Economic Dominance Research Articles

Dynamics of Postcoloniality in African Literature

This paper examines postcolonialism by analyzing Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. The research shows postcolonialism a set of theories in philosophy and different approaches to literary analysis concerned with literature written in English in countries. Indeed, postcolonial theorists inspect what happens when two cultures clash and one of them, with its accessory ideology, empowers and deems itself superior to the other. The paper explores how different dynamics of colonialism started to disappear by the early twentieth century. Political, social, economic, and ideological domination of England began to disappear, and the very process can be termed as decolonization. The article sheds light on the literature of Nigeria, a colonized country. After Nigeria became independent from the British colonization, the Biafra war began. Consequently, a great crack at the ethnic level took place in Nigeria. The paper investigates the ethnic conflict as portrayed in the novel. The novel embodies characters of both colonizing and colonized notions to reveal how the racial conflict retains in society. The article demonstrates the theoretical perspective of Homi Bhabha who questions the practice of generalizing and essentializing third world countries with homogeneity. Overall, the paper finds that education is the weapon for the colonized to fight back against the colonizers.

Governing homeowner associations in China’s gated communities: the extension of state infrastructural power and its uneven reach

ABSTRACT Homeowner associations (HOAs), the emergent neighborhood-based organizations, spawn new modes of neighborhood governance in post-reform China, meanwhile are profoundly influenced by state power. Aiming to unpack the complexity and hybridity of neighborhood governance, this research presents a detailed examination of how the local state exerts institutionalized control over HOAs through three critical mechanisms of infrastructural power: (1) the establishment of regulatory institutions to formalize the state influence on HOAs; (2) the enforcement of registration projects to make HOAs legible and governable; (3) the cultivation of clientelist ties with participants of HOAs. The uneven state reach owing to fragmentally organized local authorities is purposively designed to facilitate political control on urban neighborhoods. This study enriches Mann’s conceptual framework of infrastructural power through the scrutiny of fragmented state apparatus, and renews our understanding of the dynamic state–society interactions at the conjuncture of economic liberation and political domination in post-reform China.

Early childhood theories, ideals and social-political movements, an oral history study of pioneers in the second half of the twentieth century

ABSTRACT Early childhood education changed in the twentieth century, from mother-at-home-care in the 1950s, to professional early education today. Theoretical and social-political choices of pioneers in ECE had a profound impact on the way children’s education is conceptualized. We argue from a social constructivist perspective. The oral history method is used to document the professional life stories of 29 pioneers, born in Europe and the USA between 1940 and 1955. These pioneers were inspired by personal histories of growing up in the post-WWII / the cold war era, and, for some, their experience with poverty and discrimination based on social class and gender; but also by social-political movements of the 1970s. These experiences motivated to fight against discrimination, to support women’s and children’s rights, and communities, through the provision of high-quality services. They expressed concern that these values are at risk today by the dominance of economics and neoliberal policies.

Practicing decolonial political geography: Island perspectives on neocolonialism and the China threat discourse

Island peoples around the world remain entangled in colonial processes. Western and metropolitan powers are increasingly deploying discourse of a ‘China threat’ to justify neocolonial entrenchment in the form of greater Western militarisation and economic dominance. In this paper, we investigate how Western and metropolitan powers use the China threat and warnings of economic, environmental, demographic, and military disaster to maintain and deepen colonial influence in former colonies, with special focus on four island states and territories: Guåhan/Guam in Oceania, Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland in the Arctic, Okinawa in East Asia, and Jamaica in the Caribbean. We undertake this investigation as a means of practicing decolonial political geography, collaborating as a group of scholars from around the world and drawing upon diverse epistemologies and experiences to inform collaborative research and writing. Due to the complexities we have confronted in our efforts to think outside coloniality, this paper foregrounds our decolonial methodology and process, even as we respect our empirical findings.

A quiet revolution? Village head elections and the democratization of rural Indonesia

ABSTRACT While democratization is regularly associated with elite renewal, established elites often succeed in maintaining their dominance after the fall of the authoritarian regime that fostered them. This constitutes a relatively understudied challenge facing democratization processes: when and how do democratic reforms succeed in fostering the emergence of new elites? This paper addresses this question through a study of village head elections in three rural districts around Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Comparing older studies of village head elections with ten in-depth studies of recent village head elections as well as assessments of the backgrounds of eighty village heads (kepala desa), this paper shows that a remarkable change has taken place. Whereas up to ten years ago many villages were still ruled by leaders from established families with a quasi-hereditary grip on power, in recent years such leaders are rapidly being replaced by village heads with more modest family backgrounds and a different style of leadership. This important change has resulted from a combination of democratic reforms, the diversification of rural economies, and the particularly competitive character of village head elections. Elite renewal is possible when open and information-dense elections coincide with a process of economic diversification undercutting the economic dominance of established elites.

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of a Prescription Digital Therapeutic for the Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder

ABSTRACT The lack of adequate treatment for many patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) has led to high medical costs ($90B in 2020). An analysis of the cost-effectiveness (cost-utility) of reSET-O, the first and only FDA-approved prescription digital therapeutic (PDT) for the treatment of OUD, is needed to inform value assessments and healthcare decision making. To evaluate the cost-utility of reSET-O in conjunction with treatment-as usual (TAU) compared to TAU alone. A third-party payer-perspective decision analytic model evaluated the cost-effectiveness of reSET-O + TAU relative to TAU (i.e., oral buprenorphine, face-to-face counseling, and contingency management [immediate rewards for negative drug tests logged]) alone over 12 weeks. Clinical effectiveness data (retention in therapy and health state utilities) were obtained from the peer-reviewed literature, while resource utilization and cost data were obtained from a published claims data analyses. Over 12 weeks, the addition of reSET-O to TAU resulted in a gain of 0.003 quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), and $1,014 lower costs, resulting in economic dominance vs. TAU. reSET-O + TAU’s was economically dominant (less costly, more effective) vs. TAU alone over 12 weeks, a result that was driven by a reduction in medical costs after initiation of reSET-O observed in a recent real-world claims analysis.

Unification of Commercial Contract Law: The Role of the Dominant Economy

The economy of a state (‘dependent state’) may depend relatively more upon the economy of another, less dependent, state (‘dominant state’) than vice versa. This paper explains why the ‘dominant economy’ can wield leverage over the issue of which legal rules to include in a uniform commercial law. In the preparation of a uniform commercial law, the ‘dependent state’ looks more likely to make the tradeoff between increased interstate economic activity and applying less-preferred legal rules. Within the conceptual framework of historical and comparative institutional analysis (HCIA), an empirical study is offered of several well-known attempts to unify (and codify) divergent bodies of commercial (common) law in the past two centuries.

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

Reviewed by: The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple Meghna Sapui (bio) The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple; p. 522. Bloomsbury, 2019. $35.43 cloth. in the infamous impeachment of Warren Hastings, the then Governor-General of Bengal, Edmund Burke's four-day long address emphasized Hastings's "geographical morality … as if when you have crossed the equatorial line all the virtues die" (qtd. in Dalrymple 310). Hastings's lengthy impeachment trial was an indictment not just of him but also of the increasingly corrupt and despotic activities of the British East India Company (EIC). William Dalrymple's book is a compulsively readable and accessible history of the rise and rise of the East India Company through its deployment of, what Burke suggestively calls, its "geographical morality." Dalrymple shows how the EIC went from a gathering of a motley crew of merchants in a rundown building in London to become "the grandest society of merchants in the Universe," with armies larger than those of almost all nation states, power that encircled the globe, and shares that were, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, a kind of global reserve currency (388). The Anarchy is also, however, a compelling critique of this rise that carries with it a warning for the contemporary state of big corporations. [End Page 159] Dalrymple's chapters chart the EIC's systematic impoverishment of both the Indian nobility and peasantry in its quest to surpass its status in India as a mere trading house to become a territorial and sovereign power. Chapter 1 introduces the less-than-humble origins of the British East India Company and its rise in India against all other trading and political outfits. It demonstrates how the various competing political interests in India—such as the Mughals and, later, other regional empires, as well as trading Companies, including those of the Portuguese, Dutch, and French—folded over time as British interests gradually unfolded across the subcontinent. Chapter 2, in Dalrymple's characteristic narrative fashion, tells the stories of Robert Clive, the first British governor of Bengal; Aliverdi Khan, the Nawab of Bengal; Siraj ud-Daula, Aliverdi's grandson; and Shah Alam, the Mughal emperor. Through these figures, Dalrymple sets up the major players involved in the final struggle between existing subcontinental authority and the newly minted foreign trading power, the British EIC. Chapter 3 describes the rivalry between Siraj ud-Daula, now the Nawab of Bengal, and Robert Clive. The eventual English victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757 made the thirty-three-year-old Clive "one of the wealthiest men in Europe" (131). Dalrymple calls this "one of the largest windfalls in history" (133). More importantly, this victory permanently undermined the authority of the Nawabs, and the Company was no longer just a trading interest, "rather, it found that it had become a kingmaker and an autonomous power in its own right" (135). Chapter 4 documents the fragile nature of the relationship between the EIC and the subsequent Nawabs of Bengal. The EIC gave precedence to their commercial profitability and bulldozed any political authority that stood in the way of this, thus also acquiring substantial political power in the region. The Nawabs, on the other hand, formed alliances with the Company, recognizing in particular its superior military capabilities but, at the same time, detested its rapacious and violent ways. The Company, hitherto incomprehensive of "the different world" (139) of Indian authority, gradually came to comprehend the minute workings of a different kind of power—one based on moral authority rather than military or economic dominance. In chapter 5, Dalrymple shows how by defeating the united armies of India's Mughal rulers, "a trading corporation had become both colonial proprietor and corporate state, legally free, for the first time, to do all the things that governments do: control the law, administer justice, assess taxes, mint coins, provide protection, impose punishments, make peace and wage war" (209). The Company negotiated to win the financial rights to the entire northeast of India and benefited greatly from this. The EIC so thoroughly plundered and impoverished Bengal for profitability by exporting its...

From chinoiserie to à la manière chinoise: Théophile Gautier's "Le pavillon sur l'eau"

Due to the Western world's political and economic domination, Chinese civilization was considered as barbaric and primitive by many nineteenthcentury Westerners. However, Théophile Gautier expressed his passion for Chinese culture in his works. He invited readers to rethink the dichotomy of barbarism and civilization and to examine the aesthetic and philosophical elements of Chinese culture. This article, based on a reading of "Le pavillon sur l'eau" (1846), aims to reveal Gautier's perspectives on Chinese culture, especially the artistic and literary importance of Chinese garden landscaping.

The Centenary of the Communist Party of China, Major Developmental Achievements and the New Blue Print

This paper examines the 100 years existence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since its formation in 1921 in the city of Shanghai. The significance of the CCP is also examined because it drives the policies of the Chinese People’s Republic of China. It dominates the economy and controls all the state institutions. The analysis of the development trajectory of the Chinese state in the last 100 years is examined along with its major developmental achievements. The paper examines related literature from library research using descriptive method. The political party and Marxist theories are the theoretical frameworks used in examining the development milestones. The finding shows that China has emerged as the second most dominant economy in the world and is gearing towards overtaking the United States’ economy in all areas. This paper concludes that the developmental achievements of the People’s Republic of China was made possible by the painstaking, diligent and careful central planning of adopting the Marxist, socialist and mixed economy approach to the development of China. Finally, the paper recommends that despite all these successes recorded by transforming China and developing its economy through the careful guidance of the party, there remains a lot of challenges that its leaders must address before its continued growth gets undermined.

Modernism, Empire, World Literature by Joe Cleary

Reviewed by: Modernism, Empire, World Literature by Joe Cleary Liam Lanigan Modernism, Empire, World Literature, by Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, 326 p., hardcover, $39.99) Studies of the "literary world system" theorize and describe a unified but unequal structure of literary relations spanning the globe, in which national literatures are stratified and compete with one another for prestige and cultural hegemony. This system interacts with, but exists separately from, other world systems such as those of capital and ecology. These theories have challenged definitions of "world literature" that emphasize universal literary values, emphasizing the role of cultural domination, geopolitics, and capital in the creation of literary hierarchies. The most comprehensive theorization is Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (1999), which described Paris as the center of the literary world system during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing writers from the literary "periphery" seeking to make a name for themselves and their national traditions. For Casanova, Irish modernism provides a key model for understanding how a literature develops from a position of peripherality to becoming world literary in its ambition and influence. Casanova further notes the role of Irish writers, especially James Joyce, in catalyzing similar literary revolutions in other literary peripheries. Irish literary scholarship has challenged the details of Casanova's work, but largely avoided substantial critique or extension of her thesis. Joe Cleary's Modernism, Empire, World Literature rectifies this, acknowledging that Casanova's work reorients our understanding of how modern literary traditions take shape and intersect, but noting that her model of the world system is "troublingly static." Paris is "extraordinarily fixed and stable" as the center of Casanova's world system. Her theory explains how national literatures secure recognition, but does not allow for major reconfigurations of the system's structure. For Cleary, the unipolar vision of the literary world system centered on Paris overlooks other centers of cultural consecration, especially London, which did not simply challenge Paris for supremacy but propagated and consecrated a different literary aesthetics for the Anglophone world. Cleary historicizes a "crucial moment of rupture" in the literary world system, precipitated by the emergence [End Page 149] of US, Irish, and Caribbean modernisms as the preeminent Anglophone literary traditions of the twentieth century. With these countries long considered cultural colonies of Britain, the emergence of their modernisms transformed the literary world system "more convulsively and with more lasting effect than Casanova's account allows." Cleary reconsiders how the literary world system is shaped by transformations in economic and political systems; Ireland's literary emergence is inseparable from anti-colonial agitation and England's imperial decline, while the rise of the United States is tied to its increasing economic and political dominance and the consolidation of its universities as arbiters of cultural legitimacy. For Cleary the literary world system does not simply describe literary relationships; through readings of key modernist texts, he shows how world-systemic conditions inform their formal and thematic elements, and how they establish new relationships within the literary world system. Alexis de Tocqueville's De la démocratie en Amérique and Matthew Arnold's The Study of Celtic Literature, Cleary argues, help explain the contradiction whereby the United States and Ireland, despite the republican and democratic ideals central to both their political cultures, gave rise to an aristocratic-minded, elitist modernism. W. B. Yeats draws upon Arnoldian essentialism about the Celtic national character while rejecting Arnold's call for political and cultural union with Britain. Tocqueville's America is "a byword for democracy, [and] material progress," a "polar contrast" to Arnold's Celticist Ireland. But both countries share a sense of high culture as out of kilter with liberal-democratic modernity, and as capable of a national "renaissance" in defiance of their cultural peripherality. While Yeats and the Celtic Revival sought out a mythic Irish heritage through which to challenge modernity, Ezra Pound and the Americans embrace a futurist aesthetic; both, though, channel antipathy to the modern liberal state and cultural marginalization within the literary world system. Cleary reads Henry James's The Golden Bowl and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in the context of European imperial decline, stressing that they are...

Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959 by Megan Feeney, and: Fidel between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema by Laura-Zoë Humphreys

Reviewed by: Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959 by Megan Feeney, and: Fidel between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema by Laura-Zoë Humphreys Rielle Navitski (bio) Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959 by Megan Feeney. University of Chicago Press. 2019. 320 pages. $105.00 hardcover; $35.00 paper; also available in e-book. Fidel between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema by Laura-Zoë Humphreys. Duke University Press. 2019. 304 pages. $104.95 hardcover; $27.95 paper; also available in e-book. In English-language film studies, perceptions of Cuban cinema are still shaped by an oft-romanticized period in the 1960s, when politically and formally radical works like the recently restored Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968) emerged from the newly created Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos and gained international renown. This vision of Cuban film persists despite growing scholarly interest in its transformation after the fall of the Soviet Union, the subject of recent book-length studies such as Enrique García's Cuban Cinema After the [End Page 208] Cold War, Nicholas Balaisis's Cuban Film Media, Late Socialism, and the Public Sphere, and Dunja Fehimović's National Identity in 21st Century Cuban Cinema.1 Two monographs join this recent crop of works examining Cuban film outside its most familiar parameters, with Megan Feeney's Hollywood in Havana addressing film culture on the island prior to 1959 and Laura-Zoë Humphreys's Fidel between the Lines largely focusing on Cuban cinema from the 1980s to the present. The iconic figure of Fidel Castro, rendered all but inseparable from the Revolution in the discourse of the authoritarian Cuban state, looms as a spectral presence in both books. Hollywood in Havana begins by evoking a famous 1959 photograph of Castro gazing upward at the Lincoln Memorial, a gesture that simultaneously pays homage to US principles of liberty and democracy and offers a rebuke of actual US policies that contradict these ideals. Both are implied by the image's citation of a moment from Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), in which the idealistic protagonist, played by Jimmy Stewart, squares off against a corrupt political establishment.2 For Feeney, the photograph encapsulates how in the years prior to the Revolution, Hollywood cinema served as a means through which Cubans actively imagined political change, even as they resisted the United States' economic and cultural dominance on the island. Feeney writes, "Like Castro in the photo, Cuban film writers and moviegoers paid homage to US ideals and their heroes but also asserted themselves as agents of an adjudicating gaze rather than its passive objects."3 In Fidel between the Lines, Humphreys notes that satirical and critical references to Castro in film act as litmus tests for the shifting and uncertain limits of politically permissible cultural expression in Cuba, defined ambiguously in Castro's famous 1961 speech "Words to the Intellectuals" as "within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing."4 Humphreys argues that these perceived allusions to Castro—whether deliberately inserted by filmmakers or identified by audiences, who have developed a tendency toward "paranoid" modes of reading due to a climate of unpredictable repression—exemplify the dynamic, two-way process through which political allegory is constructed in contemporary Cuba, with creators and consumers playing equally significant roles. Humphreys observes that "[w]hile spectators argued about whether films harbored secret messages against the socialist state, veiled complicity with political leaders, or served as publicity stunts, filmmakers complained that these readings ignored the nuances of their depictions of Cuba and reduced their art to propaganda" and interrogates how "allegory and conflicts over textual interpretation shape [End Page 209] the public sphere."5 Whether focusing on production and audience reception, as in Humphreys's case, or on exhibition and film criticism, as in Feeney's, both books illuminate cinema's role in the collective construction of political imaginaries in Cuba. In her account of pre-revolutionary Cuban film culture, Feeney argues (repurposing language from a 1949 epigraph from Motion Picture Association of...

Mogućnosti održivog razvoja malih gradova

The notion of sustainable development in a line with local economic development emerged in the seventies of the 20th century when local authorities in the western countries realized that their local communities had begun abandoning mobile capital, which resulted in limiting their economic potentials and opportunities for citizens' employment. This necessitated both a detailed study of the local economic potentials, the determination of best ways to use, maintain and develop them, and a thorough examination of the impediments to the local community's economic development. Local economic development is also seen as a process of certain changes, where, in the competition for the market, economic and country dominance, local governments, despite their status as the lowest level of public administration, are recognized as competitors in the market and, in collaboration with the economic sector, try to be more innovative and more competitive among them.

Transformation of the Global Film Industry: Prospects for Asian Countries

The current rapid development of some Asian economies and the projected economic dominance of Asia in the 21st century are reasons enough to call it “the Asian century.” But will Asia’s economic growth entail an increase in political power and cultural influence? In this article the author looks at the topic through the lens of the film industry, a field of activity with a plethora of intertwined economic, political, and cultural factors. Cinema is studied here as an industry that produces “meanings” and is coupled with the concept of “strategic narratives.” According to some statistics, Asian cinema is becoming increasingly important in terms of the size of national film markets, but for a variety of reasons the U.S. remains the world’s most important exporter of motion pictures. The position of Asian countries in world cinematography is undermined by such global institutions as award ceremonies and film festivals that are held in the U.S. and Europe and tend to favor Western filmmakers. This article emphasizes the dramatic influence of digital transformation on modern cinematography and the opportunities it opens up for Asian film producers in creating a new, global streaming services market. Finally, the paper discusses development prospects for the film industries in four Asian leaders in this field—China, Japan, South Korea, and India. Japan and South Korea are likely to increase their cooperation with the U.S. in cinematography. There are great opportunities for cooperation between the film industries of India and China, but they are heavily dependent on political relations between the two nations. China’s film industry is expected to continue to develop rapidly.

Trecker , Max Red Money for the Global South: East-South Economic Relations in the Cold War (review)

REVIEWS 191 Trecker, Max. Red Money for the Global South: East-South Economic Relations in the Cold War. Routledge Studies in Modern History. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2020. x + 244 pp. Notes. Sources. Bibliography. Index. £120.00. The study of relations between the socialist bloc and the extra-European world, variously described as the Third World or, in this case, the Global South, has grown extensively in recent years. By focusing on these connections via the bloc’s trade and development organization, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, commonly referred to as Comecon), this ambitious monograph seeks to fill a number of lacunae and address some of the key questions within this emerging body of literature. First, it seeks to uncover the motives that drove cooperation between the two parties, arguing for a complex intertwining of both political and economic motives. Secondly, the book seeks to contribute to the sparse existing literature on Comecon by making the case for the agency of its smaller members, drawing similar conclusions to Laurien Crump’s work on the Warsaw Pact. Third, Trecker charts the process of change over time in East-South relations, situating this relationship within the broader story of the global economy. This is an ambitious work, making use of the archival record of the CMEA in the RGAE in Moscow, the German Federal Archives and the Hungarian National Archives, as well as the National Archives of India. While occasionally falling short of its aspirations, it represents an important contribution to the literature. In ten chapters divided into four parts, Trecker charts the story on a largely chronological basis. The first chapter deals with Comecon’s dysfunctional early years during the period of late Stalinism. Comecon is often held up as a counterpart to Western European integration, although as Trecker notes, unlike the EU, political union preceded economic integration in the Eastern bloc and the founding aim of the Comecon — wholesale economic coordination — never fully trumped national interest. For the nations of the Global South, the benefits of cooperation with the socialist world — as opposed to the former colonial metropole — were obvious. But as Trecker shows, Comecon-South trade was mired in difficulty from the very beginning, hampered by dollar hegemony and the inequities of global trade. In the 1960s and 1970s, newly independent states were often committed to import substitution industrialization, and shared socialist concerns regarding the potential for US and European neo-colonial economic domination. By offering the nations of the Global South the construction of turnkey plants in return for raw materials, Comecon members hoped to prevent such domination, while benefiting economically in the process. As Trecker shows, the Soviets hoped to use Comecon to promote intra-bloc cooperation in this regard, weaning the SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 192 Eastern Bloc states off Soviet resource dependency in the process. Although all of this is not necessarily new information for scholars familiar with the burgeoning literature on development in the Cold War, Trecker’s work reveals valuable insights into why it failed so spectacularly, using the archival record to highlight dysfunction between Comecon member states and Soviet weakness. At points, this text feels like it is attempting to answer too many questions and would have benefited from a reduction in scope: a largely superfluous chapter devoted to the question of whether or not Comecon was an instrument of Soviet empire is an example of this. Retaining focus on East-South relations would have been preferable, for it is here that the book is most original and insightful. In particular, Trecker provides important evidence regarding the effect that the early 1970s oil price shock had on East-South relations: scholars have long wondered why both sides — who often found themselves in a similar situation as rising inflation and fuel costs triggered crises of liquidity in the 1970s and 1980s — were not able to forge a common response. In highlighting the effects of the crisis, Trecker shows that East-South relations were severely hampered by the supremacy of the dollar: the debt crisis increased the thirst for hard currency across the globe, damaging the socialist world’s prospects for trade, which relied upon barter agreements. As Trecker notes...

МЕТОДИКА ОЦІНКИ ЛІДЕРСТВА У МІЖНАРОДНІЙ ТОРГІВЛІ

The main objective of the paper is to find a universal, simple in calculation and comprehensive approach to measuring the state of economies in terms of their dominance at global goods and services market. The article proposes a method for assessing the global trade leadership of countries as a component of world economic leadership, based on the calculation of the complex indicator of global trade leadership (Global Trade Leadership Index). The importance of finding the approach to calculating the state of economies in global trade in goods and services is approved by the need for monitoring current changes in state of play at the global market especially with the growing role of Asian countries, and changes in positions of traditional leaders of global economy. Global trade leadership is seen as a component of global economic leadership, which characterizes the degree of economic dominance in the global market for goods and services. At the same time, special attention in assessing the positions of countries is drawn to key trends in world trade, such as the growing role of transnational corporations and high-tech exports in trade transactions. In addition, diversification of exports is considered as an indicator showing the state of the economy at the global market as it was previously revealed by foreign scholars. When choosing the subfactors based on which the index is calculated, the main criteria are their availability and comparability for different countries, as well as the index representation of both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of countries’ participation in international trade. The index is based on eight indicators that characterize the performance of trade, the degree of concentration of national exports, the position of national transnational corporations, and degree of freedom of trade and is calculated using benchmarking to analyze countries’ approach to world leadership in trade. Based on the proposed methodology, the index was calculated for the fifteen leading exporters of the world for 2019 and 2010, which allowed to determine the position of the world’s leading economies in world trade now and to conduct a retrospective assessment of global trade leadership.

No Voice, No Exit, But Loyalty? Puerto Rico and Constitutional Obligation

The Michigan Law Review is honored to have supported Professors Charles and Fuentes-Rohwer's Essay on the subjugated status of Puerto Rico as an "unincorporated territory." This Essay contextualizes Puerto Rico not as an anomalous colonial vestige but as fundamentally a part of the United States' ongoing commitment to racial economic domination. We are thrilled to highlight this work, which indicts our constitutional complacence with the second-class status of Puerto Rican citizens and demands a national commitment to self-determination for Puerto Rico.

The indigenous participation as a pathway to decoloniality in a developing world: a reading from the constitutional jurisprudence in Colombia

Although development is a complex economic, social, cultural, and political process aimed at the constant improvement and well-being of the entire population, in many cases, it is equated with economic growth only. Focusing exclusively on this type of development, contributes to the strengthening of the economic growth of dominant economies and dismisses the local needs and knowledge of the indigenous peoples in the territory where these development projects are implemented. Based on this perspective, the concept of development becomes a discursive instrument that reflects the evolution from physical colonialism to the coloniality of power. This paper illustrates how in dominant judgments of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, indigenous participation might be a pathway to decoloniality. To reach this conclusion, this paper is divided into three sections: the first examines the concept of good living1 as one of the most significant development expressions of indigenous identity; the second analyzes the notion of good living regarding the concepts of coloniality and development; the third discusses prior consultation and free, prior, and informed consent as fundamental rights and social processes that play a decolonial role in indigenous communities in Colombia.

Features of Logistics Development in the BRICS countries

Research background: Brazil, Russia, India, China, as well as South Africa (BRICS) have such economic potential that, according to the expert community, by 2050 they may become the dominant economies of the world. The aim of the scientific contribution is to analyze the BRICS countries about Logistics Performance Index (LPI). Purpose of the article: Using the diagnostic matrix method, the analysis of the logistics development of the BRICS countries according to the estimates presented above makes it possible to characterize them according to each criterion, as well as to form a general characteristic. In addition, it is necessary to calculate the delta of the indicator for each criterion for each country for the selected study period. Methods: We suggest using the Logistics Performance Index (LPI) and Emerging Market Logistics Index (EMLI) ratings as an information base for analyzing the logistics development of the BRICS countries. The LPI rating is calculated every two years by the World Bank, which, together with the University of Turku, developed it in 2007. Findings & Value added: As the analysis has shown, even within the framework of integration groups, such as the BRICS, the level of logistics development is quite different. The undisputed leader according to LPI is China, which bypasses other countries of the grouping not only in terms of the level of infrastructure development, in which some of the world's largest financial investments are made, but also in the quality of logistics services, customs and border clearance, organization of international transport, cargo tracking. timeliness of their delivery.

Prospects for the PRC's Economic Dominance on the Continent of Eurasia

Prospects for the PRC's Economic Dominance on the Continent of Eurasia