater and increasingly imminent threats that confront us as a consequence of global climate change.     

Why can't Europe save itself? A note on a structural failure

Europe's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has been struck by one financial crisis after another. Yes despite many bold new initiatives, instability and uncertainty persist. Why can't Europe save itself? The answer, this chapter argues, lies in a structural failure. EMU lacks a credible mechanism to cope with the threat of imbalances within the group – a framework to manage the European region's internal payments problems. The challenge was foreseen from the beginning. How could a regional monetary union manage the risk of fiscal imbalances among its members? Europe might have turned to the USA for inspiration. For analytical purposes, the USA too can be considered as a regional monetary union comparable to EMU, facing the same fundamental challenge. America's solution was to create a permanent ‘transfer union’, featuring more or less automatic flows of funds through the federal budget at the centre. But European policy-makers chose otherwise, for reasons that go to the very heart of their ongoing integration project. EMU is a league of sovereign states, each determined to retain for itself as many rights and privileges as possible. In such a structure, a permanent transfer union never had a chance; and since no adequate substitute has yet been found, Europe is forced to pay a high price in terms of instability and lost growth.     

Management services and the efficient use of resources—report on a workshop

The Politics of the Urban Crisis, Andrew Sills, Gillian Taylor and Peter Golding, Hutchinson, 1988, pp. 180, £12.95 (paperback).

Providing Public Services that Serve the Public, Joyce Epstein et al. (eds), Anglo‐German Foundation, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2LP, 1989, pp. 204, £7.50 (paperback).

Human Resource Management in Local Government, Alan Fowler, Longman, 1988, pp. 122, £7.95.

Popular Attitudes to State Welfare Services: A Growing Demand for Alternatives?, P. Saunders and C. Harris, Social Affairs Unit, 9 Chesterfield St., London W1, 1989, pp. 36, £3.00.

Channel Tunnel: Vicious Circle ‐ The Impact of the Channel Tunnel on the North of England, Kerry Hamilton and Abigail Gregory, available from CLES (Centre for Local Economic Strategies) Alberton House, St Mary's Parsonage, Manchester M3 2WJ, pp. 111, £10.00.

Millwall in the Community, Chris Lightbown and Chris Schwarz, Millwall FC, 1988, pp. 49, £5.50

Housing and Social Change in Europe and the USA, Michael Ball, Michael Harloe and Maartje Martens, Routledge, 1988, pp. 222, £30 (hardback).

Privatization in Less Developed Countries, P. Cook and C. Kirkpatrick (eds), Wheatsheaf Books, Sussex, 1988, pp. xix + 315, £35.00 (hardback), £9.95 (paperback).

Regional Structural Change and Industrial Policy in International Perspective: United States, Great Britain, France, Federal Republic of Germany, Joachim Jens Hesse (ed.), Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden‐Baden, 1988, pp. 596, 187 DM.

British Coal Enterprise ‐ A first assessment, Glyn Owen, Special Report No. 3, Coalfield Communities Campaign (Enterprise Centre, 1 Pontefract Road, Barnsley S71 1AJ), 1988, pp. 28, £10.00.

Electricity, Linked Industries and Privatisation, Brian Gladstone and Damien Dewhirst, Special Report No. 4, Coalfield Communities Campaign, 1988, pp. 56, £10.00.     

Gender and the experiences of local elected members – a focus on Wales

This article explores issue of gender in relation to the experiences of local elected members. Member experiences are important as this may be one of the factors which lie behind the under-representation of women in political life at all levels. This article is focused on Wales where women make up 26% of local councillors, hold only 20% of cabinet positions and occupy one Leader position. This article reports on the views of male and female councillors from a number of Welsh authorities who, when interviewed, identified very different experiences of elected office. Central to their experiences are their routes into office, personal circumstances and societal influences. The existence of a dominant male political culture is evident and this may have an impact on the participation of women in local political life.     

The ‘true protection’ concept ‐ a comment on Greenaway and Milner

Empirical studies estimating shift‐parameters to evaluate the ‘true protection’ especially for developing countries often reach the result that those parameters have very high values. This study is to show that it is not substitutional relationships but much more the very inflationary monetary policy of many developing countries which forces the shift‐parameters towards one. Moreover it is shown that it makes little sense to distinguish between ‘traditional’ and ‘non‐traditional’ exports and that shift‐parameters are not necessarily stable over time.     

Can Lebanon Survive Future Earthquake Disasters by Relying on a Military Response Strategy?

Inefficient responses by civilian emergency organizations during crises have prompted Lebanese authorities to rely on the military for disaster response operations. Although understandable, this reliance might be insufficient to achieve desirable response efficiency. This article demonstrates that neither civilian emergency organizations nor military forces can unilaterally and efficiently handle the response to large-scale disasters, such as earthquakes, without a major restructuring of the current emergency response management. Therefore, this article describes the potential role of the integration of the military and Hezbollah in future response operations and proposes a model to improve the efficiency of future response operations.     

Is There a Social Kuznets Curve? The Influence of Labour Standards on Inequality

This study empirically investigates the impact of core labour standards on income inequality for a range of 90 countries from 1990–2000. A synthetic index of labour standards is computed by means of a Multiple Correspondence Analysis and no significant correlation is found with the Gini index. One of the reasons pointed out is that the effective implementation of core labour standards depends on the quality of the country's political and legal systems. Using instrumental variables in a TSLS model, we found an inverse ‘U’ shaped curve between the new endogenous index of core labour standards and income inequality.     

Reflections on public administration's critical stage, 1937–1940: a structural synthesis

The central theme of this article is that the critical stage in the development of the field of public administration—the most concentrated burst—covered the period between 1937-1940. Although this occupation experienced times of diffuse but substantial activity around World War 1 and during the 1960s and 1970s, the most profound changes took place shortly before the second world war. What chiefly sets this period apart from earlier and later periods of fermentation centers not so much on the quantity of innovations but, rather, on their nature (that is, their structural genre) and on their breath (their institutional reach).

This article starts with a perspective so that it may be better understood why this particular time span was instrumental to the growth of public administration. It reviews the contributions of preceding and subsequent eras in the evolution of the field, the article presents a structural synthesis by examining organizational innovations in four areas at the national level: (1) the executive branch, (2) the judiciary, (3) Congress, and (4) the profession of public administration. The paper concludes by exploring the forces that, in our view, made this period the most productive one in this history of the occupation. Finally, the research for this article rests on a reservoir of publicly available primary and secondary materials relevant to this period.     

‘People and personal projects’: a rejoinder on the challenge of teaching development studies

Abstract

In response to Juan David Parra Heredia’s criticism of her earlier article about her use of post-development as a tool in teaching development studies, Wendy Harcourt reflects further on how the course analysed in 2016 has evolved in the last three years and corrects the misreadings of the pedagogical position-taking by the teachers in the course.     

Introduction to a Special Section on ‘Exchange Rate Pass-through in Developing and Emerging Markets’

Abstract

The interest in exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) in emerging market and developing economies has burgeoned in the last two decades. Small, open and trade-dependent economies embody special features that can make it difficult to obtain reliable estimates of ERPT. This Special Section includes a survey of recent research in developing and emerging market countries on ERPT, focusing on the monetary policy relevance of ERPT.

The frequent misspecifications that produce unreliable ERPT estimates are highlighted. Many empirical issues raised in the survey are illustrated by the macro- and the micro-economic empirical studies on South Africa (SA) included in this Special Section, and an earlier published JDS paper on ERPT in SA.