Neoliberal Economic Reforms Research Articles

Capital Control Liberalization And Monetary Policy In Kenya

Economist have always considered capital as the central element of the process of economic development, the study aimed to establish the effects of capital control liberalization on monetary policy in Kenya. The Economists view that foreign investment benefits developing economies by increasing the availability of capital still holds, based on this view, the capital deficient countries heavily resort to for- eign financing as the primary source to achieve rapid economic growth and through their positive im- pact over productivity and the general economic wellbeing of the host country. Kenyan economy has accumulated a large external debt and are now facing serious debt servicing problems. The growth ex- perience of East Africa has received worldwide attention this is because Africa is seen as a new center for growth and can be an investment destination for other regions. This study is motivated on the as- sumption that this discussions ignored the experiences of developing countries in their early phase of industrialization. In addition there is a lack of proper attention on the analysis of the issue of capital inflows in the context of neo-liberal economic reforms and financial deregulation. Large swings in capital flows into and out of emerging markets can potentially lead to excessive volatility in asset pric- ing and supply of credit in the economy. In order to lessen the impact of capital flows on financial in- stability, a number of studies and policy makers have proposed the use of capital controls. This paper considers the benefit of re-introducing capital controls as a potential instrument of monetary policy in Kenya. This paper reviews the Kenyan experience with large capital inflows over the past 15 years (June 2000-June 2015). The findings revealed that capital inflow had positive effect on monetary policy in Kenya.

Neo-liberal economic reform and the Political implication of the war on drugs in Mexico

Neo-liberal economic reform and the Political implication of the war on drugs in Mexico

Cambio geoespacial y sectorial del ensamble para exportación en México. Estructura, geoespacio y estrategia. 1990 a 2014

Mexico has become the seventh world producer of automotive vehicles, but its function as an assembler of parts and components from global firms, mainly from the United States, which absorbs almost 90% of the re-exports. The boom in automotive assembly is associated with two fundamental processes: on the one hand, it culminates the government effort to increase employment and foreign exchange earnings in a critical moment because of the slowdown on electronics re-export. In addition to sustaining and expanding the assembly, the Government is committed to the modernization of the infrastructure, mainly road and ports. On the other hand, the states on Central-Western region, where new plants have been recently opening, have increased their share in the GDP, causing a change at national level.In the first place, this increasing role played by Mexico in global production networks could be seen as an opportunity to launch an Asian-style strategy for technological learning. However, this is not the case, and not for the reasons that is usually offered, i.e., lack of initiative, but due to long-standing structural problems related to the nature of neo-liberal economic reform, a reform that curtails the scope for strategic action towards new economic policies. The article concludes by stating that an unplanned result of the automotive assembly boom is the emergence of a sort of platform for production and logistics derived from the relative proximity of plants in that strategic region of the country. That platform could open a new opportunity for the integration of local companies as suppliers to automotive global networks, mainly in the service sector. Ironically, this opportunity is not perceived by policy makers, and for the reason state above, its looks like there is no economic policy instrument at hand to make that change.

Accrual Basis and Political Interest in Public Sector Accounting. The Case of a Municipal Council in Sri Lanka

This paper contributes to the discussion of introducing accrual basis accounting to public sector. Less Developed Country (LDC) studies show a failure despite the attempt for a long. Accrual accounting is beneficial compared to cash basis as far as creation of accounting information is concerned. Moreover conversion of public sector accounting from cash to accrual basis is a requirement of New Public Management practice under neo liberal economic reforms. Hence it is worth to study the reasons for the failure. This study uses the political economic perspective and accordingly hegemonic analysis of Gramsci (1971). The study is carried out as a qualitative case study in the phenomenological tradition at the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) of Sri Lanka. Findings show that accrual basis in the current accounting framework does not work because it does not address the political interest dominating over public sector organisations. It concludes emphasizing the need of reconsidering the accounting framework of public sector having regard on political interest in the state sector before introducing accrual accounting.

Human Rights, Environmental Justice, and the North-South Divide

From the Ogoni people devastated by oil drilling in Nigeria to the Inuit and other indigenous populations threatened by climate change, communities disparately burdened by environmental degradation are increasingly framing their demands for environmental justice in the language of environmental human rights. However, some scholars have expressed scepticism about the environmental human rights project. First, they remind us that the human rights governance capacity of many states in the global South has been compromised by the neoliberal economic reforms imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as well as by trade and investment agreements. Second, they question the ability of human rights law to adequately articulate and advance the aspirations and resistance strategies of diverse grassroots social justice movements, and warn us about the susceptibility of human rights law to co-optation by powerful Northern states. This Chapter examines the promise and the peril of environmental human rights as a means of challenging environmental injustice within nations and the North-South dimension of environmental injustice.

Embodying the Modern: Neoliberalism, NGOs, and the Culture of Human Rights Practices in Nigeria

IntroductionThis article is my attempt to unravel the growing influence of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) in Nigeria. There are two important elements in mapping NGOs in Nigeria today. First, the culture of NGO is emblematic of the ways in which neoliberal economic and political reforms in Africa, and particularly in Nigeria, change the face of the state, thereby creating a new space that prioritizes NGOs as a better alternative to the state. Second, by creating new spaces for NGOs to thrive, neoliberalism incorporates NGO leaders into the class of elitism. Politics is and continues to be considered the domain of elite politicians who have been in control of the political process in postcolonial Africa. NGO leaders have historically seen these politicians as standing in the way of economic and political development of Africa and Nigeria. Unfortunately, this disdain for political leaders has led NGO practitioners, who are now a part of the new elite class, to present themselves as non-political and non-partisan. This decision leaves political participation and contests for elections in the hands of the elite politicians NGO leaders oppose. Such decisions by NGO leaders ignore the possibility of using their new elite status as a mechanism for real change.The combination of these two elements has continually produced outcomes such as economic and political deprivation for many citizens in ways that have promoted NGOs and CSOs (civil society organizations) to the status of rescue organizations. One such outcome is that NGOs have become one of the fastest growing industries in Nigeria. They cater to the needs of thousands of unemployed youths by employing them in such as periodic election monitoring or regular reporting of human rights violations to the transnational networks of human rights organizations in the global north.Illustrative of these are the activities of CLEEN Foundation (formerly known as Center for Law Enforcement Education in Nigeria), and CISLAC (Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Center). Both CLEEN and CISLAC emerged in Nigeria as a result of promotion of neoliberal economic and political in the post-Cold War era by international financial institutions (e.g., the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Paris and London Clubs). While these two organizations are not alone in promoting this particular set of practices, mapping the political trajectory of its leaders provides a clear understanding of how neoliberalism promotes apolitical CSOs in ways that create new sites of power.This article also examines the emergence of NGOs in Nigeria through the location of their proliferation within a transnational economy shaped by the dominant international capitalist system. This system privileges the idea that a free market economy is deductively inscribed in the freedom of citizens, but the citizens' ability to actively participate in the affairs of the nation-state is inhibited by state (such as the violation of human rights, illegal detention, and the denial of access to land, livelihood, and resources) that negate neoliberal practices. This idea further suggests that private ownership of capital should trump the public good. Central to this idea is the notion that the state-already seen as oppressive and a locus of rights violations-does not have the capacity to mold citizens. In contrast, CSOs and NGOs are considered to be important in the construction of a new society that embodies modern ideas about participation, respect for human rights, and the molding of good citizenship. I examine what I call the rearticulation of praxis and reordering of practices by looking at the changing meaning of CSOs and NGOs in most academic literature, and suggest that there is a need to focus on how the particularities of Nigeria dictate how CSOs and NGOs shape practices.Finally, I look at the work of CLEEN and CISLAC to show how they have reshaped national discourses about power and social inequalities in ways that feed into neoliberal discourses of power and social structures. …

The Political Economy of Chinese and Indian Trade, Aid and Investments in Nigeria: A Comparative Analysis

This article provides a comparative analysis of the political economy of Chinese and Indian economic engagement strategies in Nigeria. It argues that although China is becoming increasingly prominent in Nigeria partly because of its state-led economic engagement strategy, India’s private sector-led engagement strategy chimes with Nigeria’s neoliberal economic reforms. However, the article maintains even though both Chinese and Indian strategies are not mutually exclusive to either of the two giants in the pursuit of their interests on the continent, African leaders and policymakers need to develop more strategic engagement plans in their dealings with China and India.

Foreign Capital Investment into Developing Countries: Some Economic Policy Issues

This paper analyses the role of foreign capital in the economic development of developing countries, particularly South Asian and East Asian countries. Mainstream economists suggest that foreign investment would benefit developing countries by increasing the availability of capital, and through their positive impact over productivity and the general economic wellbeing of the host country. After the Second World War, the rapid economic growth first of Japan and later on of South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan has been widely cited in support of foreign capital. It is true when we look at the records in terms of the removal of poverty, job creation, educational achievements and improving the overall living conditions. I find however, that such discussions have ignored the experiences of developed countries in their early phase of industrialisation. In addition there is a lack of attention to the analysis of the issue of capital inflows in the context of neoliberal economic reforms and financial deregulation. After the global financial crisis in 2008, capital inflows to developing countries have witnessed a sharp decline. Foreign investments are highly sensitive to foreign exchange rate fluctuations. Thus, under such a situation, it is difficult to build a long term industrialisation strategy.

Japan's Regional Inequality in Hard Times

The widening economic gap between Japan's major urban centers and its rural regions has been regarded as one of the country's most serious political and social concerns since the early 2000s. This article examines the politics of regional inequality in Japan over the past decade, focusing on the driving force of the growing divide between the urban and rural economies and the strategies of political parties to redress the problem. In this article, I argue that the Koizumi cabinet's fiscal decentralization and neoliberal economic reform contributed to the rapid rise of regional inequality. While the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan attempted to respond to this problem in the post-Koizumi period, the urban-based Democratic Party of Japan strategically made people's growing concern over regional economic disparity a key part of its electoral agenda in order to court the rural vote.

Good Times, Brought to You by Brand Modi

The impending arrival of the long awaited “good times” emerged as a powerful meme in the 2014 general elections in India. The vague but exhilarating promise of good times was not only translated into catchy campaign slogans but also acquired its own fast-circulating hashtags, domain names, and strong everyday presence on social media. In this article, I open up the notion of good times through an account of #acchedin and locate it within the longer trajectory of neoliberal economic reforms. I ask what good times might even mean in a nation that has transformed itself fully into commodity-form to become an attractive investment destination for global investors. The newly crafted Brand Modi, the natural inheritor and prime agent of 1990s Brand India, now works in tandem in anticipation of the long awaited, and ever elusive, transformative epochal threshold of good times ahead.

English

Over the last three decades or so, complex factors including the implementation of neoliberal economic reforms has led to a decline in formal sector employment in the Ghanaian economy. This together with increasing feminization of poverty has driven many, especially young women, to seek livelihoods in the informal sector mainly as hawkers and head porters. Drawing on qualitative interviews with approximately 40 urban poor women (aged 6-25 years), this paper reports the gendered aspects of poverty and the surviving strategies of young women on urban streets. The cameos presented herein highlight the experiences of poverty among street workers and how their livelihood portfolios contribute to overcoming the poor socio-economic conditions facing them. The paper shows that hawking and head portering significantly provides income for upkeep of young women and their families through meeting consumption and other needs. However, vulnerabilities manifested in unfavourable weather conditions, vehicular dangers, exploitation from employers and customers often due to lack of written work contracts are the major risks sturdily connected with these surviving strategies. The paper concludes by arguing for policy interventions such as subsidized credit schemes and organization of formal and informal forms of capacity building for the urban street workers to enhance their livelihoods.

Is better to be a kayayei than to be unemployed: reflecting on the role of head portering in ghana’s informal economy

The implementation of neoliberal economic reforms with its resultant effects on rural agricultural economies has facilitated the migration of young girls from northern to southern Ghana to seek for alternative livelihoods in the urban informal economy as head porters (Kayayei). Using semi-structured questionnaires and interviews with 45 Kayayei in Makola and Agbogbloshie Markets, Accra, this study examines how migration as a livelihood strategy contributes to an improvement in the living conditions of young girls and their families. The paper also looks more closely into the pathways through which the livelihoods of these young female migrants may contribute to local economic development. The study highlights that Kayayei contribute to local economic development through market exchange and revenue generation, also there is significant perceived positive impact of head portering on standard of living of these young girls through improved access to income, health care and asset accumulation while their families benefit from remittances. The study concludes by advocating for the need to provide access to credit and skills training in enhancing the livelihood of Kayayei.

Focus: The two crises and inequality in the labour market

INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 3 Volume 22 Issue 1 2015 FOCUS ❐ SOUTH KOREA The two crises and inequality in the labour market Kwang-Yeong Shin describes how the employment situation for workers in Korea has been greatly changed in the wake of the financial crises of 1997 and 2008 KWANG-YEONG SHIN is Professor with the Department of Sociology at Chung-Ang University in Seoul of chaebol companies, aimed at dismantling the economic institutions, norms, and culture that had developed in the period of rapid economic growth under the authoritarian regime. The IMF’s bailout package resulted in demolishing almost half of the 50 largest chaebols and creating more than one million newly unemployed in 1998. It was, in short, an attempt to abolish an economic system that was associated with crony capitalism, in which state intervention played a key role in the management of firms in the private sector, and to reinvigorate market forces that would be open to global financial capital. Market liberalisation and deregulation of the labour market were introduced simultaneously, without consideration of their social effects on the distribution of income. The restructuring was accompanied by massive layoffs to downsize the companies. By 1998, there were more than 100 thousand newly unemployed each month, resulting in a total unemployed figure of almost two million. The rate of unemployment skyrocketed immediately following the financial crisis, rising from 2.1 percent in October 1997 to 8.8 percent in February 1998. The size of the labour force decreased by more than 2.5 million, from 21,373,000 in February 1997 to 18,873,000 in February 1999. Those who were not in the labour force, due to the failure to obtain a job, were not even included in the government’s unemployment rate calculations; if these people were to be included, the number of people who were out of work would exceed four million. Elderly workers and female workers were the main layoff targets. Under the seniority wage system, older workers with higher wages were most vulnerable to mass layoff as employers tried to reduce labour costs. Female workers were vulnerable because the male bread-winner model was strongly supported by employers. One result of restructuring the economy was a freeze on the recruitment of new employees in the entire business sector and the public sector, generating massive numbers of young adults who failed to get jobs, including university graduates from February 1998. Consequently, unemployment among young adults also drastically increased. The rate of unemployment among adults under 25 years of age doubled from 7.7 percent to 15.9 percent between 1997 and 1998, a 21.4 percent reduction in employment compared with the previous year. The high unemployment rate of young adults has not changed significantly since 1998, as structural adjustment and restructuring has continued to occur. Young adults have been unable to avoid being squeezed out of employment. The number of people aged 18 to 29 years who were in employment decreased from 5,301,000 in 1997 to 3,856,000 in 2011; the T he 1997 financial crisis exacerbated the rising trend in income inequality through neoliberal economic reforms, policy measures to resolve the financial-cum-economic crisis , being implemented by the Korean government under the guidance of the IMF. Another financial crisis in 2008, triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, made rolling back the increasing inequality more difficult. The Gini coefficients for household income inequality and individual wage inequality had both decreased steadily up until the early 1990s, but then rose rapidly from 1992 onward, five years before the financial crisis in 1997. Although South Korea has fully recovered from the economic crisis in terms of GDP per capita and dollar reserves, symptoms of social crisis such as the world’s highest rate of suicide and a rise in violent crime have been observed as aftermaths of the neoliberal economic reforms undertaken by both liberal and conservative governments. As a consequence, political discourses on inequality, called ‘discourses on social polarisation’ are now significant public issues. The rise in inequality is an outcome of the complex economic, political, and social changes occurring in contemporary South Korea. In the following...

Markets, Nature, Neoliberalism, and Conservation through Private Protected Areas in Southern Chile

A vibrant literature has emerged in recent years exploring moves towards neoliberal forms of conservation, with a reduced role for the state and an enhanced role for markets and private and civil society actors. Yet there is a need for studies which explore how and why this trend has emerged, and what impact it has on both people and nature. The author provides a detailed examination of private protected areas, which are often associated with neoliberal approaches to conservation, in Chile—a country which has had a long and deep engagement with neoliberalism. It is found that private protected areas demonstrate a broad range of attitudes towards the use of markets in conservation, from enthusiasm to hostility. Yet all have been made possible, indeed incentivised, by Chile's liberalised property markets and individualistic political culture—products of earlier neoliberal reforms within Chile's society and economy. As such, they provide only a limited challenge to the social and environmental consequence of the integration of southern Chile's natural resources into global neoliberal economic chains. The author emphasises the importance of considering how broader neoliberal economic, political, and social reforms have allowed certain forms of conservation to emerge and thrive.

The Role of Civil Society and Neoliberal Economic Reform

기존의 시민사회론은 시민사회 영역을 규범적·당위적으로 규정함으로써 실제 시민사회 영역에서 발생하는 운동의 양상과 영향에 대한 적절한 평가를 이루어내지 못했다. 본 논문은 ‘시민사회’의 이름으로 신자유주의적 경제개혁이 주창되는 현상을 살펴본다. 테크노폴(technopol)의 개념을 활용하여 시민사회에서 활동하는 전문가 집단들의 신자유주의적 전문성에 대해 분석함으로써 시민사회 영역이 실제로는 대중들는 상반된 전문적 행위자들에 의해 지배될 수 있음을 밝히고자 한다. 대표적인 예로서 시민사회 영역에서 가장 큰 영향력을 가졌던 경제정의실천시민연합(경실련)과 참여연대를 살펴 보고 있다. 경실련의 경우 기층세력이 요구했던 분배 문제보다는 노동유연화, 공기업 민영화, 금융시장 개방 및 자유화라는 국가 관료들이 주창한 신자유주의적 개혁 의제에 운동의 초점을 맞추었고 정치적 성향이 강했던 참여연대 역시 일정부분 경제적 이슈로 전환되게 된다. 이와 같은 연구를 통해 경제민주화의 개념이 우리사회에서 분배나 노동자의 경영참여보다는 시장개혁으로서의 함의를 가지게 되었는지를 시민사회 운동의 성격을 통하여 알 수 있게 될 것이다.

Affirmative action in India: Before and after the neo-liberal turn

The inauguration of neo-liberal economic reforms in India coincided with a substantial expansion in the scope and coverage of affirmative action provisions. This article offers an explanation of this puzzle. However, while policies of affirmative action per se have not been adversely affected by the economic reforms, weaknesses of implementation persist, as seen in the poor outcomes for Dalits in terms of both public sector employment and poverty statistics. A small section of Dalits have lately begun to view the market as offering opportunities for accelerated advancement and prosperity, and this article assesses the discursive and empirical claims of Dalit entrepreneurship and Dalit capitalism, and its links to past histories of affirmative action.

A democratic critique of precarity

The term ‘precarity’ has become increasingly popular as a way to capture the material and psychological vulnerability resulting from neoliberal economic reforms. This article demonstrates that such precarity is incompatible with democracy. More specifically, it makes two arguments. First, and inspired by Montesquieu’s analysis of ‘the principles’, or public commitments behind different forms of government, it argues that modern democracy is asui generisform of government animated and sustained by a principle of shared responsibility. Second, it shows that this principle is negated by the neoliberal form of governing. The neoliberal policies currently operating in many democratic countries not only push ever more people into precarious conditions where they have to compete against each other for security and status; by displacing onto individuals a responsibility that ought to be shared and divided between citizens, they corrupt the core of democracy itself. The article thus suggests that precarity is problematic not only from the standpoint of social justice, as emphasized in earlier research, but also from the perspective of democracy. Precarity contradicts the ways of life that must be regenerated in order for a democratic form of government to sustain itself over time.

Neoliberal Economic Reform of Kim Young-Sam Regime: Focusing on the Interaction between Technocrats and Political Party Elites

본 논문에서는 김영삼 정권의 신자유주의적 개혁정책이 추진되는 과정을 경제정책의 입안 및 실무에 있어서의 주요 행위자인 기술관료(테크노크라트)들과 이들이 개혁을 추진해 나가기 위한 정치적 기반을 조성해주었던 정당엘리트들을 중심으로 분석한다. 김영삼 정권 수립 이전, 관료제 내부와 대의정치 영역에서 각각 열세의 상황에 처해 있었던 신자유주의 관료군과 김영삼?민주계 세력은 역사적으로 형성되어 온 한국의 관료적 장과 정치적 장 내에서 이들이 점유하고 있었던 ‘지위의 유사성’에 기반하여 동맹을 형성하였으며, 정권 수립 이후 권위주의 정치세력 및 관치주의 관료 분파 등의 경쟁세력과 국가권력을 쟁탈하기 위한 ‘궁정전투’를 벌이며 개혁을 추진해 나가게 된다. 이러한 과정을 추적하는 가운데 본 논문은 기존의 구조적?제도적 논의들과 달리, 급격한 경제전환을 추진한 행위자들이 구체적으로 누구였으며 이들의 전략과 실천, 그리고 그 결과가 어떠했는가를 살펴봄으로써 경제개혁에 관련한 현재적 함의를 도출하고자 한다.

Violencia Pública En Colombia, 1958–2010

This book recounts the history of the last half century in Colombia, focusing on the violent contention between the Colombian state, Marxist-inspired guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitary forces. Author Marco Palacios, a Colombian historian now based at the Colegio de México, is at pains to place his account against the background of US Cold War and terrorist concerns as well as the dynamics of the illegal drug trade, both of which color every aspect of the events he chronicles.Most of the information in the book is not new, drawn as it is from Colombia's major newspapers and news magazines as well as reading in an increasingly rich and sophisticated secondary literature on the period. Palacios is content, as he puts it, to “revise, correct, amplify, and restate” information and interpretations previously advanced in his own work and that of others (p. 20). In fact, his interpretations of the salient issues of the period — from the meanings of La Violencia (the civil commotion of the mid-twentieth century that pitted Liberals against Conservatives and resulted in 1958 in the power-sharing arrangement, the Frente Nacional, which marks the beginning of Palacios's study) to the ebb and flow of the different guerrilla groups' military strength over the decades and to the fate of efforts at negotiated peace between the armed contenders — follow mainstream understandings widely shared by specialists in the field of Colombian studies.Why then write and publish a book like this? Palacios himself seems somewhat at a loss to answer that question (pp. 20–21), but he concludes that his bird's-eye historical synthesis is meaningful. He is quick to point out that his interpretation is one of many possible ones and that it does not offer prescriptions for a future political settlement.Be that as it may, not all the information and analysis in the book is commonplace. There is an attempt to statistically analyze police records, for example, and although many of these labor-intensive exercises yield banal conclusions, such as the fact that most of the violence is “rural” (table 4.4, p. 175) or that it is largely perpetrated by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (figure 4.1, p. 179), there is important statistical information in the book, most notably a comparison of the degree of land concentration in 1964 and 2009 (appendix 2, p. 196). That data reveals a radical transformation of land tenure in the last half century, an agrarian counterreform of unprecedented proportions. Tens of thousands of small and medium-sized farmers, displaced by the violent contention between government forces, guerrilla groups, and paramilitary forces in rural areas, have been dispossessed by large landowners, many of them bankrolled by drug money.Palacios rightly emphasizes the growing influence of large landowners (latifundistas) in Colombian politics and society, but he curiously ignores the ideological and political legacies of the remarkable diffusion of property ownership, especially in the all-important coffee zones, during the middle decades of the twentieth century. That largely market-induced agrarian reform, I have argued elsewhere, sets Colombian history off from that of its Andean neighbors and of Latin American nations generally, and it helps to explain many of the exceptional features of Colombian history during the last half century. These include the remarkable staying power of Colombia's traditional, clientelistic two-party political system and the poor showing of third parties of both the Left and the Right; the weakness of labor and the Left, and the paradox of the longevity of an armed Left unable to win widespread political and ideological support and consequently relying on kidnapping, extortion, and drug trafficking to support itself; and the degree of Colombian acquiescence to neoliberal economic reform and the appeal of right-wing, US-allied governments like that of Álvaro Uribe's eight-year presidency, which ends the period covered by Palacios's book.A useful feature of Palacios's book is its bibliography of secondary works. But even here there are glaring omissions. These include the classic collection on La Violencia edited by Gonzalo Sánchez and Ricardo Peñaranda and the compelling critique by ex-Communist Alvaro Delgado of the Colombian Communist Party's strategy of pursuing, simultaneously, electoral and armed strategies of achieving power, a policy that proved disastrous for the peaceful Colombian Left and for labor leaders in particular.On page 79 (footnote 12), the author announces that he is at work on a study dealing with the first decade of Colombia's second most important guerrilla group, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional. Hopefully, that monograph will do more than the present survey to advance our understanding of violence in Colombia.

Natural calamities and ‘the Big Migration’: Challenges to the Mongolian health system in ‘the Age of the Market’

Beginning with the demise of the socialist state system in 1990, Mongolia embarked on a process of neoliberal economic reform, initiating what is known among the Mongols as ‘the Age of the Market’. The socialist health system has been replaced by a series of reforms initiated and substantiated by foreign donor organisations. This paper critically examines Mongolia's health system and discusses the extent to which this ‘system’, despite its provision of universal, accessible and essential primary health care services, is unable to accommodate the health needs of poor urban in-migrants and nomadic herders in remote provinces. With a particular focus on recurrent natural winter disasters (dzud) and an escalating rural to urban migration, the paper argues that the issues of access to health services and health system strengthening must be understood in relation to factors external to the health system. Ethnographic research highlights that despite a growing economy, considerable external aid and an established primary health care model, weak rural politics, environmental challenges and economic constraints create escalating health vulnerability among the poorest in Mongolia.