TILTING TOWARD MARKETIZATION: Reform of the Canadian Pension Plan

Public concern about the earnings‐related Canada Pension Plan has forced the Canadian government to move toward fuller funding, a new investment policy, and changes to benefits and administration. Together, the three initiatives, and particularly the first two, amount to a modest degree of marketization. The assumption behind the reform is that the Canada Pension Plan will remain public and mandatory but the change will create a board and an investment policy which are more sensitive to market pressures and less amendable to government interference. The Canada Pension Plan is one of three tiers of support for the elderly in retirement. It is a contributory social insurance scheme which protects against loss of income. The other two are a social allowance (Old Age Security) as well as an income tested benefit (Guaranteed Income Supplement) which provide basic income support and employment based retirement pension plans as well as group and individual registered retirement savings plans which supplement the other two tiers on a voluntary basis. This article examines the reform of the Canada Pension Plan. After a brief examination of Canada's retirement benefits in an international context, the article summarizes recent debates in Canada, government policies to develop fuller funding and new investment strategies, and reflections on possible developments in the future.     

Convergence repertoires: anti-capitalist protest at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics

This article introduces the term ‘convergence’ in order to explain a distinctive repertoire of protest events in which the following are present: (1) activists with an ideologically anti-capitalist orientation; (2) engage in property destruction; (3) travel from outside of the site of the protest event; and (4) solicit a determinable police response. Convergences have emerged as a subset of the alter-globalization movement since the ‘Battle in Seattle’ in 1999. Convergences have since emerged in resistance to meetings of global financial institutions, political primaries, and recently, the Olympic Games. We examine the logic that activists use to weave resistance to these disparate targets together. In this article, we arrive at this finding inductively, paying particular attention to convergence events at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. Narratives around convergence repertoires allow activists to link seemingly disparate actors with similar and predictable performances.     

Market segmentation and lender specialization in the primary and secondary mortgage markets

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of market segmentation and lender/purchaser specialization in the primary and secondary mortgage markets. It describes and assesses the 1990 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data, which for the first time provide detailed information on the borrower and neighborhood racial and income characteristics of mortgage loan originations and securitizations in the primary and secondary mortgage markets. Evidence presented in the paper indicates that home purchase loan origination rates for black applicants—and, to a lesser degree, Hispanic applicants—appear to be significantly lower than those of other racial or ethnic groups. Similarly, the HMDA data reveal that home purchase mortgage origination rates in predominantly minority census tracts are significantly lower than those in predominantly white neighborhoods. The HMDA data also indicate a striking reliance of black borrowers on government‐backed forms of mortgage credit.

The paper further reveals that secondary market loan purchase distributions arrayed by borrower and neighborhood characteristics generally reflect those of home mortgage originations. The borrower and locational characteristics of home purchase loans acquired by the Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA) directly reflect that agency's legislated specialization in government‐backed loans, whereas the characteristics of loans acquired by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the most part derive from the borrower and geographic composition of conventional home purchase loan originations. Findings of analyses of HMDA data raise concern regarding the access of minority and low‐income households and neighborhoods to mortgage finance. Those results also raise some question as to whether the federally chartered agencies in the secondary market are adequately promoting the availability of mortgage credit to low‐ and moderate‐income and minority households.     

The Weimar Republic — A failure of representative institutions?

Summary

The Weimar Republic is usually regarded as a theoretically near‐perfect, but practically deeply flawed representative system. Particular features of it, among them the electoral system, producing a large number of splinter parties, and the strong presidency, with emergency powers opening an easy route to authoritarianism, are held to have contributed to the failure of the first German democracy. This article argues that these alleged shortcomings did not or need not have had the damaging consequences attributed to them. It claims that the political system established by the Weimar Constitution was a finely calibrated, if complex system that could have been adequate to the needs of a modern pluralist society, especially if the powerful Länder governments, such as that of Prussia, are also taken into account. It was therefore the deliberate refusal of significant social groups to accept pluralist democracy rather than flaws in the representative system that led to ultimate failure.     

The CIA and congressional oversight: learning and forgetting lessons

Organizations both learn lessons and forget lessons. A lesson said to be learned by the CIA as a result of the negative reaction of congressional overseers to its interrogation program was the need to create opportunities to provide information and interact with them. The historical record shows that this was a lesson already learned. Why then the need to relearn it? It is suggested here that organizational forgetfulness may be triggered by the same factors which promote learning: perceived problems with organizational performance, opportunities to act, and people.     

Nations hospitable to organized crime and terrorism

This report assesses conditions that contribute to or are potentially hospitable to transnational criminal activity and terrorist activity in selected regions of the world during the period 1999–2002. Although the focus of the report is on transnational activity, domestic criminal activity is recognized as a key foundation for transnational crime, especially as the forces of globalization intensify. The report has been arranged geographically into the following major headings: Africa, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. Within the geographical headings, the report addresses individual countries with particularly salient conditions. Cases such as the Triborder Area (TBA) of South America and East and West Africa, where conditions largely overlap national borders, have been treated as regions rather than by imposing an artificial delineation by country. The bibliography has been divided into the same geographical headings as the text. The major sources for this report are recent periodical reports from Western and regional sources, Internet sites offering credible recent information, selected recent monographs, and personal communications with regional experts. Treatment of individual countries varies according to the extent and seriousness of conditions under study. Thus some countries in a region are not discussed, and others are discussed only from the perspective of one or two pertinent activities or conditions. Because they border the United States, Canada and Mexico have received especially extensive treatment.