Economic Divisions Research Articles

The phantom in American Arcadia: Rethinking race in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

The article explores the problem of race and racial ambiguity in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000). Referring to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and her assumptions concerning “the Africanist presence,” the paper discusses how the character’s repressed African-American past returns to haunt not only the protagonist but also the reader. As biracial Coleman Silk succeeds in passing for a Jew, his body becomes a signifier whose signified turns out to be problematic. While Roth’s narrative argues that the ideal of a self-made man that the protagonist represents is always already haunted by the ghost of racial uncertainty, it also demonstrates that the issue of race functions in contemporary writing primarily as a metaphor, or “a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological ‘race’ ever was.” Finally, the paper explores the way in which Roth’s novel addresses the long familiar fear that racial boundaries do not exist and the coherent white American self is an illusion.

Individual and Crowd in Stephen Crane’s New York

In the archetypal American success story, social mobility often depends on physical mobility. But such narratives of individual progress became harder to sustain amid the congestion and economic division of the 19th-century city. Industrialization and poverty brought physical immobility and constraint, elements at odds with temporal narrative itself. Both these changes in city life and the textual crisis they engendered are reflected in the work of Stephen Crane. His New York fiction, built on linear narrative and authorial detachment, tracks individual economic failure in a city divided by class privilege and exploitation. His newspaper sketches, rather, are constructed in spatial rather than temporal terms, with a focus on crowds rather than individuals. Impromptu groupings gather and then disperse, occupying space rather than moving through it. Potential conflict is diffused, the latent energy of the crowd turned into a momentary community that reappropriates and reshapes both city and text.

Pandora - valuation method of social costs of road accidents in Poland

The paper presents a valuation method of social costs of road accidents and collisions in Poland, which was developed in the Economic Division of Road and Bridge Research Institute. In addition to personal losses (expressed in physical victims of road accidents) and emotional losses (in relation to a victims' circle and their loved ones suffering mostly in the emotional way), the economic costs fall into a basic category of consequences of road occurrences. The high share of all these costs in the economy of countries (an average of over 2% of GDP), gives them the economic dimension of a problem. Moreover, the results of a detailed analysis of their structure convince that it is worth considering the process of road safety in a broader context, not just a transport one, but social as well. Dangers posed by road traffic and expressed as personal and emotional losses are still undervalued by a society and a governing body. That is the reason why the motorization education including the economic aspect can be effective: financial arguments appeal to the imagination of each homo economicus. From the operational level, unit costs of accidents in the form of the value of life and health of victims, are an essential element of the economic viability valuation of road projects, based on an analysis of social costs and benefits of road users. For this reason the choice of valuation methods for socio-economic costs of occurrences is essential and that is why it has been the subject of research in the field of transport economics for a long time.

Be Careful What You Wish For: The Ironic Connection Between the Civil Rights Struggle and Today's Divided America

The deep political and economic divisions that characterize the contemporary United States have been the subject of much discussion and analysis. However, most of the accounts of these divisions have tended to emphasize relatively recent events or trends, such as the Tea Party movement or the extreme partisanship that has marked the last three presidential administrations (e.g., Obama, George Bush Jr., Clinton). The origins of today's divisions, however, have much older roots. They date to the heyday of the Civil Rights struggle and ironically to the seminal achievements of the movement. More accurately, it is the story of not one, but two parallel movements, the revitalized civil rights movement of the early to mid‐1960s and the powerful segregationist countermovement, that quickly developed in response to the African‐American freedom struggle. The argument is that over the course of the decade of the 1960s, these two linked struggles decisively altered the partisan geography of the United States, and in the process pushed the national Democratic and Republican parties sharply to the left and right, respectively, undermining the centrist policy convergence of the postwar period and setting the parties on the divisive course they remain on today.

Important Elements in Consumer's Decision-making Process

For many Romanian people material welfare is a basic motivation for their endeavour towards a good life as they represent it and want it. In Romania, throughout the period of transition, there has been a strong tendency towards social polarization. The economic inequalities also had a long term, systematic character. The economic divisions and poverty are, at first sight, purely economic phenomena. The market decides who is rich and who is poor, who will have the desired standard of life and who will experience material deprivation. A deeper analysis will reveal, however, that, at least in a poor country, as Romania, the division of society on poor people and rich people has genetic and functional connections with the social and political order.Why are the rich people rich and the poor people poor? Which is the “key” to accomplishment which the people seek and treasure? Whom are we to hold responsible for success or failure in getting the desired standard of life: the individual characters or the social contexts? How much of the variance (and hierarchy) of welfare is due to the individual characters and how much to the structural ones? Agent or structure? The chance the people have to live better depend both on the individual characteristics (options and motivation, resources and capacities, adequate representations of the social play rules), and on the social context in which they live.

Study on the Business Mode Innovation of Firms in Logistics Industry: A Case Study

In the globalization era, alliance and partner-like relationship has continued to become more and more popular among academic scholars and practical managers. The service sector plays an increasingly important role in economic development. The emergence, development and mature of productive service industry reflect the deepening of modern economic industry labor division and the complication of industrial construction, as well as the dynamic features of resource flow, value flow and knowledge flow across industries. This article elaborates elements of the business model innovation though case analysis. By analyzing macro-environment and regional environment of logistics industry development, this article elaborates how logistics firms make innovation to create new business model and summarizes three typical business models “product supplier, value-added service supplier and supply chain service supplier”, which show the upgrading route of making profit from the economy scale to integrated service.

Applying a New Sub-Systems Model to Analyze Economic Policy and the Question of Systemic Persistence

Easton's systems theory greatly contributed to the field of political science by providing a useful holistic framework, demonstrating how the political system functions, by meeting societal demands with policy outputs. Easton's interest lay in the political system's persistence, which in his model, merely required the existence of community. Communities, however, require state-provided security to survive in a hostile international environment. Hence, this paper builds a sub-systemic governance model able to explain domestic political system and state persistence. The model argues that large input generating groups require sufficient allocation of public goods for the long term maintenance of the domestic political system. Application of the model to the successful South Korean case demonstrated that the share of public goods increased along with the size of the input generating group. Long term disruption of this critical subsystem in countries with large input generating groups, however, can destabilize the state and its domestic political system with increased pressure from unmet societal demands. This new sub-systemic model seeks to advance understanding of the operation of the system and open up new areas of research into the persistence of the domestic political system. The systems approach has greatly contributed to the study of politics. David Easton's seminal Systems Theory drew attention to important aspects of political life and provided a critical framework with which to understand and analyze inputs into the political system and policy outputs to the social environment. The advancement of systems theory in political science was hobbled, however by methodological shortcomings. Easton failed to operationalize key concepts, and as a result, the theory was neither applied nor tested. In addition, Easton's all-inclusive system design was unable to give insight into several systems-related questions areas of interest to social scientists, including the survival or collapse of states and their domestic political systems, regime change, and variation in the nature of policy outputs or societal inputs. Combining Easton's policy process framework with methodologically rigorous approaches sharing key system's theory assumptions helps to deepen understanding of these issues. By narrowing Easton's system to a critical subsystem comprised of the leader and his/her supporters, it becomes evident that changes in the size of the input-generating group can markedly affect the quality of government policy outputs. This new sub systemic model yields the prediction that leader's seeking to maintain power will allocate an increased ratio of public goods to private goods, the larger the size of the input generating group. After operationalizing the size of the input-generating group and the share of public vs. private goods allocated through economic policy, this paper applies this sub systemic hypothesis to explain recent changes in economic policy making in South Korea. Modernization theory provides the added insight that the forces of industrialization and economic development are increasing the size of the input-generating group in societies throughout the world, which are calling for public policy goods, in the form of democratic political rights as well as improved overall living standards. Leadership failing to respond to these increased demands over a prolonged period not only provokes regime change, but, in certain circumstances, can destabilize and trigger the collapse of states and of domestic political systems. Research into underdeveloped institutions, economic power concentration, sectarian division and other factors impeding delivery of public goods to large input generating groups, can offer further insight into the question of systemic persistence, the central concern of Easton's systems theory. The article first critiques the strengths and weaknesses of Easton's systems theory. A sub-systemic model is offered to ameliorate the methodological shortcomings of Easton's systems theory while making it applicable to questions concerning the persistence of domestic political systems and state maintenance. Applied to two cases of Korean industrial restructuring, the predictions of the sub-systemic model hold true: small input generating groups under authoritarian rule were associated with provision of private goods, whereas larger input generating groups under democracy produced policies that allocated public goods. The final section of the paper then explores the possible collapse of the domestic political system in cases where leadership is unable to provide public goods to large input generating groups.

Commentary: Sustaining progress towards comprehensive reproductive health services in Bangladesh

Commentary: Sustaining progress towards comprehensive reproductive health services in Bangladesh

Neoliberalization of Istanbul's Nightlife: Beer or Champagne?

AbstractThis article shows how the transformation of Istanbul's entertainment industry and of Beyoğlu, Istanbul's oldest, largest and the most diverse entertainment district, represents and reproduces spatial and economic divisions in the city. We argue that these differences also become compounded and intertwined with distinctions in consumption and taste. Taking a simultaneous look at the spatial, economic and symbolic transformations of the entertainment industry enables us to understand how and why these intense divisions emerge, and what kind of contestations, rationalizations and resistance strategies are at work in this transformation. A major contribution of this article is to document and discuss the political economy of the process of urban transformation in the city through the lens of the entertainment industry, providing an interesting case of ‘neoliberalism on the ground'. Examining the neoliberalization of nightlife in a relatively understudied context, Istanbul, also reveals that its segmentation and spatial inequality are not just determined by political economy but are also constitutive of it. By adding the concept of ‘image consumption' and taste distinctions into the analysis, the article also uncovers the symbolic nature of the ongoing transformations. Finally, exploring Beyoğlu as a district in transition with persistent contestations contributes, in turn, to the right to the city debate.

Sustainable Buildings and Contemporary Fire Protection Regimes in Australia

There is a long-term politics of regulating fire protection for the built environment in which the principal adversaries have been building developers - and often their government supporters- on one side, and the insurance industry and fire brigades on the other. Underlying such politics have been questions about the short-term versus long-term costs and benefits of fire protection with an emphasis on safety and security if life and property. In this struggle ‘green’ issues were regarded as merely a matter of customer preference rather than regulation. Over the past decade or so, environmental questions have emerged as a focal issue in fire protection. Ostensibly, general agreement has been reached promoting the idea of environmentally sustainable buildings with respect to fire prevention, albeit with disputes over the best means to produce such sustainability. While the fire protection industry promotes a vision of these differences being reconcilable through technological progress, this paper argues that the current politics reflects long-term political and economic divisions and scarcely reconcilable understandings of fire protection that go to the heart of what ‘sustainability’ is in the built environment.

Historyczne przesłanki kształtowania się polskiej kultury organizacyjnej oraz jej współczesne manifestacje w postawach i doznaniach psychicznych

The aims of the paper are: 1. Description (of the place) of Poland in the context of the economic and cultural divisions of the European space. 2. Checking if the hitherto divisions of European space are still important. In this context, the cultural division of European space is analyzed in cross – Catholic and Protestant – cultural circles. Economic division was initiated in the XVI century and divided Europe into two parts. In the first of them (Western Europe) capitalism was initialized. In the second the East European economic system has emerged. This economic system was based on agriculture and its key institution was the manor farm. The Polish organizational culture is an effect of participation in: the Catholic cultural circle and East European economic system. Contemporary researches show that the manor farm tradition is still in existence in the attitudes of workers and managers alike.

ASSESSMENT OF COMPETENCY LEVELS FOR ENTRY-LEVEL POSITIONS: A STUDY OF BUSINESS UNDERGRADUATE ALUMNI

ABSTRACT This paper presents the results of a business competency survey of alumni from a division of business and economics at a college in the southeastern United States. The survey contained 45 technical and nontechnical competencies that may be required for entry-level positions in business. The study compared the alumni perceptions of competency levels required by employers with the alumni perceptions of their own competency levels attained at the point of graduation from college. These comparisons identified statistically significant competency gaps (at p < .05) in the competency clusters of personal skills, communication, critical thinking, and computer skills. These research results may help educators to align business and general education programs with the current needs of the workplace. Keywords essential skills for business; business skills; knowledge, skills, and abilities for business; technical skills for business; soft skills for business; business competencies

Reappraising the place for private rental housing in the UK market: Why an unbalanced economy is at risk of becoming even worse…

There appears to be a current policy fascination with what rental provision from the private housing sector could offer to the UK’s housing market and to national and local economies. A plethora of reports from Parliamentary Committees, independent think-tanks, academic and professional bodies have promoted the benefits of new private rental supplies, but there seems little critical evaluation of whether this could make economic matters worse rather than better, nor of the potential negative impact upon local places. This Viewpoint tables a number of concerns on the nature of private rental supply and its problems. It notes the manner in which the rise in private renting is impacting upon other parts of the housing market, not least its growing influence on wider assessments of housing performance by the establishment of benchmarks that are based upon ‘open market’ conditions. Particular criticism is levelled at how private rental provision is increasing ‘social’ and economic divisions between those having settled and secure accommodation and those seeing their income lost to short-hold and limited residences. A critique is levelled against the promotion of the sector as some kind of a ‘value-neutral’ investment, since current rental and investment mechanisms represent an ideological framework to consolidate ever more resources with investors and property-owners that exclude increasing numbers of households from the potential benefits of their own owner-occupation. It is also argued that the ideological values underpinning a transfer of UK home ownership to the investment sector are going unreported, and that expansion of the private rental sector represents a real threat to future ‘affordable housing provision’. The piece concludes with some views for putting other frameworks and financial systems for a fairer basis of housing delivery into place.

The main methods of state regulation and their diagnostics in realization of social an d economic policy of the region

There is a set of instruments of carrying out the regional policy, successfully applied in these or those countries during various periods of their economic development. In our opinion, one of instruments of the state strategy of regional development and regional policy, rational social and economic division into districts which can form a basis of administrative-territorial division and the tool of regional policy has to act. Discrepancy of administrative-territorial division to objective borders of social and economic areas at imperfection of the federal relations conducts to economic, political, international collisions and the state shocks. But this discrepancy isn’t an absolute obstacle to implementation of regional policy and can be easily overcome without direct change of administrative-territorial division with three main mechanisms of implementation of regional policy: selective support of regional development, program approach to implementation of the purposes of regional policy and the budgetary federalism. This article is devoted to key instruments of realization of the state strategy of regional development and regional policy of territorial subjects of the Russian Federation.

ECONOMIC CONDITIONS OF THE STATES BEFORE AND AFTER THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

ABSTRACTEven though, American Civil War is considered as a seminal event in history of United States, there are not many empirical studies examining economic conditions of Union and Confederate states. Even though, economic conflict is not considered to be a cause of Civil War, economic conditions after war were vastly different in Union and Confederate states. The purpose of this study is to analyze economic outcomes of individuals in Confederate states and Union states before and after American Civil War using census data for 1860 and 1880. Our goal is to analyze improvements in occupation income scores. Since slaves were freed, we also examine whether there was a reduction in farm households.Keywords: The American Civil War, Census, Confederate States, Occupational Income Score1. INTRODUCTIONThe American Civil War is an event of significant economic impact in American history. The war resulted in abolition of slavery in Southern states and preservation of Union. The issues relating to slavery, trade and tariffs and state's rights were causing divisions between Northern and Southern states before Civil War. The economic divisions with Northern states with growing manufacturing sector and small farms using free labor and Southern states with large farms using slave labor aggravated situation. When Northern states wanted to ban slavery in Western Territories that would become new states, Southern states feared that such a move would eventually result in abolition of slavery and loss of their valuable assets in form of slaves. The American Civil War began with secession of Southern states, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, in sequential order, from Union in 1860-61. The war ended in 1865 with death of more than 750,000 people (Hacker, 2011) and destruction of South's infrastructure. Even though there is a vast literature on economic impact of civil war, most studies focus at macroeconomic level. The purpose of this study is to examine impact at individual level using census data.2. LITERATURE REVIEWThe American Civil War has been examined in detail. Therefore, we will only discuss literature relevant to this study. According to Beard and Beard (1927), defeat of agricultural South resulted in rise of Hacker (1940) also comes to same conclusion. However, his thesis is that victory of Northern states provided industrialist-capitalist class clout to pass legislation that resulted in the triumph of American capitalism. (Goldin and Lewis, 1975). In short, both Charles and Mary Beard and Hacker conclude that even though Civil War caused extensive damages, it also generated net benefits because of subsequent high growth. However, Cochran (1961), Salsbury (1967; Engerman, 1966) challenge these views. Cochran, for example, finds that growth in value added from 1839 to 1859 are similar to those from 1869 to 1889. Engerman (1966) finds that commodity output growth between 1870 and 1900 was similar to that between 1840 and 1860. Engerman (1966) also finds no basis for claim that US economic activity took off after war based on Gallman (1966) GNP estimates. Therefore, we may conclude that Civil War was not a defining moment as Beards and Hacker have claimed.Even though, census data has been an extensive source for micro-level analysis, there are not many studies that analyze Civil War using census data. Hacker (2011) uses it to estimate number of Civil War dead. Jaworski (2009) uses linked sample of census data for 1850 and 1870 to examine wealth buildup and concludes that wealth accumulation was significant in Southern states in 1850's and sluggish in 1860's. …

How Bayesian Analysis Cracked the Red-State, Blue-State Problem

In the United States as in other countries, political and economic divisions cut along geographic and demographic lines. Richer people are more likely to vote for Republican candidates while poorer voters lean Democratic; this is consistent with the positions of the two parties on economic issues. At the same time, richer states on the coasts are bastions of the Democrats, while most of the generally lower-income areas in the middle of the country strongly support Republicans. During a research project lasting several years, we reconciled these patterns by fitting a series of multilevel models to perform inference on geographic and demographic subsets of the population. We were using national survey data with relatively small samples in some states, ethnic groups and income categories; this motivated the use of Bayesian inference to partially pool between fitted models and local data. Previous, non-Bayesian analyses of income and voting had failed to connect individual and state-level patterns. Now that our analysis has been done, we believe it could be replicated using non-Bayesian methods, but Bayesian inference helped us crack the problem by directly handling the uncertainty that is inherent in working with sparse data.

“Queer” en Latin@

This essay reviews three scholarly works of queer-inflected US Chican@ and Latin@ studies that appeared in 2009 and 2010. The projects range in disciplinary approach from cultural studies (Rodríguez) to literary studies (Soto) to performance studies (Gutiérrez), but the review situates them on the common ground of a critical, interdisciplinary (queer) “humanities” methodology that continues to test its efficacy in accounting for ongoing processes of subjective formation and de-formation, both individual and collective, that insist on organizing themselves into and around categories like gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and race. The essay employs a recent theoretical intervention (Viego's) into ethnic and queer studies' more conventional and static invocations of subject formation to provide a productively critical frame for its engagement of the projects under review. Taken together, the review concludes, these projects simultaneously mark the impressive extent of the unfolding political histories and critical practices that have in less than a generation produced the conditions enabling such innovative and restless work, and in turn provide a set of potent questions to energize future work committed to the even more thoroughgoing critique of violent power as it continues to articulate itself through racialization, sexualization, and other forms of unequal economic, social, cultural, and political division.

Societal cost of skin cancer in Sweden in 2011.

Healthcare costs due to outpatient care and primary care Societal Cost of Skin Cancer in Sweden in 2011 Therese Eriksson1 and Gustav Tinghog1,2* Division of Health Care Analysis, Department of Medical and Health Sciences, and Division of Economics, Department for Management and Engineering, Linkoping University, SE-581 83 Linkoping, Sweden. *E-mail: gustav.tinghog@liu.se Accepted Aug 11, 2014; Epub ahead of print Aug 11, 2014

Research on Geographical Environment Unit Division Based on the Method of Natural Breaks (Jenks)

Abstract. Zoning which is to divide the study area into different zones according to their geographical differences at the global, national or regional level, includes natural division, economic division, geographical zoning of departments, comprehensive zoning and so on. Zoning is of important practical significance, for example, knowing regional differences and characteristics, regional research and regional development planning, understanding the favorable and unfavorable conditions of the regional development etc. Geographical environment is arising from the geographical position linkages. Geographical environment unit division is also a type of zoning. The geographical environment indicators are deeply studied and summed up in the article, including the background, the associated and the potential. The background indicators are divided into four categories, such as the socio-economic, the political and military, the strategic resources and the ecological environment, which can be divided into more sub-indexes. While the sub-indexes can be integrated to comprehensive index system by weighted stacking method. The Jenks natural breaks classification method, also called the Jenks optimization method, is a data classification method designed to determine the best arrangement of values into different classes. This is done by seeking to minimize each class’s average deviation from the class mean, while maximizing each class’s deviation from the means of the other groups. In this paper, the experiment of Chinese surrounding geographical environment unit division has been done based on the natural breaks (jenks) method, the geographical environment index system and the weighted stacking method, taking South Asia as an example. The result indicates that natural breaks (jenks) method is of good adaptability and high accuracy on the geographical environment unit division. The geographical environment research was originated in the geopolitics and flourished in the geo-economics. The main representatives of the geopolitics are German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, British geographer Mackinder and American geographical politician Nicholas John Spykman etc. The main representative of the geo-economics is American geographical economist Edward Luttwak. China has the most neighboring countries in the world, and its geographical environment is extremely complex. With the continuous development of globalization, China's relations with neighboring countries have become more complex and more closely. So it is very meaningful to have depth research on geographical environment unit division of China.

Oil Pollution in the Marine Environment I: Inputs, Big Spills, Small Spills, and Dribbles

The BP Deepwater Horizon Macondo Oil Well spill in the Gulf of Mexico three years ago renewed and reinforced concerns about oil pollution in the marine environment. This article is intended to prov...