Select bibliography of contributions to economic and social history appearing in Scandinavian books,periodicals and year-books, 1977

Abstract

The structure of markets, of production and of bargaining institutions provide us with important clues as to why British and Swedish bargaining developed in very different ways during the interwar period. To understand fully the choices which employers made and the responses of their workers to these policies we should, it is argued here, extend our analysis beyond the market environment and the institutional structures which emerged in the two countries. This essay provides evidence that the different cultural and political values of the participants was an important formative influence in the making of the bargaining system. We seek to demonstrate this point by a brief survey of the wider social and political context in which the bargaining practices of the metal working trades were developed in this period, and suggest that we need to see the local as well as central organisations of workers and employers as contributors to this process.     

NATURAL RESOURCE ABUNDANCE,INSTITUTIONS AND TAX REVENUE MOBILISATION IN SUB‐SAHARA AFRICA

The contribution of natural resources to tax revenues has generally yielded mixed results in the literature. This study asserts that the missing link to explaining these differences is the quality of institutions. More resource revenues reduce tax revenues when institutions are poor. Using an interaction term for natural resources and institutional quality, we show that institutions are decisive for the contribution of natural resources to tax revenue mobilisation. The interaction effect is statistically significant after controlling for per capita gross domestic product (GDP), an alternative measure of quality of institutions and additional regressors. This finding is robust to different econometric specifications and the type of natural resources.     

国际贸易机制对国内武装冲突影响的研究——基于回归断点设计的数量分析(1946-2009年)

国际机制不仅影响国家行为体,也影响国家层面之下的非国家行为体,并作用于两类行为体间的互动。作为最为成熟也是影响范围最为广泛的国际机制之一,国际贸易机制一方面通过机制功能作用于国内政治中的国家行为体与非国家行为体,另一方面施加影响于贸易议题从而刺激国内各行为体之间的互动。无论是机制还是贸易都与国际和平战争研究紧密相关,如"贸易和平论"与"国际制度和平论"。基于国际原因与国内产出之间的关系,国际贸易机制如何影响国内政治,特别是影响国内冲突的爆发风险?通过回归断点设计(RDD)与Logit回归分析,1946-2009年之间的国际贸易机制(关贸总协定/世界贸易组织)数据及国内武装冲突数据显示,关贸总协定/世界贸易组织成员资格的确能够在整体上显著降低国内武装冲突发生的可能性;但是,在分别控制经济因素、政治因素、社会因素、贸易因素和外部因素之后,实证结果显示国际贸易机制对各国国内冲突风险实际上是一种条件性的混合影响。     

Economic and Political Logics in the Restructuring of the Australian Domestic Aviation Industry in the 1980s

What brought about the restructuring of the Australian domestic aviation industry in the 1980s in Australia? Rather than being the product a radical shift in policy, the ‘triumph of economic rationalism’ or the victory of one set of interests over another, it was a case of the decay and dissolution of an inappropriate set of institutional arrangements. Changes in the market and in political forces prompted industry actors to undermine and challenge a prevailing set of government policies and market rules. A variety of commercial, legal, administrative and political arenas were the institutional sites for these events. Policy change and a new set of rules of the game were not so much imposed from above, as registered at the conclusion of events.     

Questioning the Relationship between Participation and Development: A case study of the Vale do Ribeira, Brazil

Through the analysis of two participatory forums active in the Vale do Ribeira (Brazil)—the Committee for the Management of Water Resources (CGRH) and the Consortium of Food Safety and Local Development (Consad)—this article discusses the argument that “well designed” institutions enable the inclusion of a broader spectrum of actors in political debates, as well as reduce the asymmetries between them thereby facilitating the negotiation and agreement of politically and economically viable projects that would help to encourage development in the region. The two forums were observed in terms of how they dealt with two polemical regional issues: the proposal to build a big dam, a process which has been going on for more than a decade and the definition of a program of sustainable development capable of reconciling environmental conservation and growth in the local economy. The analysis suggests that during the period of research, these forums recreated in the participatory sphere coalitions that were already present in the regional political scene, thereby acting as an extension of the party political game rather than as arenas where new arrangements of actors could agree on alternative projects. From a theoretical perspective, this result raises again the question of the origin and the change of institutions, in that it questions the mechanisms necessary for the creation of institutions explicitly designed to alter the status quo.     

洪涝灾区养猪场户生产恢复行为影响因素的实证分析——基于山东省潍坊市7个县（市、区）的调查

2018年8月,山东省潍坊市爆发了特大洪涝灾害,寿光等7个县(市、区)的养猪场户受灾严重,洪涝灾区养猪场户生产恢复状况成为政府和社会各界时刻关注的热点问题。基于230个养猪场户的调查数据,运用Logit模型实证分析了洪涝灾区养猪场户生产恢复行为的影响因素。研究结果表明:在230个受访养猪场户中,有52.61%选择恢复生产,有47.39%放弃恢复生产并转行;家庭年均收入、养殖年限、是否参加养殖合作组织、养猪业前景预测、有无政府扶持、有无金融机构优惠、有无社会捐助等7个因素对洪涝灾区养猪场户生产恢复行为具有显著影响。     

Innovation or Rent-seeking： The Entrepreneurial Behavior during China＇s Economic Transformation

Although achieving impressive economic growth during the economic reform period, China has been plagued by rampant corruption and a widening income gap. How can the coexistence of these two phenomena be explained？ In this paper, we argue that before 1994, the coexistence was induced by a series of expediential institutional arrangements to stimulate entrepreneurial activities and after 1994, it was entrenched because of the slow progress in the overall reform toward becoming a market economy and because of inappropriate government actions and the lack of government action in institutional building. To solve these problems, economic and political reforms need to be accelerated to improve market institutions and to establish the rule of law.     

Remittance,Institutions and Investment Volatility Interactions: An Intercontinental Analysis

Generating massive investment for growth and development has been one of the main policy goals of most economies around the globe. Countries, most especially developing ones, are highly susceptible to investment volatility owing largely to the fragile nature of their economies as well as weaknesses in terms of dysfunctional institutions. Therefore, sound economic management suggests the need to better understand possible sources for mitigating the adverse effects of investment volatility. Remittances have been identified as important capital flows which do a good job of dousing macroeconomic volatilities. It is on this basis that the study sought to uncover the causal relationship between remittances and investment volatility via the intermediating role of institutions. Using a panel of 70 countries and the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator, three insightful outcomes come to the fore. First, remittances played countercyclical roles across the estimated regressions. Second, institutional quality had no significant role in mitigating investment volatility and lastly, the interactive terms of both remittances and institutions significantly mitigated the negative impacts of investment volatility with the exception of the political component of the institutional architecture. Policy suggestions are drawn based on our results.     

Bridging the Gap between ‘Joe Sixpack’ and ‘Bill Gates’: On the Efficiency of Institutions for Redistribution

All democracies have implemented institutions that redistribute income from the rich to the poor. Economists tend to have strong views on how this redistribution should be organized, based on the two theorems of welfare economics. However, these views are mostly neglected. I argue that the reason for this neglect is likely to be that these institutions are constrained Pareto-efficient after a century of experimentation. If not, some political bargaining would lead to the implementation of the Pareto-improvement. Hence, economists should concentrate on an explanation of the constrained efficiency of existing institutions instead of on the design of drawing table grand reforms. This approach is applied to three institutions frequently observed in reality: minimum wages, education subsidies, and unemployment insurance. We show that these institutions for redistribution are likely to be constrained efficient. We analyze the impact of the constitutional environment on the implementation of efficient redistribution. Finally, we evaluate the causes for the observed cross-country variation in redistribution.     

利益冲突与制度扭曲——论政府在经济发展和转型中的作用

本文在McGuire和Olson(1996)的基础上进一步讨论了政府在经济活动中的地位和作用.我们发现,即使是具有共容利益的政府,其与社会之间依然存在着利益冲突.因此,政府的存在总会造成一定的制度扭曲,使经济处于非最优效率状态.本文还研究了政府与社会之间的利益冲突在转型经济中的表现.研究表明,政府与社会之间的利益冲突会随着经济体制的改进而得到强化,从而使新制度受到更大的扭曲.另外,政府与社会之间的利益冲突会对经济体制的优化产生不同的影响,但最终都会妨碍制度变迁达至最优状态.本文的研究实际上指出了政治体制改革对经济发展和转型的重要意义.我们也指出,在转型经济中,政治体制改革的时机选择不当可能会导致结果事与愿违     

AID US TO WIN THE ELECTIONS: FOREIGN AID AND VOTER TURNOUT

We use an innovative procedure to determine the effect of foreign aid on institutions of governance. We use voter turnout as an indicator variable which allows us to identify whether political competition in a country is based on private goods, such as vote‐buying, or on public goods. We suggest that the marginal effect of foreign aid on voter turnout depends on the wider underlying institutional setting. Contrary to popular belief, the theoretical model implies that a higher voter turnout in response to foreign aid can be undesirable when the increase is a consequence of vote‐buying in the electoral campaign. The empirical evidence we examine is consistent with private‐goods political competition, i.e., political parties use foreign aid for vote‐buying and similar electoral tactics, particularly when the underlying institutions are sufficiently bad. This is consistently estimated across specifications which address a range of endogeneity sources.     

Challenges to Proponents of Common Property Recource Systems: Despairing Voices from the Social Forests of Zimbabwe

There is a fair degree of misplaced optimism about common property resource (CPR) management. In investigating common property issues for woodlands in communal areas in Zimbabwe, we are struck by the numerous case studies showing a breakdown of local institutions for CPR management, and the lack of any emerging alternative institutions for such management. There are a number of contributing economic, social and ecological factors to this phenomenon. We argue that the formal rule-based systems that form the cornerstones of the proposed CPR systems are far removed from the current institutional systems, rooted in norm-based controls. We suggest that advocacy of CPR systems has to be tempered with critical analysis.     

自然灾害与社会冲突——基于中国省际面板数据的分析

自然灾害不仅打乱了人们的日常生活和现行的社会体系,也常常会集中引发人们对当前社会政治制度安排的质疑和不满。因此自然灾害不仅直接地导致社会不稳定,而且会因灾后资源稀缺性而加剧的社会不满间接导致社会冲突。本文使用中国2003-2011年省际面板数据,从实证的角度检验了气候引起的自然灾害与社会冲突之间可能存在的联系。研究发现自然灾害似乎与社会冲突相关,但这种关系并不是固定的。此外,人均收入水平、文盲率、人口规模与社会冲突存在显著性的联系。考虑到气候变化可能引发严重的自然灾害和近年来我国自然灾害频发,本文的研究结论认为政府采取积极的政策干预自然力量和人类行为,不仅具有重要的经济和社会意义,同时也具有极其重要的政治意义。     

Culture,institutions and long-term development: the Swedish case and implications for China

Most social scientists agree that institutional analyses seem to be a promising tool to analyse long-term development. International comparisons are also necessary to understand what constitutes ‘good’ institutions and to which extent they can be created by conscious decisions. The most important aspect of studies of other countries and their institutional development is not what we learn about them but that we by comparison can develop a better understanding of the history of our own country. This article describes the peculiarities of the Swedish institutional framework in a historical perspective. Special attention has been given to aspects that are often discussed in analyses of the Chinese development. In many aspects, China and Sweden can be seen as representatives of two opposite paths of development for instance in the sequence of institutional building, in the development of checks and balances and in whether the orientation of the culture is family or society oriented. In spite of these differences, it is not difficult to find islands of cultural concordance which can facilitate mutual learning and understanding.     

Exploiting the Chaos: Terrorist Target Choice Following Natural Disasters

This article explores the differences between transnational and domestic terrorism, further differentiating by private versus government targets, to estimate the effect of exogenous catastrophic shocks on a country's level of domestic and transnational terrorism. The empirical analysis uses detailed data on terrorism, natural disasters, and other relevant controls for 176 countries from 1970–2007 to illuminate several key disparities in a postdisaster target choice of terrorists. The results indicate that natural disasters incite both transnational and domestic terrorism; however, evidence is found for dissimilar motivations between the two. While both types of terrorism increase after disasters, transnational attacks against the government increase immediately following the disaster, suggesting an impetus to exploit weakened “hard” targets during the chaos. Conversely, domestic terrorism against the government takes longer to manifest, suggesting a period of time for which the public recovers and assesses the government's response.     

A view from behavioral political economy on China's institutional change

A behavioral political economy framework is built on the basis of prospect theory to explain the induced and imposed institutional changes during China's market reform, giving special attention to the integrated effects of economic and political institutions. According to prospect theory, how rulers frame their decisions — in the prospects of gains or losses, influences how much risk they will take. China's market reform has been largely framed in the prospects of economic gains, for which the continuously growing private sector is the driving force. China's central government adopts a growth-oriented incremental reform that coincides with the prediction of prospect theory.     

沿海地区受台风影响的易损性指标体系与应急管理策略

台风灾害一直是威胁我国沿海地区经济社会发展的一个重大障碍。构建承灾体的社会经济易损性评价指标体系,运用统计学方法对沿海地区受台风影响的社会经济易损性进行实证分析后发现,我国沿海地区受台风影响的社会经济易损性空间分布不均匀。台风灾害频发的沿海地方政府应通过制定防台应急预案,构建全面的应急预警体系,建立统一的自然灾害信息系统和信息公开机制,引入政策性金融工具建立灾后恢复、补偿的财政保障机制,从而构建一个专门针对台风灾害的应急响应机制。     

Do Institutions Matter for Foreign Direct Investment?

Using a panel of 69 countries during 1981 and 2005, we investigate the role of institutions in determining foreign direct investment (FDI). We find that institutions are a robust predictor of FDI and that the most significant institutional aspects are linked to propriety rights. Using a novel data set, we also study the impact of institutions on FDI at the sectoral level. We find that institutions do not have a significant impact on FDI in the primary sector but that institutional quality matters for FDI in manufacturing, and particularly in services.     

European Union integration lessons for ASEAN + 3: the importance of contextual specificity

This paper will argue that EU integration appears to offer ASEAN and three Northeast Asian Countries (China, Japan and South Korea) political and security lessons concerning maintenance of regional stability, as well as some economic lessons. There is not, however, any institutional blueprint for integration that these countries could emulate. This is in part because economies are characterized by “contextual specificity” of chosen institutions and their corresponding working rules. These institutions and rules evolve in particular cultural and historical settings and are shaped by the specific country’s philosophical basis, political structure, and attitudes of authorities towards alternative types of economic institutions and the types of corresponding rules they could choose to establish for those institutions.     

Rethinking the role of sovereign wealth funds in small island developing states: evidence from Tuvalu and Kiribati

This paper examines the important role that can be played by sovereign wealth funds in financing of disaster risk management. The governments of Tuvalu and Kiribati are predicting climate change and natural disaster risks imposing increasing financial pressure on their economies. Having the required financial response in the aftermath of disasters is important to these low‐lying atolls. The long‐term sustainability of sovereign wealth funds in Kiribati and Tuvalu in contributing to ex post disaster risk management is examined.