Private Commodity Research Articles

Digital Infrastructure: Public Good or Private Commodity?—Rethinking the Right to Internet Access in the Context of Urban Digitisation

The Indian state has been steadily increasing its focus on and use of digital technologies. This article argues that if digitisation is to continue and accelerate, certain other aspects of digitisation require greater scrutiny. To begin with, for digitisation to be meaningful to citizens, it is necessary to consider them not only as data points but as participants. This requires improved access to the internet. In order to do so, it is incumbent upon the Indian state to enhance digital infrastructure. However, this infrastructure cannot be narrowly conceived. There are material, educational, and legislative interventions that make digital infrastructure meaningful, accessible and non-extractive. This article raises two questions: should access to the internet be considered a basic right? And, if feasible, what would such a policy entail? This article attempts to shed light on India’s digital divide, look at the direction in which public–private relations are headed in an increasingly digital India and discuss the benefits of considering digital infrastructure—rather than the internet itself—as a public good rather than a private commodity. Such infrastructure includes laws and policies that protect and empower citizens.

TRANSFORMING SOCIAL HOUSING INTO AN ASSET CLASS: REITs and the Financialization of Supported Housing in England

AbstractThis article explores the governance of risk in financialization through the entry of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and other investment funds into specialized supported housing in England. Supported housing is a form of care accommodation intended to enable vulnerable groups such as people with learning disabilities to live more independently. Since 2014, investors have targeted the sector, developing a leaseback model that has encountered controversy due to unsustainable rents and the near bankruptcy of at least one housing association. The article unpacks these dynamics by asking how financialization has generated risk through the imposition of a ‘care fix’ in the sector, drawing on qualitative data including interviews, financial and media reports, and court and regulatory documents. In answering this question, it argues that the contradiction between housing's role as a private commodity and as a collective means of social reproduction generates tensions that suggest potential limits to financialization.

Reorienting scholarly communications from private commodity to public good

In economics, “a public good refers to a service that is made available to all members of a society”. Typically, these services are administered by governments and paid for collectively through taxation. There is an increasing awareness that the free market is creating deep inequalities in access and participation in scholarly communications, even with the transition to open science. It is now time to collectively chart a new course where research outputs are treated as public goods. This is no easy task, as it requires working across countries, domains, and stakeholder communities. This talk will identify the major actions needed to move forward with this vision, and present the activities of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), a global organisation of repository initiatives, that are contributing to our collective progress.

Green imperialism, sovereignty, and the quest for national development in the Congo

ABSTRACT This article deploys the term ‘green imperialism’ to denote the specificities of contemporary imperialism within the context of the hoped-for global transition towards low-carbon capitalist economies and societies in the coming decades. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) provides a modern exemplar of green imperialist dynamics in action. Hegemonic powers are seeking to position the Congolese economy as an exporter of low-cost, low-carbon metals and an open market for the entry of renewable energy finance and technologies. To date, the political response to green imperialism in the DRC has reproduced a model of mining-led national development that historically has delivered little by way of material improvements for most of the population, thus undermining the prospects of prosperity in the country. Albeit this time around there is the possibility of expanded access for some to renewable forms of energy as a foreign-owned private commodity, with all the limitations and contradictions this new model of energy delivery entails.

The historical political economy of Chinese housing regulation and price speculation.

This work posits that the current state of the Chinese real estate market is a result of its historical development of housing distribution and regulation, through a critical literature review embedded in a political economy analysis on China’s Three Red Line policy. The paper follows key transitory periods within Chinese socio political reform within the context of its housing sector, identifying several policy making decisions and structural shifts which contributed to its current environment that fosters exuberant speculation and the treatment of housing as a private commodity rather than public necessity. The Financial Crisis is employed as a case study on housing market failures, exploring the institutional role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as the existence of a credit-speculation binary in the distribution of subprime mortgages. The economics of the interrelationship between speculative behaviors within markets and the ability to leverage debt is then studied and applied to a Chinese context, utilizing several examples including the Evergrande crisis and the Three Red Line policy to identify the underlying failures of the Chinese housing market.

Education reforms and democracy in Pakistan: the problem of privatisation

ABSTRACT In many nations around the globe, including Pakistan, education is losing ground as a public good to become another market-based commodity as the state shrinks its responsibility to schooling. This presents challenges to democratic futures, and particularly for young democratic states such as Pakistan. The government of Pakistan is pouring a significant amount of money into the private provision of education, encouraged by the policies and investments of international donor-partners such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. These changes in educational provision represent the impacts of neoliberalism and globalisation on Pakistani policymaking and the growing influence of the conceptualisation of education as a private commodity. To address these trends, we offer a normative philosophical framework for a conception of education as a critical public good in Pakistan, drawing on Islamic tradition, public good theory, human rights, and common good global education theories.

Conjugal Rights and Sexual Privacy among Scheduled Caste Households in Caste Settlement Colonies in Kerala

Space in a household is not only a private commodity but also it has alternative uses. Scarcity and alternative uses of space compel occupants in a household to choose what they have to do with their limited space against unlimited spatial needs. A household becomes a ‘’home’’, when it serves spatial needs of its occupants and helps them to realize maximum potential of their capabilities. Space scarcity is reflecting not only existing standard of living of people but also acts as a predictor of their future attainments. In this article we present spatial conditions of scheduled caste households in caste settlement colonies in Kerala. We argue that present residential conditions and space availability among scheduled caste households in caste settlement colonies in Kerala cause denial of many human rights including conjugal rights and sexual privacy to them. We suggest that housing policies of the state must give more importance to qualitative aspects of ‘space’ in household rather than quantitative aspects like how many number of houses we add every year.

Culture and Conversation: Rethinking Brown v. Board of Education a Postponed Commitment to Educational Equality

The Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision was a significant change in social justice and human rights. There is ongoing debate about public education not as a private commodity but as a public good that must be made available on equal terms. Recently, schools are entering an era of second-generation segregation. Poor outcomes, language acquisition programs preventing access to college-readiness courses, and teacher quality are causes for concern. Research on second-generation segregation found that African-American children experience lower rates of academic achievement than their White peers. This was a case study analysis to investigate the impact of teacher preparation and culturally relevant practices related to educational opportunities. The results hold implications on misconceptions of educational improvements for Black children and identify the need to increase cultural responsiveness and an intentional focus on students’ assets and needs.

Mapping summer soybean and corn with remote sensing on Google Earth Engine cloud computing in Parana state – Brazil

ABSTRACT Brazilian farming influences directly the worldwide economy. Thus, fast and reliable information on areas sown with the main crops is essential for planning logistics and public or private commodity market policies. Recent farming practices have embraced remote sensing to provide fast and reliable information on commodity dynamics. Medium-to-low resolution free orbital images, such as those from Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2, have been used for crop mapping; however, satellite image processing requires high computing power, especially when monitoring vast areas. Therefore, cloud data processing has been the only feasible option to deal with a large amount of orbital data and its processing and analysis. Thus, our goal was to develop a method to map the two main crops (soybeans and corn) in Paraná, one of the major Brazilian state producers. Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, SRTM+, and field data from 2016 to 2018 were used with the Simple Non-Iterative Clustering segmentation method and the Continuous Naive Bayes classifier, to identify cropped areas. A minimum global accuracy of 90% was found for both crops. Comparison with field data showed correlations of 0.96 and agreement coefficients no lower than 0.86. This ensures mapping quality when using Sentinel and/or Landsat imagery on the GEE platform.

Compassion in a time of COVID-19

Compassion in a time of COVID-19

Spaces of Belonging and the Precariousness of Home

In this essay, I pose the question: what does it mean to be at home in a world where housing is increasingly a private commodity? I draw upon phenomenological analyses of the experience of home from Bachelard and Heidegger, both elaborating upon the fruitful descriptions of home as anchoring our temporal experience, while at the same time critiquing Bachelard’s all too hasty claim that all human beings begin in welcoming homes. As such, I claim that insofar as spaces of dwelling are not simply available in an increasingly precarious world, we ought to commit ourselves both to the work of cultivating more spaces of dwelling, and resisting an economic and political understanding of dwelling that reduces it to a purely material structure, or worse, an essentially fungible commodity or investment property, rather than a place that provides the conditions and parameters for human life.

Te whai mātauranga: he taonga mō te tangata kotahi pea, mō te iwi katoa rānei? Education: A Private Commodity, or a Public Good?

It is now 30 years since the appearance of New Zealand Treasury (Government management: brief to the incoming government, vol 2, education Issues, New Zealand Government, Wellington, 1987), a key text that marked the start of a new era of education policy in Aotearoa-New Zealand. In his review of this Treasury text, Professor Grace (Br J Educ Stud 37(3):207–221, 1989) commented in some detail on what he termed ‘taha Māori’ in relation to the new policy direction. This article uses policy discourse analysis informed by a Kaupapa Māori research perspective to re-visit these two texts and review their arguments about Māori education. This research aims to contribute to a politically activist form of literature research, taking up a Kaupapa Māori research lens to go back to this Treasury policy text, critiquing its analysis and prescription for Māori education at a point in time just before Kura Kaupapa Māori took off.

ENHANCEMENT OF THE GRAIN MARKET REGULATION MECHANISM AS A FACTOR OF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION AGRICULTURAL COMPLEX

In modern macroeconomic conditions, the mechanism of public procurement and commodity interventions is not an effective enough tool to regulate the grain market. The subject of the research is the state policy in the field of development of agroindustrial complex of the Russian Federation in order to develop proposals to improve the mechanisms of regulation of the grain market. The object of the research is the directions and mechanisms of agrarian policy of modern Russia. The work pays special attention to the analysis of the main shortcomings of the current regulatory mechanism of the domestic grain market, as well as offers a completely new alternative models to maintain the profitability of agricultural producers. It is shown that the commercial organizations involved in interventions are forced to accept price risks caused by state regulation of the market, but incompatible with their statutory goals. The study uses theoretical and empirical methods, in particular: literature review, logical, statistical and expert assessments, methods of collecting empirical data, system analysis, description and processing of the research results. The main results of the study are the following provisions. The authors propose the use of alternative models to maintain the level of income of agricultural producers in order to reduce the cost of the Federal budget and improve the efficiency of this mechanism, given the current conditions of the agro-industrial complex, in the framework of which an effective Institute can be created that regulates the grain market on the principles of public - private partnership-grain commodity and credit Corporation. Realizing functions on acceptance on storage and purchase of grain, commodity and credit Corporation will receive privileges from the state. At the same time, the removal of surplus grain in the subjects of the Russian Federation, not exporting it, by improving the competitiveness of these products through subsidies transportation tariffs will help to stabilize grain prices in the domestic market and will be the basis for the expansion of exports.

The effect of residential housing policy on car ownership and trip chaining behaviour in Hangzhou, China

China has recently initialised affordable housing policies to provide low rent housings for medium and low income households aiming to satisfy the growing demand in the housing market. The travel behaviour of residents in these two different types of housing is likely to differ, since public housing tenants have a limited choice of residential location, as the location of low-rent housing is fixed, while residents in commodity housing are able to take their travel patterns into account in choosing their housing location. Therefore, this paper investigates the differences in car ownership and trip chaining behaviour arising from living in different types of residential housing. The self-selection bias caused by the differences in the observed individual and household characteristics is partially controlled by a propensity score matching approach. The study further considers the endogenous effect of car ownership on travel chaining behaviour, thus controlling for the self-selection bias at car ownership level. The results show that residents in private commodity housing are more likely to own a car than those in low-rent housing with similar individual and household characteristics. Different life cycle stages play a vital role in car ownership after self-selection in residential housing has been taken into account. Living in private commodity housing has a direct negative effect on trip chaining complexity, after controlling for endogenous car ownership, although this effect is offset by the tendency for private commodity housing owners to do complex trip chaining because they have one or more cars.

Higher education: Public good or private commodity?

Authors who claim that higher education is a public service are often concerned about equity: they are making a normative case that like all education it should be available for everybody. Others stress the external economies: a society with large numbers of highly educated people is more efficient economically and better in many other ways. Finally there is the argument that 'knowledge' is a 'non-rivalrous' commodity; once something is known it is in principle available to all at very low cost and should be organized so that it is. Opponents argue that higher education needs resources, so someone must pay for it and it is more equitable for the costs to be borne by those who benefit most from it. Knowledge may intrinsically be free once it has been discovered, but the acquisition or creation of new knowledge is very expensive and those who acquire or create it need to be reimbursed. It is also argued that competition between independent creators and purveyors of knowledge is inherently more effective in the expansion of knowledge than monopolies of any kind, public or private. This article claims that the arguments on both sides are essentially about finance and concludes that neither public monopoly nor unrestricted market competition are by themselves ways providing the best higher education for all.

THE ETIQUETTE OF GREETING: OPINION OF JURISTS

Ponte Academic JournalOct 2016, Volume 72, Issue 10 THE ETIQUETTE OF GREETING: OPINION OF JURISTSAuthor(s): Mohammed Muneerdeen Olodo Al-Shafii ,Mohd Safri bin Ali, Abdulsoma ThoarlimJ. Ponte - Oct 2016 - Volume 72 - Issue 10 doi: 10.21506/j.ponte.2016.10.8 Abstract:Contemporarily, many factors have put bars between man and his fellows, most especially when security of life is taken into consideration. Everyone is always self-conscious; fellows and neighbours no more trust themselves and meaningful societal relationship is at stake. The most human factor easily relating one person to the other is greeting, but it has unfortunately been made to look as a private commodity whereby people are free to give it to whomever they want and deny it hosts of oth-ers. Those who do greet are seen as primitives and conservatives. It is time to tell what greeting is and what role and influence it plays in uniting the humanity at large, most particularly from the Islamic juristic perspective. This paper wishes to showcase the roles greeting play in ascertaining security of life and property on one hand, and how it helps strengthening and uniting humanity on the other hand. The major sources for the paper shall be from the Qur�an and Prophetic traditions. Download full text:Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution Username Password

Suspended redistribution: ‘green economy’ and water inequality in the Waterberg, South Africa

In this article I show how ideas and practices of ‘green economy’ can reproduce and even naturalise inequality in water access for local users. Evidence to support my argument is drawn from the Waterberg region in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Following the demise of apartheid and the appeal of the green economy, the Waterberg has been ‘reinvented’ as a wildlife destination. Whereas game farms enjoy secure water supply, the rural poor relocated to the small town of Vaalwater suffer severe water shortages. The article questions the mainstream view according to which game farms have no relationship to the water problems in town. Rather, I suggest that by conceiving and managing water as a private commodity deriving from land ownership and largely unregulated by the state, green economy initiatives contribute both materially and discursively to hampering more equality in water redistribution.

L. Boisson de Chazournes, Fresh Water in International Law

A natural given, or a most valuable asset? A public good, or a private commodity? With the advancing development agenda and the imminent adoption of a new set of so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a successor to the soon to expire Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), water again features prominently on the international agenda for 2015. An SDG ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water for all not only seems timely but also more urgent than ever, taking into account issues such as water loss, water privatization, and water contamination. An up-to-date compendium on the issue of fresh water in international law thus comes just at the right time. Moreover, given the not yet definite decision on how to address this issue in the post-2015 development planning, Laurence Boisson de Chazournes with her book Fresh Water in International Law, as envisaged, indeed helps to deal with ‘the complexity involved in the law’s protection and management of this natural resource’ (p. v). The book’s novel and well-structured approach to the subject is already visible from the chapter headings, including those ending with -ization (chapters 3–6), but can be manifested further by addressing topics such as other sources of fresh water (chapter 2. IV.), the right to water and environmental and cultural protection (chapter 5. V. B.), and the provision of technical and financial assistance (chapter 6. IV.). A selected bibliography at the end and selected cases at the beginning ensure its suitability for students, practitioners, and legal scholars alike. Furthermore, despite the broad

The role consumerism plays in student learning

In nations facing austerity measures, students risk diminished quality in their higher education experiences. Universities function increasingly like corporations as they struggle to compensate for budget shortfalls caused by declining public support. As a result, students become positioned as consumers of a private commodity that exists to facilitate their personal economic advantage. The purpose of this piece is to analyze the largely hidden role consumerism plays as an underlying contributor to the issue of diminished student learning in colleges and universities. This article will argue that educational quality is compromised when students are understood as customers to be placated rather than learners to be challenged. Drawing on research about how students learn, this work posits teaching and selling as inherently contradictory processes. Implications for higher education’s future and support as a public good are discussed.

Counterculture, Property, Place, and Time: Nimbin, 1973

Counterculture, Property, Place, and Time: Nimbin, 1973