American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
A close reading of Al Gore's views on the linkages between environmental issues and broader social and philosophical currents reveals their problematic political and policy implications. Gore derives our environmental problems from deeper metaphysical and psychosocial currents, a path that will foreclose a number of productive policy approaches to the problem of climate change.
Topic:
Civil Society, Development, Environment, and Politics
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Abstract:
The author restates a traditional, broad and composite view of civil society, of increasing relevance at a time of ever greater complexity in a non-state centered world; and he explores the relations between markets, associations and politics as parts of that interconnected whole. Markets as conversations shape people's dispositions and help developing a set of civil and civic virtues, bracketed together under the rubric of civility. The paper examines the scope and limits of these civilizing effects on politics and the public sphere.
Topic:
Civil Society, Development, Economics, and Markets
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Abstract:
This paper models unemployment as a general equilibrium solution in labor and capital markets, while the natural rate hypothesis explains unemployment simply as a partial equilibrium in the labor market. It is shown that monetary policy can have long-run effects by affecting required returns on capital and investment. If monetary policy is primarily concerned with maintaining price stability, the interaction between wage bargaining and the central bank's credibility as an inflation fighter becomes a crucial factor in determining employment. Different labor market institutions condition different monetary policy reactions. With centralized wage bargaining, a central bank mandate focusing primarily on price stability is sufficient. With an atomistic labor market, the central bank must also consider output as a policy objective.
Topic:
Civil Society, Development, Economics, and Markets
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Abstract:
The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between economic sociology and economic policies. In the last decades, economic sociology has made significant achievements in terms of theory and research, but that its influence on policies has remained weak. While this was inevitable in earlier decades, when scholars had to concentrate most of their effort on defining the role and contribution of economic sociology, it has since become a constraint for the institutionalization and recognition of the discipline. The return to economic sociology, since the 1980s, has brought about important theoretical achievements, especially in the analysis of economic organization at the micro level in terms of social and cultural embeddedness. The role of social relations in contemporary economy has clearly emerged, but its implications for policies to promote economic development have remained more latent so far. Although a weaker institutionalization and a poorer connection to policy-making certainly affect the political influence of economic sociology in comparison to economics, the paper focuses on the research perspective. A shift of the research focus from the statics to the dynamics of economic organization could be useful. In this framework, particular attention is drawn to the study of local development and innovation through a closer relationship of economic sociology with comparative political economy. A separation between these two approaches does not favor a full exploitation of the potential contribution of economic sociology to policies.
Topic:
Civil Society, Development, Economics, and Political Economy
In early 2005, Kurt M. Campbell, Director of CSIS' International Security Program, accompanied Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on a trip to Asia. Enroute, the Secretary and several of his close aides expressed an interest in learning more about the future of missile defenses in East Asia and the Subcontinent. Although familiar with the missile defense policies of countries in the region, they were concerned about how those policies were being implemented, whether the various national efforts were complementary or counterproductive, and how those efforts might affect the US approach to missile defense architecture.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Civil Society, and Human Welfare
What a difference a year makes. The 2004 Ukrainian presidential election entailed massive fraud, sent hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets, and sparked a revolution. The March 26 parliamentary elections, by contrast, were strikingly calm and ordinary. The Orange Revolution's main hero, President Viktor Yushchenko, saw his party, Our Ukraine, come in a disappointing third. He nevertheless remains in the driver's seat in deciding who will make up the ruling coalition in the next Rada (parliament).
IN THIS PAPER, we analyze microfinance institutions (MFIs) as businesses, asking how some MFIs succeed in reducing and covering costs, earning returns, attracting capital, and scaling up. We are interested in MFIs that are financially self-sufficient (covering the cost of daily operations as well as the cost of capital at a commercial rate) or merely operationally self-sufficient (not covering capital costs) or only, say, 90% operationally self-sufficient. All such MFIs strive for efficiency and are in many respects businesslike.
Topic:
Civil Society, Development, Economics, and Markets
William Easterly, Michael Woolcock, and Jozef Ritzen
Publication Date:
08-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
We present evidence that measures of “social cohesion,” such as income inequality and ethnic fractionalization, endogenously determine institutional quality, which in turn casually determines growth.
Topic:
Civil Society, Development, Government, and Poverty
Using a newly assembled dataset spanning from 1820 to 1998, we study the relationship between the occurrence and cruelty of episodes of mass killing and the levels of development and democracy across countries and over time. We find that massacres are more likely at intermediate levels of income and less likely at very high levels of democracy, but we do not find evidence of a linear relationship between democracy and probability of mass killings. In the 20th century, discrete improvements in democracy are systematically associated with less cruel massacre episodes. Episodes at the highest levels of democracy and income involve relatively fewer victims.
Topic:
Civil Society, Crime, Democratization, and Development
A number of high-debt emerging-market economies face structural, long-term debt problems that tend to keep their growth rates low, that impart an unequalizing bias to the growth process, that severely constrain social spending and human development, and that make them vulnerable to capital flow reversals. Unless the nature and pace of growth can be improved in these lower-middle income countries, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met either in many of these countries, or globally. These high-debt emerging-market economies face an impossible choice between draconian and never-ending fiscal austerity, or crisis and a “debt event.” Both “bitter pills" impose high social and economic costs.
Topic:
Civil Society, Debt, Economics, and International Organization