Small-Business Participation in the Informal Sector of an Emerging Economy

We investigate the characteristics of the owners of small businesses that participate in the informal sector of an emerging economy and their perception of the risk of detection by tax authorities while doing so. Data are gathered from a survey covering 1027 small businesses in Trinidad and Tobago. Results suggest that small business owners are motivated to participate in the informal sector when they believe that the risk of detection by the tax authorities is low and that government regulations are burdensome, but there is no evidence that the tax rate itself is an issue. Their perception of the risk of detection by the tax authority is determined largely by the time they spend and the income they earn in the formal sector.     

A decade of decline: a longitudinal look at big city and big county strategies to cope with declining revenues

Many local governments have now endured a decade of fiscal decline due to periodic reductions in external funding (federal and state and slowdowns in the rate of growth of the state and local government sector. This research examines the extent to which six large jurisdictions (three cities, three counties) under fiscal duress avoided political conflict and prevented further fragmentation of their authority between 1978 and 1987. The results showed that local officials generally chose retrenchment strategies (revenue, expenditure, and borrowing) with the least anticipated political opposition; but where hard choices had to be made (personnel reductions), they were made without hesitation. The timing of politically unpopular choices to coincide with downward trends in the private sector reduced the level of political fallout, even in heavily unionized, socioeconomically diverse communities. The results also showed that local officials strongly endorsed, rather than opposed, strategies that further fragmented their authority (privatization, intergovernmental cooperative agreements), because these approaches produce significant personnel and capital savings in the short term. Finally, the results indicated that the long-term cumulative effects of short-term decremental decisionmaking on the quality of life (as measured by drops in bond ratings) were negative in only one-third of the jurisdictions.     

Party,State, and Socialism in Guinea-Bissau

Suicide is generally regarded as an anti-social behavior. It is, perhaps, for this reason that sociologists and psychologists, among other experts, have been interested in studying the incidence of suicide in many societies. Most modern theories on suicide, however, do not emphasize the idea of “heroic suicide.” Epitomizing this “genre” of suicide are the high profile, politically motivated suicides in early colonial Ibadan examined here. This article suggests that the key to understanding these suicide cases is to be found not only in these people’s multilayered pasts — the general Yoruba past and Ibadan’s nineteenth-century military heritage — but also in their conception of honor and in their social norms. The ideals of honor thus carried over into the twentieth century were so strong that they survived the first three decades of colonial rule despite the intrigue-laced nature of Ibadan chieftaincy politics and the official interference of the colonial authorities. This article concludes that politically motivated suicide, though self destructive was actually meant to serve an honorable purpose such that those involved became heroes even in death. There is therefore the need for suicide theorists to highlight exceptions like these.     

Debt,Uneven Development and Capitalist Crisis in South Africa: from Moody’s macroeconomic monitoring to Marikana microfinance mashonisas

The power, vulnerability and destructiveness of financial markets are out of control in South Africa, now among the most unequal, economically volatile and protest-intensive countries worldwide. While debt made itself felt in many sites, of interest in both criticising and promoting solutions is the ‘scale jumping’ required from South Africa’s national insertion into the world financial system, entailing the Reserve Bank setting very high interest rates, in turn leading to unpayable levels of consumer debt, and at a time when microfinance is suddenly discredited as a development strategy. Macro- and micro-financial problems fused in the course of the Marikana Massacre of August 2012, reflecting the local and global powers of the Moody’s rating agency and ‘mashonisa’ loan sharks. The over-indebted Marikana mineworkers, who led a strike which catalysed many wildcat strikes elsewhere, confronted the local crisis by displacing it into the national economy. This only heightened the contradictions that Moody’s punished with its September 2012 credit-rating downgrade. Without a genuine ‘debt relief’ solution at both scales, society will continue to unravel, as financialisation reaches its limits within one of the world’s most extreme cases of uneven and combined development.     

Participatory Development and Reconstruction: a literature review

In the past decade researchers and development experts have been preoccupied by participatory development and reconstruction. Despite criticisms of its potential, it has been at the centre of development practices. This review of both published and unpublished literature aims to assess the importance of participatory development and reconstruction, especially its positive and negative characteristics. The paper shows that, despite its potentially transformative role, its main drawback rests in the power relations between elites and non-elites and that creating comprehensible ways through which non-elites can deal with these relations is one issue that needs additional research. Other issues that need more research are related to how to sustain the participatory development and reconstruction outcomes by increasing local ownership, and how to better involve existing structures and institutions (both state and non-state actors) in development and reconstruction efforts for poverty alleviation.     

Class Dealignment in Britain Revisited

Recent tranformations in voting patterns have made Britain one of the best known examples of electoral dealignment in Western Europe. But recently Heath, Jowell and Curtice have defended older accounts of class voting by questioning whether there has been any change at all in relative class voting, as measured by a particular index, the odds ratio. This article first outlines the innovative elements in Heath el al.’s argument. Second, it demonstrates that the odds ratio is a highly volatile and hard‐to‐interpret statistic. Third, it shows that other elements of Heath el al.’s empirical analysis do not substantiate their case. Fourth, it disputes the strategy of focusing only upon ‘relative class voting’, and argues that the growth of third‐party voting is a symptom of class dealignment, rather than a factor which must be discounted in advance before assessing trends in class voting.     

From permanent employment to massive lay-offs: the political economy of ‘transitional unemployment’ in urban China (1993–8)

Abstract

The idea that economic activities may be described and studied as ‘embedded’ in social relations has been central to much debate in recent economic sociology. The present paper analyses legal struggles over the status of begging in US law and argues that conflicting rhetorical accounts of begging illustrate social actors’ efforts to articulate the interconnectedness of their social world, including the ways in which economic practices are embedded in their social and institutional contexts. The paper thus suggests that embeddedness is not just something identified by social researchers, but also a problem faced by social actors as they try to understand the socio-economic order in which they live and act. By arguing for or against the claim that begging is simultaneously an economic action and the exercise of the right to freedom of expression, the voices in this debate attempted to affect the future of this marginal economic activity.     

Liar,Liar, Pants on Fire: How Fact-Checking Influences Citizens’ Reactions to Negative Advertising

Electoral campaigns are dynamic and an important change in recent elections is the growth of fact-checking; the assessment of the truthfulness of political advertisements by news media organizations and watchdog groups. In this article, we examine the role that fact-checks play in shaping citizens’ views of negative commercials and political candidates. We rely on an Internet survey experiment where we vary people’s exposure to negative advertisements and a follow-up fact-check article (i.e., no fact-check, accurate fact-check, inaccurate fact-check). The results of our experiment show that fact-checks influence people’s assessments of the accuracy, usefulness, and tone of negative political ads. Furthermore, sophisticated citizens and citizens with low tolerance for negative campaigning are most responsive to fact-checks. The fact-checks also sway citizens’ likelihood of accepting the claims made in the advertisements. Finally, negative fact-checks (e.g., fact-checks challenging the truthfulness of the claims of the negative commercial) are more powerful than positive fact-checks.