Confusion politique au Congo-Kinshasa

This article, written in February 1998, describes political confusion, contradictions, and ambiguities (institutional as well as ideological) typical of the Kabila’s regime at that time. Political mobilisation as well as political identification were polarised by opposition between “local Zairians,” born from locally-born parents, and “new Congolese” who were born elsewhere or whose parent were born outside of the country. Other factors of political identification were ethnicity, regionalism, and generation. Given the fact that the new political regime suspended all political parties and that Kabila himself did not openly declare himself leader of a political movement, there was no open political activity. The article suggests that the new political crises is coming; it was confirmed by August 1998 rebellion/invasion.     

Do African Manufacturing Firms Learn from Exporting?

We use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to investigate whether exporting impacts on efficiency, and whether efficient firms self-select into the export market. Based on simultaneous estimation of a production function and an export regression, our preferred results indicate significant efficiency gains from exporting, which can be interpreted as learning by exporting. We show that modelling unobserved heterogeneity by a flexible approach is important for deriving this conclusion. A policy implication of our results is that Africa would gain from orientating its manufacturing sector towards exporting.     

Impact of Cash Transfer Programmes on School Attendance and Child Poverty: An Ex Ante Simulation for Sri Lanka

For countries assessing whether to implement a cash transfer programme, an ex-ante evaluation is vital to assess its potential impacts. This study simulates the impact of alternative cash transfer programmes on school attendance and poverty among Sri Lankan children. We find that cash transfer programmes targeting poor children would be the most cost-effective way to reduce child poverty and encourage school attendance. If means-testing is not feasible, then programmes targeting the children in households with at least three school-age children would provide a suitable second-best solution. Our findings suggest that even a limited programme budget can provide significant impacts.     

Colloquy: Political Communication Scholarship in France

Undoubtedly, framing political issues is an effective means of influencing the distribution of opinion. But while most studies have shown the effectiveness of alternative issue frames on opinion, they largely ignore the role of the messenger. Our research examines whether message content or messengers are more important in influencing opinion. Four experimental conditions and a control were embedded in a statewide survey, allowing an explicit comparison between the impact of frames comprising message content alone and the same frames attributed to public figures identified with physician-assisted suicide. Results show that an attributed source is no more effective than content alone in influencing opinion on physician-assisted suicide and that the messenger might in fact reduce the intended influence of the message. We conclude with a discussion of our findings within the larger literature on political persuasion and attitude change.     

Transnational Migrants,Globalization Processes,and Regimes of Power and Knowledge

This article situates the Bush administration's new strategy in the historical context of the international capitalist order established by the United States at the end of the 1940s and argues that this order, though extraordinarily successful for some decades, is now in crisis. The unique capitalist international community that the United States established under its primacy revived international capitalism while preventing geopolitical rivalries between the main capitalist centers. The leading sectors of U.S. business have become dependent on the preservation of the unipolar primacy order for its own economic security and expansion while the American domestic political economy has failed to revive as an industrial economy meeting the rules of international economics, exhibiting growing problems with current account deficits and rising levels of debt. To manage the resulting tensions between the orientation of American transnational sectors and problems in the domestic American political economy, the United States has developed an international monetary and financial regime that is destabilizing and dependent upon the preservation of American political primacy over the capitalist world. But the Soviet collapse has destabilized the primacy system, while the dominant sections of American capitalism are committed to rebuilding it. The Bush administration is seeking to rebuild U.S. primacy, using U.S. military dominance. But this carries very high risks.