Southern Governments Research Articles

Seroprevalence of Human Cytomegalovirus among Aborted Women in Aden, Yemen

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is one member of Herpesviridae. It can cause serious complications in pregnant women and their fetuses. So, this study aims to determine the prevalence of IgG and IgM against HCMV among aborted women and other related factors in Aden–Yemen. An analytical cross-sectional study was conducted on 88 aborted women. Blood samples were collected and serum HCMV IgG and IgM were analyzed using ELISA. The overall prevalence of IgG and IgM of HCMV infections were 77.6% and 83.3%, respectively. Neither HCMV IgG nor IgM seroprevalence had significantly influenced by age, number of abortions, education level, trimesters, and other factors. It can be concluded that the seroprevalence IgG antibodies of HCMV infections among aborted women were slightly lower than those reported globally whereas the seroprevalence IgM antibodies were higher than most of the previous studies that performed globally. Other causative factors may also contribute to abortion among aborted women. Further research is required to detect the HCMV and other causative agents of abortion in Aden and other southern governments of Yemen using adequate sample size and new advanced techniques.

Community-Level Health Interventions are Crucial in the Post-COVID-19 Era: Lessons from Africa’s Proactive Public Health Policy Interventions

Measured against the gloomy pre-COVID-19 predictions, Africa has fared far better than most regions in managing the pandemic. This much, however, has received less attention. This paper answers the question: how have the new rituals of self determination in public health affected the successful management of COVID-19 in Africa, and how can the continent and the rest of the world build on such models/lessons in the post-pandemic era? I employ emancipatory theorising in reviewing literature on approaches to governance of COVID-19. The rationale is to empower the grassroots and to accentuate the urgency for a decolonized local ownership of the governance of all public health crises. I argue that while traditional international cooperation is necessary for additional resource and expertise from the global North for sustainable health, the political will of Southern governments remains fundamental for any extraordinary success due to its grassroots/community orientation towards non-pharmaceutical interventions and initial pre-emptive rituals. The novelty in this paper is that it lays bare the ignored African responses and lessons and reveals how to harness protective communitarian ethos in solving future crises. The paper further provides population health as an ‘immune system’ policy framework for explaining and predicting how a scientific and human-centrered grassroots leadership can yield optimal outcomes in any future crisis.

Enhancing Socio Economic Development Spurred Through STI Policy Framework Into the Nucleus Off Mainstream Society in Malaysia

Over the past decades, the Southern Governments have sought to make innovation a key issue in their policy agenda as a catalyst toward sustainable development. Many southern countries realised that innovation with the use of science and technology had a vast potential in the economic transformation of a nation and as means to economic growth. In formulating or implementing innovation policy, it is imperative to identify the possible gaps in the system and set viable interventions in promoting innovation strategic focus. As a matter of fact, innovation is termed as the evolution and implementation of an improved product or service that uses a new marketing approach through rejuvenating the workplace and reengineering the marketing philosophies to cater to the external marketplace. Contemporary nations recognised the role innovation can play in the economic transformation along with incorporating the environmental challenges that are to be faced in due time. Employment growth will accompany innovation as new avenues of study and new knowledge creation exist. Looking at Malaysia, it can be said that the 10-10MySTIE was introduced into the mainstream for the adoption into science, technology, and innovation (STI). Their intentions were admittedly commendable; however, the implementation process was wanting. Policies are the brainchild of a group of people who have adequate knowledge of the subject matter. The implementation roadmap must be clearly charted for any policy to take a life of its own. The common failing in most policies are that policies are well thought of, but a roadmap to realise the policy is seldom implemented and seldom monitored, hence many well-intentioned policies fall by the wayside. Every policy should have an implementation body and a monitoring body who answer directly to the Minister concerned. Whilst crafting a policy, it would be essential that the financial commitment and allocation are identified. For innovation policy to take shape, there is a need to commit to finance to realise the policy, where the systems must be in place, skilled labour must be made available, and where necessary, lure foreign skills to participate in the policy implementation, who are the participants that are required and their availability. Every conceivable actor must be requested to be involved. In implementing or choosing to implement a policy or a series of policies, it is crucial to identify the main actors, subsidiary actors, financial requirements and budgeting, identify the implementers, identify the monitors or monitoring agencies, set up a software programme, as well as churn out a quarterly report and the Minister concerned to sit with the implementers, the monitoring agencies and financial players to gauge the policy progress. In taking a critical view of the policy stage to implementation stage, the need to keep in mind the market segment is critical as innovation and its final product are aimed at attracting the market segment the innovation is targeting. Thus, this paper discusses in detail the enhancement of the socioeconomic development spurred through the STI policy framework into the nucleus off mainstream society toward the achievement of the aforementioned 10-10 MySTIE framework.

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South

Historians have developed a rich literature on the relationship of slavery to Christianity—showing how Black believers resisted enslavement in Christian terms and also how southern whites' proslavery faith informed the Confederate political project and spurred the Civil War. In what is sure to become a field-defining volume, Elizabeth L. Jemison carries that story forward from emancipation until the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the lower Mississippi Valley, Jemison expertly analyzes a wide range of denominational records, religious newspapers, and personal correspondence to show how Black and white Christians staked their actions and aspirations on notions of “Christian citizenship,” a highly gendered concept that each group interpreted differently (p. 2). Southern whites developed their arguments for Christian citizenship from the old logic of proslavery faith. Emancipation did not lead southern whites to question the biblical mandate for slavery. The slaveholding family necessarily excluded Black people, and postemancipation whites followed that model to develop a patriarchal Christian citizenship rooted in racial inequality (because no Black people could achieve independence) and gender inequality (because even white women depended on men). This vision of a God-given white-supremacist social order informed terrorist campaigns that overthrew the Reconstruction era's legally elected, often Black-led, Republican southern governments and replaced them with Democratic regimes. The defense of the family, especially white women from supposedly predatory Black men was, furthermore, the most common rationale for lynching. Despite the illegality of these actions, and despite a professed concern for law and order, southern whites justified them in Christian terms. The white Christian God apparently had a segregationist design for society, and as Jemison shows, later generations of Christian conservatives followed that insight in their Bible-based appeals to “family values” (p. 14).

A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era by Andrew F. Lang

Reviewed by: A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era by Andrew F. Lang Mark Wahlgren Summers A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era. By Andrew F. Lang. The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. x, 558. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6007-3.) We were one of a kind. Americans never doubted it. In a world of aristocrats, autocrats, and mobs, the United States felt like the one safe haven for liberty wedded to law: a loose-jointed governing structure shared between the states and the nation, beholden to the public will but within a constitutional framework that barred the way to would-be dictators and leveling sans-culottes, running roughshod over the safeguards for individual freedom. Every upheaval in Europe, every fresh caudillo posing as a savior in Latin America, only told Americans how rare and precious the Founders' work was and how it was worth dying for its defense. That sense of exceptionalism, as Andrew F. Lang's closely researched study makes clear, helps explain both secession and its suppression, the new birth of freedom and what, to some at least, felt like its stunted growth in the years after the Civil War. Time proved that the American experiment would not translate easily or smoothly into other cultures. It also made America more exceptional in one particular way: as one of the few Western countries where slavery persisted—indeed, embedded itself deeper. For northerners, slavery's spread looked ever more like a menace to what had made this country special. It revealed itself as a subversive force undermining white people's freedom as well as that of Black people. Slaveholding and democracy could not endure forever; the house divided could not stand. At the same time, as race and servitude became more [End Page 169] deeply entwined with white southerners' identity, they came to see attacks on slavery as a threat to what made American republicanism special. With it, they saw danger to that other distinctively American fundamental—the federal system that let states define their own institutions as they would. So in 1860, many white southerners embraced secession as the only way to preserve what made the republic unique. They were willing to fight for it, just as so many others were prepared to shoulder arms to preserve those values that they thought defined America's distinctiveness: government by the consent of the governed, the rule of law, and, at least for the antislavery minority, that gradual working toward a Union in which all were treated equally. This sense of exceptionalism defined the kind of war soldiers preferred to make, to spare civilians and to limit themselves to military targets; rather than shelving the Constitution to meet the crisis, policy makers emphasized that at worst they were only stretching it, and not for keeps. Seceded states' sovereignty might slumber, but theirs was no sleep of death. That sense of exceptionalism fostered a northern commitment to do whatever it took to save the Union, including recasting the relationship between the states and the national government and the caste system that gave white people such commanding sway over Black people. With the war's end, though, that sense of exceptionalism not only furthered the North's commitment to remake the Confederate South but also put a leash and a time limit on Reconstruction. The authority needed to subdue the often violent resistance to equal rights felt too much like the iron hand of authoritarian regimes elsewhere. The world was too much with us, late and soon: our eyes turned to French imperial adventurism in Mexico and mob law in Commune-run Paris. In President Ulysses S. Grant's use of troops to uphold southern governments, his critics saw Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte; in the so-called Force Bills they could read the ukases of czars and Iron Chancellors. Not racism alone, but a fear for the fragility of the one successful experiment in carefully restricted self-government, put confines on how far Reconstruction could go and on how long intervention from...

Swimming in their own direction: Explaining domestic variation in homegrown sustainability governance for aquaculture in Asia

Agricultural commodity production in the Global South is accompanied by a range of social and environmental problems ranging from pollution and deforestation to labor rights violations. Accordingly, governments and non-state actors have responded through various governance initiatives aimed at promoting sustainable commodity production. While the existing literature focuses largely on transnational standards originating in the North, we investigate “homegrown” approaches in the South by asking: what explains variation in the design and features of sustainable commodity governance led by Southern actors? By comparing sustainable aquaculture governance in Thailand, Vietnam, and China, we derive a novel conceptualization of two distinct types of homegrown governance approaches – certification standards and capability-building programs – and suggest that the choice between the two is contingent on the supply of, and demand for, sustainable commodity governance. We find decisions by Southern governments to supply governance can lock in top-down approaches and exclude potentially more impactful bottom-up approaches. We therefore argue that the material resources and normative concerns of Southern governance entrepreneurs lead to different homegrown approaches. Our findings contribute theoretical insights to the literature on transnational governance interactions and practical observations about the utility of different approaches to sustainability concerns in the Global South.

An Imperfect Financial Union With Heterogeneous Regions

We analyze a union of financially-integrated yet politically-sovereign countries, where households in the Northern core of the union lend to those in the Southern periphery in a unified debt market subject to a borrowing constraint. This constraint generates sudden stops throughout the South, depresses the intra-union interest rate, and reduces Northern welfare below its unconstrained level, while having ambiguous effects on Southern welfare. During sudden stops, Pareto improvements can be achieved using North-to-South governmental loans if Southern governments have the capacity to commit to repay, or using a combination of Southern debt relief and budget-neutral taxes and subsidies if they do not. From the pre-crisis perspective, it is Pareto-improving to allow loans and debt relief to be negotiated in later sudden-stop periods as long as the regions in the union are sufficiently heterogeneous to begin with. We show that our results are robust to production and to limited financial openness of the union.

Recrafting in/formality, leveraging public market trade in Baguio, Philippines

With growing urbanization, Southern governments often privilege large-scale developments that frustrate urbanites’ livelihood needs. In Baguio, Philippines public marketers counter such top-down disenfranchisement by operationalizing formal “advocacy” and informal “everyday” politics. That authorities negotiate agreements to accept payments for marketers’ infractions, I argue, materializes complex and complicit intersections of formal/informal and legal/illegal practices.

Sustainable palm oil as a public responsibility? On the governance capacity of Indonesian Standard for Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO)

This paper is motivated by the observation that Southern governments start to take responsibility for a more sustainable production of agricultural commodities as a response to earlier private initiatives by businesses and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Indonesia is one of the leading countries in this respect, with new public sustainability regulations on coffee, cocoa and palm oil. Based on the concept of governance capacity, the paper develops an evaluation tool to answer the question whether the new public regulation on sustainable palm oil (ISPO) may become a viable alternative to private regulation. ISPO embraces a tremendous governance challenge as thousands of companies and millions of smallholder farmers are expected to participate. It is concluded that, although ISPO has initiated a process of change, it has not yet developed its full potential. The main reason regards ISPO’s rather loose problem definition, weak authority of the implementing organization, and the fact that the reliability of ISPO is still too low to convince (parts) of the global market. ISPO may therefore face difficulties in meeting its own targets and solving palm-oil related problems, such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and social conflicts between big plantations and local communities. The main governance challenge regards combining a more authoritative implementation mechanism with a convincing balance between sustainability objectives and economic interests of the sector.

The Incentives to North-South Transfer of Climate-Mitigation Technologies with Trade in Polluting Goods

The need to transfer climate mitigation technologies towards the developing world has been acknowledged since the beginning of climate negotiations. Little progress has however been made as shown by Article 10 of the Paris Agreement. One reason is that these technologies could become vital assets to compete on global markets. This paper presents a partial equilibrium model with two regions, the North and the South, and imperfect competition in the international polluting goods market to analyze the North’s incentives to accept technology transfer. Results crucially depend on the existence of environmental cooperation. When both northern and southern governments set emission quotas non-cooperatively, inducing fewer global emissions is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the North to accept the transfer. In contrast, when governments set quotas cooperatively, the North never accepts the transfer because it only leads to a partial relocation of pollutant goods production to the South. We derive the implications for the global regulation of climate change.

The Incentives for North-South Transfer of Climate-Mitigation Technologies with Trade in Polluting Goods

The need to transfer climate mitigation technologies towards the developing world has been acknowledged since the beginning of climate negotiations. Little progress has however been made, as shown by Article 10 of the Paris Agreement. One reason is that these technologies could become vital assets to compete on global markets. This paper presents a partial equilibrium model with two regions, the North and the South, and imperfect competition in the international polluting goods market, to analyze the North’s incentives to accept technology transfer. Results crucially depend on the existence of environmental cooperation. When both northern and southern governments set emission quotas non-cooperatively, inducing fewer global emissions is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the North to accept the transfer. In contrast, when governments set quotas cooperatively, the North has no incentive to share its technology either before or after the agreement. Technology transfer commitments may be included in the agreement, but with no effect on global emissions and global surplus. The only impacts are distributional, technology transfers and side payments may be substitute instruments.

Toward a New Scenario in Agricultural Sustainability Certification? The Response of the Indonesian National Government to Private Certification

This article discusses a new development in the relationships between private sustainability standards and governments, one in which Southern governments reclaim the authority from mainly Northern-based businesses and nongovernmental organizations. It examines how the Indonesian government, a forerunner in this field, responds to the private certification of palm oil. The results of this in-depth study are compared with similar trends in the coffee and cocoa sectors in Indonesia. The article observes that a change takes place from a nonresponsive stance, a modest involvement in terms of sustaining the implementation of private certifications, to an active development of alternative public national standards and certifications. The article defines some factors that facilitate the development of Southern public standards as an addition or alternative to private regulations and reviews the implications for the future of private standards and certification.

Higher education and economic development: The importance of building technological capabilities

Higher education and development has not been a priority of global policy or research funding in recent decades. Yet, since the millennium, Southern governments have become believers in the global knowledge economy and higher education enrolment growth has been phenomenal. In this paper we offer an original account of how higher education institutions contribute to economic development by drawing on evolutionary economics and the national innovation systems approach. This offers distinct advantages in conceptualising higher education’s developmental role, through its stress on the importance of education, skills, work, innovation and production for economic development. Using these concepts, we examine how well South African higher education is positioned to contribute to economic development through a consideration of two case studies from astronomy and automotives. These highlight the importance of the intersection between global, national, sectoral and spatial dimensions of the education—economic development relationship. We suggest that dynamics at multiple scalar levels work in complex ways to shape possibilities for development. We argue that such an approach offers a way forward for international education and development thinking about the relationship between education, technological innovation, production and development.

Why Southern Mediterranean Countries Fail To Innovate?

This paper aims to analyze the factors that influence research investment in the Mediterranean region. We used a robust fixed effects model to analysis a panel of 22 countries for the period 2000-2012. The results showed that the FDI, the high technology export, the human capital devoted to research, intermediate and final production sectors, are significant and stimulate the Southern innovative capacity. The private R&D is a substitution to public R&D. The private returns exceed its social returns to R&D since Southern governments don’t invest too much like private firms in the innovative activities. The role of foreign institutions and international organizations is almost nonexistent in financing the southern research investments. The salaries don’t motivate the researchers and Scientifics since it has a negative effect on the R&D. The imports, the active population, the inflation, the technology infrastructure, the patent production have no effective contributions to the investment in the R&D in the Southern Mediterranean countries.

Between North and South: The World Bank and the New International Economic Order

Existing scholarship has analyzed the NIEO from the perspectives of developed and developing countries, but scant attention has been paid to actors positioned between north and south. This paper helps rectify this deficiency by providing an account of the World Bank’s response to the NIEO. The NIEO presented a significant challenge to the Bank, an intergovernmental organization tasked with promoting global economic development. The NIEO ran counter to the Bank’s development philosophy and ties to the United States government. As a result, the Bank largely avoided debates over the NIEO. Instead, the organization’s management sought to mollify southern governments by increasing the Bank’s lending and by promoting an alternative vision of economic reform centered on global poverty alleviation. As such, the NIEO accelerated ongoing transformations in the Bank’s development strategy.

Why Southern Mediterranean Countries Fail to Innovate?

This article aims to analyze the factors that influence research investment in the Mediterranean region. We used a robust fixed-effect model to analyze a group of 22 countries in the period 2000–2012. The results showed that foreign direct investment (FDI), high technology export, human capital devoted to research, and intermediate and final production sectors are significant and stimulate the Southern innovative capacity. The private research and development (R&D) is a substitute for public R&D. The private returns exceed the social returns to R&D since Southern governments don’t invest too much like private firms in innovative activities. The role of foreign institutions and international organizations is almost nonexistent in financing the Southern research investments. The salaries don’t motivate the researchers and scientists, and it has a negative effect on R&D. The imports, the active population, the inflation, the technology infrastructure, and the patent production have no effective contributions to the investment in the R&D in the Southern Mediterranean countries.

Heterogeneous Countries in a Financial Union

A financial union is a group of countries, each with its own nontradable goods sector, which can freely exchange tradable goods and debt contracts. In this paper, we establish the effects of shocks in a stylized financial union with heterogeneous regions -- a lender North and a borrower South -- and constraints on borrowing. We derive positive and normative results. First, when the degree of heterogeneity is high before the shock, the South is disproportionately hurt by the shock, no matter whether the shock strikes in the North or the South. Second, for a given value of the shock, when borrowing constraints bind in the South, the welfare of the North decreases while the welfare of the South may increase. Third, we characterize which policy interventions are able to generate Pareto improvements. Unconditional debt relief for the South fails to do so. Subsidized governmental loans succeed when Southern governments can commit to repay additional debt. Finally, whether or not Southern governments can commit to repay anything, a Pareto improvement is possible using a combination of conditional debt relief and a tax/subsidy package in the South.

R2P and Humanitarian Action

The responsibility to protect was not the only concept that grew out of the world’s failure to tackle the mass atrocities of the 1990s in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere. So too did a new approach to humanitarian action which placed a higher priority on protecting civilians, and on advocacy to do so, than had hitherto been common. Oxfam’s role in the campaign to persuade the 2005 World Summit to adopt the responsibility to protect was one prominent example, but, to different degrees, this broad approach has become widely shared among many international humanitarian agencies. Since 2005, however, even Oxfam has made little use of the responsibility to protect to frame its own work to help protect civilians, or to advocate to prevent mass atrocities in specific crises. This is partly because of the fear that R2P can be misapplied to justify military intervention where the benefits do not clearly outweigh the risks. But it is also because of the continuing suspicion around R2P among many governments. This seems to reflect the wider limits of what largely Western-based humanitarian agencies and governments can do to develop new international norms and put them into effect. When R2P was first developed, humanitarian agencies played a part in broadly similar alliances to ban landmines, establish the icc and so on. Some of these have already had a substantial effect, while it may be a generation before the value of R2P and others can be fairly evaluated. Looking ahead, humanitarian agencies will have to put an increasing emphasis on influencing emerging powers and other Southern governments, while alliances between governments and ngos, to be effective, will have to be genuinely global.

Slowing Trade: Global Activism Against Trade Liberalization

The impact of global activism against trade liberalization is examined in this article through an analysis of the initiatives of cross border civil society networks and with particular attention to the failed 2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial conference in Cancun. Key aspects considered here include the internal dynamics of mobilization – which was characterized by a strong framing and widespread protest – and the political opportunities in WTO negotiations, which were marked by divisions within the North and resistance by a large group of Southern governments. In the failure of the WTO Millennium Round in Cancun and the loss of momentum of its liberalization agenda, a significant role has been played by civil society activism and its ability to combine protest, well-prepared lobbying, an epistemic-like community able to influence public opinion, and the development of alliances with like-minded governments of the South.

South-South cooperation – policy and practice by the Export Import Bank of China

The half a century old concept of South-South cooperation got new momentum when northern cooperation weaken by the financial crisis and with the rise of south. Advanced southern countries such as China, India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa are advocating actively for south to south cooperation through their increasing aid, investment and trade. Among the southerners China headlined more with its fast growing economic strength and pouring financial assistance to southern developing countries through aid, trade and investment notably in Asia. Most of these financing are improving necessary infrastructures, increasing productive capacity and contributing to economic growth. But there are gaps in policy and practice while competing for benefit from business initiatives. This is affecting quality of South-South cooperation. In the case of Bangladesh this study found that the environmental guideline of Chinese government is not carefully considered by Exim Bank 1 of China in some projects. This paper suggests that the effort needs to be strengthened by the southern governments for getting better result from South-South cooperation. The aspects of competitiveness and complementarity, conceptual clarity and scope of cooperation should be discussed continuously.