Foreign exchange interventions in a small emerging market: the case of Croatia

This paper studies the impact of daily official foreign exchange interventions on the exchange rates in Croatia for the period from 1996 to 2004. Using the event study methodology and a variety of GARCH models reveals that the Croatian central bank was in a position to influence, to some extent, the level of the exchange rate during the period studied. This lends support to the view that foreign exchange intervention may be effective in emerging market economies.     

Palestinian state‐building: police and citizens as test of democracy

This article explores police‐society relations by assessing the impact of current state‐building efforts by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank. The article presents an outline of the emerging civilian policing model and its wider implications for citizens’ rights and the dominant political order. The specific focus of the paper rests on an examination of the potential tensions associated with the perceived need for strong coercive security structures (including the civil police) as part of state‐building efforts and the desire by the population for increased freedom and pluralism. This issue is further complicated by the ambiguous nature of the current experiment in limited autonomy underway in those areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip where Israeli redeployment has taken place.     

Regulating for media pluralism and the pitfalls of standortpolitik: the reregulation of German broadcasting ownership rules

Germany has witnessed a veritable television boom over the last ten years. However, the plethora of new private channels masks an underlying duopoly, a concentration of media power that has not been prevented by an elaborate system of regulation. This article maps these developments, particularly the Lander competition for investment, the structural power of the media industry, and the emergence of a media policy ‘Grand Coalition’ between SPD North Rhine‐Westphalia and CSU Bavaria. It assesses the Federal Constitutional Court's role and highlights the public broadcasters’ crucial function to act as a pluralistic counterbalance in the dual public/private broadcasting system.     

Subaltern Resistance in Latin America: A Reply to Tom Brass

The focus of this article is on the strong positive correlation between landholdings and household size observed in rural India. It may be recalled that Chayanov cites some Russian data exhibiting a similar correlation as evidence in support of his theory of the life cycle and its consequences among peasant families, arguing in particular that the causation behind the correlation runs from the family size and its composition to the size of landholdings. This paper argues that in the Indian case the correlation cannot possibly arise from the type of dynamics posited by Chayanovian theory. The explanation lies in the differential demographic structures, including the propensity for families to remain joint or undivided, among the peasant classes, the causation running in the direction opposite to that suggested by Chayanov.