Australian Governments and Automotive Manufacturing, 1919-1939

In recent years the progressive lowering of tariff barriers in Australia has produced a predictable backlash from those who are directly affected. The reaction, however, extends to academics and others who have no pecuniary interest in the outcome, and who have argued that the tariff represented a policy consciously designed to promote the economic development and defence capacity of this country. On the basis of experience in the motor vehicle industry, we argue that these factors had very little to do with interwar tariff policy. Rather, it was the outcome of an interplay between the Commonwealth government's need for revenue, the activities of the lobby in seeking rents, and the practices of the Customs bureaucracy.     

Book Reviews: Corporate Welfare, Taxpayer Subsidies, and Home Field Advantages

Books reviewed:
Joanna Cagan and Neil deMause, Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit
Jerold J. Duquette, Regulating the National Pastime: Baseball and Antitrust .
James Quirk and Rodney Fort, Hard Ball: The Abuse of Power in Pro Team Sports .
Wilbur C. Rich, editor, The Economics and Politics of Sports Facilities .
Mark S. Rosentraub, Major League Losers: The Real Cost of Sports and Who's Paying for It.
Jay Weiner, Stadium Games: Fifty Years of Big League Greed and Bush League Boondoggles .     

Development, Education and the Teachers Union Movement in South Korea, 1989-1999

The passing of legislation in July 1999 to legalise Chunkyojo , the Korean Teachers and Educational Workers Union signalled the culmination of ten-year struggle by teachers to form a representative organisation that could represent them in industrial matters and push forward their agenda for educational reforms in South Korean schools. However the gains, as this article points out, were substantially less than the original goals of the movement. These goals, as this article discusses, were founded on grievances of the movement located in complex facets of South Korean education at its intersection with history, politics and development. The article examines some of the core grievances of the movement emanating from issues of teachers' identities, the role of education in national development, the dominance of the examination system and the industrial relations contexts of school teachers. The analysis confirms that the systemic features which the teachers union movement challenged reside in the social and historical foundations and political constructions of school education in South Korea and indicates that the recent developments are not likely to address these but, instead, signal the emergence of a new phase of conflict between reform-minded teachers and the South Korean government.     

Transatlantic Institutions: Can Partnership be Engineered?

The transatlantic alliance is widely viewed as being in a state of decline. Conflict over the war in Iraq highlighted a growing divergence between the Bush administration and European Union governments in their attitudes towards multilateralism. The rift severely tested institutions created to manage bilateral EU–US relations in the aftermath of the cold war. This article examines how well this institutional architecture has held up. It scrutinises the limitations of networked governance in transatlantic relations and acknowledges the quandary of trying to manufacture partnership using imperfect institutions. The Brussels–Washington channel is only one among many through which transatlantic relations flow, but we argue that it continues to gain in importance. Despite the limits of institutional engineering, we conclude that the US and the EU remain each other's most important ally.