主动作为 依法维权——关于提高工资集体协议“三率”的工作与思考

工资问题是企业劳动关系的核心问题,是职工经济权益的基本内容;积极推进工资集体协商签订工资协议是维护职工合法权益、协调劳动关系的有效机制。工会应积极作为,主动作为,与党政等有关部门形成合力,通过努力提高“三率”扎实推进此项工作。     

论商主体的类型界定

世界上一些主要国家都将商主体分为商个人、商合伙与商法人三大类,我国也应将这三类商主体作为我国商事主体的基本分类在即将制定的商事通则中予以规定。本文在对国内外商主体立法例归纳的基础之上,提出了我国商主体的立法建议：商个人包括个体工商户、经过登记的农村承包经营户和个人独资企业;商合伙包括普通合伙企业和有限合伙企业;商法人包括有限责任公司和股份有限公司。合作社和农村集体经济组织不应纳入商主体范畴中。     

Connecting to regional markets? Transport,logistics services and international transit challenges for Central Asian food-processing firms

Central Asian food processors face a number of constraints when they attempt to export to the region and beyond. The Central Asian economies in focus here are landlocked, and thus lack easy access to sea transport. In addition, the region's transport network was built to reinforce the interdependence of the then Soviet republics, while conflicting economic interests make cross-border cooperation difficult. Based on extensive fieldwork on infrastructure systems and firm export strategies, this paper identifies contemporary infrastructure and transportation issues within the Central Asian region, and makes a novel attempt to examine how these factors lead to challenges for local food processing producers trying to sell their products in the region and beyond.     

Elections and “sons of the soil” conflict dynamics in Africa and Asia

Recent research reveals that nearly one-third of ethnic civil wars since 1945 have been “sons of the soil” (SoS) conflicts that pit indigenous populations against internal migrants. Despite important differences across SoS conflicts, many share a common trait as they often escalate during elections. While scholars have examined the causal mechanisms behind electoral violence, the relationship between elections and SoS conflicts has been overlooked. By examining a wide range of cases, the article breaks with previous research that privileges in-depth case studies of SoS conflicts with high levels of violence. Using insights from recent fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Indonesia, the article sheds light on the causal dynamics that link elections and diverging levels of SoS conflict. In so doing, it illustrates how the severing of patronage networks and the shifting balance of power towards migrants create fertile contexts for political elites to instrumentalize local grievances. Elections are thus more likely to produce violent SoS conflicts when elites (at both the national and local levels) are able to mobilize supporters by playing upon these grievances, often through the politicization of citizenship and/or the ethnicization of the local sphere.     

“I know! I live here”: poor women and the work of empowerment

To trace the effects of empowerment programmes in the Global South, attention needs to be focused on the everyday practices of frontline staff, or fieldworkers, who convey empowerment ideas and practices at the grassroots. This is especially critical when fieldworkers work in the marginalised communities where they also live. Instead of looking outward towards a programme’s outcomes, this article turns inward to examine the impact of women fieldworkers’ dual experiences of development on their decisions and practices in the field. The ethnography of women fieldworkers in a government-led women’s empowerment programme for the poor in Delhi, India reveals the uneasy relationship of women’s empowerment to the larger contradictory development paradigm that they work within. Fieldworkers used their experiences as poor women to meet programme quotas, while also side-lining social change in favour of shielding clients from ineffective programme activities.     

In search of the ‘Other’ in Asia: Russia–China relations revisited

This paper argues that Russia and China are partners of consequence and that the neglect of the normative dimension of the Sino-Russian relationship has led its impact on global governance to be undervalued and misunderstood. Following a constructivist approach, the paper examines the shared norms underlying an ever closer Sino-Russian partnership, despite divergent interests in a number of areas. A first section examines how shared norms lead Russia and China to define their identity similarly, facilitate joint actions, and constrain their individual policy choices. For Russia, elaborating its own unique identity is crucial to its claim to global status, though complicated by interactions with multiple ‘Others.’ Russia's effort to engage Asian partners is often viewed as hedging against China, but as second section argues that Russian engagement in Asia is better understood in terms of Russia's effort to define an Asian identity. A third section highlights the securitization/desecuritization dynamic in Sino-Russian economic relations. Xi Jinping's efforts to redefine China's global role reinforces its tendency to desecuritize the vulnerabilities that lead China to seek economic cooperation with Russia. Russia, fearing becoming a ‘resource appendage’ of China, then securitizes economic relations with China.     

China: an East Asian alternative to neoliberalism?

The political-economic evolution of post-Mao China has been portrayed as a historically inevitable embrace of neoliberalism; as an exemplification of the East Asian developmental state and as an extension of Soviet New Economic Policy-style state capitalism. This paper evaluates these portrayals through a broad historical and geographical framework. It examines the position of China as a new state after 1949. It then places the shifting logics of socioeconomic regulation in China in relation to (1) the global neoliberal hegemony since the 1980s and (2) the concomitant shifts in the economic policies of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how the Communist Party of China creatively adapted and re-purposed regulatory logics from the Washington Consensus and East Asian policies to consolidate its own version of Leninist state-led development.