States and Caliphates

ABSTRACT

At the end of June 2014, Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi, the leader of what was to become Da’ish or the Islamic State, announced at the main mosque in Mosul the creation of an ‘Islamic caliphate’ with himself as caliph. With its creation, he announced, the division of the Middle East, forced upon the region by the 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement, was ended, to be replaced by a territorially limitless caliphate for all Muslims. Despite the obvious political rhetoric that the announcement involved, al-Baghdadi’s aspirations raised interesting questions of historical and legal interpretation. Quite apart from what the Sykes–Picot agreement actually established, to what extent, for instance, is there an innate contradiction between visions of state and boundary in international law and the Islamic concept of the caliphate? How have those concepts evolved over the past century and how inimical are contemporary views of ‘the caliphate’ to established principles of territorial delimitation? And, to what extent do the actual territorial delimitations of Middle Eastern states reflect pre-colonial patterns of spatial division rather than simply the consequences of colonial imposition? How distinct, in short, are the apparently opposed concepts of state and caliphate in the contemporary world? This article will attempt to show that the points of similarity between them are probably far greater than is usually recognised.     

The Property Tax Incidence Debate and the Mix of State and Local Finance of Local Public Expenditures

Many states in the US have in recent years changed the mix ofstate and local revenue sources used to finance local publicexpenditures, especially primary and secondary education, withlocal property taxes being replaced by various sources of statetax revenue. This article examines the desirability of sucha tax substitution, focusing on the implications of the long-standingdebate between the "benefit tax" and "capital tax" views ofthe incidence of the tax. It also includes a discussion of somerecent research that elaborates the capital tax view of theproperty tax. (JEL codes: H10, H21, H22, H71)     

Structure in product line management: The role of formalization in service elimination decisions

Formalization is a core structural characteristic of the firm and an important determinant of decision-making efficiency. This empirical paper explores formalization in financial institutions’ product line pruning decisions. The authors develop a set of hypotheses that are empirically tested in a stratified random sample of UK financial institutions. The results demonstrate that the level of formalization in the elimination decision-making process depends on specific organizational and environmental conditions, including overall company strategy, product line length, market orientation, top management attitude toward line pruning, austerity of the regulatory context, and rate of technological change. The results also show that formalization enhances the procedural rationality of elimination decisions, and leads to customer-sensitive implementation strategies. This paper is the first attempt to link service elimination decision-making with structural characteristics of organizational decision-making. The results yield important managerial implications and point at useful directions for future research.     

Measuring the effect of Kyoto protocol agreement on countries’ environmental efficiency in CO2 emissions: an application of conditional full frontiers

This paper applies the probabilistic approach developed by Daraio and Simar (J Prod Anal 24:93–121, 2005, Advanced robust and nonparametric methods in efficiency analysis. Springer Science, New York, 2007a, J Prod Anal 28:13–32, 2007b) in order to develop conditional and unconditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models for the measurement of countries’ environmental efficiency levels for a sample of 110 countries in 2007. In order to capture the effect of countries compliance with the Kyoto protocol agreement (KPA) policies, we condition first the years since a country has signed the KPA until 2007 and secondly the obliged percentage level of countries’ emission reductions. Particularly, various DEA models have been applied alongside with bootstrap techniques in order to determine the effect of KPA on countries’ environmental efficiencies. The study illustrates how the recent developments in efficiency analysis and statistical inference can be applied when evaluating environmental performance issues. The results indicate a nonlinear relationship between countries’ obliged percentage levels of emission reductions and their environmental efficiency levels. Finally, a similar nonlinear relationship is also recorded between the duration which a country has signed the KPA and its environmental efficiency levels.     

Hot Spots: Why Some Teams,Workplaces and Organizations Buzz with Energy—and Others Don't by Lynda Gratton

Books reviewed in this issue:

• ? Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces and Organizations Buzz with Energy—and Others Don't
• ? Cracking the Ad Code
• ? Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities

     

A meta-analysis of community-based studies on quality protein maize

Biofortification, or the improvement of nutritional quality in food crops, is a promising strategy to combat undernutrition, particularly among the rural poor in developing countries. However, traditional methods of impact assessment are inadequate for biofortified crops, as they do not consider their nutritional benefits. Evidence for the nutritional impact of maize varieties with improved protein quality, collectively known as quality protein maize (QPM), was evaluated using meta-analysis of randomized, controlled studies in target communities. A new and generalizable effect size was proposed to quantify the impact of QPM on a key outcome, child growth. The results indicated that consumption of QPM instead of conventional maize leads to a 12% (95% CI: 7–18%) increase in the rate of growth in weight and a 9% (95% CI: 6–15%) increase in the rate of growth in height in infants and young children with mild to moderate undernutrition from populations in which maize is the major staple food. The proposed effect size and use of bootstrapping to determine statistical significance addressed some methodological limitations in the existing studies.     

Equity Markets and Economic Development: Does the Primary Market Matter?

This article examines the role played by primary and secondary equity markets in economic growth. It departs from standard literature to integrate both markets and to explicitly acknowledge the primary equity market. By employing a variety of dynamic panel estimators for 54 countries over the period 1995‐2010, we show that the primary equity market is not an important determinant of economic growth, although it facilitates the development of the secondary market. This study also confirms the importance of liquidity provided by the secondary market. The evidence here calls for further investigation into the capital‐raising function of equity markets.