Economic Configurations Research Articles

Danger Zones for Banking Crises in Emerging Markets

AbstractThis paper employs a recently developed statistical algorithm in order to build an early warning model for banking crises in emerging markets. The procedure creates many ‘artificial’ samples by iteratively perturbing the original data set and estimates many models from these samples. The final model is constructed by aggregation, so that, by construction, it is flexible enough to accommodate new data for out‐of‐sample prediction. Out of a large number (540) of candidate explanatory variables, ranging from macroeconomic variables to balance sheet indicators, our procedure selects a handful of indicators (and their combinations) that is sufficient to generate accurate out‐of‐sample predictions of banking crises. Using data covering emerging markets from 1980 to 2010, the model identifies two banking crisis' ‘danger‐zones’, e.g. economic configurations that are conducive to crises. The first occurs when high interest rates on bank deposits, possibly reflecting liquidity risks and solvency fears, interact with credit‐booms and capital flights; the second occurs when an investment boom is financed by a large rise in banks' net foreign exposure. We compare our model to models derived by standard econometric techniques, and find that our approach delivers much better out‐of‐sample predictions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The festival of moors and christians as pillar of the arts.

ABSTRACTThe Festivals of Moors and Christians represents a unique and concrete world that crosses both the history and geography of Spain and its social, political and economic configurations. Historically, they have had a pedagogical sense and, for that reason, they present the complexity of different events, elements, objects and actors that compose it as contrasting elements (assimilation of nationalism and regionalisms or the eternal Hispanic struggle between good and evil), making everything appear normal, exerting a power that few celebrations hold. These chameleonic feasts have adapted to different historical moments and, with the coming of postmodernity, have opened their gates to a colorful game of fantasy where visual and performing arts have become of the utmost importance.

The Digital Economy and Variegated Capitalism

This article sets out to conceptualize the ways in which the development of the digital economy (Malecki & Moriset, 2007) can be understood within the framework of variegated capitalism (Peck & Theodore, 2007). In doing so, it explores the question of how communication technologies interact with place-specific institutional, political, and economic configurations to shape the geographically differentiated construction of an economy centred on the production, distribution, and consumption of digital information. These interactions are examined through the development of geolocation technologies and their impact on a variety of approaches to jurisdiction over the Internet.

Les zones grises de l’autonomie juvénile. Le traitement de la solidarité familiale dans le fonds d’aide aux jeunes

Grey areas for the self-sufficiency of young people. The inclusion of family solidarity in the funds for supporting young people How are public and family solidarity expressed in concrete terms in the financial assistance schemes for vulnerable young people ? For those directly involved with public solidarity who are tasked with implementing the social policy for young people, this question relates to the extent and limits of family solidarity, i. e. of the support the young person may reasonably expect from their parent in varying social and economic configurations. An ethnographic study into two departmental funds for aid for young people reveals, firstly, the implicit familialisation of integration aid, taking the family rather than the individual as the basic unit of intervention and, moreover, the challenges encountered by those directly involved in this scheme when assessing self-sufficiency of the individual at stage of life characterised by fluctuating and ambiguous situations.

The Embededness of Responsible Business Practice: National Institutional Environments and Corporate Social Responsibility

Academic literature recognizes that firms in different countries deal with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in different ways. Because of this, analysts presume that variations in national institutional arrangements affect CSR practices. Literature however lacks specificity in determining, first, what parts of national political economic configurations actually affect CSR practices; second, the precise aspects of CSR affected by national-institutional variables; third, how causal mechanisms between national institutional framework variables and aspects of CSR practices work. Because of this the literature is not able to address to what extent CSR practices are affected by either global or national policies, discourses and economic pressures; and to what extent CSR evolves as either an alternative to or an extension of national institutional arrangements. This paper proposes an alternative approach that focuses on an exploration of links between disaggregated variables, which can then be the basis for imagining new national-institutional configurations affecting aspects of CSR.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): the Chinese perspective

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was accepted by the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) as one among other pathfinders, for a comprehensive Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP). Though the TPP negotiations do not include China at the moment, she has declared her interest in the TPP and is paying close attention to it. In fact, many question the likely success of the TPP with China's exclusion from it, given her prominence in the region. To provide insights for leveraging trade opportunities with the TPP economies, China's export potentials with the TPP are empirically tested and compared with those of alternative economic configurations in East Asia which China is a party to, namely the ASEAN+1, ASEAN+3 and ASEAN+6. The empirical findings suggest that China's participation in the TPP will offer better market access for final goods, an important trade opportunity that is somewhat limited in partnerships through regional initiatives. Even then, the paper contends that the payoffs to China following the TPP deal remain intangible and at best speculative given the coverage (or substance) and depth of the agreement.

Vocational education and training in Australia and three-dimensional federalism

Education policy-making in Australia remains one of the most complex of government’s responsibilities, affecting a broad spectrum of social and political advancements of national and international importance. The advancement of education policy has been accepted as a key factor in achieving the labour productivity and innovation capacity that are needed to compete within the global economy and to build social capital. Yet, the challenge of development and implementation of education policy in Australia has been significantly influenced by its unique federal model, where the state and commonwealth jurisdictions increasingly overlap. This article offers a descriptive account of federal policy involvement in Australian education since federation, with particular attention to vocational education. It demonstrates that national education policy development is characterised by downwards, upwards and horizontal patterns of cooperation between national and state governments, which are in turn influenced by contextual factors such as national economic policy goals, economic and social conditions and political configurations. The article presents an innovative approach to educational research as it brings together two fields of specialisation: vocational education and training research and political science.

Capitalism and evolution

In this paper I to ask an old fashioned question, “Why do capitalist economies evolve in the way that they do?” The answer will lie, in the nature of human curiosity and the corresponding growth of knowledge and in the particular instituted rules of the game that induce the self transformation of each particular economic order. The essential idea is this; the manner of self transforming is contingent on the manner of self-ordering, so that different instituting frames have different dynamic consequences. The notion of order provides the bridge to the systemic properties of the economy, the nature of its parts and the manner of their interconnection, while the notion of transformation provides the link with evolution and the open-ended, essentially unpredictable, development of capitalism. From my perspective capitalist economies are ignorance economies, in which highly specialised individuals and teams know a great deal about very little, so that the productive strength of the system, its collective knowing, depends on how the pools of specialised, narrow understandings are connected. Connectivity requires organisation and organisation depends on rules of the game and on belief and trust so that we can rely upon the testimony and actions of others. Failure of trust leads to failure of connectivity and a corresponding loss of system coherence. Order is central to the notion of economic evolution and, in practice, economic configurations demonstrate immense richness and subtlety but order is not equilibrium. Systems in equilibrium do not evolve. That the day to day structures of capitalism are the product of ordering processes in the epistemic as well as the material realm seems to me self evident and it is equally self evident that these structures are restless, that their development is open-ended and unpredictable.

Globalising Worlds and New Economic Configurations – Edited by Christine Tamásy and Mike Taylor

Growth and ChangeVolume 41, Issue 1 p. 138-141 Globalising Worlds and New Economic Configurations – Edited by Christine Tamásy and Mike Taylor Jane Pollard, Jane Pollard Centre for Urban and Regional Development StudiesSchool of Geography, Politics and SociologyNewcastle UniversityEmail: j.s.pollard@newcastle.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author Jane Pollard, Jane Pollard Centre for Urban and Regional Development StudiesSchool of Geography, Politics and SociologyNewcastle UniversityEmail: j.s.pollard@newcastle.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 03 March 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2257.2009.00520.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume41, Issue1March 2010Pages 138-141 RelatedInformation

The unplanned creative city: an emerging sustainability? Crossroads between education and innovation in Santiago, Chile

Santiago, Chile's capital city, has undergone numerous changes in its urban fabric due the process of economic globalisation since mid 1980s, affecting its social, physical and economic configurations. But behind all those changes, the concentration of high knowledge-based activities has been proof critical to improve the innovation capacity of the city; in Santiago's case those are the information and communications technologies (ICT) and biotechnology, mainly clustered in central areas. Several government initiatives have encouraged new approaches to improve these technology concentrations, most of them based in the 'Technology Park' typology, disconnected from the traditional networks of knowledge. In this context, the University Neighborhood of Santiago (UNS) project could reveal some clues where to encourage future development. Thus, the unplanned formation of creative hubs in areas in regeneration is presented as two complementary processes that could lead a more sustainable approach to the future development of city historical centres.

Introduction to “Political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations”

The papers in this special issue focus on the political ecology of waterfronts in selected cities in Europe, North America and the Caribbean. The papers incorporate emphases on the myriad influences that different scales of social and environmental policy development and implementation, planning decisions, infrastructure funding, investment and ownership practices, and public engagement, for example, have on the social and ecological processes that occur on urban waterfronts. We posit that urban waterfronts are interesting and complex spatial locations that, when studied with attention to broader transformative processes as well as the changes that occur within the scale of the urban waterfront, allow for new insights into the production of nature, patterns of social entanglement, and political–economic configurations in cities.

The death of radical thought: from dispassionate to disinterested professionalism in intellectual labour

Much has been written on the role that the intellectual classes play as ‘workers’ within the reproduction of advanced capitalist systems of production. This article traces some of the salient developments of this group of workers during the twentieth century focusing on their critical, although sometimes problematic, relation to capital. Using the seminal ideas of Aglietta, Lipietz and others associated with the French ‘regulation school’ I propose the idea that intellectual workers function as key agents within the mode of capitalist regulation, most significantly as ‘cultural regulators’. The article goes on to suggest that there has been a significant drift in the status of this group following the demise of ‘Fordism’ and the emergence of new ‘post-Fordist’ economic configurations and their corresponding ‘promotional cultures’ throughout many advanced industrial nations. It is suggested that this shift marks a crucial realignment of notions of professionalism within the occupations and job prospects of the intellectual classes, signalling a move away from a ‘professional radicalism’ in intellectual work towards a far more routinized and bureaucratic mode of labour. The article considers how this shift has impacted upon higher education within the context of the United Kingdom.

Historical Impacts on Political Economy in Pakistan

This article analyses the role and impact of the pre-1947 historical developments on political, policy and economic configurations in post-1947 Pakistan. There is a major gap in social science analysis on how and why these processes had pre-1947 main-springs. The article illustrates that Pakistan experienced a substantial level of resilience and continuity of structures and processes from the period of British rule and even earlier. This ‘long view’ can help us understand the undercurrents and articulations of power in the state of Pakistan. The article scrutinizes transitions in the late Mughal period; British policies and their consequences; and the major political transitions and policy parameters in post-1947 Pakistan. Linkages and continuities, as well as the relationships between the past and present, are brought together in this article in an effort to understand the fundamental forces that have shaped the political economy of Pakistan.

The democratic method of obtaining capital—culture, governmentality and ethics of mass investment

The past thirty years have witnessed a range of complex changes in global and national political–economic landscapes. One of the most dramatic aspects of these changes is the “globalization” of finance capital. “Finance” is often said to be at the center of a new and globalizing set of financial spaces in which “everyday” actors are increasingly asked to participate. However, these developments are often depicted in the critical literature in epochal terms as political–economic configurations arising out of macro‐structural episodes of change. In contrast to these approaches, this paper argues for a “cultural economy” for finance as a way of both situating recent developments in a more specific and historically subtle manner and underscoring the ways in which “finance” is lived and constituted at a “minor” or everyday level. By assessing the advertising initiatives of three campaigns of “mass investment” from earlier moments of the twentieth century, this paper foregrounds some of the contexts out of and against which neo‐liberal modes of globalized finance arise, concluding that more historically‐situated accounts could lead to more contingent, and hence, contestable analyses of “global finance”.

Rare Resources and Environmental Crises: Notes on Water Management among the Aït Unzâr Pastoralists in South-Eastern Morocco

Introduction This is a brief report on an on-going study that is being carried out as part of a larger interdisciplinary project (the IMPETUS Project at Bonn and Cologne Universities) focusing on water management in south-eastern Morocco. (1) The first area selected for ethnographic enquiry is the southern region of the Dra Valley, which corresponds to the last two oases of Ktawoua and Mhamid. (2) This area represents the proper Saharan part of the Dra Valley and is most affected by drought and desertification. At the same time, it is the most isolated and, despite real needs, also the least studied and less impacted by 'development projects' than the other four oases of Mezguita, Tinzouline, Ternata and Fezouata. The study focuses on the access to and management of natural resources--mainly the rarest one, water--in relation to the social and economic features of the communities living in the area. It is also concerned with the interactions between nomad and sedentary peoples, both in the past and today, the process of sedentarisation among nomads; the transformation of the pastoral economy, and the differences and similarities between the strategies used by nomadic and sedentary domestic units for coping with crises. After a broad survey of the wider region, stretching from the southern High Atlas to the Saharan borders in October 2000, fieldwork among the Ait Unzar was carried out between February and April 2001 and again, between September and December 2001. The Context of Research: South-Eastern Morocco and the Dra Valley Three main forms of economy have existed in the Dra Valley since early times: agriculture, animal husbandry and trade. For ecological reasons, agriculture has been restricted to six oases that benefit from the hydrological resources of the valley, especially the periodical floods of the Wadi Dra. The date palm is the most productive and widely cultivated plant and has the highest market value, but other annual crops--cereals, lucerne, legumes, vegetables, fruit trees (in the north)--have always been cultivated, mainly for domestic consumption. Until recently, the most common form of pastoralism was extensive herding. Its economic and social framework was well adapted to the extreme ecological environments of desert lands and mountains, and to the consequent scarcity and irregularity of rains. Various nomadic populations occupied the huge grazing lands surrounding the six oases of Wadi Dra. Intensive herding also existed, and was practised both by peasants in the oases and by settled nomads. Finally, the valley played a major role in the trans-Saharan trade between western Africa and the Maghreb, the Dra being the caravan route leading from Timbuktu to the northern cities and coasts of Morocco. These ecological and economic configurations affected the political relations between people of the valley. Various dynamics of complementarity, conflict and subordination between: sedentary peoples and nomadic groups; different nomadic communities; and people of the Dra and the Moroccan ruling dynasties or centralised state authorities, marked the history of this area. The hegemony of Arab Bedouin groups coming from North Africa was well consolidated in the region by the medieval period, but in the seventeenth century the southern Berbers, previously dispersed by the Maqil Arabs, gathered in the huge Ait Atta confederation and again played a dominant role from the High Atlas down to the Dra Valley. Since these times 'protection' pacts (raya) established between the farmers living in the qsar (fortified villages) of the oases and the nomads became common. The Dra region has also been characterised by a relative autonomy from the central power of the Makhzen, so much so that it has been called the bled assiba, meaning 'the country of insubordination'. This characterisation persisted during French colonisation. The Ai't Atta especially were among the toughest to resist the French occupation, and the 'pacification' of southern Morocco was achieved only in 1936. …

Of Transgression and Forgiveness

Philosophers, theologians, and lawyers concern themselves with the ethics of conflict resolution and the pragmatics of forgiveness. So do writers of literature. Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, a play set in the context of post-Pinochet Chile about the reaction of a woman to a chance encounter with the man whom she believes tortured her during the period of the army's rule, explores the ethics of revenge by dramatizing the struggle between the woman and her husband, a member of the national reconciliation board. It raises the question what is the response to one who has intentionally harmed you before plunging us into the psyche of the torturer, a doctor whose participation in the torture sessions transforms him from healer to sadistic torturer and rapist who acts because he finds himself in a situation in which he is free to cast aside all the restraints that civilization has constructed to keep us from that terrible freedom. The play forces us to confront not merely the question of what a proper response to having been tortured might be but also to consider how being tortured changes one. The central figure's husband repeatedly is forced to acknowledge the gap between his wife and himself-he escaped torture and remains a liberal desiring to achieve a peaceful reconciliation between the tortured and the torturers; she is filled with rage and desires vengeance (23-6, 33-42). To what extent is the individual psychological response shaped both by cultural expectations and by individual experiences? What kinds of psychologies are constituted by particular cultures and economic configurations? The larger movement that contains questions about the possibilities for individual and communal forgiveness is the quest for justice, in the course of which we will also touch on questions of transgression, punishment and responsibility. This essay starts with an analysis of Lone Star. The movie combines several cinematic genres: it is a western, a police procedural, and partakes of some of the conventions of film noir. In the second section of the essay, I examine an essay by Emmanuel Levinas on the Talmudic responsibility to forgive. Levinas, who died recently, was a Lithuanian Jewish philosopher engaged in the centuries long attempt to join the rigor of Athens with the ethical concerns of Jerusalem. Here I will interrogate Levinas' struggle to forgive Heidegger his Nazi politics as he feels Talmudically bound to do so. The last part of the essay returns to fiction and looks at The Reader, a German attempt to consider German responsibility for the Holocaust.

Culture and accounting in Indonesia: An empirical examination

This study examines the relationships among the cultural characteristics of Indonesian society, reporting practices of Indonesian firms, and accounting standards promulgated by the Association of Indonesian Accountants. It is argued that an empirical relation exists between the change in cultural values, as conceived by Hofstede's theory of the five dimensions of cultural values (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, masculinity, and time horizon and the change in accounting values as captures by Gray's four dimensions (professionalism, conservatism, secrecy, and uniformity). Using LISREL to evaluate data between 1981 and 1992, three of Hofstede's five cultural values (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and individualism) have significant relationships with one or more accounting value. This limited confirmation of the culture-accounting relationships suggest that particular historical and economic configurations must be considered in longitudinal analysis. The conflicting influences of extensive government involvement in the economy and nascent market competition are a possible explanation of the Indonesian results.

Intercluster Lithic Patterning at Nobles Pond: A Case for “Disembedded” Procurement among Early Paleoindian Societies

This study examines the relation between raw-material procurement and subsistence behavior among foraging societies. “Embedded procurement” of raw materials may characterize many or most modern foraging societies (Binford 1979). Past societies, however, present economic configurations different than those of any contemporary society. The Early Paleoindian societies of North America present extreme examples in this regard, and were characterized by high mobility, low population density, and high weapon reliability. A lithic-debitage analysis of a portion of the Nobles Pond site (33ST357) supports the argument that the acquisition of lithic raw materials was not embedded in subsistence behavior, but rather, was a specialized activity required by the particular demands of band aggregation in a location far removed from sources of acceptable lithic materials.

Comparative historical research and rational choice theory: The case of transitions to democracy

The "third wave" of democratization in this century, which rolled first through Southern Europe in the 1970s, then Latin America, and finally Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has brought about a revision of three fundamental theoretical premises on which social scientists have based conventional explanations of political regime change.' First, conventional thinking has been preoccupied with identifying structural "preconditions" of democratization, such as economic development, property rights, class configurations, cultural patterns, and state institutions. More recent approaches focus instead on the process of political interaction and bargaining between stalwarts of an existing non-democratic regime, reform elites, and outside democratic challengers. One guiding hypothesis of revisionist thinking is that the process of transition is a better predictor of eventual regime outcomes than structural preconditions that precede the advent of liberalization.2 Second, whereas conventional thinking insists on the importance of democratic norms and orientations as preconditions of democratization, novel approaches argue that popular democratic commitments are the result, not the prerequisite of democratization.3 Democracy is the contingent outcome of conflicts that depends on actors' initial resources, not their values.4 The key factor allowing democracies to emerge and stabilize is not legitimacy, but the absence of alternatives to democracy that significant political actors view as feasible and preferable.5

Muscle Manor: the Use of Sport Metaphor and History in Sport Sociology

This paper looks at one historical paradigm in the study of sport. Using social traits reflective of feudalism and capitalism, big time bodybuilding developed a set of seemingly contradictory institutions and values. Atavistic social and political relations were fused with a modern capitalist economic base. Two important traits in bodybuilding's ideology - dependency and individualism - are examined as reflective of these different epochs. It is shown that feudal ideology and social traits at times function to obscure capitalist relations and vice versa. The consequence of such interplay is to reinforce existing political and economic configurations by preventing competition and retarding cohesion within bodybuilding's rank and file.