The Southern African Development Community (SADC) seeks to deepen economic integration among its members through the SADC free trade area that came into effect in January 2008. The thrust for a progressive reduction of tariff and no-tariff barriers, which the market integration model emphasises, has serious implications for the impact of transport and communication systems on economic integration and development within SADC.
Transport and communications systems have an important bearing on economic integration and development because they can be significant non-tariff barriers. The SADC Protocol on Transport, Communications and Meteorology is the instrument through which transport and communications constraints are to be addressed. Through this protocol, some institutions have been established and others proposed to ensure that projects designed to deepen economic integration and development are implemented effectively.
The neo-functional integration approach is a relevant theoretical framework for analysing transport and communications issues and for implementing joint sectoral projects in areas that impact on overcoming development-related deficiencies in production and infrastructure. Transport and communications fall in this category of projects and the SADC region has benefited from functional co-operation in this sector.
As integration proceeds, polarisation of industries could occur, raising concerns about the distributional effects of economic integration as this affects development. However, polarisation is not inevitable: it depends on transport costs. This might seriously address transport and communications constraints because, if these are greatly reduced and eventually removed, weaker SADC countries need not lose industries to the core with the SADC Free Trade Area in place. 相似文献
There have now been two successive policy regimes since the Second World War that have temporarily succeeded in reconciling the uncertainties and instabilities of a capitalist economy with democracy's need for stability for people's lives and capitalism's own need for confident mass consumers. The first of these was the system of public demand management generally known as Keynesianism. The second was not, as has often been thought, a neo-liberal turn to pure markets, but a system of markets alongside extensive housing and other debt among low- and medium-income people linked to unregulated derivatives markets. It was a form of privatised Keynesianism. This combination reconciled capitalism's problem, but in a way that eventually proved unsustainable. After its collapse there is debate over what will succeed it. Most likely is an attempt to re-create it on a basis of corporate social responsibility. 相似文献
This study examined (a) the associations between school connectedness and early adolescent adjustment problems over a 1 year
period and (b) the equivalence of these associations across gender. Five hundred middle school students (53.4% female), initially
in the 6th and 7th grades, participated in the two-wave study. Results from two-group cross-lagged panel analyses were consistent
across boys’ and girls’ data. After controlling for baseline levels of adjustment problems, school connectedness predicted
lower levels of early adolescent conduct problems 1 year later. Regarding the opposite direction of associations, and even
after baseline levels of school connectedness were taken into account, conduct problems predicted lower levels of subsequent
school connectedness. There were no cross-lagged associations between depressive symptoms and school connectedness, although
elevated levels of baseline depressive symptoms predicted higher levels of subsequent conduct problems. Findings elaborate
previous research by demonstrating that early adolescents actively shape the middle school environment.