The Most Recent Input-Output Table: A Milestone in Soviet Statistics

The paper reproduces the 18 × 18 sector Soviet input-output table for 1988 which became available in the West in April 1990, but has not been published in the USSR. The layout (quadrants) and selected elements of the table are described and briefly analyzed. Because the hitherto unavailable statistics facilitate the analysts of a variety of critical issues such as the price reform, defense expenditures, and private incomes and taxation, the input-output table is regarded as an important contribution as well as a milestone in the gradual process of releasing economic data in accordance with the policies of glasnost'. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 027, 052, 222.     

Nuclear perceptions from radioactive blue to sustainable green: The EU taxonomy as reflection of a divided public

Following the Fukushima disaster, several European countries revisited their policies and decided to phase out nuclear energy production. More recently, however, the EU taxonomy proposed a classification system of environmentally sustainable economic activities and consequently reopened the debate regarding nuclear energy. This study analyses public comments about the inclusion or exclusion of nuclear energy as a response to climate change, in the conceptual frameworks of ecological modernization, sustainability and technological neutrality. The study highlights the challenge of shaping energy policies amid dynamic circumstances and diverse viewpoints. Proponents of nuclear energy emphasised its low-carbon emissions and climate change mitigation potential, while opponents focused on issues of radioactive waste and environmental risks. The study reveals that sustainability emerges as a potential reconciling framework to match arguments to influence the EU's decision-making, while it reflects the political primacy of this process. Finally, this research recommends improving feedback visibility and enhancing clear communication, and suggests further research directions to understand future EU nuclear energy policies.     

Haseki Women’s Hospital and the female destitute of nineteenth-century Istanbul

This article is on one of the longest-lived medical institutions of the Ottoman Empire, the Haseki Hospital. I will try to glimpse to the daily workings of the Haseki Hospital and the transformations it underwent in terms of the services it offered, its patients, its social functions, and its relevance for the urban lives of the destitute women of the empire for the period between the 1830s and 1893. During that period, the Haseki Women's Hospital was an institution hosting poor and destitute women as well as pregnant, ill, feeble-minded, convicted women, widows, prostitutes, and orphans. Although it has been called a hospital, it has been used as a women's hospital, lying-in clinic, madness asylum, widow's house, orphanage, and a women's prison. I submit that the Haseki Women's Hospital fulfilled a dual purpose by combining social relief services with medical care for female patients. Besides being a locus of medicine, the hospital was also a site where women in the margins were confined and isolated, but also received care otherwise denied to them. Along these lines, this article searches the vulnerability of the destitute women of nineteenth century Istanbul.     

Understanding Local Service Delivery Arrangements: Are the ICMA ASD Data Reliable?

The authors utilize the two latest ICMA Profile of Local Government Service Delivery Choices surveys to investigate whether the service provision and delivery arrangement information reported in the surveys accurately represents reality and, if not, what factors contribute to generating incorrect or unreliable survey responses. Interviews with practitioners are used to better understand both the accuracy of the survey responses and improvements that could be made to the survey instrument. Results suggest that the ICMA ASD survey data are highly erratic, with more than 70 percent of the cases (N = 70) investigated containing some inaccuracies. A qualitative analysis shows that the majority of the errors appear to be caused by the lack of a clear definition of service provision or by the service titles being too vague or too broad, both of which likely lead to discretion in interpreting survey questions and thus inconsistent answers by individual respondents over time.     

‘Just like working for the dole’: Rural households,export crops and state subsidies in Papua New Guinea

Globally national governments have been forced to devise means for dealing with a rising tide of unemployed and semi‐employed. One method used in industrial countries involves reducing the levels of welfare payments and attaching particular conditions for the receipt of unemployment benefits. Working for the dole is one such condition. In non‐industrial countries, with primarily rural populations and without previously established unemployment benefits, other forms of dealing with increased levels of the relative surplus population have been devised. When unemployed are associated with lawlessness, forming a threat to social order and capital accumulation, particularly in urban centres, particular efforts are made to keep people in the countryside. Although household production of export crops faces global surpluses and falling international prices, one means of pressing the relative surplus population to smallholdings has been to subsidise their growing of even greater volumes of the produce. The dressing of virtuous rhetoric, ‘honest toil’ and similar terms, should not disguise the fact that the nationally subsidised crop prices are a form of welfare payment. The payment is intended to resecure the subsumption of labour to capital in conditions where accumulation forces increasing numbers of people into pools of surplus labour. Here the case of rural households in Papua New Guinea is utilised for an argument which has a much wider application.     

Finance capital and peasants in Colonial West Africa: A comment on Cowen and Shenton

The presence of finance capital in colonial West Africa was predicated on the presence of imperial administration and merchant capital. From these it derived its profits. Cowen and Shenton suggested finance capital was seeking to diversify its sources of profit by engaging cocoa farmers in credit. While this may have been true for the period of cocoa boom before the First World War, it is argued in this piece that in 1938‐more than 20 years later ‐ the banks’ motivation was entirely defensive. No diversification was intended, and the action was directed at salvaging current business. This comment does not question Cowen and Shenton's ‘Fabianism’ thesis but substitutes merchant for finance capital as being in conflict with Colonial Office attitudes.