Benevolent State Research Articles

Directorss Duties and Shareholderss Rights in the European Union: Mandatory and/or Default Rules?

Deciding between mandatory and/or default rules (or as they are also called: eligible law, enabling rules, optional rules, legal menus, rules allowing contracting around, fallback provisions, and dispositives Recht) is a fundamental choice for the law. To what degree do legislators, courts, academia and lawyers trust private ordering in stock corporation law or expect a strong benevolent state to regulate? The legislative models differ greatly. In the USA, freedom of contract is the general principle also in stock corporation law, while in Germany just the opposite is true, as laid down in the German Stock Corporation Act. Yet both jurisdictions are outliers. Most European countries have chosen a middle way between these two extremes. This article analyses the policy reasons given in the USA and in Europe and discusses the various models in the UK, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Austria and the Netherlands. In the European Union, corporate law and capital market law differ in this respect, but the free choice between more or less regulated corporate forms, the free movement of corporations within the EU and competition of legal orders give flexibility to the enterprises. Unfortunately this flexibility is diminishing as a consequence of paternalism and protectionism after the financial crisis.

Borneo History: Time for a New Look?

The present article re-assesses key episodes before and during the period of colonial rule in northern Borneo. Historical accounts of this region generally present colonial rule as benevolent state paternalism, echoing official narratives from the colonial era. Community and political leaders in the Borneo states have often called for historical accounts that reflect the vibrancy of indigenous aspirations and eschew the historiographical legacy of colonialism. The response has been muted, and consequently the historical significance of events in Brunei, Sabah and Sarawak tends to be ignored or misrepresented in wider-ranging accounts. Recently released ‘migrated archives’ from British official sources can facilitate such a re-assessment, but it cannot be confined to the period of formal colonial rule, or constricted by traditional academic boundaries.

Health journalism in the service of power: 'moral complacency' and the Hebrew media in the Gaza-Israel conflict.

The power of health news as a vehicle in the production of meaning in the service of power is the core of this article. Tracking the media coverage of a medical service, it shows how a routine practice can be invoked at a time of armed conflict so as to enhance a benevolent state image. The case at hand is the medical treatment of Gaza children in Israeli hospitals. A series of Internet searches revealed a group of publications on the subject in the Hebrew media, during and shortly after Israel's assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009. In the press articles the treatments were invariably constituted as the epitome of Israel's compassion towards the enemy's children. This image relied, however, on a simultaneous silencing of other aspects of these treatments, which would have challenged this image. The monolithic depictions give rise to the notion of reversed moral panic or 'moral complacency', wherein the media amplifies a little-known social phenomenon into an epitome of societal values and charges it with significance on a national scale. The article ends with considering some features that possibly render health news an especially convenient domain for state-supportive media presentations.

Community lost: the state, civil society, and displaced survivors of Hurricane Katrina

Neither government programs nor massive charitable efforts responded adequately to the human crisis that was Hurricane Katrina. In this study, the authors use extensive interviews with Katrina evacuees and reports from service providers to identify what helped or hindered the reestablishment of the lives of hurricane survivors who relocated to Austin, Texas. Drawing on social capital and social network theory, the authors assess the complementary, and often conflicting, roles of FEMA, other governmental agencies and a range of non-governmental organizations in addressing survivors' short- and longer-term needs. While these organizations came together to assist with immediate emergency needs, even collectively they could not deal with survivors' long-term needs for employment, affordable housing and personal records necessary to rebuild lives. Community Lost provides empirical evidence that civil society organizations cannot substitute for an efficient and benevolent state, which is necessary for society to function.

Hybridising State and Ethnicity in an Indonesian Region

This study traces long processes of ethnic politics in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. It argues that ethnicity has always been a component in the hybrid state throughout the contemporary political history of the region. By employing the concept of hybridisation, the study reveals that the weak degree of the hybridised state during the Soeharto era has become a necessary condition for the rise of ethnic violence. Only recently, the reconstruction of the benevolent hybrid state may gradually prevail. The existence of power sharing among ethnic elite, the democratic and peaceful gubernatorial direct elections that have taken place, and the inter-ethnic economic co-operation among ordinary citizens could make ethnicity develop in a constructive way as one of basic components within the hybrid state. Qualitative method has been used to collect data from various actors who have direct and indirect knowledge both during and after the Suharto eras.

The Finnish Welfare State in the 1990s

Finland has an advanced welfare state system, which extends social protection for everyone in the country. The system is anchored in a full-employment policy, a steeply progressive taxation system, and a strong, benevolent and resourceful state, endowed with the authority to regulate the economic and social life of people. This system has been established through the institutionalization of various social insurance schemes and schemes for pensions, health care, childcare, free and compulsory education, etc. In the 1990s, the Finnish state experienced an economic crisis, borne out of flawed economic reforms like the deregulation of the financial market and other changes that aimed at hastening Finland’s European Union (EU) membership. The crisis forced the government to tighten the preconditions for availing of welfare benefits. Some notable changes made during the crisis have not yet been rescinded even after it ended. Nevertheless, the crisis underlined the value of the welfare state system in helping ordinary people to successfully insulate themselves against any serious hardship during the period. As a result, the system is very popular in Finland. The Finnish welfare system today faces new challenges emanating from globalization, the EU, demographic changes and structural unemployment.

American Studies in Review

The economic collapse of 2008 left a trail of global destruction that is only widening as European economies slash and burn their way toward fiscal austerity. As destructive as the recession has been for working-class Americans, the crisis has also been—in a macabre sort of fashion—a boon for the history of the lean years. Now, journalists and cable-TV pundits invoke Keynesianism, infrastructure renewal, banking regulation, and the Roosevelt recession of 1937 with the kind of tripping familiarity that rivals global warming and anti-terrorism. Yet as historians of that debacle have learned, there is a vast gulf between scholarly insight and what passes for historically informed policy. It should come as little surprise that powerbrokers can be whimsical, selective, and self-serving in their use of the past, bending it to suit political expediency or to placate the comforting distortions of historical memory. The books under consideration confirm the central importance of the 1930s in forming, for better and worse, the contours of modern America. Each complicates simplistic visions of an era defined by presidential pump-priming and benevolent state intervention. Each asks questions that policy makers would find inconvenient.

Analysand And Analyst In The Global Economy, Or Why Anyone In Their Right Mind Would Pay For An Analysis

According to Lacan, Pascal invented game theory with the notion that the ante staked in a game of chance must be viewed as lost from the moment one agrees to play. (1) Whatever amount one agrees to gamble should be considered a pure loss. Hence the advice sometimes given to gamblers not to bring more money with them to the casino than they are comfortable losing, given how likely it is that they will lose all of it. This well-meaning advice is obviously futile in the age of ATMs and credit cards, as anyone on a losing streak can easily obtain more money to wager. Rather than openly declare buying and selling on the stock market as tantamount to gambling--an arena in which one should not wager more money than one is comfortable losing--politicians and financial advisers have increasingly dissimulated the gambling aspect of the stock market behind the notion of 'investing'. They have touted the idea that conservative investing over the long term can bring in a decent, fairly consistent percentage--not as nice as Bernie Madoff's too-good-to-be-true, consistently positive returns, (2) naturally, but better than those achievable virtually anywhere else, whether in a savings account, a certificate of deposit or government bonds. As company pensions have been progressively eliminated in the United States and putting away money for retirement has increasingly become an individual endeavour even in France, the speculative nature of the stock market has been downplayed and the notion of conservative long-term investing trumpeted far and wide. Such tactics are necessary if politicians are to make people forget about soon-to-be bankrupt Social Security administrations, where their retirement income was to be doled out by the benevolent state, and rely instead on personal efforts to secure financial solvency beyond their working years. Diversification has been advertised as the cure-all for stock-market gyrations; and governments, in concert with financial advisers of all ilks, have attempted to convince the public that the market can be mastered through careful, conservative, diversified investments in raw materials, health care, technology, and, yes, even banks--investments that might well be hedged to offset risk using puts, calls, straddles, strangles, three-way collars and the like. According to some, the boom-and-bust business cycles Marx exposed as endemic to capitalism in the nineteenth century have been tamed and contained. BusinessWeek, a well-known US financial magazine, spent much of the last decade announcing the advent of what its authors referred to as the 'New Economy', by which they meant an economic system immune to serious downturns and crashes. All of that has turned to dust in the past few years, but the Pascalian truth that one should begin one's investing with the notion that whatever one stakes should be viewed as always already lost has been one-upped or raised to the second (or even higher) power by the widespread use of leverage in financial instruments. Ever more exchange-traded funds (ETFs), available like ordinary stocks on the NYSE Euronext, offer double or even triple the gains made by various asset categories or market indexes, not to mention double- or triple-sized losses. When investors purchase such funds on margin--that is, with borrowed money based on the purported value of their other paper assets, as so many have done over the past fifteen years--they can very easily lose more than they anted up. Those who invest in certain kinds of futures and options should obviously be informed of the risk. This is also true in the real-estate market, where, at least in the United States, it was quite possible until recently to buy a home with no money down, only to find the value of the house decline by as much as 40 per cent within a year. Mortgage holders often lost far more money in a few short months than they could have hoped to earn in a decade. Were we to follow Pascal, we would be inclined to replace the ubiquitous formula found at the bottom of virtually every mutual-fund prospectus these days--'Past results are no guarantee of future returns', an understatement if ever there was one--with the Pascalian warning: 'Expect to lose at least as much as you put in. …

‘The Sweet Taste of Sin’—A Muslim Drug Dealer in a Nordic Welfare State

Moa is a 22-year-old Muslim dealer selling drugs at a street drug market in Oslo. The main part of the paper consists of long interview extracts from three interviews with him. The aim is to capture some of the ambivalence and complexity that might otherwise be lost in traditional scholarly analysis. In short, Moa tells how he got into drug dealing in the first place, the help he received from a well-meaning welfare state apparatus, his feelings of remorse, guilt, and shame, and the attempts he made to break with the drug trade and its life-style. Moa's story highlights differences between street life in a benevolent welfare state with a penal system famous for its open-handedness, and street life under harder socio-economic and penal conditions. Even though Moa has more opportunities than offenders elsewhere, failing in a society where most others succeed is different from failing in a larger marginalized community. Moa's story also challenges the public view of Muslim offenders and questions established assumptions about the relationship between Islam and crime.

Peddling Postcards and Selling Empire: Image-Making in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule

Picture postcards were an important element of Japanese imperial propaganda, though they have yet to receive the scholarly attention they deserve. This paper argues that the Taiwan Government-General played an active role in the production and dissemination of picture postcards to propagate a particular view of life in the ‘Aborigine Territory’. To promote ethnic tourism in the wake of the bloody 1930 Wushe Uprising, and to construct Taiwan's majority Han population as ‘inauthentic’ as part of a wider ideological offensive against China, Japanese colonial postcards portrayed Taiwan Indigenous Peoples as isolated, culturally intact, and indebted to a benevolent state. The most widely circulated picture-postcard images of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples were produced by a coterie that included photographer Segawa Kōkichi, publisher Katsuyama Yoshisaku, watercolorist Lan Yinding and Aborigine Affairs Chief Suzuki Hideo. The documentary traces they left behind reveal a series of cross-cutting social and professional ties that bound them together as an ‘interpretive community’. Their location in centers of colonial culture, commerce, and government, along with the internal consistency of their vision, well positioned them to not only peddle postcards, but to sell an empire.

Vaccine anxieties: global science, child health and society

Since its very inception, the practice of mass vaccination has frequently met with ambivalence and occasionally encountered open resistance. For many health professionals, this opposition was and remains a mystery. How can parents deny their children a preventive treatment of such obvious individual and public benefit? The lack of public acceptance of vaccination is often explained as resulting from an information and knowledge deficit. The British social anthropologists Melissa Leach and James Fairhead draw on experiences from their extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the United Kingdom and several west African countries to argue that this attitude overlooks how people themselves understand health and vaccines, and whether a globalized medical technology meets the profoundly personal, social and cultural worlds of infant care. They maintain that the concepts of risk, trust and rumour that have been the cornerstones of existing policies and social science discourse on resistance to vaccination are inadequate and are actually part of the problem. The authors prefer the notion of “anxiety”, which can both denote an uneasiness of and a desire for a technology, and encompasses bodily, social and political dimensions. According to them, this term captures well the ambivalence of attitudes and the often deeply personal struggles that people face when making decisions about vaccination. Leach & Fairhead steer clear of portraying parents as being easily and carelessly influenced by dubious information or as merely following the agenda of an ill-defined “anti-vaccination movement”. Rather, they draw on the conceptual tool of “framing” to study the different perceptions of parents and public health practitioners: attitudes towards medical technology can be seen as a kind of story-telling by communities situated in particular times and places, attempting to deal with potentially troubling challenges in their lives. The “story”, the “frame”, gives meaning to complex and challenging experiences. In the United Kingdom, for example, attitudes towards vaccination are embedded into a context of personalized perspectives concerning parenting, child development and health. Whereas epidemiology takes a population-based approach to risk, parents facing the decision to have their child vaccinated might view the situation from a different perspective – that of the specific health history of the family and the child and of personal experiences with institutions. Parents do not assess risk on a population level, but in relation to their child. Public health practitioners and many citizens often have views of government, society and of the body that are at odds with one another and to describe those opposing views using concepts such as ignorance of “sound science” seems highly inappropriate to the authors of this book. In west Africa, traditional ideas about the causes of health and disease affect attitudes towards vaccination, but other factors matter as well. Particularly interesting are the social dimensions of attendance at vaccination sessions. Not only in remote areas, but also in urban areas, vaccination attendance is not just a parental decision, but a matter of community orchestration. This most often encourages attendance, but in some cases can lead to stigmatization, because the state of the child does necessarily reflect the moral status of the mother. Vaccination also has wider political dimensions. International vaccination campaigns are often disconnected from nationally administered routine services and thus invite suspicions. Routine services represent flows of benefits from a sovereign, benevolent state, and the integration of disease eradication programmes into routine services is seen by Leach & Fairhead as an important step forward. The authors offer a stimulating, fresh, but not necessarily comfortable, look at the vaccination controversy, and their book should prove valuable reading for a broad specialist and non-specialist audience. Readers will find that familiarity with the terminology of anthropology and modern social studies of science and medicine is, however, helpful. The analysis and the conclusions of the book will not serve as easy ammunition for any side of the debate. The authors emphasize that vaccines save lives, promote child health and reduce disease burden among the poor. But they are adamant that vaccine anxieties need to be taken seriously. Leach & Fairhead maintain that vaccine delivery systems must suit social, cultural and political realities. The ethnographic perspective does suggest several possible means to bridge the gulf that has emerged between parents and what the authors describe as “vaccination technocracies”. They recommend that information should not be delivered in a top-down manner, but that a more dialogue-based approach, acknowledging the possible complementarities between “traditional” practices and “modern” medicine, needs to be developed. Acceptance of all parental worries and anxieties is not necessarily called for, but at least more attentiveness to these issues by public health practitioners. ■

A THEORY OF THE INFORMAL SECTOR

In many countries, especially poor countries, a heavy burden of taxes, fees, bureaucratic hassles, and bribes drives many producers into an informal sector. This paper shows that we can attribute the existence of a large informal sector to the fact that, because productive endowments contain important unobservable components, the state cannot adjust the amounts that it extracts from producers in the formal sector finely according to each producer's endowment. Given this fact, we find that if the endowment of well‐endowed producers is sufficiently large relative to poorly endowed producers, or if their number is relatively large, or if the quality of public services is sufficiently low, then the state extracts a large enough amount from producers in the formal sector that poorly endowed producers choose to work in the informal sector. This result obtains both for a proprietary state, which maximizes its own net revenue, and for a hypothetical benevolent state, which would maximize total net output. But, we also find that there exist combinations of the distribution of endowments and the quality of public services such that the policies of a proprietary state, but not the policies of a hypothetical benevolent state, would cause poorly endowed producers to work in the informal sector.

The social reproduction of community-based development: syncretism and sustainability in a Senegalese farmers' association

This article traces the rise and decline of a grassroots community organisation in rural Senegal. It has three aims. First, it problematises the sometimes idealistic nature of the rhetoric and literature on community-based development. Second, it suggests three factors that contribute to the effectiveness of rural self-help organisations: educated and technocratically skilled leadership, unintentionally benevolent state neglect, and a willingness to syncretically recycle elements of ‘traditional' social order and culture in the service of contemporary development tasks. Finally, the demise of the community-based organisation examined here suggests a need to shift focus away from the institutionalisation of community-based or civil society organisations per se, and to consider instead the routinisation of the participatory, empowering, and deliberative socio-political conditions that make possible the regular emergence of new grassroots organisations across time within a given community. Recent events (since 2005) in the village in question support this shift, as a new generation of community leaders has begun to craft a new community organisation, explicitly built from the detritus of the older organisation described in this article.

Counting the homeless in Malta

There are no visible signs of homelessness in Malta similar to what can be seen on the streets of many North American or European cities, yet there are few hundred homeless who stay in shelters and another few thousand households that are at risk of being homeless. Malta has a comparatively sizeable social housing sector (9000–10,000) and approximately 3300 households on its waiting list. There is, however, no official recognition of homelessness, no definition and thus, no program to alleviate the problem—the problem is hidden under the facade of strong family ties, community cohesion and the benevolent state. This paper has two major objectives: (1) an attempt to define and suggest a framework in counting the homeless in Malta; (2) identify and examine major contributing factors to homelessness in Malta. Although the study suggests some contributing factors, the task of establishing causal relationships between possible sources of homelessness and actual homelessness is outside the scope of this preliminary study. This study concerns only with the section of the larger homeless spectrum, namely those who stay in temporary shelters. The article indicates general features, interpreting from the existing information, which is indicative rather than conclusive. In addition to information collected from government and non-governmental institutions, the study benefits from data collected through in-depth interviews from two homeless shelters. Although, the quantitative data is small and more cases would be needed to give an appropriate overview, it is hoped that the two issues that are identified (domestic violence and children in homes) would generate discussion. Furthermore, it is hoped that the ideas of “spectrum” and segmentation can be shown to be useful in facilitating collection of data and identification of possible sources of homelessness in Malta and in other culturally similar EU countries. The result of the small sample puts forward some issues and raises some others regarding the change in traditional family structure, the role of the state and how public policy is formed, particularly in Malta.

Private enforcement and social efficiency

This paper makes precise the distributional consequences and social efficiency of private enforcement of property rights. Properties of different values are subject to predation and owners choose between self-defense and private enforcement services. A distributional conflict of interest arises as private protection purchased by rich owners deflects predators on low value properties. The market structure of enforcement and development affect the distribution of property income through relative changes in the security of high and low values property. Moreover, because of the externality enforcers impose on poorer owners, the availability of private enforcement may constrain the policy of a benevolent State.

Economic Theory of Control and Supervising Activity of the Government

The attempt to configure general contours of the economic theory of government control and supervising activity is undertaken in the article. Basing on the prerequisite of the benevolent state, the author considers its function of prevention of occurrence and compensation of undesirable (harmful) externalities caused by activities of economic agents. The author classifies types of externalities and offers corresponding mechanisms of their internalization.

"Wayward and noncompliant" people with mental disabilities: What advocates of involuntary outpatient commitment can learn from the juvenile court experience with status offense juridiction.

Proponents of involuntary outpatient commitment (IOC) have much to learn from a previous social and legal experiment designed to force an identified group of recalcitrant individuals to behave in ways that a benevolent state has deemed reasonable. It's called status offense jurisdiction, and empowers the state to assume authority over minors who are "wayward," "ungovernable," "incorrigible" or "stubborn and rebellious." Although these children have not committed any crime, the state may restrict their liberty under a blend of parens patriae and police power rationales, in order to protect them from future harm and provide them with rehabilitative treatment. Since the establishment in the United States of the first juvenile court in 1899, the various states and the federal government have struggled to address the unintended but serious negative consequences of attempts to protect and control non-criminal children whose common characteristic is their resistance to authority. This essay will review the history of status offense jurisdiction within the context of the juvenile justice system. Next it will draw parallels between status offense jurisdiction and proposed IOC of adults with mental disabilities who are "noncompliant" with what the state regards as a reasonable treatment plan. The paper predicts that IOC will have the same enforcement problems and negative consequences as status offense jurisdiction - indeed, possibly even more negative because of the additional stigma associated with the status of mental illness plus a prediction of future danger to self or others. Ultimately it recommends that proponents of IOC reconsider the whole concept in light of the cautionary tale of status offense jurisdiction.

A Theory of the Informal Sector

In many countries, especially poor countries, a heavy burden of taxes, bribes, and bureaucratic hassles drives many producers into the informal sector. Is this situation explicable only as a consequence of either the ignorance or the ineptitude of the state authorities? On the contrary this paper shows that we can attribute the existence of a large informal sector to the fact that, because productive endowments contain important unobservable components, the state cannot adjust the amounts that it extracts from producers in the formal sector according to each producer's endowment. Given this fact we find that, if either the distribution of endowments is sufficiently inegalitarian or the production of private substitutes for public services is sufficiently easy, then the state would extract a large enough amount from producers in the formal sector that poorly endowed producers would choose to work in the informal sector. This result obtains both for a proprietary state, which maximizes its own net revenue, and for a hypothetical benevolent state, which would maximize the total net income of producers. But, we also find that a proprietary state would create an informal sector for a larger set of combinations of parameter values than would a hypothetical benevolent state.

Public economics yesterday, today and tomorrow

Public economics, that is to say the study of public intervention in the economy, 1 has emerged from public finance in the 1950s to reach its autonomy at the beginning of the seventies, with, in particular, the creation of the Journal of Public Economics in 1971. With some oversimplifications, we are going to argue that modern public economics was born from taking into account more or less explicitly the informational constraints of the State in its role of production, allocation and distribution of resources. The criticism of the benevolent State by the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Chicago Schools, followed today by a renewal of political economy, constitutes the second major key to read the new developments of public economics. This leads us to a presentation in four parts. Section 2 will overview the implications of the Arrow–Debreu general equilibrium paradigm in public economics. Section 3 will present some essential results obtained in public economics when the informational constraints of the State are taken into account. The paradigm of the benevolent State will be criticized in Section 4. Section 5 will briefly sketch our view of the immediate future for public economics.

Urban National, Suburban Transnational: Civic Theatres and the Urban Development of Toronto's Downtowns

Now, after nearly two decades of continental economics and the recurring threat of federal dissolution, it is sometimes hard to imagine just how celebratory Canadian nationalism was in the late 1960s. Canada commemorated its hundredth birthday in 1967, and the optimism embodied in projects like Expo 67 in Montr?al seemed to signal that the country had achieved national maturity and international stature. centennial celebrations implied?indeed, shouted?that the Canadian federation was confident, modern, and secure, and that the able steward for the national project was a benevolent state. Like many Western countries in the late 1960s, Canada's economic expansion was accompanied by legal liberalization, greater immigration, and an increasingly generous welfare state. Unlike many Western countries in the late 1960s, however, the counter-cultural corollary to this modernization project did not seek to challenge significantly the supremacy of the national state. If anything, the centennial best illustrates how the ascendancy of Canadian cultural nationalism was secured by a kind of soft authoritarianism. As one popular commentary observes, The great Canadian Centennial love-in was definitely a top-down affair: an officially legislated, publicly-sponsored, impeccably choreographed national debutante ball. Compulsory attendance notwithstanding, we loved it anyway: it was probably the most fun the country ever had doing something it was told to do.1