Growth versus Conservation: A Veblenian Perspective

This article is concerned with the role of institutions in organizing the economy and argues with some neoclassical and Marxist positions. The neoclassical approach usually ignores the role of institutions, while its “public choice-property rights” extensions overemphasize the market solution to market failure problems. The Marxist approach is useful in relating institutions to the conflicts of interest, but tends to be overoptimistic about possibilities of social control of economic activities.     

Maquiladoras: the First World Abusing the Third World?

The industrial border region between Mexico and the USA is notorious for its physical, social and moral squalor. But is it entirely a matter of total exploitation or is the answer to the title’s question more complex than a simple yes? The author is completing his MBA degree at London Business School, is an American citizen and has a background as a consultant in information technology.     

New Regionalism Reconsidered: Globalization and the Remaking of Political Economic Space

Amid the near frenzied exaltation of economic globalization and a purported decline of the nation state, a range of subnational regional economies and urban metropoles are increasingly being canonized as the paradigmatic exemplars of wealth creation. Indeed, across many of the advanced developed countries a whole host of academics, consultants, influential commentators, politicians and bourgeois interest groups are readily invoking the region to be the appropriate site for regulating global capitalism. In a recent article in IJURR, though, John Lovering disputes this emerging New Regionalism, viewing it to be seriously compromised by several practical and theoretical inadequacies. This article has two principal aims. First, and while sympathetic to the general tenor of Lovering’s critique, it offers a rejoinder through some sobering reflections on what might be recovered from the range of New Regionalist perspectives currently vying for attention within critical studies of regional development. Second, it presents a series of future theoretical directions for a geopolitically sensitive regional research agenda, drawing on recent thinking from the new regional geography, globalization and the politics of scale, institutional‐relational state theory and the regulation approach. An argument is made that a synthesis of these perspectives might intensify our understanding of the social and political construction of regions, the uneven geography of growth, and the moments of re‐scaled regionalized state power that now enframe the process of economic governance.     

Public/private health care: The British scenario

The issue of public versus private health care is too often treated as an ideological issue, with each side unwilling to discuss common problems of cost containment and quality control which have to be faced, no matter what the financial framework. Thus, cost containment will worry the administrators of insurance funds just as much, if not more, than health service administrators. Health care is not, in the economist's sense, a perfect market; it cannot and does not remain unregulated. So what is at issue is whether regulation is carried out by government, by insurance companies, or by the professions, and what the balance between them shall be.

These and other lessons are drawn from a series of studies describing the workings of insurance systems in a number of countries, in Europe, as well as the United States, Canada and Australia. The findings of the book ‐ The Public/Private Mix for Health, edited by Gordon McLachlan and Alan Maynard, and published this autumn by the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust ‐ are too rich to be summarised here. What follows is an extract from the final chapter containing the editors’ own reflections on the material they have brought together.     

Public finance foundation

Tight cash limits have continued to keep public sector pay under control. Though the Government may be pleased, their success is making it ever more difficult for public sector managers to recruit staff and use them more effectively.     

Optimizing the Use of Televised Instruction

Experiments with various techniques of teaching have generally not permitted students to elect the combination of techniques they most prefer. Gordon discusses preliminary results that contrast with some of the findings reported to date.     

Has the Fed been a failure?

As the 100th anniversary of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act approaches, we assess whether the nation’s experiment with the Federal Reserve has been a success or a failure. Drawing on a wide range of recent empirical research, we find the following: (1) The Fed’s full history (1914 to present) has been characterized by more rather than fewer symptoms of monetary and macroeconomic instability than the decades leading to the Fed’s establishment. (2) While the Fed’s performance has undoubtedly improved since World War II, even its postwar performance has not clearly surpassed that of its undoubtedly flawed predecessor, the National Banking system, before World War I. (3) Some proposed alternative arrangements might plausibly do better than the Fed as presently constituted. We conclude that the need for a systematic exploration of alternatives to the established monetary system is as pressing today as it was a century ago.     

Public participation and organizational change in Wisconsin land use management

This article explores the issues that arise when land use management organizations change their previous ways of relating to the public. I introduce an analytic framework for evaluating organizational changes that are grounded in participatory planning and decision making. Using a case study of a recent planning initiative of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, I examine dynamics of trust, civic capacities, personal demands, history of working relationships, and interest in the issue at hand. Though preliminary, the conclusions drawn from this research illustrate how these dynamics may influence the success of participatory planning that reflects organizational change.     

Rules, Policy and Rent Seeking: A Cross-border Comparison

The United States and Canada are similar in many ways, yet they have taken different approaches to agricultural policy. This paper discusses what affect the different constitutional arrangements have had on the development of agricultural policy. Constitutions can affect the policy bargaining process in several ways: they determine who has access to the bargaining process, what is the legal set of policy options and what is the admissible coalition. The two countries' Constitutions differ in where regions have access to the bargaining process, the use of the courts and the size of the admissible coalition. These differences have led to divergent policies, which are evidenced by the response to the recent drop in commodity prices.