Current Popular Debate Research Articles

Policy Forum: Taxing Wealth Transfers in Canada Using an Accession Tax

Wealth transfer taxes have had a long history in Canada: the Rowell-Sirois report suggested federal administration; the Carter report emphasized the importance of including wealth transfers in income. Yet by the 1980s wealth transfer taxes had largely disappeared in Canada. This article makes the case for consideration of an accession tax, which taxes wealth transfers in the recipients' hands. An accession tax has significant administrative advantages over the annual wealth tax featured in current popular debates.

What Kinds of Trade Liberalization Agreements Do People in Developing Countries Want?

ABSTRACTOne of the most striking developments in the global economy in the past decades is the rapid proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), with many of them concluded among or with participation of developing countries. On the presumption that current popular debates on trade policy are not so much about whether citizens want free trade but rather what kinds of trade liberalization they want, we examine individual trade policy preferences with regard to PTAs that can vary in content along several dimensions. To that end we carried out conjoint choice experiments embedded in representative surveys in three developing countries that differ strongly in income levels, political system, and trade liberalization history: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. We conceptualize trade policy preferences as preferences over the scale and scope of trade liberalization, environmental and labor standards, and labor market access (migration). Two main findings emerge. First, non-economic considerations, such as sympathy/antipathy toward particular countries and environmental and labor rights concerns influence citizens’ preferences at least as much as factors based on standard economic logic. Second, preferences over particular facets (attributes) of trade liberalization, that is PTA content, are surprisingly consistent across countries, despite strong differences in macro-economic and political context.

Poverty, the Underclass, and Immigration: Another Look at the Debate on Poverty

Author(s): Mueller, Elizabeth | Abstract: The current popular debate on poverty focuses on the underclass. Poverty is considered, in this context, a problem of unskilled, uneducated individuals or of groups ofpeople whose lifestyles mire them in poverty. In this article, the author argues that the focus on the underclass, and subsequent use of individually and culturally focused explanations for poverty, skew our understanding of the problem and divert our attention from appropriate policy responses. Using evidence from four different periods of immigration into Ameri­ can cities, an argument is presentecffor the importance ofstructural and institutional factors in understanding the success or failure of each group to find work and move up. The author concludes that these factors are better able to account for poverty and justify increased attention to structural conditions in poverty.

Ambiguity, Children, Representation, and Sexuality

In her article Ambiguity, Children, Representation, and Sexuality Catharine Lumby considers current and historical scholarly and popular debates about the representation of children, including concerns about their sexualisation in such representations. The article begins by examining images taken by photographers in the Victorian era, including Charles Dodgson and Julia Cameron, and asks not only how the gaze of the photographer frames the child but how the child returns the adult gaze. Lumby seeks to problematize our understanding of the ways in which images sexualize children. Drawing on the work of James Kincaid, it examines discourses that frame children as, on one hand, naturally innocent, yet, on the other, as unnaturally corruptible. It explores how these discourses underpin current popular debates about the alleged sexualisation of children through amateur and commercial photography. Animating Lumby's argumentation are the questions: what draws us to images of children? What disturbs us about them? and what is at stake in the gaze of the child? Ultimately, Lumby argues that anxieties about representations of children are always located in anxieties about the ambiguity of the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Catharine Lumby, Ambiguity, Children, Representation, and Sexuality page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.4 (2010): Thematic Issue Ambiguity in Culture and Literature. Ed. Paolo Bartoloni and Anthony Stephens

The Sad, the Mad and the Bad: Co-Existing Discourses of Girlhood

Three significant, prevailing and overlapping narratives of teenage girls have dominated North American popular consciousness since the early 1990s: the sad girl, victimized by male privilege and misogyny of adolescence and beyond; the mad grrrls who rejected this vulnerability through music and media; and the bad girls of much current popular debate, those girls who are bad because they are conniving and/or because they are violent. This article reviews these three discourses by locating them within their historical contexts, including conceptualizations of the ‘girl’ from feminist poststructuralist perspectives. Literature from the field of girlhood studies provides the basis from which the discourses of growing up female are explored.

Mixing God's Work and the Public Business: A Framework for the Analysis of Faith‐Based Service Delivery

AbstractOver the past thirty years, there has been a dramatic transformation in the way the American political process operates. There has been a growing public perception that traditional political institutions lack the capacity to meet existing challenges. This has led many observers to call for a rethinking of how government does its work. Numerous alternatives, including the use of faith‐based organizations, have been suggested. The current popular debate on the appropriate role of faith‐based organizations in public service delivery has shed little light on a number of important issues raised by engaging such actors in governance issues. The impact of using faith‐based institutions to design and implement public policy must be considered not only in terms of traditional evaluation standards, but also regarding potential long‐term impacts on the political process itself. This article outlines a theoretical framework for the evaluation of faith‐based organizations as “alternatives” to conventional governance structures. It identifies key practical and theoretical issues raised by such substitution, in both short and long range systemic terms.

GEOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS ON GLOBAL CLIMATE VARIABILITY

Anthropogenic forcing of global climate is a concept with great political appeal but generally ignores basic concepts of science, particularly geological knowledge. Much of the current popular debate focuses on decadal variation in global temperature and ignores the natural variability inherent in geological records ranging in scale from centuries to eras. Discussions about geological constraints require understanding that geological science views the earth processes as being in disequilibrium, geology is a temporal science, and the energy budget of the earth is controlled by radiogenic and solar inputs creating a single dynamic Earth system. One illustration of the geological constraints on global climate is the congruence of widespread glacial episodes (icehouses) and warm periods (greenhouses) with continental plate configurations. During icehouse events (Late Precambrian, Carboniferous, Neogene), continents are arranged so as to disrupt equatorial ocean currents, distributing heat unevenly and providing polar moisture to sustain large-scale glaciers. During greenhouse events, earth-circling equatorial currents are presumed from lack of physical barriers. The conclusion is that tectonic distribution of topography and placement of continents control the geometry of ocean currents which in turn determine Earth climate.

AMERICAN STATES AND THE INDUSTRIAL POLICY DEBATE

The current popular debate over industrial policy tends to be Indifferent to the possible relevance of economic policies in American states. The states are not only very active in this arena through their Industrial and economic development efforts, but also have untapped potential for influencing business decisions. As an integral part of the Amerlcan economic policy arena, states cannot and should not be ignored by industrial policy advocates. Some constitutional, policy, and programmatlc implications of this point are briefly discussed.