Kyoto Protocol cooperation: Does government corruption facilitate environmental lobbying?

Does environmental lobbying affect the probability of environmental treaty ratification? Does the level of government corruption play a role for the success of such lobbying? In this paper, we propose that a more corruptible government may be more responsive to the demands of the environmental lobby. We use several stratified hazard models and panel data from 170 countries on the timing of Kyoto Protocol ratification to test this hypothesis. We find that increased environmental lobby group activity raises the probability of ratification, and the effect rises with the degree of corruption.     

Monetary transmission and the financial sector in the Czech Republic

In this paper, we (1) examine the interactions of financial variables and the macroeconomy within the block-restriction vector autoregression model and (2) evaluate to what extent the financial variables improve the forecasts of GDP growth and inflation. For this reason, various financial variables are examined, including those unexplored in previous literature, such as the share of liquid assets in the banking industry and the loan loss provision rate. Our results suggest that financial variables have a systematic and statistically significant effect on macroeconomic fluctuations. In terms of forecast evaluation, financial variables in general seem to improve the forecast of macroeconomic variables, but the predictive performance of individual financial variables varies over time, even though it strengthens during the 2008?C2009 crisis. The results give some support for the risk-taking channel of monetary policy, as the level of the monetary policy rate is positively associated with the loan loss provision rate of commercial banks. Finally, a more stable financial system is found to contribute to faster economic growth.     

Regendering the Rural: The Agricultural Training of Office Ladies in Hokkaido

This article investigates the gendering nature of depopulation and rural revitalization in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. After outlining the cultural politics of these twin phenomena, I explore them further through a case study of the depopulated community of Shintoku. By establishing the Ladies Farm School in 1996, the town hoped that the agricultural training of single urban women would eventually lead them to settle down as young (and productive) “farming ladies.” Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in the school, I examine how gender is contested and constructed by seemingly progressive changes in women's social status. The argument I make here is that we reconsider the sexual division of labor as a (historical) product of modernization, instead of interpreting it as a timeless cultural pattern. A society is deeply marked by the specific forms in which its labor power is prepared. —Paul Willis, Learning to Labour     

Diversity recognition and minority representation in Central and Southeast Europe: a comparative analysis

The need to handle ethnocultural diversity and the external pressures of Euro-Atlantic integration have led to the development of complex minority rights regimes in Central and Southeast European states. The aim of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis of the political representation dimension of these regimes, and to investigate how the regulations in this domain are related to the more general attitude of states toward diversity recognition and registration. For this purpose, we classify the states according to a series of variables concerning the manner in which ethnocultural diversity is recognized and portrayed, as well as the regulations concerning the representation of minorities, and identify patterns of their incidence. The formal-legal analysis of the constitutions, minority protection laws and of the electoral legislation of the included countries reveals a clear connection between the general attitude of the state toward diversity and the incidence of autonomies, and a less unequivocal, yet strong relationship in the case of minority representation in the national polity.     

Analysis of pathological and non-pathological human skeletal remains by FT-IR spectroscopy

In this study, we report the chemical analyses of various non-pathological, tuberculosis and syphilis infected bone samples from different burial environments by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), in the framework of a general study of diagenesis. Dating human skeletal remains is one of the most important and yet unreliable aspects of forensic anthropology. In this paper, a new method has been suggested, using the crystallinity index and carbonate-phosphate index as a means of distinction between recent and archaeological, anthropological bone samples. Pathological bone samples were analyzed with the same method to see if changes in crystallinity interfere with the process of dating.