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57711. The European Union's New Crisis Management Capability

Author:
Raimo Väyrynen
Publication Date:
02-2000
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame
Abstract:
To the surprise of most observers, the European Union is moving quickly toward the establishment of its own crisis management capability. In its June 1999 meeting in Cologne the European Council concluded that the Union must have "the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military force, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises without prejudice to actions by NATO." The Council pledged to develop an effective EU-led military crisis management capacity in which all EU members, both NATO and non-allied countries, would participate on an equal footing. The new force will perform the so-called Petersberg tasks: humanitarian and rescue operations, peacekeeping, and the use of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking.
Topic:
Security, NATO, and International Organization
Political Geography:
Europe

57712. Preventing a Nuclear Arms Race in South Asia

Author:
David Cortright and Samina Ahmed
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame
Abstract:
The United States must unequivocally demand that India and Pakistan join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear weapon states. The United States should retain punitive sanctions which target Indian and Pakistani institutions and policymakers responsible for their nuclear weapons programs. Targeted incentives should be provided that seek to diminish internal support for nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan. The United States should fulfill its obligation under Article VI of the NPT to achieve global nuclear disarmament.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Arms Control and Proliferation, and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
United States and South Asia

57713. New Answers To Old Questions: Explaining The Slow Adoption Of Ring Spinning In Lancashire, 1880-1913

Author:
Timothy Leunig
Publication Date:
10-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
This paper re-examines theories previously advanced to explain Lancashire's slow adoption of ring spinning. New cost estimates show that although additional transport costs and technical complementarities between certain types of machine reduced ring adoption rates, these supply side constraints were not dominant. Instead what mattered most were demand side factors. Lancashire produced far more fine yarns than other countries and that yarn was better spun on mules. Furthermore, Lancashire had a sizeable export yarn trade, a market again more suited to mule spinning. Low ring adoption rates were a positive response to demand patterns dominated by high quality goods.
Topic:
Economics, Industrial Policy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United Kingdom

57714. The 'Labour Question' in Nineteenth Century Brazil: Railways, Export Agriculture and Labour Scarcity

Author:
Lucia Lamounier
Publication Date:
10-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
This paper examines changing patterns of labour relations in nineteenth-century Brazil associated with the building of railways and expansion of export agriculture. It addresses the 1850s-1880s period, decades when the `labour question' became a pressing issue for contemporaries. The extinction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1850 posed the problem of finding alternative supplies of labour at a time of increasing agro-export production. In 1852 effective action to start the building of railways was taken. As part of efforts to improve conditions in the sugar and coffee sectors, several concessions were approved. From the middle of the century through to the 1870s, the expansion of coffee cultivation and railway construction were closely inter-related phenomena in the southern provinces of Brazil and shaped the debate about labour. The 1870s was a key decade. First, these years witnessed a `railway mania' - a great fever of building new lines and branches in various regions of the country, especially in the new coffee districts. Second, concern about the labour question intensified with the approval in 1871 of the Rio Branco Law which provided for the gradual emancipation of slaves. From then until 1888, when slavery was finally abolished, several policies were implemented trying to solve the problem of labour supply and to set new patterns of labour relations. This involved the arrival of thousands of immigrants in the 1880s, imported with government aid, to support the near-continuous expansion of coffee cultivation.
Topic:
Economics, Industrial Policy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
Brazil and South America

57715. Distribution Dynamics: Stratification, Polarization and Convergence Among OECD Economies, 1870-1992

Author:
Philip Epstein
Publication Date:
10-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
Since the 1980s the debate about economic convergence has dominated empirical work about the dynamics of growth. Economic historians have been attracted, in particular, by stories of club convergence. However, the analytical foundations of most of the work in this area have rested on linear, or more usually log-linear, regression analysis. Thus, the results tend to be dependent on a conditional average in which time is the dominant player. This is surprising as space, and issues of distribution, have long been important to both theorists and historians. A notable exception to the 'regression school' has been the work on distribution dynamics pioneered in a series of papers by Danny Quah (1993, 1996, 1997). He believes that only by considering the issues of growth and distribution simultaneously can we understand their underlying dynamics. He has argued, for example, that there is no simple causal relationship between the concepts of β-convergence and σ- convergence and that similar stories of global (or club) convergence may be driven by very different stories of individual economy mobility. This is an approach that should appeal to economic historians (both because it can encompass a rich diversity of individual economy experience and because it emphasises that same diversity). We hope to illustrate this by considering the experience of some of the leading OECD economies since 1870 within an explicit distribution dynamics framework.
Topic:
Economics, Industrial Policy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United Kingdom

57716. Competition and Innovation in 1950's Britain

Author:
Stephen Broadberry and Nicholas Crafts
Publication Date:
10-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
We find little support for the Schumpeterian hypothesis of a positive relationship between market power and innovation in 1950's Britain even though many economists and policymakers accepted it at the time. Price-fixing agreements were very widespread prior to the 1956 Restrictive Practices Act and they seem to have had adverse effects on costs and productivity. Competition policy appears to have been much too lenient but the productivity problems of British industry at this time are best viewed as arising largely from the difficulties of reaping the benefits of innovation rather than from a failure to innovate per se.
Topic:
Economics, Industrial Policy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
Britain and United Kingdom

57717. From Economic Convergence to Convergence in Affluence? Income Growth, Household Expenditure and the Rise of Mass Consumption in Britain and West Germany, 1950-1974

Author:
Peter Kramper
Publication Date:
10-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
The “Golden Age” of post-war European economic growth has witnessed extraordinary changes not only in the economic, but also in the social and cultural outlook of Western European societies. Eric Hobsbawm's statement that “[h]istorians of the twentieth century in the third millennium will probably see the century's major impact on history as the one made by and in this astonishing period” is perhaps a little bit too enthusiastic; but it shows that the “Great Boom” has come to be regarded as a key period on the road to the present-day Western world. It has transformed the countries of the West and has at the same time made them more similar to each other. No matter what European societies were in 1950 by 1973, they were all, in Galbraith's famous.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Regional Cooperation
Political Geography:
Britain and Europe

57718. Market Integration in the North and Baltic Seas, 1500-1800

Author:
David Jacks
Publication Date:
10-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
Ever since the time of Adam Smith, the attribution to foreign trade of the ability to affect the wholesale transformation of the productive powers of an economy has remained a very powerful concept in both economics and economic history. At the heart of this interpretation is the observation that improvements in productivity are generated by the expansion of trade through the spreading of fixed costs and an increasing international division of labour.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Regional Cooperation
Political Geography:
United Kingdom

57719. Development History

Author:
N.F.R. Crafts
Publication Date:
10-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
This paper discusses some aspects of the changing relationship between the study of economic history and development economics. Forty years ago the subjects seemed to be quite closely linked in the sense that senior figures straddled both areas, the development history of the advanced countries was frequently studied with a view to deriving lessons for development policy and economic historians made big generalizations as to what these were. In the 1990s, things appear to have been very different. There is much less overlap between the fields of development and history, historians have largely retreated from the brash claims of the early postwar generation and less- developed countries have their own well-documented recent history from which to draw lessons. This state of affairs is clearly reflected in the most recent edition of Meier (1995) where the historical perspective on development is still derived largely from Gerschenkron and Rostow.
Topic:
Development, Economics, and Regional Cooperation
Political Geography:
United Kingdom

57720. Altruism and Imperialism: The Western Religious and Cultural Missionary Enterprise in the Middle East

Author:
Eleanor Doumato, Andrew Porter, Samir Khalaf, Reeva Simon, Elizabeth Thompson, Carolyn Goffman, Hans-Lukas Kieser, Jeremy Salt, Ruth Kark, Paul Sedra, Michael Zirinsky, Mahmoud Haddad, Linda Herrera, and Eleanor H. Tejirian
Publication Date:
08-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Middle East Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
The Western missionary enterprise in the Middle East, while in theory altruistic, has generally been considered part and parcel of Western imperialism and colonialism as it evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, deconstruction of this enterprise reveals that it was by no means monolithic, nor was it necessarily directly related to or supportive of Western imperial ambitions. This project, of which a conference at the Rockefeller Foundation Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, in August 2000 is a part, seeks to examine all aspects of the Western missionary enterprise in the Middle East, focusing on its political and social impact on the region as well as on its entanglement with the political and social currents of the Western countries from which it came. Furthermore, the premise of the project is that the missionary enterprise was also the forerunner of the activities of Western nongovernmental organizations in the region, setting the agenda and establishing the categories of these activities in areas including human rights, education, and economic development.
Topic:
Economics, Human Rights, Non-Governmental Organization, and Religion
Political Geography:
Middle East