South European Healthcare Systems under Harsh Austerity: A Progress–Regression Mix?

This article addresses the question of whether the economic crisis provides a politically opportune time to drastically curtail public healthcare in South Europe or whether, instead, there are signs of longer-term reform strategies for potentially balancing fiscal targets with the quest for enhanced value and health outcomes, when eventually growth resumes. After a brief examination of the profile of healthcare systems in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain prior to the crisis, we comparatively assess the mix of retrenchment, restructuring and recalibration strategies. The effects of the austerity-driven reforms on current (and expected) health outcomes are also briefly analysed. We conclude with reflections on the future of public healthcare in South Europe.     

Workers,state, and development in Brazil: powers of labour,chains of value

This paper examines the significance of landscape and memory in peasant–state relations in Eritrea since independence in the early 1990s. During this period, people were being resettled around cultivable land in the western lowlands as a means of recuperating land and society after prolonged warfare. Projects of statemaking in Eritrea, involving both refugee resettlement and agrarian development, have drawn from a national narrative of lost fertility and deforestation caused by generations of colonial extraction and violence. This paper explores how shared memories of environmental change, an ecological nostalgia, become a means through which people from diverse ethno-linguistic, religious, and regional backgrounds come together to imagine a collective future based in creating livelihood from farm land. However, as people reclaim remembered landscapes and face the challenges of rebuilding communities and livelihoods during a time of tense political and economic change, their ideas of a shared future diverge from state-led projects of nation-building. This article argues that ecological nostalgia legitimises state interventions into rural livelihoods but also provides a means for people to speak and critique the state under conditions of increasing fear and silencing.     

East Is East and South Is South: The Cases of Sarojini Naidu and Arundhati Roy

Boehmer begins by outlining suggestive parallels between the doubly orientalizing reception of an Indian woman poet, Sarojini Naidu, in 1890s London, and the publicity and critical enthusiasm surrounding the appearance of Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things , in the 1990s. Building on these century-broad connections, she goes on to observe how, despite its liberatory agendas, certain constructions within postcolonial criticism appear to emerge virtually intact out of the colonial discourses of the past: in particular, the conflation of biology and biography in representations of the writing of the South, and constructions of a singular oriental femaleness, and an extravagant oriental style. The second part of the essay examines more closely these seemingly 'neo-orientalist' underpinnings of postcolonial literary criticism located in the West, and then considers resistances to these, both in terms of cultural contextualization and verbal recalcitrance.     

新疆利用韩国企业直接投资的现状与展望

随着韩国企业在中国东部沿海发达地区的布局趋于完善和成熟以及中国西部大开发战略的逐步深入,全球经济格局调整和产业转移,大规模进入新疆等中国西部地区已成为必然。但目前韩国企业在新疆直接投资的整体规模上一直徘徊不前,相较东西部其他地区的投资额也有明显差距。因此,为了释放新疆与韩国的经济合作潜力,建议通过加强文化交流促进经济合作和改善投资环境加强直接投资的吸引力;通过吸引更多韩国跨国公司,扩大投资规模。     

把握中韩关系发展的三个层面,开启互利共赢新时代

中韩关系自建交以来飞速发展,其动力来源于双边层面上两国经贸与人文交流的迅猛发展、半岛层面上双方共识的不断扩大以及地区层面上基于东北亚局势变化两国政府的选择。习近平主席访韩为中韩关系发展提出了新的要求并提供了新的契机。未来中韩关系要想进一步保持发展势头,需要在双边层面上增强沟通与合作,半岛层面上扩大交流与共识以及地区层面共同为东北亚乃至整个亚洲提供有效的公共产品,从而开启中韩互利共赢的新时代。     

两岸投资争端解决机制的制度创新及其完善

投资争端解决机制是《海峡两岸投资保障和促进协议》（简称《两岸投资协议》）中体现两岸特色的重要制度创新之一。相较于传统双边投资协议中的投资争端解决机制而言,两岸投资争端解决机制除了引入两岸私人投资争端解决方式,还规定了投资者与投资所在地一方投资争端的协调、协处和调解等多元化机制,实现了单方规定的协议化和国际实践的两岸化,从而有效降低了两岸投资争端的“泛政治化”风险。未来,应进一步完善两岸投资补偿争端的调解程序,确保调解协议的法律约束力和执行力。     

连横《台湾通史》论析：基于学术史的考察

连横一生以搜集、记录、整理、保存、研究台湾历史和文化为职志,著述颇丰,尤以《台湾通史》名世。纵观《台湾通史》的出版史和相关研究的学术史,实与近代以来中国历史进程相契合,其独特的学术价值和现实意义也逐步彰显。20世纪90年代以来,海峡两岸的《台湾通史》研究均进入新的发展阶段,无论视角还是视野、方法还是理论,特别是在学术性或学理性上,都有显著的推进和拓展。     

Wisconsin Institutionalism: John R. Commons and His Students

This paper seeks to provide a close examination of the nature and history of the institutional economics that developed at the University of Wisconsin. There has been a significant amount of work done on the thinking of John R. Commons, but much less on the history of Wisconsin institutionalism more generally. The paper proceeds through an examination of the development of the Department of Economics at Wisconsin from the time of the hiring of Richard T. Ely in 1892; the faculty hired to the Department from the early 1900s through to Commons's retirement in 1933; the program of instruction offered, particularly in the late 1920s when the full complement of institutionalist faculty were present; and the areas of study and later careers of Commons's graduate students. It is argued that although Ely played a role in the development of Wisconsin institutionalism, it was Commons who became the center of graduate student work, and that the Department only took on its decidedly institutionalist character after the hiring of Commons and a number of his students as faculty. The program of study in the late 1920s was very heavily institutionalist in character with Commons providing a core course on value and valuation, and a notable emphasis in the fields of public utilities, labor economics, and statistics. Very little instruction was provided in neoclassical theory. Many of Commons's students went on to notable careers in the academic world or public service or both. Wisconsin students were heavily involved in labor legislation issues, and in the development and administration of social security. But a number of Commons's students went into academic careers, and many produced large numbers of PhD students themselves. The decline of Wisconsin-style institutionalism after World War II was not, as has been suggested, a result of Commons's students moving largely into non-academic careers, but of many other factors, including the rise of Keynesian economics, and the migration of what had been much of Wisconsin institutionalism into new schools of industrial relations.     

Dismissal of strikers and industrial disputes: the 1985–1987 strike and mass sackings at Silentnight

The 1985–1987 dispute at Silentnight bed factories in the north of England was an exceptionally long and bitter strike, lasting for 20 months from June 1985 until February 1987. A total of 346 workers were sacked for taking part in the strike, which gained a high profile with remarkable levels of support and solidarity action, largely due to its emblematic status as an extreme example of punitive treatment of workers taking industrial action in the period immediately following the defeat of the miners in 1984/1985. Workers took lawful strike action in 1985 over the non-implementation of agreed pay rises and compulsory redundancies counter to an existing agreement between the firm and the union, with the company responding to the dispute with mass dismissals. Pickets were maintained at the two factories in question for nearly two years, with the strikers gaining wide-ranging support from across the labour movement, but the company stood firm against the dismissed strikers who were ultimately defeated. Based on archival research and interviews with participants in the strike, the article analyses in detail how the dispute was sustained for so long, the legal context and the weakness of legal protections for strikers in the period, and the widespread political mobilisation and networks of support and solidarity that arose around the strike and in opposition to the policies of the Conservative government of the day.     

“We feel that our strength is on the factory floor”: Dualism,shop-floor power,and labor law reform in late apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores the transformation of South African labor relations during the 1980s. In 1979, prompted by new shop-floor militancy, the Wiehahn Commission recommended that black workers, previously excluded from state labor machinery, be permitted to join recognized trade unions. Most discussions of this shift in apartheid labor relations focus on the ensuing debate within the black unions, torn between preserving their independence or securing state legitimation. This article looks instead at the related debate about ‘levels of bargaining’: should emergent black unions demand to negotiate at the factory level, where they had secured shop-floor strength through organizing and democratic practice, or pursue the benefits of the corporatist bargaining structures that had long excluded them and had privileged white workers? The eventual drift towards corporatism, I argue, imprinted the character of the South African labor movement into the post-apartheid era. An understandable desire to wield influence at the level of the national political economy eroded the tradition of workers’ control, shop floor democracy, and struggle unionism that black unions had forged during the 1970s and 1980s.