Latin America:Key Trends and Challenges

The first decade of the 21st century has been an important period for Latin America’s modernization. In the face of rapid economic globalization and a changing global order,most countries in the region have been carefully reflecting on their development paths. After a decade of adjustments and reforms,great changes have been seen in terms of politics,economics,society,and diplomacy. Many governments in the region are also facing serious challenges. The next decade will therefore also be a key period for the...     

Socialization and generational political trajectories: an age,period and cohort analysis of political participation in Britain

The role of political socialization in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods. While most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action, we propose a unified theory based on the different socialization experiences of subsequent generations. We test this theory using a new dataset of collated waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey and by applying age–period–cohort models for repeated cross-sectional data and generalized additive models to identify generational effects. We show that generational effects underlie the participatory decline across repertoires. Consistent with our expectations, the results reveal that the generation of “Thatcher’s Children” are much less likely to engage in a range of repertoires of political action than “Wilson/Callaghan’s Children”, who came of age in the more politicized 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, and in line with our theoretical expectations, the “Blair’s Babies” generation is the least politically engaged of all. We reflect on these findings and highlight the concerning implications of falling levels of activism for advanced democracies.     

Preventing Financial Risks

The global economy faces an uncertain future.China also faces challenges to ensure steady economic development. shared his views with Financial News on how China will prevent financial risks and reform its financial system in 2012.Edited excerpts follow:     

Putin’s Dream of a Eurasian Union: Background, Objectives and Possibilities

Russia is trying to establish a Eurasian Economic Union with a Free Trade Area under the CIS, a Customs Union and a Unified Economic Space under the framework of the Eurasian Economic Community. Its ultimate goal is to achieve integration of former USSR satellites and make it into one of the world’s top powers.