Birth spacing as a family strategy: evidence from 19th century Leuven, Belgium

This article investigates the hypothesis that 19th-century working class families in Leuven, Belgium, were controlling their fertility by means of birth spacing for household economic reasons. Detailed life-course data were collected in order to construct, on one hand, a set of covariates that represent the influences of natural fertility on birth intervals and, on the other, a number of family variables that represent the hypothetical, household economic motivation to space births. The findings strongly suggest that birth intervals were not merely a function of natural fertility differences and that family strategic spacing behavior also played a role.     

Beautiful Day: Awakening to Responsibility

Recently published works, such Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, have suggested the natural confederacy of the sensory appreciation of beauty and the achievement of social justice. Scarry (amongst others) has proposed that the opiated moment in which one is arrested by beauty's spell results in a ‘radical decentrification’, where under they who behold beauty are awakened to alterity and, consequentially, encouraged to realize an ethical agenda based upon just (sic) relations between people. The present article refutes the adequacy of the beauty - ethics - justice triptych and, instead, proposes that the entire variegated aesthetic quantum operates as the medium through which recognition of (in)justice reminds us of our responsibility to the other. As essentially inarticulate concepts, justice and responsibility are capable of ‘speaking’ to us through the channel of the aesthetic. The aesthetic is the plane of dialogue on which our felt appreciation of (in)justice prompts us to responsibility. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Democratizing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: Governance and Accountability

Much has been said about the failing policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In this essay, I attempt to explain why the IMF has pursued policies that in many cases not only failed to promote the stated objectives of enhancing growth and stability, but were probably counterproductive and even flew in the face of a considerable body of theoretical and empirical work that suggested these poilcies would be counterproductive. I argue that the root of the problem lies in the IMF's system of governance. Thereafter, I discuss how the World Bank managed to reform its agenda in order to fulfill its goals of poverty reduction more successfully, and what lessons this reform holds for the IMF. I conclude by proposing needed reforms for the IMF that might mitigate some of the problems it has encountered in the past.¹