美国工会应对经济危机的政策措施及启示

经济危机给美国工人阶级带来重大影响。美国工会视危机为创新工会工作和发展工会的大好时机,积极从国家层面和地区层面上采取措施积极应对经济危机以保护工人权益,虽然在宏观上收效甚微,但是其在地区层面上采取的策略和方法收效较好,值得我国工会借鉴。     

The Catalytic Effect of IMF Lending: Evidence from Sectoral FDI Data

Our study contributes to the search for the elusive catalytic effect of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending on inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Recent scholarship has found that the catalytic effect is conditional on political regime and program stringency. We contribute to this literature by developing and testing a theory which describes how the catalytic effect also varies by economic sector. This is a departure from existing studies, which have tended to focus on aggregate FDI flows after crises. Our findings corroborate previous research, which finds that in general IMF lending has a substantial and negative effect on FDI. However, we find that the negative effect is concentrated in sectors that are highly dependent on external capital and have low sunk costs in the host country. Our findings are robust to several alternative explanations common in IMF literature, namely the importance of IMF program design and the ability of governments to make credible commitments to reform. Substantively, our findings suggest that investors are more likely to use IMF lending as an escape hatch in countries where FDI is dependent on external capital and has low sunk costs.     

Dodging the bullet: How crises trigger technocrat‐led governments

Governments led by nonpartisan, ‘technocratic’ prime ministers are a rare phenomenon in parliamentary democracies, but have become more frequent since the late 1980s. This article focuses on the factors that lead to the formation of such cabinets. It posits that parliamentary parties with the chance to win the prime ministerial post will only relinquish it during political and economic crises that drastically increase the electoral costs of ruling and limit policy returns from governing. Statistical analyses of 469 government formations in 29 European democracies between 1977 and 2013 suggest that political scandals and economic recessions are major drivers of the occurrence of technocratic prime ministers. Meanwhile, neither presidential powers nor party system fragmentation and polarisation have any independent effect. The findings suggest that parties strategically choose technocrat‐led governments to shift blame and re‐establish their credibility and that of their policies in the face of crises that de‐legitimise their rule.     

Fiscal Policy Learning from Crisis: Comparative Analysis of the Baltic Countries

The experience of a major crisis is often expected to lead to policy learning but the empirical evidence about this is limited. The goal of the paper is to explore comparatively whether the crisis of 2008–2010 has led to fiscal policy learning by civil servants in the three Baltic countries. Despite some differences in the crisis experience, the finance ministry officials in all three countries have identified the same lesson from the crisis: fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical and help to stabilize the economy. The paper also discusses how various factors have influenced policy learning, including the acknowledgment of failure, blame shifting, and analytical tractability.     

Social Innovation and Crisis in the Third Sector in Spain. Results,Challenges and Limitations of ‘Civic Crowdfunding’

Based on the evolution and institutional transformation of the Welfare State and its relationship with the Third Sector of Social Action, the present article describes and analyzes the aspects of the financial crisis and resources that the sector is currently suffering. In regards of these structural transformations the evolution, characteristics, limitations and opportunities offered by ‘civic crowdfunding’ in Spain between the years 2011 and 2015 as an innovative social practice for the increase of the own funding between the entities of the Third Sector of Social Action and the changes that must be experienced by the sector in order to optimize and improve its self-funding ratios through this mechanism are examined. The high index of success of financing social projects (96.5%) through this tool, and the annual growth during the analyzed period shows the potential of civic crowdfuding. On the other hand, the small size of the bankable projects (95.2% less than 10,000 euros), as well as the low total amount collected (2,665,384 euros) indicates that civic crowdfunding is still an insufficient mechanism to mitigate the severe public resource cuts suffered by the entities of the Third Sector of Social Action and also to bring these entities closer to the objective of self-financing. Finally, we formulated a series of recommendations aimed at improving the self-financing ratios of the Third Sector of Social Action, including a more efficient and cooperative use of civic crowdfunding.     

Prospect theory,operational code analysis,and risk-taking behaviour: a new model of China’s crisis behaviour

Integrating prospect theory and operational code analysis, this paper introduces an innovative approach to studying the decision making of Chinese leaders during crises. The unique contribution of this paper is to adopt the methodology of operational code analysis to measure the domain of actions of policy makers in the application of prospect theory. We suggest that leaders’ operational code beliefs can help us to identify in which domain of actions (gains or losses) leaders are located during crises. Xi Jinping experienced two notable foreign policy crises in 2014, the ‘oil rig’ crisis with Vietnam and the ‘P-8 crisis’ with the United States, which are examined in detail to illustrate Xi’s operational code beliefs and risk-taking behaviour of ‘confident accommodation’ behaviour during crises. To test the process validity of integrating operational code analysis and prospect theory, Hu Jintao’s operational code beliefs and crisis behaviour in 2011–2012 are then compared to Xi’s beliefs and decisions in this study of China’s crisis behaviour.     

Where Do We Go from Here?

The left needs a fundamental rethinking of its politics for a new era. The first task is to understand the contemporary conjuncture: the dynamic combination of events and circumstances which structure a political settlement. Two such conjunctures have occurred in recent history. The first produced the postwar welfare settlement of 1945, which broke down in the economic crisis of the 1970s. The second took shape in the 1980s around the revival of liberal market economics and what became known as Thatcherism. It failed following the 2008 financial crash, and has begun to break apart with the vote to leave the EU. New political and cultural faultlines are confounding the orthodoxies of the governing class and cutting across the partisan loyalties of the main political parties. They herald the renewal of politics. But Labour is on the edge of an abyss. This article considers what the left can learn from Labour's previous periods of defeat and revisionism, and suggests where—if it survives—it should go next.     

How the City of London lost at Brexit: a historical perspective

The nature of the City of London as an offshore financial centre has long made London dependent on the British state providing protection from external political regulation, even as London’s foreign currency business separated its interests from British governments’ economic policy preoccupations. Since the 2008 crash and the onset of the eurozone crisis, London has faced threats to both its autonomy from external regulatory demands and to its offshore business interests at the same time as the long-standing external statecraft of British governments around EU membership has broken down. The Cameron governments’ efforts to protect the City within the European Union under political conditions that were transformed by the eurozone crisis exposed the limits of Britain’s position as a member of the European Union. When David Cameron then tried to resolve the problem of EU membership through a referendum he made it extremely difficult to defend the City’s broader commercial interests in the Single European Market because freedom of movement issues weighed significantly more in British domestic politics than financial services.     

Learning-Shaping Crises: A Longitudinal Comparison of Public Personnel Reforms in Italy, 1992‒2014

Abstract

This article analyses the attempts to reform public administration, notably personnel management, in Italy between 1992 and 2014, with a focus on implementation and the period following the multiple crises that have unfolded since 2008. By untangling the policy learning processes between multiple crises, past reform attempts and domestic and European “contexts in motion”, the article finds that efficiency-oriented reforms have floundered regardless of the political color of governments or indeed of the nature – political or technocratic – of the governments. Domestic factors, notably the frequency of government alternation, i.e. government instability, and European pressure have further reinforced the orientation towards single-loop lessons, i.e. the almost exclusive effecting of short-term cost-cutting measures.     

Containing the Refugee Crisis: How the EU Turned the Balkans and Turkey into an EU Borderland

The events that took place during the 2015-16 refugee crisis in the southeastern EU region boosted unprecedented bordering processes. Borders were reinforced and extended and a costly and difficult deal with Turkey was undertaken; the western Balkans were turned into a vast buffer zone made up of multiple buffer states with fences of all types and sizes; while Greece was ring-fenced and to this day struggles to manage thousands of refugees stranded in camps all over its territory. By seeking to contain the refugee flows, the EU turned its southeastern region into a fortified EU borderland.