Political Economy Factors Research Articles

Persistent Current Account Deficits: a Warning Signal?

When should persistent current account deficits be of concern to policymakers? We address this question by developing a framework for analysing current account sustainability, that explicitly takes into account willingness to pay and willingness to lend in addition to intertemporal solvency. This framework helps understand a variety of country experiences with protracted current account imbalances. We identify a number of sustainab ility indicators related to the structure of the economy, the economic policy stance, and political economy factors, and use them to evaluate the experience of countries that suffered external crises and of others that avoided them.

Providing better protection and promoting growth: A defence of Averting the old age crisis

This article briefly summarizes the recommendations of the recent World Bank report, Averting the old age crisis, analyses why representatives of the ISSA and the ILO came to quite different policy conclusions from that report, and takes up other selected issues. The article argues that there are four underlying reasons for the divergence between the World Bank and the ILO/ISSA positions: the Bank is more concerned about the impact of social security systems on the broader economy; the Bank is troubled by the inequities that we often find in current systems in practice, even though they may look equitable on paper; the Bank believes that behavioural responses and political economy factors sometimes make non‐viable the design changes of public systems recommended by the ILO and the ISSA; and the Bank places considerable emphasis on the benefits of risk diversification.

Pseudoseizures in Social and Cultural Context

Pseudoseizures remain a common form of conversion symp tom worldwide, particularly among patients with co-existing epilepsy. This paper reviews current biomedical diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to pseudoseizures. It then com pares the individual-centred psychopathological accounts of pseudoseizures in biomedicine with anthropological accounts of other dissociative phenomena including behaviour in some possession cults. Two cases of pseudoseizures from a Japanese neuropsychiatric hospital illustrate the role of family, social and political-economic factors in chronicity. These examples demonstrate the need for a social perspective in research on pseudoseizures.

Endogeneous price and trade policy developments in Central European agricultrue

Endogenous policy theory is used to explain developments in agricultural and trade policies in Central Europe (CE). There have been three phases since 1989. After the initial liberalisation, ad hoc interventions emerged to protect consumers and producers against the negative real income effects of economic reform. These ad hoc interventions were gradually consolidated into a policy package. Average CE agricultural protection increased after 1992, but large differences exist between countries and commodities. The differences are largely consistent with political economy predictions. Domestic political economy factors may stimulate further increases in agricultural protection as CE economies grow. International agreements could plan an important role in limiting CE agricultural protectionism. Copyright 1996 by Oxford University Press.

The Punjab crisis since 1984: A reassessment

Abstract Over the last decade there has been increasing scholarly interest in the ethnic character of the Indian state. This interest has coincided with the rise of the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP], nation‐wide clashes between Hindus and Muslims, and bitter conflict over affirmative action for backward classes. Simultaneously, the Indian state has been confronted by regional movements in Kashmir, Assam and Punjab seeking secession from the Indian Union. By focusing on the Punjab crisis this article argues that conventional explanations have concentrated on national political centralization and regional economic factors, to the neglect of Sikh ethno‐nationalism and its dialectical relationship with strategies for ethnic conflict management followed by the Indian state since 1947. Drawing on recent revisionist accounts, the Indian state, it is suggested, should be viewed as a form of an ethnic democracy in which hegemonic control is exercised over non‐Hindu ethnic groups. The Punjab case‐st...

The theory of social forestry intervention: the state of the art in Asia

This study focuses on the major issues in current thinking about the theory of social forestry development in Asia. The first of these issues concerns the cause of deforestation. The governmental view is that deforestation is a gradual process driven by community-based factors, whereas the community view is that deforestation is a stochastic process driven by external, political-economic factors. The two explanations have different implications for where the ‘problematique’ of social forestry is located — in the forest community or in the forest agency — and how, therefore, it is to be addressed.

Political Leadership and Liberal Economic Subsystems: The Constraints of Structural Assumptions

AbstractTheories of hegemonic leadership often begin with a constraining assumption: that international structure can explain both a state's capability to provide leadership and its interest in doing so. By conflating these explanations, traditional theories, even those from quite different approaches, share common problems. These problems are illustrated by examining three well-known models, and comparing their applications to the eighteenth century. This period provides difficult cases for all three, since countries with power did not provide political or economic leadership, and those which were attempting to provide leadership were not powerful. An alternative theory of leadership is then offered, using structural factors to explain capabilities, but domestic political economic factors to explain interests. The ability of this model to handle the historical cases with greater accuracy suggests that domestic factors could offer fresh insight into theories of leadership.

Earthquake risk reduction: An examination of local regulatory efforts

We develop an understanding of local governmental efforts to address earthquake risks. Our data for a sample of California and Washington cities' risk-reduction efforts sort into two different clusters of leading jurisdictions as contrasted with a cluster of lagging jurisdictions. We explain differences among the three categories of cities in terms of different political-economic factors. Local governmental willingness and ability to undertake risk-reduction programs have more to do with local political demands and community resources than with objective risk or previous earthquake experience. State mandates have a selective impact on local risk-reduction efforts. The principal policy lessons concern the need to address gaps in local risk-reduction efforts through more careful targeting of federal and state earthquake programs and by including stronger teeth within state mandates.

Suicide Among Canadian Aboriginal Peoples

This paper reviews research on suicide and attempted suicide among Canadian Aboriginal peoples (Amer indians, Métis and Inuit). The demographic and cul tural diversity of the Aboriginal population is described and basic epidemiological data are summar ized. Social, cultural, and political economic factors that may contribute to suicide and culturally appropri ate interventions are reviewed. A model integrating social and psychiatric perspectives on suicide is presented. The high prevalence of suicide in this population indicates widespread social problems that demand community-based interventions and socio- political change in addition to the conventional psychiatric emphasis on individual psychopathology and family dynamics.

Organized Labor in the Electorate, 1960-1988

This paper examines the union effect on vote choice and turnout in presidential elections from 1960 to 1988. It shows that union household status had a significant effect on vote choice in the last four presidential elections, including the widely reported debacle of 1984. Declining membership and other political-economic factors may explain organized labor's apparent political weakness, but these explanations have very different implications for our thinking about labor politics than the argument that leaders have diminishing impact on members' voting decisions. Surprisingly, union status does not have a significant impact on tumout; Verba, Nie, and Kim's "group-based political mobilization" hypothesis does not hold up well in the American context.

Immigration: R.I.P.?

The author briefly describes the political social and economic factors that may result in a movement by the U.S. government to significantly curb immigration to the United States. (ANNOTATION)

Political Economy of Protection to Australian Manufacturing: Further Results

This study examines the determinants of inter-industry variation of tariff protection to Australian manufacturing using a simultaneous equations model incorporating various political-economic factors derived from both 'interest group' and 'public interest' models. 'The results shed some Sight on the degree of bias which may have been involved in the previous empirical results of single equation models which ignored simultaneity in the basic relationships under consideration. The study has also identified some new factors which exert strong influence in determining the levels of protection.

Determinants of a merger in a publicly-funded health system: a political-economy perspective.

This article reports the results of a case study, spanning a period of 10 years, of the merger of two hospitals in a publicly-funded health system. A political economy model was used to analyse the determinants of the merger. Results show that external political economy factors, mainly pressure from the state to rationalize health services and the organization's needs to acquire critical resources, significantly contributed to the merger decision. At the internal political economy level, groups and individual strategies also played a determinant role. Our study suggests that merger in the public sector may not necessarily result from efficiency motives.

Biocultural synthesis in medical anthropology.

Medical anthropology has developed distinct and separate biological and cultural approaches to the study of health and disease in human populations. Within cultural anthropology a major focus has been the ethnomedical perspective that analyzes the process of defining disease and describing the social response to disease. In biological anthropology, an ecological perspective considers the interaction of the population, the insult and the environment at the core of the disease process. There has been limited success in integrating the cultural and biological perspective. Some cultural anthropologists claim that the ecological perspective relies on a biomedical model and therefore is not useful in studying non-Western societies. Others are critical of the adaptivist perspective that they believe fails to consider political economic factors that affect the disease process. The lack of a biocultural integration has hindered the systematic analysis of health and disease in contemporary traditional and non-Western groups. An ecological model that addresses these problems will provide a biocultural integration of the disease process.

Pecunia non olet: Cleansing the money-launderers from the Temple

This article analyses the development of police-bank relationships, principally in the UK but also elsewhere, within the context of the control of money laundering. It argues that we have moved from a situation of national control over bank secrecy to an emerging New International Order in which most, though not all, countries are pressurised into taking greater measures to reduce bank secrecy where crime is suspected. In Europe, particularly, banks are being turned into an arm of the state by being required to keep detailed records and to inform police where they suspect — or even where they ought to suspect — that moneys banked are the proceeds of crime. The article concludes with discussion of the limitations on this process generated by political economy factors.

Sterilization of Workers from Pesticide Exposure: The Causes and Consequences of DBCP-Induced Damage in Costa Rica and beyond

Public health hazards from the use of agricultural pesticides have received increasing attention in developing as well as industrial nations. This article examines a remarkable case of massive sterilization of approximately 1,500 workers in Costa Rica, due to exposure to a toxic nematicide called DBCP 1,2-dibromo-3-chloropropane), applied in large commercial banana plantations. Although the product was used during the 1970s, sterile victims have continued to be diagnosed through the 1980s. The effects include psychological trauma as well as permanent infertility. The case has international repercussions because several hundred workers have filed law suits against the U.S.-based transnational DBCP manufacturers, and because DBCP use was continued during the 1980s in other developing nations. The author analyzes the causes behind this serious impairment. It is argued that the contributing factors include not only biomedical processes and technical dimensions (i.e., how DBCP was used), but most importantly, political-economic factors that explain how and why DBCP was used despite the severe hazard. The crucial determinants pertain to the dominance of short-term profit motives, and the control over information and technology by the manufacturers (who concealed early toxicological research evidence of the reproductive hazards) and by the managers of the banana producer-companies. This case well illustrates problems and injustices from labor exploitation and resource extraction from transnational agro-industries. The article concludes with a brief summary of policy implications from the case.

In pursuit of proper contexts for sustainability in rural Africa

Sustainable development is high on development analysts' agendas as people seek viable alternatives to current development concepts. These latter approaches have not satisfied people's livelihoods especially in developing countries. This paper suggests that the promotion of sustainable development must correctly identify the contexts within which it is to be pursued. It is essential to note that this is best done if people recognize that as a complex concept, sustainable development has several dimensions, including the resource base of a country/community/society; external factors impacting on it; internal factors at play within; population factors and political economic factors.

Explaining Asian economic organization

Social theorists are challenged to explain an increasingly complex economic order. It is clear that old theories that posited a developmental sequence from “undeveloped” to “industrialized” cannot explain the diverse patterns of industrialization that exist. Certainly, Japan is as developed as Western nations but its patterns of development, its economic norms, and its industrial practices are substantially different from the United States and even its Asian neighbors in Taiwan and South Korea. For example, the fact that Japan has the largest banks in the world, and Taiwan relatively few and weak ones (despite the world's largest per capita foreign reserve holdings), cannot be explained only by recourse to market or state factors, although each play a role. Both countries were literally awash in money in the 1980s, and both countries are clearly capitalist societies where banking institutions are assumed to be critical to economic development, as they have been in the West. But more than market and political economy factors are at work here. In Japan, historically developed institutional factors, dating from before the Meiji Restoration and industrial revolution, created conditions for business group self-financing. Modern-day keiretsu, such as Sumitomo and Mitsui, with their huge banks as centerpieces, trace their origins to pre-industrial merchant houses under family ownership. Inheritance practices in Japan are based on primogeniture, inheritance of the entire fortune by the eldest son. This practice allowed merchant family fortunes to remain intact under the stewardship of the heir. Successful families thus had huge sums of money available to finance the businesses of affiliated branches operating under the “badge” of the mother house. The descendents of the zaibatsu merchant houses, the keiretsu, continue to rely on their own sources of finance, now institutionalized in banks that serve their credit and other financial needs. To see large banks encapsulated within business networks as only the outcome of distorted market conditions, or as only the result of a powerful business class, misses the institutional origins and overlooks the contemporary institutional underpinnings of the Japanese banking system. Ironically, the weakness of Taiwanese banks can also be traced to a strong family system. Chinese societies practice partible inheritance, that is, division of a family estate equally among all sons. As a result, families divide their fortunes every generation, mitigating against the development of large sums of money. Instead, there is great pressure within families to develop multiple businesses so that at the death of the family head, each son can claim an independent enterprise. Because all Chinese families face the problem of setting up children in business (being an employee is not a desirable status in Taiwan as it is in Japan), a range of informal lending arrangements have arisen within families and among friends to generate investment capital. Strong social norms dictate that one assist financially a kin member or close friend. Banks play a relatively minor role in Taiwan because alternative institutional arrangements, also with preindustrial origins, have obviated the need for banks for some financial functions. Again, market factors are important to understanding the strong curb market and weak formal banking system in Taiwan, and political economy factors, notably the absence of a strong central bank, are also significant. But an institutional explanation integrates these factors into an explanation that begins with the character of the society being explained. We need theories that can account for difference without reducing cases to unique instances, that do not presume the individualistic character of Western social orders, and that are sensitive to an array of ideal as well as material factors operating in different locations. Although political economy, market, and culture theories each have contributions to make, an institutional perspective of the type I outline may be especially suited to the comparative analysis of emerging world economic organization. I think, ironically, that a sensitivity to institutional factors may yield better theories of the West. Rather than assume that the United States and Europe are the exemplars of advanced capitalism, the closest empirical instances of the idealized competitive market, Japan and other Asian nations are suggesting that the West is simply one form of capitalist economic development, an expression no doubt, of the West's own institutional heritage. When we relinquish ethnocentric perspectives we can begin to look at ourselves and our own institutional heritage more clearly.

Indian nutritionists and international nutritional standards: Concepts and controversies

This paper explores how Indian nutritional scientists and policy planners have influenced the formulation and interpretation of standards of nutritional status. It draws on diverse published evidence by Indian scientists on three controversial issues: (1) the validity and applicability of international nutritional standards to India; (2) the so-called protein gap; and (3) the ‘small but healthy’ hypothesis. The paper concludes that Indian scientists have had considerable influence in international nutrition and food policy debates. Moreover, their positions seem to have been motivated more by nationalistic and scientific, rather than Indian ethnomedical cultural concerns. The paper provides one example of how Third World scientists and science have influenced a major area of scientific policy debate. The roles of cultural and political-economic factors in the construction of national and international nutritional standards are highlighted.

The Kur in West Germany as an interface between naturopathic and allopathic ideologies

In countries where biomedicine developed from earlier medical knowledge, medical pluralism provides unusual cultural parameters and perspectives on biomedical epistemologies. Past therapy traditions, which are still salient in the biomedical system of West Germany today, are examined historically and ethnomedically. The Kur, now part of a complex system of rehabilitation medicine utilizing medical bathing and environmental stimuli, illustrates divergent ideologies in the contemporary German health care system. The influence of cultural, social, and political-economic factors on therapeutic eclecticism and directions are discussed as cultural dynamics of the biomedical system in general.