Well-Being in the Welfare State: Level Not Higher, Distribution Not More Equitable

The terms well-being and welfare are Often bracketed together, especially well-being and state welfare. The level of well-being is believed to be higher in welfare states, and its distribution more equitable. This theory is tested here in a comparative study of 41 nations from 1980 to 1990. The size of state welfare is measured by social security expenditures. The well-being of citizens is measured in terms of the degree to which they lead healthy and happy lives. Contrary to expectation, there appears to be no link between the size of the welfare state and the level of well-being within it. In countries with generous social security schemes, people are not healthier or happier than in equally affluent countries where the state is less open-handed. Increases or reductions in social security expenditure are not related to a rise or fall in the level of health and happiness either. There also appears to be no connection between the size of state welfare and equality in well-being among citizens of the state. In countries where social security expenditure is high, the dispersion of health and happiness is not smaller than in equally prosperous countries with less social insurance spending. Again, increases and reductions in social security expenditure are not linked with equality in health and happiness among citizens. This counterintuitive result raises five questions: (1) Is this really true? (2) If so, what could explain this lack of effect? (3) Why is it so difficult to believe this result? (4) How should this information affect social policy? (5) What can we learn from further research?     

Civil Servants, Economic Ideas, and Economic Policies: Lessons from Italy

Building on theoretically oriented and empirically grounded research on two key macroeconomic institutions in Italy, this article explains how and why civil servants can engineer major policy changes, making a difference in a country's trajectory. Italy provides a challenging testing ground for this kind of analysis, as it is generally portrayed as a highly politicized system in which political parties and politicians fully control public policies. Three general lessons can be learned, the first being that the role of civil servants in changing modes of economic governance depends on the resources that they master in the system in which they operate. "Intangible assets" are of primary importance in complex and perceived technical policies, such as monetary and exchange rate policy, which have high potential for "technocratic capture." Second, in these policies, certain intangible assets, such as specific bodies of economic knowledge or policy paradigms, have a considerable impact on policy making. Third, besides interactions in international fora, the professional training of civil servants is a mainstream way through which economic policy beliefs circulate and gain currency, laying the foundations for policy shifts. By highlighting the importance of the intangible assets of macroeconomic institutions, this research makes an unorthodox contribution to the primarily economic literature on central bank independence.     

Risking Regulation,Regulating Risk: Lessons from the Transatlantic Biotech Dispute

Debates over the future of new technologies frequently implicate governmental policies and regulation, the purpose of which has traditionally been to mitigate the dangers of new technologies through promotion of conditions of safe use. It is increasingly recognized, however, that regulation is predicated on a particular conception of the nature of risk which may or may not correspond to the views and beliefs held by society. Here I explore three broadly related questions in the context of the debates around agricultural biotechnology. First, what are the implications of varying conceptions of risk for regulatory policy in the United States and in the European Union? Second, what are the implications of differing conceptions of risk and resulting regulatory policy for agricultural trade relations between the two giants of international trade? And finally, what lessons might we draw from contemporary disputes over agricultural biotechnology?     

Railway Dreaming: Lessons for Economic Regulators from Aboriginal Resource Management Lore

Railway reform in the past decade has seen the introduction of mandated third party access to track in a number of jurisdictions. This article argues that third party access changes the property rights associated with railway track, rendering it a common pool resource. As such, it is useful to ask whether the literature on the governance of common pool resources could inform the economic regulation of railways. This article suggests that it might, and draws some lessons from the common pool resource governance mechanisms traditionally used by Australia's Aborigines in managing their land that may have application within the context of the railways.     

More Than One Trap: Problematic Interpretations and Overlooked Lessons from Thucydides

Popular rendition of the so-called Thucydides’ Trap focuses excessively on only one possible explanation of interstate wars to the exclusion of others. It also commits various acts of commission and omission that threaten the validity of its central proposition. This essay reviews some of the major problems pertaining to the logic of inquiry characteristic to this genre of analysis, its interpretation of historical evidence, and its neglect of alternative explanations of war – even those that Thucydides had written about in his account. There is a danger of self-fulfilling prophecy to the extent that leaders in Beijing and Washington are inclined to believe in an analogy to an ancient war that happened some 2500 years ago. Conventional invocations of Thucydides’ Trap fail to recognize that there are several possible pathways to war. Because they offer only a structural explanation based on interstate power shifts, they give short shrift to the role of human agency and fail to attend sufficiently to what leaders can do to avoid conflict.

     

Learning Contested Lessons: Participation Equity and Electric Utility Regulation

Electric utilities have typically enjoyed a close and cooperative relationship with the state regulatory bodies that oversee them. In 2001, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission mandated that the largest Colorado utility build a wind power plant as part of its conventional generating capacity, despite the utility's vigorous objections. Local environmental groups, intervening in a form of rule making called Integrated Resource Planning, succeeded in overturning regulatory capture. This paper explains this anomalous case and highlights the role of knowledge and learning in the outcome. The case shows the opportunities and limitations of using contested technical knowledge to push for institutional learning. The case also suggests the importance of repeated policy processes. Wind energy advocates perceived that they had acquired participation equity, ownership in the process akin to Kingdon's “softening up,” which led policy makers to take their arguments more seriously, opening up the possibility of institutional learning.     

The Rising Tide Economy: Lessons from the Squeezed Middle for Progressive Economic Policy

For all its rhetorical potency, the policy implications of the ‘squeezed middle’ are yet to be fully explored. This article looks at what the phenomenon means for the design and prosecution of progressive economic policy. It argues that any progressive government today needs to adopt a new first order goal of economic policy: ensuring that the material wellbeing of ordinary working people rises when the economy grows, a project referred to as ‘building a rising tide economy’. This objective would sit in addition to the traditional goals of sustained GDP growth, high employment, low inflation and poverty reduction. It would have real implications across a range of important policy areas.     

IRCs versus DRAs: Budgetary Support for Economic and Social Regulation

This article examines whether Independent Regulatory Commissions (IRCs) received less budgetary support than executive branch Dependent Regulatory Agencies (DRAs) between the late 1970s and 2000. It also examines whether there were political differences in spending priorities between social and economic regulation. The principal-agent theory was used to explain why IRCs do not fare as well compared to DRAs in terms of budgetary support. The findings indicate that IRCs received less funding than DRAs in the social regulation field, supporting the principal-agent model of budgetary decision making. Political impacts were prevalent in all areas of regulation spending.     

The Economic Consequences of a Hung Parliament: Lessons from February 1974

The British general election on 10 May 2010 delivered Britain's first hung Parliament since February 1974, and in the run‐up, the Conservative party made much of the economic difficulties Britain faced in the second half of the 1970s in order to try and convince voters that anything other than a Tory vote would risk exposing the nation to the discipline of financial markets. The question of how well equipped an exceptional kind of British government is to deal with exceptional economic circumstances is therefore of paramount importance. This paper argues that the Conservative party made too much of the impact of the 1974 hung Parliament in precipitating subsequent economic crisis and suggests that as such, there is no reason to assume that the Conservative–Liberal coalition government is ill‐equipped to manage British economic affairs in difficult circumstances.     

More Inequality,More Killings: The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal

The hypothesis of inequality as the source of violent conflict is investigated empirically in the context of killings by Nepalese Maoists in their People's War against their government during 1996–2003. The dependent variable is the total number of people killed during that period by Maoist rebels in each of 3,857 villages. Inequality is measured by the Gini, the Esteban‐Ray polarization index, and four other between‐groups indexes. Using models with district fixed effects, and instrumenting for endogeneity of the inequality measures, we find strong evidence that greater inequality escalated killings by Maoists. Poverty did not necessarily increase violence. Education moderated the effect of inequality on killing, while predominance of farmers and of Nepali speakers exacerbated it. We find evidence that more killings occurred in populous villages, lending support to the idea that violence was directed at expanding the Maoist franchise by demonstrating that opposition to the monarchy and elites in power was possible to achieve.     

Clinton,Europe and Economic Diplomacy: What Makes the EU Different?

The Clinton administration's economic diplomacy has been more aggressive, politicized and controversial than that of any recent US administration. We examine its application to the European Union (EU) and seek to answer the question: what makes Europe different? Put another way, why has the US pursued cooperation on “behind-the-border” issues such as competition policy, standards and investment rules, and eschewed export promotion? We offer three explanations. First, the EU's market is unique: it is a mature, but lucrative one for large US-owned firms concerned more with behind-the-border issues than with market access issues. Second, American companies who have invested heavily in Europe have developed their own political links to the EU, particularly through the EU Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce. Third, these same companies have a powerful influence over US policy towards Europe as well as EU policymaking. Our analysis develops these three hypotheses, and also offers an assessment of the progress and meaning of the Transatlantic Business Dialogue.     

How (Not) to Form a Progressive Alliance: Lessons from the History of Left Cooperation

Britain’s political parties can be divided into two blocs: a ‘progressive bloc’ of parties on the left/centre‐left, and a ‘reactionary bloc’ of those on the right/centre‐right. In three of the last four general elections, the progressive bloc won an appreciably larger share of the popular vote than its reactionary rival. Yet its greater internal fragmentation has been repeatedly punished under first past the post, leading to what is now over a decade of Conservative‐led governments. This has prompted growing pressure to form a ‘progressive alliance’ between Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens, and their Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish nationalist competitors. This article sheds a historical and international light on these demands, examining the difficulties other similar efforts at progressive cooperation have faced across the world. It considers how progressive alliances have previously sought to overcome geographical, ideological, and social divides between their constituent members, and draws some salutary lessons for British progressives today.     

此经济法非彼经济法

我国高等院校经济类、管理类及其他非法学专业普遍开设经济法课程,该课程的内容包括法学专业的民法、商法、经济法(有些教材还包括社会法)的内容.法学专业经济法与非法学专业经济法并存的现象,给非法学专业的法学教育带来困惑和不利效果.追溯非法学经济法课程来源及成因,提出应尽快为其正名.建议近期将非法学专业开设的经济法更名为“民商经济法基础”,远期将大学一年级的法律内容结合起来,这样既有利于非法学专业法学教育系统化,又能解决非法学专业经济法名不副实的问题.     

Security,Not Defence,Strategic, Not Habit: Restructuring the Political Arrangements for Policy Making on Britain's Role in the World

The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government has committed itself to a Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDR) in 2010. The government and the country face very hard choices to bring United Kingdom defence and security policy back from the brink of bankruptcy—both financial and strategic (Gow). To succeed, it must overcome the failings of the past (Chisnall, Dorman, Rees) and take a truly open and radical look at all aspects of policy and process—including the Trident independent nuclear deterrent (Allen), relations with Europe (Witney) and the importance of cyber‐issues in the future security context (Fisher). It must get strategic concepts right to provide flexibility with credibility (Stone). It must deliver ‘what the military wants’: true strategic prioritisation, radical defence acquisition reform, and credible balancing of resources and commitments (Kiszley). The scale of the challenge facing the United Kingdom in—and beyond—the 2010 SDR is why The Political Quarterly convened a workshop early in 2010 involving MPs, practitioners, retired military personnel, journalists, commentators, business people and academics, and publishes these associated papers. Most of all, to overcome the failings of the past, there must be a radical move beyond the welcome first steps of the Cameron–Clegg government to introduce a National Security Council and a National Security Advisor, to reconfigure relationships within government, across departments and with Parliament to have a government figure of accountability and responsibility—a Secretary of State for Security Policy, primus inter pares with other Secretaries of State—to make sense of the questions needing to be asked and answered (Gearson and Gow).     

State Environmental Regulation and Economic Development: Are They Compatible?

An underlyingussumption of the partial preemption apprmh is the belief that minimum federal standmds contribute to the prospective decentralization of environmental protection programs by removing or reducing industry incentives to shop aroundfor states with a more lenient regulatory stance. This assumption was examined through a survey of chief executive oficers of pollution-generating firms. Tlze data suggest that corporate officials see regulatory climate m an important component of overhead ctxits. The author concludes that the desire to retain industries within state boundaries does inhibit the promulgation of strict environmental regulat ions by public officials.