Capitalist Market System Research Articles

Pathways to meet critical success factors for local PPPs: The cases of urban transport infrastructure in Korean cities

Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been utilized extensively in both developed and developing countries to provide various public services and infrastructure. The literature points to many common critical success factors, including a mature financial market, transparent regulatory framework, advanced technology, and people's acceptance of new forms, but those can vary from country to country. South Korea's mature market capitalist system and strong regulatory framework have led to somewhat successful infrastructure provision through PPPs at the national level, but as our two cases of urban transportation in the Seoul Metropolitan Area indicate, local-level PPPs have demonstrated mixed results. By elaborating on the factors that affect the outcomes of PPPs at the local level, we argue that under a relatively new local democracy, Korean cities are likely to be susceptible to producing unfair contracts mainly due to limited local fiscal authority and resources, opportunistic behavior of local politicians, an underdeveloped urban institutional framework for PPPs, and the rise of new conditions such as economic nationalism intermixed with speculative foreign investment.

Inside post-socialist courts: the determinants of adjudicatory outcomes in Slovenian commercial disputes

Despite the judiciary’s central role in the capitalist market system, micro-level empirical analyses of courts in post-socialist countries are remarkably rare. This paper draws on a unique hand-collected dataset of commercial claims filed at Slovenian courts to examine the determinants of two salient adjudicatory outcomes: whether a case was resolved via trial or settlement and if the case was tried, whether the plaintiff was awarded the initial claim. Consistent with the divergent expectations theories of litigation, we find that trial-based resolution is less likely when parties use mediation and more likely when the case is complex as proxied by appointment of an expert. In contrast, stakes do not predict the prospects of trial. Addressing sample selection concerns, we show that defendants’ legal representation, plaintiffs’ profitability, and court identity are robust predictors of plaintiff victory at trial. We discuss possible explanations for these data patterns.

Walter Lippmann: Public Economist, by Craufurd D. Goodwin

Walter Lippmann: Public Economist, by Craufurd D. Goodwin. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014. viii, 414 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). His long career dedicated to the history of economic thought, Craufurd Goodwin has written a stimulating policy biography of the most prominent public intellectual of the twentieth century. Walter Lippmann learned about unemployment, trade, monetary policy, and fiscal issues from the likes of Keynes and Hayek. A voracious reader and active correspondent, Lippmann passed on his knowledge through books, articles, reviews, columns (most famously, Today and Tomorrow), and speeches. Teaching the public was his cardinal objective. Lippmann linked economics to larger political, even philosophical, constructs of American life, such as free markets and democracy. It was his job as a journalist to translate esoteric concepts to a public tuned out to national policies and subject to superficial politicians but which, he believed, could choose wise leaders if only it had the facts. Lippmann provided the lay public with such direction. The focus is not on Lippmann the person, as Goodwin cursorily mentions his failed marriage, various residences, and social life. A short bibliography includes some general, contextual works and writings related directly to economics. For an exposition of Lippmann's ideas on economics, however, this book is indispensable. Present at many creations (post-World War I peace planning, the advent of Keynesianism in America, advocacy for a council of economic advisors), Lippmann learned on the fly and changed as circumstances dictated. He remained above the professional and political fray, reluctant to join groups that might want to use or bias him. Goodwin focuses on the period 1931-46, though he sets up the story in Lippmann's formative years and finishes it with the twenty postwar years in which he focused on foreign affairs. This truly public economist dealt with the roots of the Great Depression and ways to avoid a recurrence after World War II. But economics was more than just numbers; it provided the basis for a philosophy of governance, social organization, and national interests. Lippmann moved from being a socialist to an advocate for the New Deal without becoming an acolyte of Franklin Roosevelt, and then evolved into a confirmed Keynesian (well before FDR and JFK adopted that view). Government regulation was the price to pay for avoiding leftist regimentation or rightwing authoritarianism --and the capitalist class's affinity for reckless speculation--and preserving freedom. As the country adjusted, therefore, so did Lippmann. What generated his economic concerns? He obsessed over the preservation of the market capitalist system by good government. He profoundly believed that free markets undergirded freedom, liberty, and democracy, but that laissez-faire thinking was unreasonable. Those who preached free markets actually undermined them by their own selfish, monopolistic interests. Thus, wise government regulations would protect capitalism from itself through countercyclical spending and saving, decent wages, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial spirit. Lippmann liked balance, reason, and principles tempered by pragmatism (that is, true liberalism). …

Corporate crime and state legitimacy: the 2008 Chinese melamine milk scandal

Corporate crime is a worldwide problem [41], but the burgeoning reported economic crime rate in China [33] involving such acts as poisoned food [109] and rampant environmental pollution [95], provide a unique opportunity to study the nature of such offending in a country whose economy is growing faster than any other in history. China retained authoritarian one-party control as the nation transitioned from the collectivist economy established by Mao Zedong to the current Bsocialist market economy,^ a capitalist market system combined with state-owned-enterprises. This combination of control and capital may help explain the documented rise in whitecollar and corporate offending in China, and provides a unique backdrop for examining the relevance of theories developed through the study of western capitalist societies. Few scholarly works exist that examine similarities and differences between corporate crime in China with offenses in the west [19, 46]. One paramount issue is whether such illegalities are subject to Bnon-issue making^ [29, 47] where the state provides de facto approval for injurious behaviors through non-response. Not all corporate offenses in the west are treated in this manner as some have argued that selectivity in regulatory enforcement results in the investigation of crimes that threaten capital accumulation [17]. This is likely due to the state’s desire to maintain a balance between its essential functions: capital accumulation and government legitimacy [69, 73]. While there appears to be evidence for such theories in western capitalist democracies, their applicability to single-party states such as China has yet to be examined by scholars. The aim of this study is to compare Chinese state response to corporate crime with that of capitalist democracies given the People’s Republic of China’s authoritarian, oneparty rule. It seeks to answer four questions regarding China’s response to economic crime. First, to what extent do local and national enforcement agencies in China allow Crime Law Soc Change (2015) 63:247–267 DOI 10.1007/s10611-015-9567-5

Commensurable Distinctions: Intercultural Negotiations of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Visual Culture

Commensurable Distinctions:Intercultural Negotiations of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Visual Culture Bert Winther-Tamaki (bio) and Kenichi Yoshida (bio) Over two decades have passed since the end of the Cold War when two leading proponents of Japanese studies in the United States, the literary scholar Masao Miyoshi and the historian Harry Harootunian, declared that “Japan in the world as an isolated national entity is no more meaningful than any other claim to a unique national identity.”1 And more recently it has become commonplace to hear, for example, that art is undergoing a “progressive denationalization” induced by “globalization and worldwide mediatization.”2 Whether or not the demise of the nation is in fact at hand, this discursive environment problematizes the once unthinkingly accepted link between the first two terms of the field “Japanese art history.” For how can Japanese art alone be studied if Japan has no meaning “as an isolated national entity”? And how promising is continued investment in the adjudication of differences between Japanese and non-Japanese art amidst a “progressive denationalization” of art? While recognizing, as even historians of globalization have, that Japan and other nations remain “preferred settings” for organizing group identity and articulating shared aims,3 we would like to explore a less dichotomous logic than has often been deployed, at least with regard to the modern and contemporary periods during which Japanese art has been deeply and increasingly imbricated with other parts of the world. We propose “commensurable distinctions” as an alternative logic to suggest the mutually reinforcing dynamics of increasing sameness and increasing difference that unfold in contact zones arrayed in a strikingly uneven global geography. Historians of post-Edo Japanese art have often prioritized the uniqueness of Japanese transformations or revisions of Euro-American art and privileged purported continuities or vestiges of earlier indigenous practices. Consequently, the closeness of modern Japanese art to transnational ideas and forms has often been overlooked, regretted, or derided for being imitative and lacking in originality. This is a view of modern Japanese art that sociologist Bruno Latour [End Page 1] might regard as exemplifying the modernist “Great Divide” that has historically reduced intricate transcultural entanglements to schematic monumental dichotomies such as nature and culture, or more specifically in this case, Japan and the West, the West and the Other.4 To adhere to this divide is to fail to recognize things and occasions that mediate, travel, and translate between multiple regions and places. Our approach, then, seeks to apprehend the critical role of relations of convergence, similarity, or identity—in conditions where such relations blur and confuse the definition of national culture as well as conditions where they produce artistic tropes of Japaneseness. Focusing on fluidity, mutations, and interstices as opposed to modes of analysis based on contained national and cultural forms, this approach examines the benefits of compatibility and global passages of transfer that lead to situated distinctions and complex drifts. “Commensurable distinctions” may be defined as visual features of the art of a nation or region generated by a transnational framework (format or genre) that positions artists (and artworks, styles, movements) in relative measure to some standard presumed to have global reach or authority. Commensurability is perhaps better understood in other areas of culture than art. The global maritime network of port cities, for example, comprises a well-developed infrastructure dictated by the need for common measurements. The inter-regional standardization of weights and measures began in antiquity, while the wharves, docks, and loading equipment of the vast maritime network of container terminals around the world today are virtually indistinguishable.5 Yet the contents of these standardized containers, sometimes including works of art, often encompass far greater diversity than the hardware used in their transportation, and the circulation of these commodities and search for new markets stimulates further diversification. The currency and exchange of the capitalist market system have been central to these processes driving commensuration and differentiation. In a study titled Ethnicity, Inc., the anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff describe new developments in the commodification of all kinds of cultural properties and the incorporation of identity itself: “Those who seek to brand their otherness, to profit from what makes them different, find themselves...

Mercado religioso e mercado como religião (Religious Market and Market as Religion) - DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2014v12n34p290

The theory of the religious market begins with the observation of religious pluralism and comes to the conclusion that, in this situation, religion becomes a matter of personal or family choice and it is established a situation of competition among religions subordinated to the logic of the market economy. Thus, religions reduced to the sphere of private life can no longer perform the traditional role of religions in legitimizing the whole social order. This article analyzes the thesis of the subordination of religion to the logic of the market economy and puts forward the hypothesis that the traditional function of the religion of absolutizing the relative and legitimizing the arbitrary is exercised today by the capitalist market system itself; and, because of that, the logic of the market economy has become the natural” way of thinking today, even to think about religion. To this purpose, it dialogues mainly with the thought of P. Berger, P. Bourdieu, M. Weber, W. Benjamin, K. Marx, F. Hinkelammert and H. Assmann, showing how the theme of faith in and sacralization of market appears in discourses of economists.

Possibilities for Changing Capitalism from Within: Perspectives on Critical Management Studies

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have given considerable attention to the deleterious effects of neoliberal, capitalist systems; however, the critique of capitalism does not emanate singularly from these academic areas. There is also an active and growing critique of capitalist systems from within the field of business by critical management studies theorists. This essay introduces the contemporary perspectives of Critical Management Studies (CMS) to an interdisciplinary audience for its potential to bridge some perceived ideological gaps between those disciplines that likewise offer critique of the systems of power that perpetuate the neoliberal state. I argue that CMS has a potentially important political voice to offer because of its inherently critical consideration of the normalized assumptions of organizations that reflect the aims of economic capitalism. Additionally as a political resource, CMS offers additional possibilities to de-center neoliberal discourse because of its academic location within the discipline of business. I suggest that CMS could be a vehicle for providing analytical focus on, and an accessible public voice to, those power structures of domination that populate the capitalist market system. This essay also provides a brief demonstration of the potential intersection of interdisciplinary and CMS scholarship through Clegg‘s circuits of power model.

Inside Post-Socialist Courts: The Determinants of Adjudicatory Outcomes in Slovenian Commercial Disputes

Despite the judiciary’s central role in the capitalist market system, micro-level empirical analyses of courts in post-socialist countries are remarkably rare. This paper draws on a unique hand-collected dataset of commercial claims filed at Slovenian courts to examine the determinants of two salient adjudicatory outcomes: whether a case was resolved via trial or settlement and if the case was tried, whether the plaintiff was awarded the initial claim. Consistent with the divergent expectations theory of litigation, we find that trial-based resolution is more likely when the case is complex and less likely when parties use mediation. Addressing sample selection and endogeneity concerns, we show that defendant’s legal representation, plaintiff’s profitability, and, importantly, court identity are robust predictors of plaintiff victory at trial. Thus, more than two decades after the start of transition in Slovenia, the judicial system is still a source of legal inconsistency and uncertainty.

Beyond the Spirit of Capitalism

Weber (1902; 1978) coined the term, the spirit of capitalism referring to the logic or rationality that underlies the market-capitalist system as a whole. Since then, a rational view of spirit has become the dominant paradigm of the spirit that animates capitalist market behavior. After providing a brief overview of the historical context in which the concept was developed, a first step is made in this paper to broaden the notion of a rational, capitalistic spirit and its influence in leadership and organizational change theories followed by suggestions for further research.

The “Minister of Production in the Collectivist State” as a Third Way of the Market: China Between Ethics and Growth

This paper proposes a comparison between the Chinese social-economic system of today and the economic planning system theorized by Enrico Barone in 1908, which described in his famous paper ”The minister of production in the collectivist state”. The work stems from a critical reflection on the premises of the capitalist market system. From Adam Smith to J. M. Keynes (included), economists have identified in traditional capitalistmodels (search for maximum profit, economic efficiency, free competition system) the best economic system, universally implementable, feasible and infallible in democratic capitalist contexts. In the history of economic ideas have always been clear gap between the ”capitalist system” and the ”collectivist system”. The choice of a government had to fall back on one or on the other system. The first considered ”good”, the second considered ”bad” for economic growth. Times since September 11, 2001, however, seem to have debunked the myth of capitalism as the only model of democratic growth: Asia and China have given the world a lesson in humility. China has shown that although not being a democratic country could developed a robust and highly competitive economic model that has weakened the pillars of the western capitalism. China through Confucianism and Taoism has been able to establish the new global economic laws: low labour costs, low prices, mass production of low quality with a mixed mercantilist philosophy which is unknown to the Western world: the silent, smooth, radical trade expansion. As in a game of dominoes, China has been able to drop the capitalism safeties and America had to bow its head and agree to no longer be the only great power in the international scenario. But the peculiarity of this work is not only to define the root causes of China's success in the West; also reflects the fact that an Italian economist (Enrico Barone), in 1908, predicted analytically and developed a theoretical system very similar to that of China nowadays, between capitalism and collectivism (a third way of the market). The Asian culture has developed a market system that has proven to be accommodating to the needs of the capitalist market and to grasp the development opportunities that the same Western capitalism has offered.

THINKING OBJECTIVELY: AN OVERVIEW OF “THING THEORY” IN VICTORIAN STUDIES

For those of us whose life's work consists of the study of the Victorian Era, nothing is plainer than the fact that one cannot escape from “things.” Indeed, for many of us the wealth of detail and artefact available is one of the attractions of the era: who could resist the hats, coaches, buttons, newspapers, lengths of ribbon, packets of tea, bits of old lace, sugared plums, ink pots, keys, and pocket watches that clutter the pages of Dickens, overflow from Gaskell, and crowd in amongst the characters of Collins, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, and Brontë? The Victorians had a preoccupation with and predilection for the careful and considered acquisition and utilisation of objects, and this preoccupation has become a focus for critical trends in this area. In 2003, Lynn Pykett wrote that “The Victorians were fascinated with objects and things – but recent scholarship has proved equally fascinated with this Victorian obsession” (1). This obsession can be traced back to a turn in Victorianist criticism in the 1980s, beginning with Brigg's Victorian Things and based on theories of commodity culture in writers such as Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin, towards an interdisciplinary interest in material culture and particularly in consumer culture and theories of consumption and commodification. More recently critics have moved away from Marxist explorations of objects as commodities, to explore the possibilities of the object in contexts other than those generated by discourses of exchange value, production, and consumption, adopting cultural materialist and new historicist approaches to the objects of Victorian culture and literature. This movement has become known as “Thing Theory.” Starting with Bill Brown's seminal work, A Sense of Things, in 2003, critics have sought for ways of explaining the relationship between the subject and the object in terms other than those of the capitalist market system, in order to take account of the complexities of the object as a signifier. This review seeks to give an overview of these two critical perspectives on the objects of Victorian studies, from the roots of “thing theory” in consumer culture and commodity studies, to the key texts and indicative readings which have shaped “thing theory” as a discipline. Starting with a look at some key texts on consumer culture in the nineteenth century, I then move on to look at those “thing theory” works which have moved away from a focus on the object as commodity, towards cultural materialism and an understanding of the Victorian “object” beyond its role in consumer culture. Finally, I look at some readings indicative of the work currently being published in the field.

A grand theory of human nature and happiness

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to offer a new theory of human nature to explain the happiness paradox of capitalism.Design/methodology/approachIt is argued that happiness crisis in capitalism stems from the lack of full understanding of human nature which is like a black box from which key assumptions in capitalist market system are derived. The author attempts to unlock this black box in order to understand the failure of capitalism in bringing happiness.FindingsAs the success of capitalism comes from its partial understanding of human nature, its failure comes from its partial misunderstanding or exploitation of human nature. This leads to ignoring the needs and desires of certain elements of human nature for the sake of serving only the animal spirit and self‐centric ego. The proposed new theory offers a new understanding of happiness and its determinants. Comparing the human body to a luxury recreational vehicle (RV) and the elements of human nature to the companions on this vehicle, the theory suggests that an individual cannot be truly happy if he or she listens only to one of his/her residents while disregarding the others. The new theory offers better explanation for the 2008 financial crisis and the happiness paradox in wealthy nations. It also provides an underlining framework for the existing happiness theories.Research limitations/implicationsThe new theory needs to be tested through empirical studies.Social implicationsThe paper theoretically argues that that authentic happiness is possible if individuals listen to the voices of all elements of human nature and try to fulfil their needs and desires in a balanced manner.Originality/valueThe paper offers a new comprehensive theory on human nature.

Morality and capitalism – friends or foes?

A bona fide morality favours a consistent free market capitalist system of law. If there are dangers and temptations arising from such a society, let the various institutions that can develop among free people respond to them. Individuals and their various voluntary organisations – not governments that have the unique responsibility to use force judiciously – ought to take care of our souls, our medical needs, our preservation of monuments, historical buildings, wild parks and the rest. Let those things be taken care by people in their voluntary interaction, not by some elite that thinks itself to be above the rest of us – even if they do it democratically.

Consuming Mother in Diana Raznovich's Casa Matriz

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY CONSUMING MOTHER IN DIANA RAZNOVICH’S CASA MATRIZ ROSE MARIE BROUGHAM CONSUMERISM and the daughter-mother relationship in Diana Raznovich ’s Casa Matriz (1981) has been the subject of recent comment. Nora Glickman describes Casa Matriz as a parody of the consumption of feelings . From her perspective the idea of being able to purchase a different mother evokes the very common daughter-mother relationship in which “nadie tenía la hija que deseaba, ni la madre que hubiera querido tener” (95).1 For Catherine Larson, Raznovich’s satiric perspective of consumerism supports the gender stereotyping in the work. Larson suggests that the substitute mother in Casa Matriz serves as the “master copy” for all Hispanic mothers (113). In his brief study, David William Foster identifies one of these maternal copies as the “perfect mother,” who persists under the “oppressive weight of hegemonic definitions of motherhood ” (51). For Diana Taylor, Raznovich’s humor defies censorship, gender violence, and political limitations by employing stereotypes that reflect consumer and patriarchal constructs in Latin America. Taylor maintains that Raznovich presents her criticism by opposing the ideas of “real” and “substitute.” In her chapter Taylor explains how “the ‘real’ is produced through the capitalist market system that trades in desires and emotions. Rather than allowing us to buy into the seemingly natural mother/daughter experience, to idealize it or psychologize it, Raznovich leaves all the performative strings showing” (85). As all these scholars confirm, Raznovich uses consumerism as a structural device to frame her critique of patriarchy and the notion of female gender identity as a 1 No one had the daughter she wanted, nor the mother she would have wanted to have (my translation). YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 323 construct: what current research leaves unaddressed is a detailed study of the mother economy in Casa Matriz. The following paper seeks to understand the mechanics of consumer behavior that underscores Raznovich’s criticism, and argues that the role of mother portrays a reified commodity whose purchase and consumption parallels the performative acts of gender identity construction. In Casa Matriz Raznovich links two seemingly contrary theories: consumerism and gender identity. Society’s power to objectify the subject links these two ideas. Jean Baudrillard interprets the social function of consumer and object production. The purchaser, according to Baudrillard , maintains a reciprocal relationship with the object of consumption : in modern, capitalist societies consumers, markets, and objects shape and design each other (64). The same holds true for gender identity . Judith Butler explains gender as a set of performative acts regulated by hegemonic powers. Performative in this case means, “constituting the identity it is purported to be” (33). In both instances the fundamentals of society at the Casa Matriz – be it the consumer or woman – reify the subject who participates in the very mechanism of objectification. To examine the functionality of the social mechanisms of consumer behavior and gender identity formation I begin by describing the structure of consumer society in Raznovich’s drama. The study then reads the role of the Substitute Mother in terms of Baudrillard’s explanation of “model” and “series.” By understanding how the Substitute Mother is transformed into a consumer object we can better appreciate how the maternal commodity informs the daughter’s consumer behavior. Finally, this discussion will demonstrate the parallels between the daughter’s consumer behavior and gender as a performative act, illuminating Raznovich ’s parody of gender formation. Raznovich constructs a consumer society inside her piece by situating her characters within an agency, much like a brothel, in which the daughter, Bárbara, purchases a substitute mother who portrays different maternal roles. Rhyming “sustituta” with “prostituta” underscores the parallel between the casa and the brothel and aligns the notions of “mother acts” with “sex acts.”2 This parody reverses audience expecta324 ROMANCE NOTES 2 See also the stage directions for Bárbara: “(…a punto de decir ‘prostituta’)” (267), along with the Substitute Mother’s complaint: “¡Este trabajo de Madre Sustituta tiene aspectos francamente denigrantes” (280). tions by changing a personal and intimate relationship into a reified commodity. Baudrillard describes the exchange of merchandise in terms of production, one that seduces clients into purchasing not one product, rather the entire system that subsequently generates...

Embedded Localities: Employment Decline, Inner City Population Growth, and Declining Place Stratification among Japan's Mid‐Size and Large Cities

The 1990s were a decade of economic decline in Japan. During this period, similar to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, Japan's largest cities suffered contractions in total and manufacturing employment, and income inequality widened, nationwide. In contrast, after 1995, inner city districts in eight of its 11 largest cities and in central Tokyo experienced population and housing growth. Residential growth, coupled with contracting incomes in affluent cities and rising incomes in provincial large and mid‐sized cities, then fostered a decline in place stratification by per capita and household income among cities with more than 200,000, between 1990 and 2000. This article argues that the primary factors provoking this combination of positive and negative outcomes were the same policies implemented by the Japanese Developmental State in order to protect its firms from the destructive forces of the world capitalist market system. In other words, failed market interventions unintentionally led to industrial disinvestment and plunging urban land prices. These conditions, supported by national and subnational urban redevelopment policies, then spurred residential growth in large cities. In sum, Japan's interventionist policy logic and its unique development trends suggest that its cities remain as embedded localities, tightly nested within their own political‐economic development context. Its situation also suggests that it might be time to create a more integrated metatheory of urban development, one which fully incorporates the reflexive nature of the interplay among the global, the national, and the local political‐economic contexts in order to explain its impacts on spatial patterns.

Was Shock Therapy Really a Shock?

The shock therapy model derived its name from Poland’s stabilization and liberalization program, initiated on January 1, 1990, which became known as “shock therapy” or “big bang.” The countries that followed with the shock therapy approach were Czechoslovakia (starting January 1991), Bulgaria (February 1991), Russia (February 1992), Albania (July 1992), Estonia (September 1992), and Latvia (June 1993). In summary, the shock therapy model was a neoclassical model of transition advocating the immediate implementation of the necessary reforms to establish a free market economy. The shock therapy model of transition, the dominant model of transition, was attractive to transition governments, international financial institutions, and mature market economies due to its simplicity and narrow transition policies recommended. “Get prices right” and the remaining elements of a market capitalist system would, more or less, fall into place was an antithesis to an institutionalist approach to transition. The shock therapy approach abstracted from the more insightful and complicated institutionalist dimensions of the transition process. The transition process was characterized by uncertainty and the absence of any historical paradigms. Hence the Economist’s metaphor about the transition process was that there was no known recipe for unmaking an omelette (“No Halfway House” 1990, 18). Few economists attempted to approximate the initial conditions of centrally administered economies with the stabilization programs initiated in the mature market economies. For example, Jeffrey Sachs (1993, 3) argued “the prototypical case in Europe that I will refer to is that of Spain, which in many ways provides a kind of guidepost to the path that the economies of Eastern Europe should follow.” Sebastian Edwards (1992, 131)

We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other

We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other

A Christian Critique of Economics

Contrary to the assertions of many contemporary economists, no economic model is value-free. Both of the major models in the world today, capitalism (or neoclassical economic theory) and Marxism (or Marxian economics), have a long history in which basic assumptions and value choices were made that govern the models. Those assumptions and value choices have deep roots in Western culture, and were certainly shaped by Christianity as it has been practiced in the West (as opposed, often, to how it should have been practiced!). But in both cases, alternative choices were possible, and, as we shall see, some opportunities were missed. However, it is not my purpose to attempt to determine to what extent Christianity can be blamed or credited with the economics we must live with today. Rather, I hope to examine economics from the perspective of my Christian faith to ask how the economic models so powerful today have missed (or worked against) crucial elements of Jewish and Christian standards of justice, and how they might be transformed to create economies that are healthier for human and natural communities, and ecologically sustainable. When Adam Smith published his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth ofNations in 1776, he was asking if there could be a better way to run economies than the entrenched mercantilism of his day, which operated through state monopolies to benefit an elite. He and many others in his time were frustrated with mercantilism and searching for alternatives. They never imagined that the ideas they wrote about would some day coalesce into what we now call capitalism, and succeed beyond their wildest dreams. They were just trying to make the system more open to more participation by a wider range of people. I believe that today we are in a similar situation. Capitalism has been wildly successful in its single goal: constant growth in the production of goods. From a Christian perspective, this is an ambiguous goal and in and of itself cannot be supported. In addition, capitalism also has serious negative effects on both communities and the natural environment that must be dealt with, and it has a built-in tendency to leave many people marginalized-not only unemployed and often unemployable within the capitalist market system, but even worse,

Preventive Therapy: The Neoclassical Gradualist Model of Transition from Central Administration to Market Relations

The fundamental basis of the neoclassical gradualist approach to transition in Russia and Eastern Europe was to establish economic, institutional, political, and ideological structures before attempting liberalization. Without this minimum foundation, radical reforms would have inhibited the development of a competitive market capitalist system. This was because "privatization, marketization, and the introduction of competition cannot be contemplated in an economy reduced to barter" (Carrington 1992, 24). Also, implementation of the reform program required minimum standards ofliving; otherwise the social fabric of the whole society would have been at risk. The reform had to foster a social consensus that endorsed a system of secure private property rights (Murrell, 1995, 171) and had to be guided by the principles of voluntariness and free choice (Kornai, 1992b, 17).

Sexual trafficking in women: international political economy and the politics of sex.

A recent manifestation of the North/South, East/West political-economic divide is the international sex trade in women, of which trafficking in women for purposes of sexual employment is a large subset. Trafficking in humans in general, and women in particular, has taken center stage in many nation-states as an issue of a threat to national security and societal cohesion. This article explores some of the basic facts about trafficking and spotlights it as a truly global phenomenon, with its contemporary origins in the international capitalist market system. Furthermore, it argues that the international political economy of sex not only includes the supply side--the women of the third world, the poor states, or exotic Asian women--but it cannot maintain itself without the demand from the organizers of the trade--the men from industrialized and developing countries. The patriarchal world system hungers for and sustains the international subculture of docile women from underdeveloped nations.