Distinct Institutional Arrangements Research Articles

Maritime Sar Systems in the EU: Convergence and Co-optation into the Anti-Immigration Border

ABSTRACT Research focusing on maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) operations in contexts of migration typically focuses on single-country studies, rarely engaging with the development of regional trends. This paper centers on five maritime areas along the southern EU border (Eastern Mediterranean, Central Mediterranean, Western Mediterranean, Canary Islands) and the Dover Strait to examine the transformation of maritime SAR in Europe over the last decade. Our analysis draws from secondary sources to understand trends in these five major sea routes to and out of the EU. We conclude that ways of doing maritime SAR in the region are converging and that the emerging approach to maritime SAR is defined by its co-optation into the anti-immigration border apparatus, its militarization and the externalization of SAR responsibilities to countries of origin and transit. This convergence of SAR policy is evident yet still incomplete and fragmented, with each country exhibiting distinct institutional arrangements.

How different multilevel and multi-actor arrangements impact policy implementation: evidence from EU regional policy

ABSTRACT While implementation through multilevel governance (MLG) has often been found to have achieved limited success, the literature agrees that further studies are required to investigate if and how different MLG systems impact policy implementation. By collecting data from the implementation of four European Union (EU) regional development programmes, characterized by distinct organizational and institutional arrangements, this article adopts a performance-oriented approach to EU implementation in order to support or challenge the conventional assumptions about the expected benefits of MLG. The data suggest that effective MLG needs a central coordinating authority that has the power to enforce decentralized actors’ compliance, mobilize the implementation bodies, and provide actors with adequate organizational structures and the resources that they lack.

Local level institutional complementarities in contemporary China

This paper has the objective of bringing to light and comparing two different types of institutional arrangements existing in two different prefecture-level cities in China: Nanjing and Suzhou. Although both are considered affluent cities, and located in the same broad economic area, the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), and the same sub-provincial region, Southern Jiangsu, the cities present markedly distinct local institutional arrangements and accumulation regimes. The paper argues that the historical legacies of Nanjing and Suzhou have moulded the distinct institutional arrangements found in both cities, and that institutional path-dependences shaped the policies and strategies the cities decided to implement, eventually leading to distinct accumulation regimes. This study privileges a political economy definition of institutions (Amable, 2003; Boyer, 1988), and employs the concept of institutional complementarities (Amable, 2016; Aoki, 1994) in order to tackle the institutional arrangements of Nanjing and Suzhou. Initially, the paper introduces the debate on the nature of China’s state, arguing that the country is better characterized by its internal institutional heterogeneities, and that these heterogeneities often reveal themselves at subnational levels. Then the paper proceeds by presenting the analytical framework employed in this research and, after introducing the definitions of institutions and institutional complementarities, a comparison between Nanjing and Suzhou is presented. The final sections summarize the institutional characteristics and accumulation regimes found in both cities and conclude with the analysis.

Empowerment or Disintegration? Migration, Social Institutions, and Collective Action in Rural China

This article integrates literature on social movements and migration to examine how migration shapes both the cognitive and social foundations of collective action in origin communities. Using longitudinal data and in-depth interviews from rural China, the author finds that outward migration spurs collective resistance in origin communities and shapes the form and scale of collective action. Migration fosters noninstitutionalized rather than institutionalized collective action, because it induces relational diffusion that empowers peasants to mobilize and employ more effective resistance strategies. This holds more for small- and medium-size collective action than for large-scale mobilizations, mainly because out-migration can also trigger community disintegration that inhibits larger-scale action. Furthermore, local social institutions condition the role of migration: migration has a stronger positive impact in close-knit villages embedded in strong lineage networks than in less cohesive villages. The author contextualizes the findings against the distinct institutional arrangements in China, which were originally engineered to disenfranchise rural-origin people but which instead have inadvertently politicized migrants and peasants alike.

Debt Limits and Credit Bubbles in General Equilibrium

We provide a novel characterization of self-enforcing debt limits in a general equilibrium framework of risk sharing with limited commitment, where defaulters are subject to recourse (a fractional loss of current and future endowments) and exclusion from future credit. We show that debt limits are exactly equal to the present value of recourse plus a credit bubble component. We provide applications to models of sovereign debt, private collateralized debt, and domestic public debt. Implications include an original equivalence mapping among distinct institutional arrangements, thereby clarifying the relationship between different enforcement mechanisms and the connection between asset and credit bubbles.

Elections, Heterogeneity of Central Bankers and Inflationary Pressure: The case for staggered terms for the president and the central banker

Abstract This paper analyzes a signaling model of monetary policy when inflation targets are not set by the monetary authority. The most important implication of the model’s solution is that a higher ex-ante dispersion in central bankers’ preferences, referred to as heterogeneity in policy orientation, increases the signaling cost of commitment to inflation targets. The model allows for a comparison of two distinct institutional arrangements regarding the tenure in office of the central banker and the head of government. We find that staggered terms yield superior equilibria when opportunistic political business cycles can arise from presidential elections. This is a consequence of a reduction of information asymmetry about monetary policy, and gives theoretic support to the observed practice of staggered terms among independent central banks.

The critical role of a lead institution in ecotourism management: a case of dual governance in Belum-Temengor, Malaysia

ABSTRACTThe study examined the dual governance of ecotourism in Belum-Temengor Forest Reserve, Malaysia, through the qualitative method whereby 29 semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with stakeholders of the ecotourism sector in the locality. Two distinct institutional arrangements resulted when one third of the forest reserve was declared the Royal Belum State Park and the Perak State Parks Corporation (PSPC) designated for its environmental management. By contrast, there was no lead institution for Temengor, where licensed logging also took place. The findings showed that the status/categorisation of forest land, the prioritisation of conservation and the presence of a lead institution significantly affected the ecotourism governance of a locality. The PSPC’s effective stewardship ensured that ecotourism was conducted sustainably at the state park, but the lack of a Temengor lead institution resulted in unregulated visitor entries and poor solid waste disposal in Temengor forest sites. The study contributes to the tourism governance discourse in Malaysia by highlighting the undesirability of a dual governance structure premised on unequal status of the ecotourism destinations involved. The study also demonstrates the need for leadership and multi-actors’ collaboration in the environmental management of ecotourism destinations.

Tough Choices: School Behaviour Management and Institutional Context

In the light of recent disciplinary reform in United States and United Kingdom schools, academic attention has increasingly focused on school punishment. Drawing on interviews with school staff in alternative and mainstream schools in the United States and the United Kingdom, we highlight differences in understandings and practices of school discipline. We argue that, in both countries, there is a mismatch between mainstream schools and alternative schools regarding approaches to punishment, techniques employed to manage student behaviour and supports given to students. While these disparities mirror what one would expect based on the distinct institutional arrangements and organizational priorities of alternative and mainstream schools, they pose particular problems for children transitioning between the two types of school. In this article, we raise a series of questions about the impact of these mismatches on children’s experiences and the potential for school disciplinary reform to achieve lasting results.

Citizen Empowerment in Service Delivery

This paper examines different approaches for promoting empowerment and discusses conditions required for effective empowerment. It focuses on three empowerment models, including grievance redress, participatory performance monitoring, and community-driven development. There are three sets of factors that affect people’s ability to influence service delivery: institutional properties of empowerment models, citizen participation, and responses of service providers and public officials.Evidence suggests that all three models can enhance people’s capacity to engage with service providers and government agencies, articulate their needs, and demand better service quality and accountability. Yet, these models are based on distinct institutional arrangements that account for the variation in their empowerment and service delivery outcomes.Citizen empowerment in service delivery necessitates the need to enhance people’s ability and willingness to participate and express their voice. It also requires commitment of service providers and government agencies to facilitate fair and effective redress. To address these conditions, policy makers need to ensure careful design and effective outreach as well as support broader policies to allow opportunities for citizen participation, enforce the rule of law, and ensure inclusive access to services.

ANÁLISE DOS MODELOS INSTITUCIONAIS DE REGULAÇÃO ECONÔMICA DA EXPLORAÇÃO DO PETRÓLEO NOS EUA, BRASIL, ARGENTINA, VENEZUELA E ARÁBIA SAUDITA

This paper aims to investigate the institutional and the regulation models of the production of oil of the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, especially contractual point of view and the level of government intervention. The theoretical conception of the regulation tends to accommodate the interests of lobbies politics, mainly the regulated industries and the consumers, as form of political support to the government. The oil is a strategical factor in the international economy. Govornments tend to support the producing companies of oil and they look for to participate in the profits for its extraction. Thus, it was demonstrated the five distinct realities how much to the production, consumption, capacity of refining and trade of the oil in the studied countries. It was also studied the forms of distinct institutional arrangements for which these countries regulate the exploration, either through contracts of concession and institutionalization of regulating agencies of the sector, as the United States, or only with contracts of concession as in Argentina. In the Venezuelan case, there is only a contract of joint-venture between the private initiative and the state-owned company. Saudi Arabia has an absolute monopoly in the oil sector of state property. In Brazil, there are a concession contract, regulating agency and one company of state capital.

Institutional diversity and local forest governance

• We investigate the effects of distinct institutional arrangements on forest conditions. • We analyze observations from 200 rural communities in Bolivia. • Institutions for rule-making, monitoring, and sanctioning affect forest conditions. • The more governance activities local users engage in, the better it is for forests. Scholarship on common-pool resource governance suggests that collective outcomes vary with the strength of the local arrangements for compliance monitoring. Following Elinor Ostrom's approach to question panaceas, we explore the possibility that there are multiple institutional designs can help sustain forests. We test this argument with data from a sample of 200 forest user groups in Bolivia and find broad empirical support for our propositions: Local monitoring can be an important predictor of forest governance performance, but focusing on monitoring alone can be misleading. Sometimes other aspects of the local governance system, such as self-organized rule making and sanctioning, are more important in explaining why some groups govern their forests more effectively than others. We also find that the more governance functions that communities decide to organize themselves, the more likely it is that local forests are sustained.

Economic Integration, Cultural Standardization, and the Politics of Social Insurance

We explore cultural aspects of globalization and provide a model to illuminate some possible effects of globalization on the politics of redistribution within nations. The argument of the paper is as follows. Globalization is an extension of nationalism (not its antithesis) with regard to some aspects of culture and economic structure: it promotes cultural standardization and economic integration across national boundaries. But unlike nationalism, globalization does this without providing either the international cultural solidarity or governmental institutions capable of supporting egalitarian redistribution and insurance on a global scale, while weakening the nation-based institutions for the same. In this respect a globalized world may recreate the social structure of the archetypal agrarian empire: a dominant English-speaking class of cosmopolitans presiding over a heterogeneous and provincial underclass with little solidarity across the language groups and weak nationally-based instruments of social insurance and egalitarian redistribution. The politics of social insurance may thus increasingly pit the cosmopolitans against the provincials (not capital against labor, or even the high earners against the low earners, as many of the cosmopolitans are far from rich.) The result need not be institutional convergence to a world of uniformly minimalist welfare states, however, for the process of specialization induced by greater integration may support distinct institutional arrangements appropriate to each economy's divergent product mixes. Countries specializing in goods characterized by volatile demand or requiring high levels of specific skills may be induced by globalization to strengthen their systems of social protection.

Bills of exchange, interest bans, and impersonal exchange in Islam and Christianity

A vast economic history literature suggests that medieval institutions supporting contract enforcement were necessary for impersonal exchange to emerge. Yet this literature cannot account for the bill of exchange, an important financial instrument that had positive legal standing in both the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds but remained relegated to personal networks only in the former. This paper suggests that a seemingly innocuous difference – the involvement of currency exchange in European but not Middle Eastern bills, a difference resulting from the secular legalization of interest in Europe – encouraged divergent endogenous processes resulting in these distinct institutional arrangements.

Science versus Profit in Research

This paper deals with Science and Technology in research policy. Following recent literature on the economics of knowledge, Science and Technology are defined as distinct institutional arrangements, broadly corresponding to nonmarket and market allocation mechanisms. Previous analyses argued that Science and Technology can and should coexist within an economic system or society. This paper shows that Science and Technology tend to coexist—and should coexist on welfare grounds—also within the same research field, and even when researchers are perfectly identical. Our analysis was inspired by the race to sequence the human genome, but the proposed theoretical framework can also be used to assess the recent evolution of other research fields, e.g., research on GMOs. The paper also provides guidelines for policies designed to achieve the optimal size of public research within a given research field.

ENFORCEABILITY AND RISK-SHARING IN FINANCIAL CONTRACTS: FROM THE SEA LOAN TO THE COMMENDA IN LATE MEDIEVAL VENICE

My dissertation uses historical records and a context-specific mechanism-design model to investigate the institutional and contractual arrangements that enhanced mobilization of capital and risk-sharing in late-medieval Venice.This disssertation was written at the Department of Economics at the European University Institute under the supervision of Professors Avner Greif and Ramon Marimon with support from the Social Science History Institute at Stanford University. I also wish to thank Andrea Drago, Gavin Wright, Jaime Reis, and Leandro Prados de la Escosura for their help in various ways. The funding of long-distance risky trade in late medieval Venice could potentially promote economic prosperity, but it required that merchants were able to commit ex-ante not to breach their financial contracts ex-post. Institutions for contract enforcement were thus required to mitigate this commitment problem and enable welfare-enhancing financial exchange.Institutions are constraints that enable merchants to commit. For a definition of institutions, see Greif, Historical Institutional Analysis; and North, Institutions. Distinct institutional arrangements enforce different sets of contractual forms, among which particular ones can be chosen. The selection of various contracts, and their underlying institutional foundations, has significant efficiency effects. The dissertation thus integrates a historical institutional analysis of the emergence and transition of various contracts with the study of their efficiency attributes. This approach enables me to address the following questions: What institutions for contract enforcement enabled the Venetians to commit to the sea loan (a debt-like contract) and the commenda (an equity-like contract)? What caused the transition from the former to the latter? Did the Venetians attain an optimal allocation of risk?

Coordenação vertical do transporte de madeira: análise empírica dos arranjos institucionais existentes na indústria brasileira de celulose

Este trabalho trata dos elementos que influenciam o processo de escolha dos distintos arranjos institucionais existentes no transporte de madeira entre florestas e fábricas de celulose. Buscou-se, a partir de análises estatísticas, detectar a influência das variáveis descritas pela Economia dos Custos de Transação - ECT - no processo de escolha dos arranjos institucionais. No processo de análise foram discutidas, sob a ótica dos custos de transação, não apenas as questões referentes à integração vertical, mas também aquelas referentes ao tamanho dos agentes envolvidos na transação.