Building an alternative economic network? Consumer cooperation in Scotland from the 1870s to the 1960s†

There is growing interest in the ways in which, and the values according to which, economic activity is undertaken. For instance, mutual ownership has been identified as one means of helping to ‘redeem’ capitalism. This article engages with such issues by examining aspects of the behaviour of consumer cooperative societies in Scotland from the 1870s to the 1960s. It starts by discussing whether cooperatives represent a means of conceptualizing and undertaking economic activity that provides an alternative to the paradigm of investor‐led (neo)liberal capitalism. From this, and an outline history of consumer cooperatives in Scotland, it identifies two variables—dividend on purchases and funds for education—as proxies for the values underpinning cooperatives’ economic behaviour. Analysis of these variables indicates the existence of distinct cultures of cooperation, notably in the Glasgow and Edinburgh areas. The article concludes by offering two ‘lessons from history’ for those interested in alternative economic networks. The first is that cooperation can, and has, conceptualized and sustained an alternative to the dominant (neo)liberal economic paradigm. The second is that the scaling‐up of such voluntaristic economic thought and behaviour is unlikely to present a macro‐level challenge to it.     

Social history as economic history in Sweden. Some remarks

Abstract

During the last two decades social history as a subject has developed rapidly, with regard both to the number of its practicioners as well as the general interest it attracts within the international academic community. In a book of some years ago D.C. Coleman even emphasized that its success has been so great that it has had a tendency to outcompete discourses of older and more distinguished standing; that is, political history as well as economic history. In several countries — particularly Britain — social history has acquired its own departments, and has thus created problems for the older and less buoyant disciplines which have had to compete with this vital and growing new subject for funding and students.¹     

改革户籍制度促进我国社会发展

较长时期内，我国二元结构的户籍制度成为社会持续关注且饱受诟病的根本制度之一。为何户籍是其他社会政策、制度的“固定器”？户籍制度的改革为何进展缓慢？文章尝试对我国户籍制度之上的社会福利及其它具体社会权益做深入分析，提出了改革户籍制度的基本思路：理清户籍制度上的各种经济、社会等权益的政策规定、措施，按照其社会权益的重要性、实现的可行性以及户籍政策供给主体的权责性质以及财政能力等，对我国户籍制度的改革提出分步骤、分阶段、阶梯式的户籍制度改革新思路。     

A Changing South: The 2008 Elections Illuminate Demographic and Economic Trends

The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States opened a window for an examination of the most recent round of demographic, social and economic change in the American South. Using the 2008 election—in which the nation’s first black president won three states of the former Confederacy—as a launching pad for analysis, this paper presents a South that has become metropolitan-driven, more prosperous and economically diverse than ever in its history. The paper also depicts a South with inter-regional differences and with distinct inequalities, especially in income and educational attainment.     

Environmental Entitlements: Dynamics and Institutions in Community-Based Natural Resource Management

While community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) now attracts widespread international attention, its practical implementation frequently falls short of expectations. This paper contributes to emerging critiques by focusing on the implications of intracommunity dynamics and ecological heterogeneity. It builds a conceptual framework highlighting the central role of institutions — regularized patterns of behavior between individuals and groups in society — in mediating environment-society relationships. Grounded in an extended form of entitlements analysis, the framework explores how differently positioned social actors command environmental goods and services that are instrumental to their well-being. Further insights are drawn from analyses of social difference; “new”, dynamic ecology; new institutional economics; structuration theory, and landscape history. The theoretical argument is illustrated with case material from India, South Africa and Ghana.     

The impact of cash transfers on household welfare in Namibia

Namibia has a long history of providing a universal and non-contributory old age pension, child grants using means testing and quasi-conditionalities, and other cash transfers. Multivariate analysis presented in this paper confirms that these transfers play an important role in alleviating poverty, especially for the very poor. The poverty-reducing effects of the child grants are likely to increase further as access is being rapidly expanded. However, the impact in terms of reducing Namibia's extremely high inequality is limited. The targeting of the cash transfers towards the poorest groups takes place through two main channels. For the child grant, targeting occurs as a result of the orphan status eligibility criteria, as orphans are over-represented in lower-income households. For the universal social pension, it appears that some of the relatively less poor do not receive it even if they are eligible. Means testing of child grants appears ineffective, even without considering administrative costs.     

Sozialgeschichte und Medizin

Abstract

In recent decades historical demography has attracted increasing interest in Europe. Of the main demographic variables, mortality has been treated from several angles, but the central question of the causes of death has been dealt with fairly summarily until now not because of any lack of sources (Swedo—Finnish material in particular is both copious and relatively reliable) but mainly because of the lack of scholars equally competent in medicine and social history.     

Patrilineality,fertility, and women's income: Evidence from family lineage in China

This study investigates how traditional patrilineal family institution influences women's income through fertility behavior by offering evidence from family lineage (zongzu) in China. We hypothesize that family with strong lineage—proxied by owning genealogy—has a negative effect on women's income through the son-targeting fertility behavior. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, this study confirms the hypothesis. Relative to the women whose first child is a son, the women marring into families owning genealogy indeed have more children and lower income, if their first child is a daughter. In contrast, such finding does not hold for the male sample. Preliminary evidence suggests that shorter work time can explain the findings.     

对我国户籍制度改革的思考——从农民工的视角审视

农民工是伴随着中国改革开放而产生的新兴社会群体,也是中国社会中的又一弱势群体,他们在现行的户籍制度下被定为农民。本文从农民工视角出发,从中国户籍管理制度变迁着手,分析了我国户籍制度存在的弊端,及其对农民工的影响。针对户籍制度存在的问题,提出了改革户籍制度的相关建议。     

Dynamics of two-sided internet markets

This paper presents a dynamic view of a two-sided market combined with Dixit’s approach of entry deterrence used in industrial economics. Resolving backwards the development to reach the point of entry deterrence in time the model splits the business strategy of the first entrant in a social network market into three phases: Market Entry, Automatic Growth Path, Exploiting Monopolistic Rents. A result is that the company has to solve the trade-off between the height of registration fees and marketing efforts in time. The real world story, that registration fees are omitted by social network provider in the Internet and the companies nevertheless invest in marketing and technology, so that they have to take losses during the first years, can be explained. In contrast to standard assumptions about the strategy of Schumpeterian pioneers, in social networks the market leader does not exploit monopolistic profits at the beginning.     

Modernization and rural imagery at the Paris Salon: an interdisciplinary approach to the economic history of art

This article proposes a novel interdisciplinary approach to the economic history of art. Engaging with research questions defined by the existing art‐historical literature, it draws on econometric approaches to understand better and measure how social and economic change affected artistic output—particularly output of rural imagery—in nineteenth‐century France. To facilitate this quantitative approach, the article introduces a novel data source that provides information about more than 140,000 works of art displayed in Paris during the nineteenth century. Analysis of this dataset demonstrates that artists’ ability to have regular access to the countryside, largely because of artists’ colonies and inexpensive train travel from Paris, had the greatest demonstrable effect on the output of landscape and rural genre painting in France during the nineteenth century.     

Dynamics of maternal union dissolution and childhood mortality in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

The family setting has implications for child survival. In this study, the dynamics of maternal union dissolution and childhood mortality were investigated in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Birth history data of 235 454 children from the most recent Demographic and Health Survey conducted in 23 SSA countries were analysed using life table techniques and piecewise exponential hazards models. The results revealed that the childhood mortality rates were 35 vs 32 per 1000 live births (one month), 61 vs 54 per 1000 (11 months) and 95 vs 86 per 1000 (48 months) for children of women in marital dissolution compared with those with intact marriages. Despite controlling for background variables, the risk of under-five mortality was significantly higher among children of women in marital dissolution (relative risk?=?1.35, confidence interval: 1.30–1.40). The effect of dissolution on childhood mortality has not changed since the 1990s. Marital stability is an important social structure for child survival.     

The Market‐Promoting and Market‐Preserving Role of Social Trust in Reforms of Policies and Institutions

Social trust has been identified as a catalyst for reforms. We take the literature further in two ways. First, we analyze mechanisms through which social trust enables liberalizing reforms—by overcoming obstacles in the political process (stemming from ideology, ideological fractionalization, coalition government, minority government, and legislature‐seat instability). Second, we define reforms as distinct changes in the quality of the legal institutions and in the scope of regulation and separate reforms that increase economic freedom in these two areas from reforms that decrease it. We study separately how social trust, interacted with the different types of political hindrances, affects the probability of reforms. We find a dual role of social trust in the political process—facilitating liberalizing reforms and making deliberalizing ones more difficult. This suggests that trust does not make agreement on any reform more probable—the content of the reform is crucial.     

The Impact of Public Works Programme on Child Labour in Ethiopia

Given the conventional wisdom that poverty and associated income shocks are the fundamental causes of child labour, from a policy perspective, there is a perception that social safety net programmes can play a vital role in reducing child labour. While there is extensive evidence that shows the prevalence of child labour is low among beneficiaries of conditional cash transfer programmes, the impact of workfare programs on child labour has been rarely investigated in the economics literature. This paper addresses the issue by evaluating the impact of the public works component of the Productive Safety Net Programme implemented in Ethiopia in 2005. The programme aims to help poor households to build assets and develop resilience to shocks through employment in public projects. Results from child fixed effects estimations show that children in programme beneficiary households are significantly less likely than their counterparts in non‐beneficiary households to be involved in child labour. The findings suggest that, if well targeted, even safety net programmes that do not primarily target child outcomes can be useful in addressing child labour problems.     

Partnership and Community Involvement: Institutional Morphing in Dundee

In recent years, the policy agenda for urban regeneration in Scotland has focused on social justice and inclusion, reflecting the priorities of the New Labour government and the Scottish Parliament. In addition, there is now a national 'community planning' agenda in Scotland, aimed at improving service delivery by enhancing partnership between all relevant agencies, including local communities. This article examines how the regeneration partnership in Dundee - the 'Dundee Partnership' - has 'morphed'or evolved, in terms of institutional capacity, to respond to this changing context, as well as changing expectations in terms of community involvement. Firstly, critical concepts are set out; secondly, the evolution of the Dundee Partnership is considered; thirdly, the changing nature of community involvement within regeneration is highlighted; and finally, broad conclusions are proposed.     

公共政策与社会排斥问题研究——农村剩余劳动力转移过程中的社会排斥问题探析

由于二元劳动力市场的存在,农民工在城市劳动力市场上并没有取得平等的就业资格,他们仍然是社会排斥的对象.文章以社会排斥为中心概念,通过定性分析和研究发现,户籍制度、就业制度和社会保障体制等要素构成了独特复杂的社会排斥主体系统,共同作用于社会排斥客体即农村剩余劳动力.文章最后得出了解决好农村剩余劳动力转移问题的基础是法制与公共政策要先行的结论.     

深圳社会组织管理体制改革的经验和借鉴

我国社会组织实行的双重管理体制,限制了社会组织的发展。深圳于2004年开始改革社会登记管理制度。2006年底实现了行业协会直接登记,2008年开始对工商经济类、社会福利类、公益慈善类社会组织实行直接登记。深圳的实践表明了政府对社会组织监管方式的理性回归,也为我国社会组织管理体制改革提供了经验。     

Between micro and macro — what economic history can learn from modern economics

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the role of economic history to modern economic theory. Taking my point of departure from the division that still haunts economic history — between micro and macro approaches — the paper argues that economic theory today is significantly different from what it was only twenty or thirty years ago. Hence, for example, the division between micro and macro has been upset in modern economics. Also the development of institutional economics, the use of concepts like “bounded rationality” or “path dependence” makes it necessary for economic historians to learn from and confront modern economic theorizing. Many economic historians criticise a version of (neo-classical) economics) that belongs rather to the past than to the present.     

Are social protection programmes child-sensitive?

There is no doubt that child focus in the social protection agenda makes development and economic sense, yet child-sensitive social protection still remains elusive in some African country programmes. The case study of the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia discussed in this paper shows that the child-conditioned component in both the design and the implementation of this huge social protection programme is largely absent. Child-sensitive social programming, which discretely improves children's schooling and access to basic health care services and protects them from child labour, is recommended, with prioritisation of child labour saving assets as one of the key interventions.     

Adaptable and sustainable? Male farm service and the agricultural labour force in midland and southern England,c.1850–19251

This article argues that farm service was an adaptable and sustainable system of hiring labour in areas of midland and southern England after 1850, having much in common with the model recently identified for northern England and Scotland. Analysing the Census Enumerators Books from selected parishes in seven counties in 1851, 1871, and 1891, we reveal an intricate pattern of farm service ‘survival’ both within and between counties. We then use a range of reports printed between the 1860s and 1920s to examine the national picture. The later regional persistence of farm service has implications for broader debates on the rural workforce and social relations.