The two freedoms,economic growth and development: An empirical study

Log-linear methods are applied to categorical data containing economic freedom, political freedom, the level of income, and the rate of economic growth for a panel of about 100 countries from 1975 to 1992. The main results are: given economic freedom, the rate of economic growth is independent of political freedom and the level of income; given the level of income, political freedom is independent of economic freedom and the growth rate. The analysis suggests the fundamental effects of economic freedom in fostering economic growth, and a high level of income as the condition of a high degree of political freedom.     

The political and practical obstacles to the reform of the judiciary and the establishment of a rule of law in China

Is China’s “socialist rule by law” (社会主义法制) qualified to be called “rule of law” (法治) or a “thin rule of law” proposed by Randall Peeremboon, without abolishing the political supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party and the establishment of an independent judiciary? Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese legal system and its judiciary have gone through reforms and on the whole modernized. However, the Chinese judiciary still faces many problems, and among them the lack of professional jurists, corruption and local protectionism appear as crucial ones. The current political and institutional arrangements and lack of freedom of the press and freedom of association clearly intensify these problems. “Rule of law” (法治) or “rule by law” (法制) in China is still more often interpreted in the light of the respective political, bureaucratic and economic powers of the parties involved than according to principles of law or equity. The modernization of the legal system will continue, but the political translation of the legal demands of society and the international community will take time to materialize. In the meantime, risks, setbacks and difficulties will continue to prevent China from establishing a truly independent judiciary and what is universally called a rule of law.     

Political freedom, economic freedom, and income convergence: Do stages of economic development matter?

In the literature, theory and empirical evidence on the nexus of political freedom, economic freedom, and economic growth are mixed. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the effect of political freedom on promoting economic growth is realized and detectable at later stages of social and economic development. Using panel data for a sample of 104 countries between 1970 and 2003, we find strong support for our hypothesis. While economic freedom has greater effects on income convergence in the OECD countries, political freedom clearly promotes the convergence among those OECD countries.     

Institutions and economic growth: Recent British experience in an international context

The impact of institutions and political constraints on economic growth is greater than many economists’ models acknowledge. At the same time judgements about growth performance and policy effectiveness need to take account of differential scope for growth through ‘catch‐up’ across countries and over time. British performance, particularly that of the 1980s, seen in the light of the earlier relative economic decline of the UK, is reviewed and comparisons with other European countries are highlighted. This evidence confirms the importance of an approach to growth based on political economy and permits some predictions about relative growth rates in the 1990s.     

Institutional competitiveness in the global economy: Denmark,the United States,and the varieties of capitalism

Despite high taxes, a large welfare state, and much economic regulation, Denmark competes successfully against other advanced capitalist economies. Denmark’s success is based in large part on its institutional competitiveness – its capacity to achieve socioeconomic success as a result of the competitive advantages that firms derive from operating within a particular set of institutions. The institutional basis for successfully coordinating labor markets and vocational training programs are examined for Denmark and the US – two countries that were very different institutionally but very successful in the 1990s and in the 2000s. We show that there is no one best way to achieve success in today’s global economy, except with respect to social inequality; that the mechanisms underlying institutional competitiveness are more complex than often recognized; that institutional hybrids can be as successful as purer political economic cases; and that high taxes and state spending can enhance socioeconomic performance. As such, this paper challenges both neoliberalism and the varieties of capitalism school of comparative political economy.     

An Empirical Note on Economic Freedom and Income Inequality

I report estimates for a fixed-effects model of country-level Gini coefficients as a function of economic freedom along with relevant control variables. Gini coefficients are drawn from the UNU/WIDER World Income Inequality Database Version 2.0a, while economic freedom is measured by the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World index. Controls are included for per capita income, political structure, education, demographics, and industrial composition. Over a broad range of freedom, the estimated relation between economic freedom and income inequality is positive, statistically significant, but relatively inelastic.     

Political Support: Social Capital, Civil Society and Political and Economic Performance

This article assesses two main theories of the decline of political support that is found in many western democracies. The first is society centred and built on the concepts of social capital, trust and civil society. The second is politics centred and focuses on the performance of government and the economy. The two theories are not necessarily incompatible, but they are usually treated in a mutually exclusive way. In this article they are tested against a combination of aggregate cross-national comparative data and detailed case studies of four countries that have suffered exceptional decline of political support for politicians, political institutions and the systems of government. The puzzle is that cross-national comparative evidence about a large and diverse number of nations supports social capital theory, whereas in-depth study of four countries that have experienced substantial decline of political support does not. The erosion of support coincides in all four with poor economic and/or political performance. A way of reconciling the two theories and their supporting evidence is suggested, arguing that while social capital is a necessary foundation for democratic support, it is not a sufficient cause.     

Political and social rights for second country nationals: freedom of movement and citizenship in Australasia

Agreements allowing regional freedom of movement inevitably raise questions about the citizenship status and rights of those who exercise regional mobility. In the case of the European Union, such questions have received considerable academic attention, particularly since the creation of European citizenship in 1992. Little attention has been paid to Australasia, where a long-standing freedom of movement agreement, the trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement (TTTA), permits New Zealanders and Australians to live and work indefinitely in each others' country. As the two countries pursue a single economic market, the TTTA has played a central role in facilitating the creation of a regional labour market. Changes to Australian social security and citizenship legislation, however, have meant that many New Zealanders permanently resident in Australia have limited social and political rights, and no access to citizenship. This article extends debates about whether the political and social rights of citizenship ought to be granted to second-country nationals into the Australasian context. It examines a range of arrangements by which citizenship could be protected during the current period of intense economic integration in Australasia, asking which provides the best fit with existing constitutional and political arrangements.     

The political economy of freedom, democracy and transnational terrorism

We conduct an empirical analysis of data relating measures of economic and political freedom to the occurrence of transnational terrorism 1996–2002. We use binary logistical regression models to predict the probablities that a country will experience transnational terrorist attacks and that a given terrorist originates in a particular country. We find that the extent of political rights and civil liberties is negatively related with the generation of transnational terrorists from a country, but where the former is also negatively related with the occurrence of transnational terrorism in a country, the latter exhibits a non-linear relationship. A number of alternative explanations are disconfirmed: transnational terrorism is unrelated to inequality, economic growth, education, poverty, etc., while a society's fractionalization has mixed importance, and the religious composition has no or little association with attracting or producing transnational terrorism. A more trade-oriented economy seems consistently to associate with smaller probabilities of a country experiencing and generating transnational terrorism.     

马克思“唯灵论”批判思想研究

在马克思的理论视野中，资产阶级在政治与经济领域所持有的观念形态继承了宗教（基督教）以抽象的精神观念能动地把握世界的方式，从而都具有了唯灵论特征。因而，马克思把对宗教唯灵论的批判看作是政治与经济领域批判的前提。在政治领域中，资产阶级思想家把私有财产制度抽象人格化，从简单的经济关系出发来论证自由和平等，从而使建立在这种抽象人格基础上的自由和平等等政治国家的政治理念日益抽象化，并支配着社会成员的头脑且企图实现所谓的普遍利益而具有唯灵论特征；在经济领域中，资本拜物教是商品拜物教、货币拜物教的最高峰，资本这一抽象的“死劳动”借助于雇佣劳动这一“活劳动”得以不断增殖从而具有了支配人的灵性。马克思对这三种唯灵论批判的意图在于提醒人们要搞清楚资本主义制度所包含的矛盾以及资本主义社会的现实形态和观念形态之间的差别，不被抽象观念所支配，从而唤醒工人阶级的彻底的革命意识。     

Macroeconomic performance,political trust and the Great Recession: A multilevel analysis of the effects of within‐country fluctuations in macroeconomic performance on political trust in 15 EU countries, 1999–2011

Recent cross‐national comparative studies have found no effect of countries’ macroeconomic performances on trust in national political institutions, once political explanations (most notably corruption) are taken into account. Although political trust is not determined by the comparison of national economic performance to other countries, it is argued in this article that it is affected by comparisons to their own past performance. In a multilevel, fixed effects analysis of Eurobarometer data (21 waves in 15 European Union Member States between 1999 and 2011) the extent to which within‐country variations in economic performance affect political trust longitudinally is tested. Three major conclusions are reached. First, within‐country, longitudinal changes in performance (growth, deficits, unemployment and inflation) affect political trust. Second, the impact of macroeconomic performance is stronger among the lower educated. Third, even in times of economic duress, budgetary deficits tend to undermine political trust.     

From the Wagner Act to the Human Rights Watch Report: Labor and Freedom of Expression and Association, 1935-2000*

This paper examines the legal restrictions on the labor movement's right to picket and strike since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or Wagner Act in 1935. The NLRA was seen as a statutory equivalent of the First Amendment for the labor movement, guaranteeing workers rights of association and expression they had been denied historically through the use of court injunctions, criminal conspiracy prosecutions, and extra-legal violence. Supreme Court decisions of the late 1930s, often arising out of labor conflicts, also significantly expanded rights of freedom of association and expression. Yet a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 2000 concluded that US workers lacked the basic rights to organize, bargain, and strike required by international human rights standards. It found that US labor laws permitted employers to fire, harass, and intimidate workers with impunity. This paper examines the decline of these rights since the Wagner Act, seeing the roots of the legal decline in the ambivalent legacy of the Act itself. On the one hand, both the Act and the Court legally recognized unions as legitimate political organizations and extended to them many of the associative and expressive freedoms that had been available to other groups. On the other hand, the legal price for this recognition of legitimacy was the restriction of a range of expressive activities. Subsequently, labor's rights came to be treated more under the framework of industrial relations and economic policy than of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. This gradual legal retrenchment, along with political and economic developments, left the labor movement severely weakened by the end of the century, with significantly less legal protection than its counterparts in other economically advanced countries. I explore these developments by relating them to the literatures on American exceptionalism and industrial relations. Theoretically, I rely on work which examines the relationship between institutional structure and human agency to understand the strategic choices made by corporations, state actors, and the labor movement. The paper concludes with an assessment of recent calls for labor law reform as a strategy for reviving the labor movement.     

Political competition and economic performance: evidence from the Italian regions

We verify the predictions of the theoretical literature on the relationship between political competition and economic performance, holding that, when the predominance of an ideological dimension creates a political rent, the party exploiting it selects lower quality politicians whose policy choices worsen economic performance. We examine the sample of 15 Italian Regions from 1980 to 2002 that exploits the institutional reforms of 1995 as an exogenous shock to pre-existing rents. We find evidence that higher political competition improves economic performance, through the choice of more efficiency-oriented policies.     

An economic theory of governability: Choosing policy and optimizing performance

When collective violence occurs, a management and decision-making crisis exists for governmental authorities. We examine this situation with an economic model of governability within states. Political decision-makers wish to minimize two goals that enter as components of the government's performance function: political violence and revolutionary change of regime. We further assume that authorities have only a scarce supply of two policy instruments available with which to respond to violence: the accommodation and repression of the demands of their oppositions. Moreover, these elites confront a number of structural determinants of violence and revolution. After laying out these basic components of the model, we propose several theorems about the causes of political performance and about the regime's decision-calculus. These are then proven through a comparative static analysis of the model and by optimizing the performance function. The deductions indicate that the regime's policy instruments produce contradictory effects on the targetted levels of violence and revolution. In general, both accommodation and repression of opponents will, up to some point, reduce violence (an intended consequence) but increase revolution (an unintended consequence). Thus, upon close examination the goals of political decision-makers, to simultaneously minimize both violence and revolution, turn out to be inconsistent. Authorities therefore select an optimal level of performance by balancing the costs and benefits that come from accommodating and repressing their opponents.     

Waiting for privatization in developing countries: Towards the integration of economic and non-economic explanations

The intention of this paper is to examine the political and administrative limits on the effective implementation of privatization in developing countries and so to present a challenge to the view that slow progress is primarily attributable to economic constraints. After examining these economic aspects, the paper provides an explanatory framework which incorporates those political and administrative processes central to an understanding of what happens to state economic policies in practice. The significance of these processes is demonstrated by drawing on research material from India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. The conclusion drawn is that responses to pressures for economic reform will be determined, not so much by economic criteria as by the political and bureaucratic resources available to decision makers. Since policy processes in developing countries show considerable variety it is likely that there will be substantial variations in the practical achievement of privatization objectives.     

Campaign contributions as a commitment device

Mancur Olson’s theory of the decline of nations is path-breaking in political economics. It has been tested cross-sectionally in numerous empirical studies. We survey the existing results briefly, with a special focus on studies using the number of lobbies as an exogenous variable. Using data from the period 1973–2006, we then present the field’s first time-series analysis of the effects of the number of interest groups on the German lobby list and macroeconomic performance, gauged in terms of economic growth and inflation. The number of interest groups (as a proxy for their influence) is shown to have an important impact on macro-variables: Interest group activity significantly leads to a decline in the growth rate and a rise in the inflation rate.     

CAPITAL MOBILITY, DOMESTIC POLITICS, and FRENCH MONETARY DIPLOMACY

This article evaluates the role of increased capital mobility, sectoral interests, and domestic institutions in bringing about policy change in French capital markets. Capital mobility played an indirect role by making it more costly for French governments to pursue inflationary economic policies. But it was domestic politics, not capital mobility, that led governments to achieve lower inflation by stabilizing the exchange rate. The key domestic political factor was institutional change to regulatory practices, while financial markets reduced bank lending to industry and internationalized French finance, breaking the strong ties and comon monetary diplomacy interests of bankers, industralists, and policymakers, and thereby weaken the political priority of promoting domestic growth and industrial competitiveness.     

Rise and Decline of Nations: Sweden

The development of the Swedish political economy is interesting in the perspective of the Mancur Olson theory about the rise and decline of nations. It is shown that the general argument of RADON is not in agreement with facts about the growth of the affluent society in Sweden between 1870 and 1970. The strong growth in the overall economic output took place in a society where a number of distributional coalitions were strongly organized. Also the special argument in RADON about the reversed consequences of broad interest organizations meets with little support. Whatever is meant by an encompassing interest organisation, what was crucial in the Swedish case was the strong position of party government and the broad participatory nature of the political process. Directly contradicting the RADON argument is the fact that the structure of distributional coalitions has in general become even more encompassing since 1970. yet the economic situation of Sweden has deteriorated considerably. The predicament of party government mest be emphasized, as the period since 1970 has witnessed a decline in the capacity of political leadership to govern the country.     

Trial by Development: Senian “Concurrence” in the New Asian Developmentalism*

Building on the development theory of Amartya Sen, this study takes the Asian Crisis as a window on the politics of globalization. It follows from Sen's axiom of “development as freedom” that just and sustainable development is best achieved where economic and political priorities are pursued simultaneously. This is the foundation for the “concurrence” model that I adopt in the light of three test cases: the Philippines, Indonesia, and Korea. Sen's model provides what amounts to an Asian Third Way, circumventing the East/West schism that the Crash exposed and exacerbated: made-in-Singapore “Asian values” vs. made-in-America globalization. The new Asian developmentalism is torn between the distinctly Asian antipodes of Senism and Sino-capitalism, which is to say development with or without freedom. The outcome of this trial-by-development will define the meaning of globalization for decades to come.     

GPS vs Galileo: Balancing for Position in Space

ABSTRACT

This study comprises an investigation of Europe's motives to develop the independent satellite navigation system known as Galileo, despite the existence of America's successful – and freely available – Global Positioning System (GPS). The study begins with an analysis of both systems to familiarize the reader with global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), to provide an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of GPS and Galileo, and to highlight the systems' similarities and differences. Although the two systems have different founding principles, they employ similar infrastructures and operational concepts. In the short term, however, Galileo will provide better accuracy for civilian users, at least until GPS upgrades take effect. But performance is only part of the rationale. The author contends that Europe's pursuit of Galileo represents a desire for enhanced performance and independence, as well as an economic incentive. With Galileo, Europe hopes to achieve political, security and technological independence from the United States. Additionally, Europe envisions overcoming the US monopoly on GNSS by seizing a sizable share of the expanding GNSS market and setting a new world standard for satellite navigation. Finally, the author explores Galileo's impact on the United States and reviews US policy towards Galileo. The article concludes with recommendations to strengthen the competitiveness of GPS.