Western Capitalist Countries Research Articles

Red green prospects in Ireland

“Ireland is the “Emerald Isle” in popular imagination. There is certainly some truth in this, since of all European countries the Republic of Ireland is the least ecologically ravaged. Ireland has been spared many of the ecological problems that afflict other Western capitalist countries due principally to its relatively underindustrialized nature. It is therefore a rather special case in the general development of red!green political dialogue of the type that typifies the realignment of European oppositional politics along an emerging continuum stretching from red/green/new social movements to conservative/christian democratic/neo‐fascist parties. The decks have now been cleared for the construction of a viable Irish eco‐social politics.”

Give 'em enough rope… The changing role of the state under the Labour government in Australia, 1983 to 1991

The international economic instability since the 1970s has led to major restructuring of industrial relations processes and structures in most Western capitalist countries, as governments and employers have sought to confront new competitive pressures in the face of declining profit rates. A major response to the economic pressure in some countries has been a retreat from Keynesian‐type economic policies of the post‐war years and a new commitment to varieties of neo‐classical economics, evident in the popularity of such actions as deregulating markets and privatisation of government functions. In this circumstance trade unions have frequently found themselves in a far more reactive situation than they had previously experienced. Matters open to union intervention declined and the employment relationship increasingly came under formal control of employers and management. Areas previously under some informal employee control, (the now infamous ‘work practices’) have also become areas of joint formal processes, if not unilateral management control.

The Antitrust Doctrine: How It Was Internationalized

ABSTRACT The pro-competitive antitrust doctrine has originated in the free-market economies of Western capitalist countries but with economic transformations in Eastern Europe the doctrine ceased to be an exclusive Western concept. Using the example of the Polish law on combating Trust in the National Economy of 1987, the author demonstrates the spread of the antitrust doctrine from capitalism to socialism. Apart from these changes, the doctrine has been spreading on the international level because increasingly it has found application not only within particular countries but also with regard to trade and commerce between and among countries. The multidimensional nature of the antitrust doctrine has important implications for combating both domestic and international antitrust crime. The efficiency of efforts to combat abuse of a dominant market position, limiting access to the market or other forms of restraining competition will depend increasingly on the degree to which organs responsible for fighting ...

The Origins of Detente: The Genoa Conference and Soviet-Western Relations, 1921-1922

The Genoa Conference of April-May 1922 saw the first serious and sustained attempt to negotiate a modus vivendi between the newly established Soviet government in Moscow and the western capitalist countries that surrounded it. Drawing upon a wide range of archival and other sources, many of them unfamiliar or previously unexplored for this purpose, this study traces the evolution of Soviet-Western relations from the Revolution up to the autumn of 1921, when the proposal for a conference first began to emerge, and then considers in more detail the course of preconference diplomacy and the proceedings of the conference itself, up to the early summer of 1922. In his final chapter Dr White argues that the failure to resolve East-West differences at Genoa was attributable to a variety of circumstances, but above all to a failure of political will.

6 Redistribution of Income in Denmark

(1986). 6 Redistribution of Income in Denmark. International Journal of Sociology: Vol. 16, No. 3-4, pp. 139-160.

The politico-economic behavior of authoritarian governments

The study of the interaction between the economic and political behavior of governments in democratic, Western capitalist countries has yielded many insights in the three decades since Anthony Downs' An Economic Theory of Democracy was published in 1957. Similarly, the study of the overt political component of the economic decision-making process in authoritarian, Eastern centrally-planned economies has attained a great degree of refinement in the post-Stalin era. For most countries in the world, however, neither model (democratic curn capitalist nor authoritarian curn centrally-planned) applies very well. Rather there is a third type - more or less authoritarian curn more or less capitalist - which reasonably describes a large number of developing countries. It is likely that the behavior of these countries' governments will not be well explained by models which fit the other two types. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework in which the economic decisions of authoritarian governments can be analyzed without assuming that the government is the only economic agent, thus in basically capitalist countries where elections are not the means by which power is Validated and transferred. 1. The political-economic behavior of government An individual's first formal exposure to economics is usually a principles text. In early chapters of most of them, the economic system is described as being determined by the interaction among three groups of economic agents: households, firms, and governments. The latter, which only began to be considered an economic agent of important status with the advent of Keynesian analysis, is in such texts initially accorded a place of equality with the other two, but soon is presumed to behave entirely differently: while households and firms exhibit maximizing behavior in their own self-interest, the government's economic actions are motivated by a desire to stabilize and

The Pattern of Mass Disease in the U.S.S.R.: A Product of Socialist or Capitalist Development?

The mortality structure of a society is determined primarily by the nature of the social organization. Although this general principle, which forms the basis of the Marxist approach to public health, has been well demonstrated in the classical model of capitalist society, there has been little attempt to apply this theory to countries that have experienced socialist revolutions. This paper examines the mortality structure of the U.S.S.R. Given the high degree of similarity between mass disease in the U.S.S.R. and Western capitalist countries, fundamental questions must be raised about the political and economic system currently operating in the U.S.S.R. It is suggested that the health experience in the Soviet Union over the last two decades has been determined primarily by the nature of the antagonistic class relations that have resulted from the restoration on capitalism.

Recent trends in coronary risk factors in the USSR.

The soviet Union has experienced an increase in the incidence of coronary heart disease over the last 15 years sufficient to result in an overall deterioration in the health of adults. The distribution of coronary risk factors, and the secular trends in diet and cigarette consumption, provide a potential explanation for the upsurge in death rates. The animal fat content of the Soviet diet has been steadily enriched since the 1950s and cigarette production increased 72 per cent from 1959 to 1980. The post-Stalin orientation of the Soviet economy toward a policy of motivating the work force primarily through the provision of consumer goods, in a pattern comparable to western capitalist countries, appear to have laid the basis for these developments. Given the central control of Soviet society, the negative impact of current economic policy on the public health could be viewed as paradoxical. Our analysis suggests that the paradox is only apparent, however, and that the basis for the widespread occurrence of coronary heart disease is similar in the Soviet Union and western societies.

Rising death rates in the Soviet Union: the impact of coronary heart disease.

Age-adjusted overall death rates in men and women in the Soviet Union began to rise in the mid-1960s; an 18 per cent increase occurred in the entire population from 1964 to 1975. The epidemic of coronary heart disease (CHD) appears to be the primary cause of this trend and has been particularly widespread among middle-aged men. Prospective epidemiologic studies and autopsy reports confirm the high prevalence rates of atherosclerosis and its complications. The major risk factors for CHD occur frequently in the Soviet population. The epidemic nature of the modern chronic diseases is dramatically apparent in the secular trends in Soviet vital statistics. A similar pattern of life style as related to risk of CHD in the Soviet Union and in Western capitalist countries further suggests a similar social basis for this epidemic in both areas.

Intra-COMECON manpower migration.

While in West Germany the term Gastarbeiter or in England the term Immigrant Worker is used to mean the employed foreign worker from the comparatively less-industrially-developed Southern European and less-developed Asian African and Latin American countries - the East European CMEA or COMECON countries (members of the Council of Mutual Economic Aid) prefer to use the terminology of mutual contractual exchange of manpower in their intercountries multilateral labour exchange relations. The rights and obligations of the gastarbeiter of the Western Europe and the contracted exchange labour of the Eastern Europe are almost similar if not the same but there exists wage-discrimination working condition-discrimination and discrimination in the provision of lodgings between the indigenous workers and the immigrant workers in the West while the same is absent in the intra- community labour relations in the East. The history of immigrant workers in the Western Europe dates back about two and a half decades ago but the contractual labour-exchange scheme among the COMECON member countries started in 1965 with the signing of the GDR-Polish Labour Exchange Scheme for working of the Polish workers in the western bank of the Oder to help the GDR workers in the construction of oil and natural gas pipelines and railways. In the industrially developed western capitalist countries the number of immigrant workers went up to about 4 million in 1976 but it never passed the number of immigrant workers went up to about 4 million in 1976 but it never passed the number of 50000 at a time in the last four years the peak years of the COMECON mutual labour- mobility for deepening and developing further the socialist economic cooperation among the COMECON member countries as stated in the COMECON Comprehensive Programme of 1971 adopted in August of the same year at its Bucharest session. (excerpt)

Reorganization of the National Health Service: Background and Issues in England's Quest for a Comprehensive-Integrated Planning and Delivery System

are involved: the consolidation of the tripartite structure into a single unified system, the strengthening of management processes, and the expansion of machinery for making health services more responsive to local needs. While generally supportive of the reorganization, this assessment of the changes in policy and structure identifies a number of constraints in the form of political realities and organizational-administrative capabilities which may limit the attainment of objectives. In particular, the bias in modern medicine for hospital-based specialization, the uneven power relationships among competing professional interests, and the continued separation of health from social services are seen as restricting policy aimed at altering the balance between primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of care and between curative and carative services. Since the pressures underlying the reorganization of the National Health Service (NHS) reflect the broad changes accompanying social and economic development, such as the aging of the population, the shift from acute to chronic patterns of illness, and the decline in the marginal social benefit of capital-intensive medical technology, England's experience may be relevant to other highly developed countries, both as a field laboratory for the elucidation of alternatives and as a case study of the complexities inherent in any attempt to carry out large-scale organizational change. With the possible exception of Sweden's, the reorganization represents the most ambitious attempt to institute comprehensive health services planning and integrated delivery among Western capitalist countries.

Increasing Misery of the Proletariat: An Analysis of Marx's Wage and Employment Theory

The intent of this paper is to demonstrate (1) that Marx's analysis of the workers' fate under capitalism is not quite as scientific as he had professed, and (2) that, on the other hand, his analysis of wage and employment determination in a capitalist economy is not quite as misleading as many critics contend.If Marx's theoretical contributions in this area have been unjustly discounted by “bourgeois economists,” much of the fault may be traced directly to Marx himself. For it was he who suggested that the veracity of his economic analysis could be measured by the accuracy of his economic predictions. Non-Marxists and neo-Marxists alike have faithfully followed his suggestion. Thus, since overwhelming evidence of rising standards of living in Western capitalist countries clearly discredits Marx's prediction concerning the increasing misery of the proletariat, we generally discard not only the prediction but also the theoretical apparatus whence it was allegedly derived.To reject Marx in this matter on his own grounds, however, is to acknowledge logical consistency in his derivation of prediction from model. It is the consistency that is questioned here. And if Marx's prediction of misery is found not to derive from his wage and employment theory, then the Marxian theory of wages and employment may prove to be a more valid view of capitalism than is generally suspected.