The road to pro-poor growth: the Indonesian experience in regional perspective

Indonesia's long-run ‘pro-poor growth’ record is among the best in Asia. It shows that appropriate policies can free societies from poverty's worst manifestations in a generation, a crucial message as democracy begins to influence the policy process. This paper places Indonesia's record in regional perspective, analysing determinants of income distribution in Asia and connecting this analysis to Indonesia's pro-poor growth process and the policy mechanisms that encourage pro-poor growth. Using a data set for eight Asian countries, it examines patterns of change in incomes and distribution across countries and over time. Building on Indonesian experience, the paper presents a pro-poor growth model encompassing three levels: improving the ‘capabilities’ of the poor, lowering transactions costs in the economy, especially between rural and urban areas, and increasing demand for goods and services produced by the poor. It finds that rapid pro-poor growth requires simultaneous and balanced interaction between growth and distribution processes.     

Retail growth and consumer changes in a declining urban economy: Antwerp (1650–1750)

This article examines the interplay between retail changes and transformations in the material culture of Antwerp, a provincial town in the southern Netherlands. We argue that major changes in the eighteenth‐century material culture and retail sector were not significantly linked to preconditions of economic growth and urbanization. The Antwerp ‘retail paradox’ is that of a shrinking economic horizon running parallel to material culture and retail transformations, usually connected to expanding urban economies and societies. Changing retail and consumer practices explain the growing and prospering retail sector, rather than a growing economy.     

The political economy of stabilization: Commitment,capacity, and public response

Political pressures are generally recognized as important in determining success or failure of economic stabilization and adjustment programs. But there has been little comparative analysis of the politics of stabilization. This study examines the factors affecting (i) political leaders' commitment to stabilization measures (often called ‘political will’); (ii) governmental ability to implement stabilization measures; and (iii) the responses of key interest groups and the public at large to those measures. The study also discusses political implications of the design of programs and the attempted speed of stabilization, and sketches the tactics available to governments to manage political risk, including partial compensation, persuasion, diversion or obfuscation, and containment of protest. The discussion is based on case studies of stabilization efforts in five fairly poor, small, highly trade-dependent countries; Ghana in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Zambia, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A subsidiary theme within the broader discussion is the ways in which the political economy of stabilization may differ in such countries, as compared to larger, semi-industrialized economies.     

中印城市化比较研究

通过中印城市化基础、城市化动力、城市化演进以及城市化进程中政府作用四个方面的比较,结合国际经验,在现有数据基础上对比分析两国城市化过程中的异同点,提出中印两国可以相互借鉴城市化经验、取长补短走出一条更为合理的城市化之路的政策建议。     

‘The rules of the game’: London finance,Australia, and Canada,c.1900–14

It is often asserted that, between 1865 and 1914, economic dependence on British capital subjected settler societies to an unofficial imperialism wielded by the City of London. This article argues that both advocates and critics of such models, particularly in the recent controversy over ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, pay insufficient attention to the City itself. Using the Edwardian City's connections with Australia and Canada, it illustrates the range of financial intermediaries involved and explores their perceptions of political economy in these countries. It concludes that the City's influence (or ‘structural power’) was limited by its internal divisions and hazy conceptions of political economy.     

Repositioning the urban environment question in Zimbabwe: a review of the context,conditions and processes

This analysis is a reappraisal of two perspectives in urban development in Zimbabwe: environmental sustainability and human sustenance. The discussion seeks to reposition the conservation–survival debate by broadening it to the wider urban and national macroeconomic and sociopolitical context. It re‐examines Zimbabwe's environmental problems by examining the challenges posed by urbanisation, industrialisation and informalisation. To these ‘permanent’ strands are added the ‘transient’ phenomena of structural adjustment and indigenisation. The analysis is done within the overall national macroeconomic and sociopolitical environment. The article examines environmental sustainability and human sustenance as the two policy challenges that have to be reconciled in the quest for sustainable urban settlements in Zimbabwe. The analysis stresses that the exercise of striking a balance between the needs of humankind and those of nature has to take cognisance of the complexity of issues and the processes going on elsewhere in the urban and national context.     

Guaranteeing employment to the rural poor: Social functions and class interests in the employment guarantee scheme in Western India

Numerous observers rightly term the landless rural population the ‘most intractable development problem’ in poor societies. Given the extraordinary political and administrative obstacles to redistrubution of rural assets in India (the widely-recognized failture land reforms), attention and finances have recently been focused on public rural employment programmes to alleviate rural distribution. Within India, the State of Maharashtra, with a size and population of a large European nation, has instituted a striking departure from traditional rural works programmes: a guarantee of employment to rural adults on demand. The Employment Guarantee Scheme in one state has since become a significant policy model, and the experience in that state provides something like a laboratory for its analysis. Based on analysis of previous studies and original field work in rural Maharashtra, the article argues that the scheme is something of a rare bird: a programme which seems to be in the objective and subjective interests of the rural poor, as well as consistent with the interests of the rural landed elite, despite their early political objections. The fiscal structure of the scheme is a direct contradiction of Lipton's (1977) model of ‘urban bias’ in Third World development strategies; the Employment Guarantee Scheme is rather more a manifestation of ‘kulak power’. Though promulgated as an alternative to policies entailing redistribution of rural assets, and clearly superior to doing nothing about rural distribution, the scheme is inferior to genuine redistribution in terms of altering the rural political economy. The functions, if not the motivations, of the scheme are profoundly conservative in a structural sense, politically and economically; the philosophical underpinnings, and perhaps, potentially, the consequences for mobilization of the rural poor, are quite the opposite.     

American agricultural assistance and the new international economic order

Combining ethical, political and economic elements, this paper studies the relationship between American food aid and agricultural assistance and the evolution of demands made by developing countries for a new international economic order. The ethical viewpoint is based on John Rawls' theory of ‘distributive justice’ and argues that the ‘Right to Food Resolution’ does not meet the developing countries' calls for redistribution. After analysing the political and economic differences in outlook of the developed and developing countries, it is concluded that the conduct of American agricultural assistance policies towards the developing countries has failed to appreciate the needs expressed in their demands for a new order.     

Sustainable livelihood principles and urban greening in informal settlements in practice: A case of Zandspruit informal settlement,South Africa

This article looks to investigate the practice of using the ‘sustainable livelihood approach’ in a multifaceted urban greening project, Trees for Homes. The urban greening project was implemented to improve the quality of life and help marginalised citizens of an informal settlement in South Africa to adapt to climate variability through tree planting. We explored the actual execution of the independent techniques being utilised in the implementation of the Trees for Homes project and how it can promote sustainable livelihood objectives in the Zandspruit informal settlement in South Africa. Using a qualitative approach, the study was able to effectively apply sustainable livelihood principles. It was also found, however, that the multi-level principle was limited by the lack of political muscle which is endemic to many disempowered poor citizens of developing economies. Although the project was successful in many ways, political vulnerability within the development cycle threatens the longer term sustainability of the project outcomes.     

Exploring income variations across traditional authorities in KwaZulu‐Natal,South Africa

To understand income inequality and poverty, one must go beyond the important and much‐studied differences rural and urban living and investigate inequalities within rural areas. Using new South African data aggregated by ‘traditional authorities’, this article examines variations in per capita income across poor, rural, mostly black areas of KwaZulu‐Natal (KZN) province. The inequalities are significant. In explaining them, the article examines the importance of such variables as education, proportion of females in the resident population, population density, soil quality and rainfall. A geographical information system is used to map both the raw data and the residuals from a regression analysis, and this combination of statistical and geographical analyses yields new insights. Finally, the article suggests how these techniques might be supplemented by qualitative and quantitative studies of ‘overachieving’ and ‘underachieving’ traditional authorities ‐ those whose incomes per capita are well above or below what regression equations would predict.     

Migration from rural areas of poor countries: The impact on rural productivity and income distribution

Evidence is presented elsewhere²⁶ that intra-rural inequality is a major cause of rural-urban migration: that better-off villagers tend to be ‘pulled’, and worse-off villagers ‘pushed’, from the same subset of relatively ‘unequal’ villages. This paper argues that townward emigration, and its after-effects (remittances, return migration), in turn increases interpersonal and inter-household inequality within and between villages. As for rural labour productivity, the neoclassical expectation (that townward migration increases it) rests on special definitions and doubtful assumptions. Fortunately, in most of the poorer developing countries, rural-urban migration is much smaller, less permanent and more likely to set up countervailing economic-demographic pressures restoring the rural population share, than received opinion about ‘the urban crisis’ suggests. Migration does not equilibriate between urban and rural sectors, largely because of externalities and compositional factors; but it does smoothe itself, largely because individuals behave rationally and learn quickly. As so often, the lesson for development studies is not that ‘markets fail’. It is that, under conditions of both poverty and structural inequality, they function — but with generally unacceptable, misery-preserving consequences.     

Taxation and the urban poor in developing countries

Empirical evidence indicated that the poor, and particularly the urban poor, in developing countries pay a substantial part of their income as taxes. This paper examines critically the procedures employed in measuring the incidence of taxation in LDCs, with a particular emphasis on evidence concerning the tax burdens of the urban poor, and presents a summary of some empirical work in this area. It then provides a review and analysis of fiscal policies which at the margin can assist in improving the position of the urban poor by reducing the regressivity, and increasing the progressivity, of existing or potential revenue instruments, including public service prices, and by improving the fiscal position of the poor through expenditure programmes.     

On Public Organizations in Ghana: What Differentiates Good Performers from Poor Performers?*

Abstract: Public sector reform programs implemented across Africa, including the World Bank's ‘first’ and ‘second’ generation reforms, are based on the assumption that all public organizations are inefficient. This problematic assumption has had significant implications for policy in Africa. By failing to recognize that not all public organizations perform poorly, we ignore any potential lessons that could have been learnt from the experiences of organizations that have managed to perform effectively under the same social, political, economic and institutional environment. This paper uses Ghana as a case study to examine whether there are significant differences in the characteristics of poor and good performing public organizations. It is found that good and poor performing organizations in Ghana were significantly different in two respects: remuneration and hiring criteria.     

Recent declines in fertility in less developed countries,and what ‘population planners’ may learn from them

Significant and rapid fertility declines have occurred in many countries in the poor world over the past decade; many of these were unanticipated by demographers. Despite advances in statistical technique and demographic theory, little is yet known about the demographic rhythms of life in poor countries, or of the social forces behind them. Fertility decline, however, appears to have much to do with changes, economic and otherwise, within the family structure. The impact of ‘family planning’ programmes on fertility decline appears to have been exaggerated. ‘Population planners’ should be sensitive to the fact that a decline in fertility does not necessarily mean that an improvement in the standard of living has occurred, and they should not assume that reducing fertility automatically increases either the quality of life or the prospects for ‘development’.     

Easy prey? Firms based in small nations and international cartels, 1919–1939

Abstract

It is taken as common sense that small countries have been more pressed and exploited by transnational enterprises than large ones. Economists call this the ‘small-country-squeeze’. Our contribution tries to transfer the thesis to the micro-economic level: Did mighty international cartels exploit their cartel partners based in small countries more easily than enterprises from larger states? From a viewpoint of political logic, or everyday feeling, such a thesis looks straightforward. In the following we apply the thesis of small-country-squeeze to several cases of cartels during their peak period, 1919–1939, and find surprisingly little evidence for this ‘common sense’. The assumption rather needs to be reversed: We should take non-discrimination as the normal case and try to find contradicting cases of discrimination.     

‘Growing’ social protection in developing countries: Lessons from Brazil and South Africa

The rapid expansion of social protection in the South provides a rich diversity of experiences and lessons on how best to reduce poverty and ultimately eradicate it. Knowledge on how best to ‘grow’ social assistance, understood as long-term institutions responsible for reducing and preventing poverty, is at a premium. This article examines the expansion of social assistance in Brazil and South Africa, two of the middle income countries widely perceived to have advanced furthest in ‘growing’ social protection. It examines three aspects: the primacy of politics in explaining the expansion of social protection and assistance, the tensions between path-dependence and innovation in terms of institutions and practices, and the poverty and inequality outcomes of social assistance expansion. The article concludes by drawing the main lessons for other developing countries.     

Is there a poverty trap for developing countries? Polarization: Reality or myth

A general view that as between countries ‘the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer’ supported in the development literature by explanations relating to cumulative causation, economies of scale etc., and statistically based on the relation between GNP per capita in 1978 and its growth rates during 1960–1978, is shown to contain considerable elements of ‘myth’ or statistical ‘delusion’. The ‘naïve’ polarization hypothesis based on income levels at the end of the period over which growth rates are measured is left with a much weakened empirical basis when the proper substitution of levels of income at the beginning of the period is made. This is particularly so for low- and middle-income countries taken separately, while for the 18 industrialized countries a strong tendency towards convergence in per capita incomes emerges. Finally, for the growth in manufacturing value added during 1960–1977 a significant tendency towards convergence was observed in the case of a group of 24 least developed countries.     

我国新型城镇化建设的文化动力机制研究

文化是新时期城镇化发展研究的新视角。中国城镇化进程在时间上表现出动态演进性,其动力机制也经历了由一元化、二元化向多元化发展的趋势。文化作为一种资本,被纳入经济社会发展尤其是可持续发展的模型之中,是城市发展的动力要素之一,但是城市文化对城市发展的影响是一个复杂的、双向的过程。城市文化通过引领城市转型,提升城镇化质量;形成文化生产力,增加城镇经济张力;彰显人文精神,促进人口城镇化发展;培育文化生态,推动城镇文明发展;塑造软实力,加速城镇现代化进程等来驱动我国新型城镇化建设。当前,提升城市文化动力,应从五个方面着手:转变政府职能,深化改革城市文化管理体制;建设文化市场,完善城市文化经营机制;加强文化交融,促进城市文化传承创新;创新坚持"以人为本",健全公共文化服务体系;构建适宜环境,推动文化建设与城市发展的融合。     

Peasant labour for urban industry: Temporary contract labour,urban-rural balance and class relations in a Chinese county

Urban-rural relations in China have a dual character: while a higher level of urban-rural economic balance than most other countries has been achieved, a sharp structural cleavage between workers and peasants has been maintained, based mainly on strict household registrations. Peasants are prevented from migrating to towns and gaining employment there, except under specially approved contracts arranged to resolve local shortages of industrial labour. Contract labour has complex and important effects on rural and urban industrial development. It also embodies the duality of urban-rural relations in China: at the same time as it redistributes wage funds from urban to rural areas, it reinforces the class cleavage between workers and peasants (including contract workers). It also opens up a complex web of inequalities and cleavages among those peasants with contract work and those without. Contract workers have been placed in a contradictory class position which has been a flashpoint of political conflict. The relationships of contract labour to urban industrial and rural development, urbanization, urban-rural balance and structural cleavage, class structure and political conflict are examined through a study of Shulu County, an ordinary rural area with agrowing industrial centre in which over half of the industrial labour force is comprised of peasant contract workers.     

Bilateral political relations,space spillovers and the import expansion of China’s bulk commodity

The stability of bulk commodities imports is crucial to the development and stability of the country’s economy. Because its political attribute is more significant than other commodities, the trade of bulk commodities is more easily affected by bilateral political relations. However, there are only few studies examine the impact of political relations between countries and their spatial spillovers on bulk commodities’ imports. Based on “United Nations (UN) Voting General Assembly Voting Data” and “China Import and Export Statistics Data” from 1996 to 2014, this paper empirically examines the influence of the spatial spillover of China’s political relations with countries other than potential importing countries on the import expansion of China’s bulk commodity from the potential importing country. The results show that the improvement of bilateral political relations between China and other countries has a negative spatial spillover effect on the import of bulk commodities. However, this negative effect will be changed as China starts to establish a sound bilateral political relation with the potential importing country. Meanwhile, the more significant the political attributes of commodities, the greater the negative effect of spatial spillover. The import expansion of commodities with significant political attributes requires an improvement in direct bilateral relations.