Oil price shocks and policy responses in the post‐reform Chinese economy

This study analyses the impact of the 1986 oil price shock on China and the policy options for accommodating the shock. A computable general equilibrium model is used to capture the complex interactions in the Chinese economy in response to the shock. Interpreted in the theoretical framework of the ‘Booming Sector’ model, the results of the model provide insights on both the real and monetary effects of the shock, and suggest that a combination of policy instruments such as a cut in real absorption, depreciation of the official exchange rate and tight monetary control are required to facilitate adjustment.     

Changing Agendas in Australian Indigenous Policy: Federalism,Competing Principles and Generational Dynamics

This paper identifies two periods of punctuated change in the content and style of Australian Indigenous policy in the last fifty years. It also identifies a third period in which attention to Indigenous policy was heightened through the nationalisation of land issues already well‐established on the agendas of sub‐national jurisdictions. The paper relates all three periods to the changing federal institutions of Australian Indigenous policy, with the Commonwealth slowly exploring its post‐1967 role as a national government in Indigenous affairs. In later sections, the paper identifies some more conceptual bases of changing policy agendas, through ideas of the competing principles of equality, choice and guardianship and the generational moral dynamics of Indigenous affairs.     

Ethnicity Matters: Transnational Ethnic Alliances and Foreign Policy Behavior

This article investigates the influence of transnational ethnic alliances on the international interactions of states. Transnational ethnic alliances exist when both states in a dyad contain members of the same ethnic group. We argue that two types of dyads will experience higher levels of conflict than other dyads: (1) those where an advantaged minority in state A has an ethnic tie to a nonadvantaged minority in state B, and (2) those with a transnational ethnic alliance where the group in one of the states is politically mobilized. Using data from the COPDAB, Minorities at Risk, Polity II, COW, and Penn World Tables projects we find support for these contentions.     

Comparing Northern Territory Elections, 1974-2016: Independent Success in a Strong Two-Party System

Electoral success of independents and minor parties is often interpreted as indicating a weakening of two-party systems of political competition. This paper, on all thirteen elections for the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly since 1974, observes that independents have enjoyed far more success than minor parties. It argues that independent success has reflected a continuing strong two-party system, not a weakening one. Six of ten successful independents in NTLA elections have been “splitters” from the Country Liberal Party in times of intra-party turmoil. Their subsequent electoral success as independents in divisions previously very safe for the CLP leads to development of a “lopsided seats” hypothesis; that independents succeed in electoral divisions where the two-party contest has become lopsided, with one major party attracting twice the votes of the other or more. Two successful “non-splitter” independents in the 2016 election also contested such divisions — one lopsided to the CLP and one to Labor. This latter successful independent ran with the support of a Yolgnu First Nation organisation, which re-opens questions in the literature about Aboriginal candidates and Aboriginal voters, including turnout levels. A jurisdiction-wide graphic technique of “proportionality profiling” is applied to all thirteen NTLA elections and contextualises the later division-level analysis.     

Suicide of a man with known allergy to fish protein by ingesting tinned fish

On a day in November, the body of a 31-year-old man was found near a swimming lake with two open and partly emptied fish tins lying next to him. Further investigations showed that the man had been allergic to fish protein and suffered from severe depression and drug psychosis. Already some days before the suicide, he had repeatedly asked for fish to kill himself. Although the results of the chemical and toxicological examinations were negative, the autopsy findings and histological tests suggest that death was caused by an anaphylactic reaction.     

Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Cosmopolitanism

In this paper we explore the sustained and multifaceted attempt of Jürgen Habermas to reconstruct Kant's theory of cosmopolitan right for our own times. In a series of articles written in the post‐1989 period, Habermas has argued that the challenge posed both by the catastrophes of the twentieth century, and by social forces of globalization, has given new impetus to the idea of cosmopolitan justice that Kant first expressed. He recognizes that today we cannot simply repeat Kant's eighteenth‐century vision: that if we are to grapple with the complexities of present‐day problems, it is necessary to iron out certain inconsistencies in Kant's thinking, radicalize it where its break from the old order of nation‐states is incomplete, socialize it so as to draw out the connections between perpetual peace and social justice, and modernize it so as to comprehend the “differences both in global situation and conceptual framework that now separate us from him.” ¹ 1 Karl‐Otto Apel, “Kant's Toward Perpetual Peace as historical prognosis from the point of view of moral duty,” in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz‐Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997), 87. Jürgen Habermas, “Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years Hindsight,” ibid., 113–53; and in Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 165–202. His basic intuition, however, is that Kant's idea of cosmopolitan right is as relevant to our times as it was to Kant's own. If it was Kant's achievement to formulate the idea of cosmopolitanism in a modern philosophical form, Habermas takes up the challenge posed by Karl‐Otto Apel: to “think with Kant against Kant” in reconstructing this idea. What follows is a critical assessment of Habermas's response to this challenge. We focus here on the dilemmas he faces in grounding his normative commitment to cosmopolitan politics and in reconciling his cosmopolitanism with the national framework in which he developed his ideas of constitutional patriotism and deliberative democracy.