Austerity's Wasted Years

Austerity has become the norm of economic management in the EU, Britain and the USA. In each it is offered as the answer to different problems but everywhere the result is cuts in public spending, higher unemployment and low growth, none of which helps recovery from recession. Labour's response should not be to endorse or continue austerity but to initiate a Keynesian expansionary stimulus based on borrowing and spending on a huge programme of building public housing for rent. This should be accompanied by a competitive exchange rate, an industrial policy to boost the manufacturing sector and a National Investment Bank, the aim being to expand the production base so that it can pay the nation's way in the World and support the structure and the improvements Labour needs. This makes the choice at the next election the issue of what kind of Britain the electorate wants to see: a low wage, mean economy or a determined attempt to rebuild a stronger nation with a more powerful economy.     

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND THE EVALUATION OF PARTICIPATORY INSTRUMENTS IN SPANISH CITIES

The article examines the role that personal experience with participatory mechanisms plays in the explanation of the perceived efficacy of these instruments. The first part demonstrates that , contrary to most expectations, citizens who have direct experience with these processes have a more negative evaluation of their performance. Where does this frustration effect come from? The second part analyzes three potential explanations of why this pattern emerges: (1) overly high prior expectations; (2) the existence of an underdeveloped institutional participatory context; and (3) the design of participatory mechanisms. We use a public opinion survey representative of the Spanish adult population living in medium sized cities to test these hypotheses. Results show that participants' overly high expectations are not crucial. On the other hand, people who live in more participatory cities and those who participate in individually based mechanisms do not feel the same disappointment with participatory experiences.     

CAUSALITY,ECONOMIC CONDITIONS,AND BURGLARY*

This study examines the extent to which the symmetry-asymmetry distinction and offense aggregation bias obfuscate the relationship between economic conditions and crime. Specifically, we use ARIMA techniques to assess the impact of incremental and abrupt changes in oil prices on counts of total, commercial, and residential burglaries in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Taken together, the bivariate and interrupted time series analyses indicate that the causal impact of oil prices on burglary is asymmetrical and varies across the two subcategories of breaking and entering.