Decentralization,Fiscal Independence,and Poverty in the Philippines

Decentralization is a common public sector reform in developing countries. Its basic rationale is that local governments have an informational advantage regarding the needs and preferences of consumers. However, decentralization also has drawbacks. Foremost is the efficiency advantage of the central government in providing public services because of economies of scale and better access to resources. This study looked at the relationship between decentralization and poverty using data from Philippine cities and municipalities. Results suggest that decentralization, as represented by fiscal independence and measured by the share of locally sourced revenues to total local government revenues, is indeed associated with lower poverty. However, this effect is not linear—the marginal effect of decentralization on poverty diminishes as decentralization increases. Moreover, decentralization moderates the positive effect of good governance on poverty reduction and the magnitude of the relationship between poverty and decentralization is stronger in poorer municipalities than in richer ones.     

Exploitation in Human Trafficking and Smuggling

This article explores the mechanisms that underpin human smuggling and trafficking. It argues for the continued analytical relevance of the distinction between “trafficking” and “smuggling”, as posited by the 2000 UN Protocols. While this distinction has come under sustained criticism from several authors over the last 15 years, it nonetheless continues to capture the essential features of two distinct phenomena (control over a human being vs. illegal entry into a country), and acknowledges the role of agency in smuggling. The paper goes on to discuss three different scenarios that may emerge as a result of the interplay between smugglers and smuggled persons, and it specifies the role of exploitation in each scenario. In addition, the paper offers empirical evidence of the key building blocks of smuggling — namely the search for reliable information and the reaching of an agreement in regard to the service offered — and of how smuggling can turn into trafficking. This work concludes by drawing out the relevant policy implications.     

The making and political life of Miners Shot Down: an interview with Rehad Desai and Anita Khanna

The interview that follows was conducted in Kensington, Johannesburg, in may 2015. I had not originally planned to publish it: I interviewed rehad desai and anita Khanna in preparation for a presentation on their documentary, Miners Shot Down (2014), I was going to give at a conference, to be repeated at the annual colloquium we organise with the school of Communication at the university of Johannesburg to mark the anniversary of the marikana massacre. I had been monitoring the marikana support Campaign quite closely, so I was interested in hearing not only about the documentary – the way it frames and narrates the story of the massacre – but also about its role in this multimedia campaign. I wanted the director and producer to share their thoughts on the impact the film had made, on the response at the local and international screenings they had attended, on what the miners of marikana and their communities thought of it, and on the campaign to have the film screened on South African national television. in the interview, they also describe the involvement of the miners and their communities in the political life of the film and their own experience of filming, producing and promoting the documentary. When Miners Shot Down won the international emmy award for best documentary in november 2015, I reread the interview and thought others might be interested in it – especially scholars working in media, film and communication studies. So here it is. Thanks go to rehad desai and anita Khanna for their time and generosity and to amy maphagela for transcribing the interview.     

From Text to Image: The Sacred Foundation of Western Institutional Order: Legal-Semiotic Perspectives

The paper analyzes the sacred foundations of Western institutional order, moving from an epistemological, historical and legal–aesthetic perspective. Firstly, it identifies an epistemological theory of complexity which, pursuing Hayek’s theory of complexity, Robilant’s notion of informative–normative systems, Popper’s theory of the Worlds, and Dupuy’s theory of endogenous fixed point, will conclusively lead to presenting the hypothesis of World 0 as the World of the foundation of legal thinking, the home of the sacred and the aesthetic. Secondly, it identifies the axiological character of the legal aesthetic as a discipline, a topic that will be taken up in relation to the work of the French historian of canonical law and psychoanalyst Legendre, starting from the analysis of a legal/historiographical context (Corpus Iuris Civilis, Corpus Iuris Canonici, Hobbesian Leviathan, Kelsenian Grundnorm). Thirdly, following Ellul’s thought on secularization, the idea that we now live in a secularized, lay society, lacking in the sacred is revealed as a sort of illusion, the creation of a myth of modernity, only apparently rational. Finally the paper proposes as the task of legal theory the identification of the system of “nomograms” in which the normative message is organized, according to a nonreductionistic approach that forces legal theory to recognize the plurality of the iconic forms of the normative message. The “nomograms” respond to the need of extending the field of legal science to phenomena that the positivist theory of law does not consider important, but which the process of evolution of contemporary society imposes.     

Protest Diffusion and Cultural Resonance in the 2011 Protest Wave

The 2011 protest wave, encompassing the Arab Spring revolutions, the Indignados movement in Spain and Greece, and the Occupy Wall Street movement has often been described as a new global protest cycle. However, the dynamics of diffusion suggest a more complex picture. Transmission of protest frames and repertoires from one country and cultural region to another was quite slow and tortuous. Moreover, adoption of the new ideas and practices of protest spawned by the protest wave of 2011 involved laborious dynamics of cultural translation and domestication. This situation points to the continuing importance of local protest cultures and cultural contexts, in addition to channels of transmission, even in an era of instantaneous communication technologies.     

Returns to Foreign Language Skills in a Developing Country: The Case of Turkey

This paper analyses the economic value of foreign languages in Turkey using data on some 6000 adult male wage-earners in 2007. We find positive earnings returns to proficiency in English and Russian, which increase with the level of competence. French and German skills are also positively rewarded, although their return seems mostly linked to the likelihood to hold specific occupations. In contrast, knowing Arabic does not generate an earnings premium. Focusing on English, we check for heterogeneous returns along the conditional earnings distribution. The results are qualitatively invariant when we account for misclassification errors in self-reported English skills.     

Emission Trading Restrictions with Endogenous Technological Change

In this paper we use a simple climate model for endogenous environmental technical change in order to analyse the effects on equity and efficiency of placing different degrees of restrictions on trade in the market of pollution permits. The model is obtained by incorporating in Nordhaus and Yang (1996)'s RICE model a notion of induced technical change close to the one proposed in Goulder and Mathai (2000). With the help of such a model, we assess the pros and cons of introducing ceilings on emission trading. In particular, we analyse both the cost effectiveness and the distributional effects of placing restrictions of trading emissions. The analysis takes into account the role of environmental technical change that could be enhanced by emission trade limitations. However, this effect is shown to be offset by the increased abatement cost induced by the larger than optimal adoption of domestic policy measures when ceilings are made binding. Hence, our analysis provides little support for quantitative restrictions of emission trading, even when these restrictions actually have a positive impact of technical change. Even in terms of equity, ceilings find no justification within our theoretical and modelling framework. Indeed, we find that flexibility mechanisms in the presence of endogenous technical change increase equity and that the highest equity levels are achieved without ceilings, both in the short and in the long run.