Developmental Regime Research Articles

Desert(ed) nuclear scapes: a geontological reading of Uday Singh’s Pokhran: a novel

This paper argues that the nuclear deserts of Pokhran in Northwest India are appropriated under ‘developmental regimes’ that employ wastelanding and erasure as strategic tools. Mobilizing Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s concept of ‘geontopower’ and Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’, we read Uday Singh’s fictional treatment Pokhran: A Novel (2020), which deals with the Pokhran-I nuclear test carried out in 1974, as narrating a tale of power that not only seeps through institutions related to human/life/bio but also as probing socio-materialities through active geo/nonlife/nonhuman entities. These critical taxonomies frame Pokhran-I as a complex site of human-nonhuman entanglements. Human agency has predominantly informed the prevailing discourses on desert(ed) scapes as ‘sacrifice zones’ devoid of agency. However, we interrogate Pokhran as a discard scape, first, via geontopower which evidences wastelanding and erasure, and second, as a potent agential nonhuman entity.

Spatial Patterns of Nonprofit Founding: Toward a Local Ecology

Nonprofit organizations are vital to the implementation of social policy and provide myriad benefits to those nearby, yet few studies consider founding patterns in small areas. Conceptualizing ecological processes at the local level and in the context of developmental regimes, this article investigates nonprofit founding events among neighborhoods with a unique data set aggregated by census tract from 2010 to 2016 in one northeast Ohio county (United States) using a hierarchical Bayesian model. The results broadly support the density dependence hypothesis, however, suggest high density is required to reduce founding rates in small areas. The results indicate nonprofit founding rates are lower in tracts with higher levels of economic disadvantage and higher shares of Latino residents. The paper calls for further research into nonprofit population dynamics among small areas and for policymakers to closely consider nonprofit founding events, as founding determines the future of a region’s nonprofit infrastructure.

Rentierism, ‘Capitalist Breakthroughs’ and Non-Transformative Development in Late Putinism

This essay explores ‘territories of accelerated development’ (TORs) to reconstruct the economic policy-making, development institutions and macroeconomic framework of late Putinism since the 2010s. It argues that even with Russia’s integration into the world economy and the developmental rhetoric of state elites, TORs and the national developmental regime around them reproduce the patronal management and recycling of rents rather than the transformative and state-permeated facilitation of productive investments and capitalist profits. This upscaling of rents has been systemic. The result—rentierism—challenges common understandings of rent-seeking and commodity rents as incidental features of Russian ‘state capitalism’, and, instead places them at the centre of a non-capitalist order of its own.

Changing roles of the state in the development of long-term rental apartments under a transitional housing regime in China

Long-term rental apartments (LRAs) are booming in Chinese megacities in recent years, largely facilitated by various forms of state intervention in the private rental sector. Focusing on the state’s endeavours in promoting LRA development and incorporating it into the affordable rental housing scheme nationwide, this study explores the changing roles of the state in two stages of LRA development through the conceptual lens of housing regime. Drawing on a comprehensive policy analysis and a field investigation in Beijing, our major findings are threefold. First, two stages of LRA development—market-led under state supervision (from 2015 to 2019) and state-led development (after 2019) are identified, in which highly responsive state interventions were introduced to cope with the housing affordability crisis and maintain social stability. Second, the role of the state shifted from a facilitator to an active participant with the deepening involvement of state-owned enterprises in the rental housing market. Third, a transitional housing regime shifting from a productivist regime to a developmental regime is underway to achieve different socioeconomic goals. This study enriches our conceptual and empirical understanding of the latest episode of housing and land policies in response to the volatile political and socioeconomic climate by introducing a transitional housing regime in urban China.

Changes in the quality of life in teenagers studying in closed general educational institutions

Introduction. The quality of life reflects a personal health state and its ability to live a normal and fulfilling life.
 Study purpose: the quality of life (QoL) determination in teenagers studying in closed general educational institutions in Barnaul.
 Materials and methods. The study included one hundred sixty eight teenagers studying in closed general educational institutions in the city of Barnaul. The quality of life indicators were estimated using a valid, randomized Pediatric Quality of Life Questionnaire PEDsQL™4.0, for children aged up 13 to 18 years. There were obtained such 5 QoL indicators as physical, emotional, social and school functioning and psychosocial health.
 Results. The analysis of the results of QoL indicators by teenagers revealed that the generalized QoL indicator in the general group of children was equal to 77.71 scores. The highest score was obtained for the indicator of physical functioning — 88.29 scores. The social functioning scale took the next place in terms of total scores — 83.57. The lowest scores on scales related to QoL were noted in emotional functioning — 67.73 scores and school environment — 70.47 scores. Based on the results it was possible to establish that the lowest scores were obtained on the scales of emotional and school functioning, which compared with the total score, shows a lower integrated indicator of psychosocial health and is equal to 73.81 scores.
 Conclusion. To prevent undesirable consequences for the health of adolescents with low QoL indicators, a protective and developmental regime should be recommended and, if necessary, dispensary supervision of a pediatrician with additional involvement of doctors of narrow specialties on an individual basis.

Center-Left Parties and Developmental Regimes in Latin America: Assessing the Role of Democracy

Comparison of the paths of two countries with developmental regimes led by left-of-center parties, Chile and Mexico, shows that the democratic regime, Chile’s, had better social indicators than its authoritarian counterpart at the price of slower industrialization.Comparação das trajetórias de dois países com regimes desenvolvimentistas dirigidos por partidos do centro-esquerda no Chile e México demostra que o regime democrâtico chileno teve maiores indicadores sociais que sua contraparte autoritária às custas de uma industrialização mais lenta.

Dynamic multi-dimensional scaling of 30+ year evolution of Chinese urban systems: Patterns and performance

Understanding the co-evolution and organizational dynamics of urban properties (i.e., urban scaling) is the science base for pursuing synergies toward sustainable cities and society. The generalization of urban scaling theory yet requires more studies from various developmental regimes and across time. Here, we extend the universality proposition by exploring the evolution of longitudinal and transversal scaling of Chinese urban attributes between 1987 and 2018 using a global artificial impervious area (GAIA) remotely sensed dataset, harmonized night light data (NTL), and socioeconomic data, and revealed agreements and disagreements with theories. The superlinear relationship of urban area and population often considered as an indicator of wasting land resources (challenging the universality theory βc = 2/3), is in fact the powerful impetus (capital raising) behind the concurrent superlinear expansion of socio-economic metabolisms (e.g., GDP, total wage) in a rapidly urbanizing country that has not yet reached equilibrium. Similarly, infrastructural variables associated with public services, such as hospitals and educational institutions, exhibited some deviations as well and were scaled linearly. However, the temporal narrowing of spatial deviations, such as the decline in urban land diseconomies of scale and the stabilization of economic output, clearly indicates the Chinese government's effort in charting urban systems toward balanced and sustainable development across the country. More importantly, the transversal sublinear scaling of areal-based socio-economic variables was inconsistent with the theoretical concept of increasing returns to scale, thus validating the view that a single measurement cannot unravel the intricate web of diverse urban attributes and urbanization. Our dynamic urban scaling analysis across space and through time in China provides new insights into the evolving nexus of urbanization, socioeconomic development, and national policies.

From zeilenbau slabs to community-building clusters. The contribution of Seoul to the planning of mass housing estates, 1962–2008

ABSTRACT More than half of the population of Seoul lives today in mass housing estates due to the housing policies initiated by the South Korean developmental regime. This paper aims to assert the degree of typomorphological innovation introduced by the large-scale construction of mass housing in the capital during the second half of the twentieth century to situate their contribution to modern housing. Twelve case studies have been redrawn according to eight morphological categories and compared through a timeline. The study period is structured in four phases to contextualize the cases with the socio-political background and broader housing architecture and planning developments. Stephen V. Ward’s typology of diffusion of modern planning concepts has been adopted as a conceptual framework to evaluate the degree of innovation. The research shows how site planning strategies based on parallel rows of housing blocks were consolidated as the most common morphology in the 1970s under the leadership of the public housing authority. A brief but intense period of innovation followed during the 1980s featuring clusters catering to community-building agendas. Nonetheless, the shift towards the private sector at the end of the decade curtailed housing innovation, and original solutions developed earlier were standardized by the market.

Regime Maturity and the Future of Asia's Regional Economic Order

Regime Maturity and the Future of Asia's Regional Economic Order Saori N. Katada (bio) In 2020 the Asian economies became larger than those of the rest of the world combined, and the region is now home to half the world's middle class. These economies' growth over the last several decades has been impressive but not uniform. As such, T.J. Pempel's new book, A Region of Regimes: Prosperity and Plunder in the Asia-Pacific, provides a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the distinctive developmental pathways in the region. These pathways are heavily influenced by "regimes" that are constructed by interactions among political, socioeconomic, and international properties.1 Covering the growth paths of ten countries in East Asia, Pempel maps out three distinct types of regimes, with two styles (developmental and ersatz) that have achieved prosperity and one (rapacious) that has led to plunder. A Region of Regimes is a tour de force—the culmination of the depth, breadth, and expanse of Pempel's research career as a prominent scholar of the international and comparative political economy of East Asia. This study provides an ambitious and comprehensive yet nuanced treatment of the region's political-economic trajectory. The complex interaction among domestic regimes, policy paradigms, and the regional order, Pempel argues, has evolved in an Asia-Pacific that has not only pursued and mostly achieved rapid economic growth but also introduced diplomatic and security tension threatening the regional order. With this generative book, Pempel provides a multitude of insights that will attract many other studies on the topic to follow. Of particular interest to me are the regional implications of the "aged" or "mature" developmental regimes of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. In chapter four, Pempel examines their slow transformation. Once having had very cohesive unity pursuing embedded mercantilism, these developmental regimes have undergone fragmentation due to globalization and private-sector maturity, including the regional expansion of production networks. Nonetheless, these regimes have been very resistant to fundamental changes. In other words, [End Page 174] "regime shift" has not been a smooth process. With such regime stickiness on the one hand, I see that these economies are faced with a challenge of disembedded private businesses on the other. Despite the continued influence that large corporations or peak associations, such as Keidanren in Japan, wield over governments' economic policies, these businesses no longer need government protection, nor are they willing to be controlled by state guidance. As discussed elsewhere by Henry Wai-chung Yeung, new strategic couplings through Asian firms' pursuit of competitive positions in the global marketplace are leading these firms to free themselves from national constraints.2 By extending Pempel's argument regarding these three developmental economies, an interesting angle to investigate would be to consider multiple implications that these matured developmental regimes with disembedded businesses could have on the regional order. First, to support the national firms that have offshored and globalized, developmental governments such as those in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are faced with the task of supporting businesses that stretch outside of their national jurisdiction. Particularly given their demographic challenges with aging populations and low birth rates, these mature developmental states continue to rely on regional production and global markets continue as the lifeline for their future prosperity. Economic regionalization and regional institutions built over the course of the last twenty years have created a heavily connected region, as Pempel discusses in chapter six. These conditions would inevitably draw these governments to act in support of a rules-based economic order and continued globalization to undergird their firms' regional and global activities. Furthermore, intraregional contagion through emulation and diffusion of policy ideas are an important factor in predicting the region's future course. In the 20th century, Japan was the developmental model to emulate. Since the 1980s, China has learned from Japan's successes and failures (p. 157), and Malaysia has also implemented a "Look East" policy during this time. In the 21st century, China has its own version of a "going out" and connectivity strategy that is particularly prominent in the Belt and Road Initiative introduced in 2013. At the same time, the mature developmental states from Japan to South Korea must...

Author's Response: The Asia-Pacific Kaleidoscope Continues to Shift

Author's Response:The Asia-Pacific Kaleidoscope Continues to Shift T.J. Pempel (bio) I want to express my sincere thanks to Asia Policy for providing the venue for this collective assessment of A Region of Regimes: Prosperity and Plunder in the Asia-Pacific. I am especially indebted to the five reviewers for their thoughtful reflections on the book. Nothing is more rewarding to an author who has finished a major book project than to have respected colleagues engage in a thoughtful and appreciative critique of its core arguments. Beyond the usual highlighting of the book's merits and flaws, each reviewer draws attention to different facets of its key contentions. Most go on to suggest valuable extensions of its logic, plus ways in which it points to new research targets and future real-world problems. Although it is tempting to underscore the reviewers' favorable comments, I would prefer to use this limited space to respond to several of the challenges they raise, the extensions they suggest, and the implications for evolving regional uncertainties. Let me begin by addressing two key criticisms. First, though gentle in his wording and appreciative of the "big" picture the book attempts, Thomas Pepinsky questions my provocative grouping of the Philippines with Myanmar and North Korea as rapacious regimes. His data on GDP per capita, tertiary education, and trade certainly suggest more economic differences than similarities among the three regimes. I would raise two counterpoints. First, I focused almost exclusively on the Marcos era (1965–86), when a host of similarities such as official corruption, widespread repression, and anti-industrialization radiated closer resonance. Second, external forces in all three regimes provided powerful underpinnings for rapacious repression while mitigating against industrial development. In North Korea and Myanmar, foreign sanctions, self-chosen isolation, and extensive reliance on foreign profiteering from raw materials and agricultural riches were key elements keeping narrow and repressive elites in power while simultaneously obstructing industrialization. Likewise, the United States was a fulsome supporter of the Marcos dictatorship; moreover, in an ironic twist, U.S. support for land reform and industrial upgrades that had been so critical to industrial development within Japan, [End Page 194] South Korea, and Taiwan gained no traction in the Philippines. Rather, the U.S. government defended entrenched U.S.-run sugar magnates and landed elites in the country, both powerful veto players against land reform and serious industrial improvement. Pepinsky's data also points to something not discussed in his review but that the book treated as pivotal in its distinction between the developmental and the ersatz developmental regimes—tertiary education. It is high and rises continually in the developmental regimes, while it lags demonstrably in the ersatz developmental regimes, creating a long-term obstacle against those regimes capturing a substantial portion of GDP gains. Mary Alice Haddad raises a second criticism worthy of discussion. Although she acknowledges that different mixes of regimes play a powerful role in the dynamics and shaping of the regional order, she rightly notes that my treatment of the Asian region devotes little attention to subnational linkages. As a corrective, she foregrounds the ways in which micro-level multilateral projects often span different regime types and serve as powerful spurs to cross-border cooperation and mutual learning. As such, they add vibrant threads to the regional tapestry. While I accept her point, the argument in the book's concluding chapter analyzes how shifting balances and interactions among the national regimes examined in earlier chapters were critical drivers of the most visible alterations in the regional order. Though one can, of course, debate the significance of state-level vs. local-level webs of cooperation, as Gilbert Rozman found to his disappointment in his 2004 study Northeast Asia's Stunted Regionalism, nationalism, competition for power, and bilateral national government distrust in many instances upended even the most diligent efforts at cross-border cooperation by city mayors or NGOs.1 Several reviews suggest tantalizing ways to extend the logic of the book. Pepinsky sees it as calling for more macro-structural studies of political economy. I share his predisposition. Such macro-structural analyses hold the greatest potential not only to expand our theoretical understanding of East Asia...

Developmental, Ersatz, Rapacious, or Mixed? Conceptualizing Regime Types in Asia

Developmental, Ersatz, Rapacious, or Mixed?Conceptualizing Regime Types in Asia Thomas Pepinsky (bio) In A Region of Regimes: Prosperity and Plunder in the Asia-Pacific, T.J. Pempel, one of the world's foremost experts on the political economy of East Asia, sets out to explain the divergent trajectories of the major countries of East and Southeast Asia since the end of World War II. The general story is well-known. Japan recovered from the war's devastation in short order and became a global economic powerhouse by the 1980s. Although Japan's growth has slowed since the roaring 1980s, as an economic dynamo it has been joined by South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, which together are some of the most prosperous economies in the world today. Over this same postwar time span, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand have enjoyed decades of steady growth—albeit with some interruptions—and are today solidly middle-income countries. These development "miracles" (to use the terminology of the World Bank in the 1990s) have been overshadowed in the past twenty years by China, which has grown at a remarkable pace after decades of stagnation under Mao Zedong.1 And amid all of this prosperity, there are also cases of more modest economic growth, such as in the Philippines, as well as sheer economic catastrophe, such as in Myanmar and North Korea. Less well-understood are the politics behind these developmental miracles and debacles. Through the 1990s, much was written about the political foundations of economic performance, and several important works adopted a comparative perspective on the region's performance. Pempel himself played an important role in this research. But "big" arguments about economic performance and its political foundations across Asia have been somewhat displaced in the political economy literature by within-country research that probes mechanisms instead of macrostructures. This is the emerging hole in the literature on Asian political economy that A Region of Regimes fills. [End Page 181] Pempel's approach is synthetic and typological, exploring the interrelationships among political institutions, economic policy, and each country's international position. There is a wealth of empirical detail to cover, and the book's major contribution is to organize this material to identify three distinct development models that characterize the region's economies. Developmental regimes (such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) are those with strong, meritocratic, and semi-autonomous bureaucracies that have tight links to the business community and which benefit from a supportive international environment. Ersatz regimes (such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand) are those in which the bureaucracy is less autonomous from sociopolitical forces and that possess a fragmented business community but a fundamentally open (if dependent) economy. And rapacious regimes (such as North Korea, Myanmar, and the Philippines) have weak bureaucracies and weak business environments. China is its own regime type, mixing various elements of the other three. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. GDP per Capita, 1945–2020 Source: Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Maddison Project Database, 2020 ≈ https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/research. It can be helpful to look at the empirical record of economic development across these regimes. Figure 1 plots real GDP per capita for [End Page 182] the economies that Pempel covers from 1945 (or the year first available) until now. Just looking at material economic performance, we can see clear differences between the developmental and ersatz regimes. The rapacious regimes are more of a mixed bag though—the Philippines does not look very different from Indonesia, and Myanmar and North Korea stand out for their stagnant growth in the early independence period (Myanmar) and today (North Korea). The heterogeneity among the rapacious regimes is evident if we look at tertiary education completion rates (Figure 2) or total trade as percentage of GDP (Figure 3). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Tertiary Education Completion Rates, 1945–2020 Source: Robert J. Barro and Jong Wha Lee, "A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950–2010," Journal of Development Economics 104 (2013): 184–98. Note: Data for North Korea was not available. These simple quantitative summaries of these regimes' economic trajectories do not do justice...

City Networks in East Asia: A New Dimension to Regional Politics

City Networks in East Asia:A New Dimension to Regional Politics Mary Alice Haddad (bio) T.J. Pempel's new book, A Region of Regimes: Prosperity and Plunder in the Asia-Pacific, offers an expansive overview of regional politics in East Asia that credits the region's extraordinary economic growth and (relative) political stability over the past 70 years to the variations of developmental regimes. In his telling, the political parties in charge matter less than the country's type of political "regime" when determining the overall success of its political economy.1 Of particular interest are the ways that the different domestic regimes interact with one another, creating a kind of regional system that, while not nearly as formal or institutionalized as the European Union, nonetheless has contributed to the region's overall economic prosperity even in the context of considerable security tension and uncertainty. The main players in the story Pempel tells about the region are national ministries and big business, when discussing domestic politics, and national governments and regional institutions, when discussing regional politics. Civil society actors, whether they are grassroots neighborhood groups, nonprofit organizations, or global NGOs, are bit players. Labor unions receive occasional mention, generally in the context of compromises made with businesses and political parties. Subnational governments are not included. In this brief review essay, I would like to highlight the increasingly large role that these excluded actors are playing in East Asia's regional politics. In doing so, I am not suggesting that subnational governments and NGOs play a more important role than national ministries and big business, nor am I arguing that they constitute an alternative version of regional regimes. Rather, city networks and civil society collaborators crosscut the regional dynamics identified by Pempel. Especially important from my perspective, these networks connect cities located in countries with different regime types, thereby allowing patterns of good governance and successful [End Page 190] policymaking to spread to cities located in ersatz regimes and China. Furthermore, individual East Asian cities and the networks to which they belong are increasingly exerting global influence. Thus, transnational city networks both complicate and expand the view of regional politics provided by A Region of Regimes. I will offer three brief examples from the areas of environment, health, and international peace to illustrate the diverse types of city networks shaping East Asia and the world. The first example is the KitaQ Composting Network. In 2001 the city of Surabaya, Indonesia (with a population of 3 million people), faced a solid waste crisis when local resistance forced the closure of one of the city's largest landfill sites.2 To address this problem, Surabaya worked with its Japanese sister city, Kitakyushu, to investigate its municipal solid waste challenges and develop a solution. The Japan-based Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) coordinated with Japanese scientists, Surabaya city officials, and Pusdakota (a local women's organization in Surabaya) to develop a household composting system that was fast, clean, and efficient. They also designed a collection-and-distribution scheme using a system of neighborhood advocates that would engage individual households while both reducing the demand for municipally collected solid waste and contributing to neighborhood beautification.3 In 2007, they rolled out their first pilot demonstration project, working with 10 and then 90 households in Surabaya to distribute special composting baskets and train community members in how to use them. In the first five years of the program, Surabaya reduced its municipal solid waste by 30%, created 75 new jobs for low-income residents, and increased green space in the city by 10%.4 IGES then worked to disseminate Surabaya's success to other municipalities abroad, hosting a series of workshops that brought municipal leaders from Southeast Asia together to explain how the system worked.5 By 2011, 15 cities in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia had formed the KitaQ Composting Network.6 By 2018, more than 30 cities, [End Page 191] including 11 in Latin America and 6 in Africa, had established community composting systems based on Surabaya's.7 My second example highlights Seoul's leadership around Covid-19, which shows how East Asia's cities are not just operating at the grassroots...

Apartheid, authoritarianism and anticolonial struggles viewed from the Right

After his commitment to the eventually failed defence of segregation in the United States during the 1960s, political scientist A. James Gregor (1929-2019) created an extensive oeuvre on the history of Fascism and its ideology. While personally remaining an éminence grise, his ideo-centric approach proved influential in international academic discussions. He helped foster an approach centred on the representation of ideological aspects of Fascism at the expense of the critical analysis of other historical elements, thus obscuring Fascism’s societal roots. Moreover, Gregor’s definition of Fascism, intrinsically linked to his understanding of a developmental dictatorship, blurs the line between colonialism and anticolonial struggles. In his works on Fascism in the Global South, written during the Cold War, Gregor does not find developmental regimes akin to the Mussolini dictatorship among the largely pro-Western right-wing authoritarianisms that emerged in the Tricont, but rather within the largely left-wing national liberation fronts and the political systems they built up. This peculiar verdict is linked to Gregor’s own apologia of historical Italian Fascism and more recent right-wing dictatorships in the so-called Third World, like, for instance, the Apartheid regime, and to his simultaneous denigration of anticolonial struggle as it was pursued i.a. by the anti-Apartheid movement. Through a critique of ideology which delineates and analyses Gregor’s argument evolving around these themes, this article contests his political compass in his search for Fascism in a historical-critical manner and offers an alternative proposition on how to identify the historical and contemporary role of far-right politics in the world system of capitalism.

Integrate, Adapt, Collaborate: Comecon Architecture in Socialist Mongolia

This paper conceptualizes the uneven dynamics of architectural mobilities between member states of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) and socialist Mongolia, a member of the Comecon since 1962. These long, intense, multilateral, and coordinated exchanges decisively contributed to the development of the “material-technical base” for construction in Cold War Mongolia, including planning institutions as well as construction and construction-materials industries. Based on archival research and interviews in Mongolia, Russia, Germany, and Poland, we introduce the concept of “concern” and argue that the priorities, motivations, and aspirations of the professionals involved were informed by three concerns. They included, first, the concern for integrating Mongolian design and construction industries into a comprehensive network of organizations in charge of the urbanization processes; second, the concern for adapting foreign resources to the conditions on the ground; and, third, the concern for an increasing collaboration between Mongolian, Soviet, and Eastern European actors. We study how these actors followed, exploited, and sometimes challenged the political economy of the Comecon, and how they negotiated it with feedback from specific investments. We argue that the concept of the three concerns is useful for studying architectural mobilities in global socialism and across competing 20th-century developmental regimes.

Literature as a Matter of Policy

Literature as a Matter of Policy

Rural Transformations in Pursat Province, Cambodia: With a Special Focus on Livelihood Activities and Their Changes under the Developmental Regime

Rural Transformations in Pursat Province, Cambodia: With a Special Focus on Livelihood Activities and Their Changes under the Developmental Regime

Analyzing industrial policy regimes within global production networks: the Ethiopian leather industry

AbstractThis article contributes to debates on how to broaden and deepen our understanding of the interrelationships between the state and global production networks (GPNs). It proposes that combining the GPN framework and the developmental regime perspective based on a strategic-relational conceptualization of institutions allows for better assessment of the interrelationship between the strategies of (supplier) firms and industrial policy institutions that (re)structure the dynamically changing, interrelated and multiscalar institutional underpinnings of states and GPNs, with important implications for upgrading and coupling processes. Empirically, the article presents a case study of the Ethiopian leather industry.

XDream: Finding preferred stimuli for visual neurons using generative networks and gradient-free optimization.

A longstanding question in sensory neuroscience is what types of stimuli drive neurons to fire. The characterization of effective stimuli has traditionally been based on a combination of intuition, insights from previous studies, and luck. A new method termed XDream (EXtending DeepDream with real-time evolution for activation maximization) combined a generative neural network and a genetic algorithm in a closed loop to create strong stimuli for neurons in the macaque visual cortex. Here we extensively and systematically evaluate the performance of XDream. We use ConvNet units as in silico models of neurons, enabling experiments that would be prohibitive with biological neurons. We evaluated how the method compares to brute-force search, and how well the method generalizes to different neurons and processing stages. We also explored design and parameter choices. XDream can efficiently find preferred features for visual units without any prior knowledge about them. XDream extrapolates to different layers, architectures, and developmental regimes, performing better than brute-force search, and often better than exhaustive sampling of >1 million images. Furthermore, XDream is robust to choices of multiple image generators, optimization algorithms, and hyperparameters, suggesting that its performance is locally near-optimal. Lastly, we found no significant advantage to problem-specific parameter tuning. These results establish expectations and provide practical recommendations for using XDream to investigate neural coding in biological preparations. Overall, XDream is an efficient, general, and robust algorithm for uncovering neuronal tuning preferences using a vast and diverse stimulus space. XDream is implemented in Python, released under the MIT License, and works on Linux, Windows, and MacOS.

Catholic Church, Fishers and Negotiating Development: A Study on the Vizhinjam Port Project

We examine the mobilisation and negotiation of a local community against the construction of a trans-shipment container terminal in Vizhinjam village in southern India. Initiated by the state and executed by the private capital, the project represents the wider pattern of developmental regimes characterised by accumulation by dispossession. Like several other fishing villages in southern Kerala, Vizhinjam has active associational forms of civil society, largely mediated as well as shaped by the Latin Catholic church. The common religious identity of these associational forms, however, failed to generate a consensus among the local community regarding the port project. Diverse positions emerged in the village due to different class formations and mobility aspirations of the population. The political atmosphere constrained the church from strongly opposing the project due to the fear of it being labelled ‘anti-national’, since the port project was projected as essential for the nation’s development and progress.

‘Moving up in the league’ with a little help from the state: The Spanish shipbuilding industry during the developmental Francoist regime

The aim of this article is to explain the factors that underpinned the expansion of the Spanish shipbuilding industry during the Francoist regime, when it grew to rank fourth in the league of shipbuilding nations in the 1970s. After a brief description of the evolution of its output and markets, the article focuses on three aspects of shipbuilding: technology and costs; industrial structure and ship specialisation; and, above all, the strong government support that made this industry one of the symbols of the international success of the Franco’s new developmental policies.