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6821. Rival Views Of Postcommunist Market Society

Author:
Béla Greskovits
Publication Date:
10-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for European Studies at Cornell University
Abstract:
While reviewing various interpretations of the postcommunist transformation it is demonstrated that the manner social scientists think about postcommunism has much in common with the ideas of their predecessors who faced the emergence of capitalism over the past centuries. What explains the continuity of the major views? Why did the debate on the perspectives of capitalism and on the nature of its strengths and weaknesses reappear in the new historical case of postcommunist market society? This author argues that neither the specific historical nor the systemic context of capitalist expansion can account for the prevalence of competing interpretations. Rather the latter is the standard way social scientists think about systems and systemic change in general. But the trench-war between rival views of postcommunist market society also reflects the impact of new psychological, political, and institutional factors specific to the mass-production of social science ideas towards the end of the XXth century.
Topic:
Communism and Economics
Political Geography:
Europe

6822. Global Banking

Author:
Tom Barry, Martha Honey, and Christian Weller
Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Foreign Policy In Focus
Abstract:
International banking activities frequently result in financial instability and serious economic downturns as financial markets become more open and deregulated. Competition from multinational banks has reduced the availability of credit to small- and medium-sized enterprises, to low- and middle-income consumers, and to farmers. While economies experience financial instabilities and declining credit, governments are losing the means to protect their domestic markets.
Topic:
Economics, Government, International Organization, and International Trade and Finance

6823. Ideas, Culture and Political Analysis Workshop

Author:
Thomas Risse, Sarah Mendelson, Neil Fligstein, Jan Kubik, Jeffrey T. Checkel, Consuelo Cruz, Kathleen McNamara, Sheri Berman, Frank Dobbin, Mark Blyth, Ken Pollack, George Steinmetz, Daniel Philpott, Gideon Rose, Martha Finnemore, Kathryn Skikkink, Marie Gottschalk, John Kurt Jacobsen, and Anna Seleny
Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Social Science Research Council
Abstract:
The last decade or so has witnessed a resurgence in scholarship employing ideational and cultural factors in the analysis of political life. This scholarship has addressed political phenomena across a variety of national and international settings, with studies of European politics being particularly well represented. For example, the work of scholars like Peter Hall (1993), Peter Katzenstein (1996), Ronald Inglehart (1997), Robert Putnam (1994) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (1995) has improved our understandings of European polities, societies and economies. Yet despite a recent rise in interest, ideational and cultural explanations still meet with skepticism in many quarters of the discipline. Some scholars doubt whether non-material factors like ideas or culture have independent causal effects, and others, who accept that such factors might matter, despair of devising viable ways of analyzing their impact on political life.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Relations, Security, Democratization, Economics, Government, Human Rights, International Cooperation, Nationalism, and Politics
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, France, and Latin America

6824. Emissions and Development in the United States: International Implications

Author:
Richard T. Carson and Donald R. McCubbin
Publication Date:
01-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC)
Abstract:
Concerns about the sustainability of resource use have no doubt been raised since civilization began. The most famous proponent of these concerns is Thomas Malthus (1976), who, in 1798, predicted that population growth would outstrip the ability of agriculture to supply food, and mass starvation would ensue. More recently, the widely read Limits to Growth report, by Meadows et al. (1974), presented a model of resource use and development that predicted humans would face unprecedented pollution and starvation, if current resource use patterns continued into the future. Of course, both reports' most dire predictions have not come true for several reasons. They failed to account for improvements in technology, the power of market prices to ration scarce resources, and the public's demand for environmental preservation when confronted with a perceived scarcity of environmental goods. Although the dire predictions failed to materialize, many believe that environmental quality will deteriorate as the world's economies grow, unless there are significant changes in human behavior. In this paper we make a modest attempt, using air pollution data, to examine the linkage between economic growth, human behavior, and environmental quality.
Topic:
Development, Economics, and Environment
Political Geography:
United States

6825. Focal Points and International Financial Markets: The Maastricht Convergence Criteria

Author:
Layna Mosley
Publication Date:
03-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Studies Association
Abstract:
A central research problem in comparative and international political economy concerns the implications of economic globalization - and more specifically, of international capital mobility - for national economic policy choice. A large body of recent literature suggests that governments are, at least to some extent, constrained by relatively high levels of international capital mobility (Garrett, 1998; O'Brien, 1992). At the very least, the asset allocation decisions of financial market participants affect interest rate levels, and, therefore, the cost of borrowing for governments and private actors.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, and International Organization
Political Geography:
Europe

6826. International Capital Mobility and Monetary Politics in the U.S. Congress, 1960–1997

Author:
J. Lawrence Broz
Publication Date:
10-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Prevailing approaches to the politics of monetary policy in the United States are based on closed economy assumptions, which is appropriate for analyzing the period before about 1980. However, the opening of U.S. and foreign financial markets since the early 1980s has had a profound effect on domestic monetary policy and domestic monetary politics. The major policy effect is that the transmission channels of monetary policy now include the exchange rate. The major political effect is that the exchange rate has become a focus of concern for well-organized industries in the traded goods sector and, by extension, for Congress. This paper presents statistical evidence showing that the forces driving congressional activity on monetary policy have changed dramatically with the international financial integration of the U.S. economy. Exchange rates, as opposed to interest rates, now largely determine congressional attentiveness to monetary policy and the Federal Reserve.
Topic:
Economics, Government, and International Political Economy
Political Geography:
United States

6827. Negotiating Economic Transitions in Liberizing Polities

Author:
Frances Hagopian
Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
How do governments struggling to consolidate new democracies enact effective stabilization and adjustment policies, reform the public sector, and deregulate markets? And what has been the impact of economic liberalization on political institutions and systems of political representation? Treating economic and political transitions as mutually interdependent, this paper couples these questions to suggest a reformulation of the conventional wisdom about how economic liberalization proceeds and how political interests are determined. It challenges the assumption that neoliberal reform is most readily achieved in liberalizing polities when visionary political leaders surrounded by coherent economic teams with comprehensive programs in place act with a wide margin of autonomy from society. It also questions the contention that structures of political representation are the outgrowth of either economic organization or the product of state engineering. The paper makes two arguments. Its central argument is that economic reform is accomplished most readily when government reformers, acting through available clientelistic, corporatist, and party-based networks of mediation, negotiate the compliance of public and private sector representatives of social actors for the introduction of market-oriented reforms. They trade public resources or legislation favoring the representational status of political or social actors in the present for the agreement of those actors to accept diminished state resources for their organizations or constituents in the future. The use of specific networks of negotiation, moreover, influences the design of liberalization policies and helps to account for national differences in the pace and sequence of economic reform measures. The paper's second argument is that those systems of political representation that are strengthened as a result of the temporary advantages that accrue to them during the process of state retreat will endure even when they are incompatible with economic liberalism. This is so because the politicians and group leaders who manage these networks have the opportunity to design institutions that will allow them to accommodate themselves and adapt their power bases to economies in which the market plays a larger role.
Topic:
Economics and Political Economy
Political Geography:
South America, Latin America, Central America, and North America

6828. Curbed Markets?

Author:
Kellee S. Tsai
Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Our country does not permit the establishment of private banks. We must continue to investigate and impose discipline on non-banking financial institutions and other creditors that charge high interest rates. This is clearly one of the most important measures for ensuring order in the entire financial system.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
China and Asia

6829. The State in a Changing World: A Critique of the 1997 World Development Report

Author:
Devesh Kapur
Publication Date:
02-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
In recent years, the World Bank has been at the vanguard in pressing for a circumscribed role for the State in developing countries. It therefore comes as somewhat of a surprise that the 1997 World Development Report (WDR - the World Bank's annual flagship publication), The State in a Changing World, underscores the continuing significance of the State in LDCs.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Emerging Markets, Government, International Organization, and Third World

6830. 100 Companies Receiving The Largest Dollar Volume Of Prime Contract Awards—Fiscal Year 1997

Publication Date:
01-1998
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
U.S. Economic Statistics Briefing Room
Abstract:
This report presents summary data on the 100 companies, and their subsidiaries, receiving the largest dollar volume of Department of Defense (DoD) prime contract awards during fiscal year (FY) 1997. Table 1 lists the 100 companies in alphabetical order and gives their associated rank. Table 2 identifies the parent companies in rank order, with their subsidiaries, and gives the total net value of awards for both the parent company and its subsidiaries. In many cases, the parent company receives no awards itself, but appears on the list because of its subsidiaries. Table 2 also shows what percentage of the total awards each company's awards represent, as well as the cumulative percentage represented by all companies. Table 3 lists the top 100 companies DoD-wide in rank order and breaks the totals into three categories of procurement: Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT); Other Services and Construction; and Supplies and Equipment. Table 4 lists the top 50 companies for each of the Reporting Components in rank order, and by category of procurement.
Topic:
Defense Policy and Economics
Political Geography:
United States

6833. Prime Contract Awards—Size Distribution: Fiscal Year 1997

Publication Date:
09-1998
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
U.S. Economic Statistics Briefing Room
Abstract:
This report provides data on prime contract actions (PCAs) over $25,000 awarded by the Department of Defense (DoD) in fiscal year (FY) 1997. For reporting purposes, contracts have been distributed by dollar value into 11 different size categories. The tables provide information on the number of total actions, their net value, and their percentage of distribution, by size, and according to a variety of categories. The categories include Defense Component, type of contract involved, extent of competed procurements, kind of contract action taken, selected procurement programs, and labor standard statutes. Table 1 presents data by individual size category (e.g., $25,000 to $49,999, $50,000 to $99,999) while Tables 2 through 7 present data in cumulative categories (e.g., $25,000 or more; $50,000 or more). The information in Prime Contract Awards, Size Distribution, assists DoD management in projecting the workload that will be required by various proposed projects. For example, using data in this publication, DoD officials could determine that a proposal to review all contract actions of $500,000 or more in FY 1997 would require examining approximately 26,000 transactions, or 11.3 percent of the total transactions as shown in Table 2. These data can also be used to identify trends in DoD procurement, (e.g., to identify which of the various types of contracts were most frequently awarded, in terms of number of contract actions, during FY 1997).
Topic:
Defense Policy and Economics
Political Geography:
United States

6837. Balance on Current Account - As of December 9, 1998

Publication Date:
12-1998
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
U.S. Economic Statistics Briefing Room
Abstract:
No abstract is available.
Topic:
Economics and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States

6838. Balance on Current Account - As of September 10, 1998

Publication Date:
09-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
U.S. Economic Statistics Briefing Room
Abstract:
No abstract is available.
Topic:
Economics and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States

6839. U.S. Direct Investment Abroad: 1994 Benchmark Survey, Final Results

Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
U.S. Economic Statistics Briefing Room
Abstract:
The 1994 Benchmark Survey of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad was conducted by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to obtain complete and accurate data on U.S. direct investment abroad in 1994. Reporting in the survey was mandatory under the International Investment and Trade in Services Survey Act.
Topic:
Economics and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States

6840. U.S. Government Statistics: R Expenditures as a Percent of GDP

Publication Date:
10-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
U.S. Economic Statistics Briefing Room
Abstract:
The Division of Science Resources Studies (SRS) of the National Science Foundation publishes the biennial report, National Patterns of R Resources. This report describes and analyzes current patterns of research and development (R) in the United States, in relation to the historical record and the reported R levels of other industrialized countries. For years in which the full report is not produced, current, annual statistics on national and international R trends are released in data updates like this one.
Topic:
Economics and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
United States