Paying for Pipes,Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery

This article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites of market‐oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a water project mandating significant ‘beneficiary’ cash contributions from lower‐middle‐class dwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city's peripheries. Drawing on quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lack formal water access and land tenure — groups referred to in this article as the ‘peripheralized middle class’ — consent to paying for pipes rather than resist all together despite the high cost involved. It argues that far from reflecting an internalization of a ‘willingness to pay’ or ‘stakeholder’ ethos celebrated by development practitioners today, payment for water provides an insurgent means to bargain for greater symbolic recognition, respectability and material benefits from the state. In particular, payment for pipes enables peripheral dwellers to strengthen their claims to secure land tenure in an era of exclusionary and punitive spatial policies. Payment thus comprises a terrain of contested meaning making and political struggle, at the heart of which lie the stakes of urban citizenship. In documenting the process by which property related interests and tenure claims are advanced under a scenario of reforms, this article contributes to Gramscian political‐ecological conversations on subaltern political agency and the lived character of hegemony in urban environments.     

Productivity and the Euro-Dollar exchange rate

This article analyses the impact of productivity developments in the United States and the euro area on the euro-dollar exchange rate. The article presents a new measure of relative average labour, productivity (ALP) which does not suffer from the biases implicit in readily available relative ALP data. Importantly, the patterns of these series differ widely. Employing the Johansen cointegration framework, four models are estimated using four different productivity proxies. Our results indicate that the extent to which productivity can explain the euro depreciation varies with the productivity proxy used: readily available measures explain most, our new, preferred measure least. In all models, however, productivity can explain only a fraction of the actual euro depreciation experienced in 1999–2000. JEL no. F31, C32, O47 The views expressed in this study are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Central Bank or its staff.     

Monetary disequilibria and the euro/dollar exchange rate

Although stable money demand functions are crucial for the monetary model of the exchange rate, empirical research on exchange rates and money demand is more or less disconnected. This paper tries to fill the gap for the euro/dollar exchange rate. We investigate whether monetary disequilibria provided by the empirical literature on US and European money demand functions contain useful information about exchange rate movements. Our results suggest that the empirical performance of the monetary exchange rate model improves when insights from the money demand literature are explicitly taken into account.     

全球金融危机背景下的我国货币错配问题研究

我国的货币错配具有一些自身的特点,表现为巨额正外币资产头寸,在全球金融危机背景下,这将带来巨大的风险挑战。因此加强对货币错配问题的研究对于宏观经济政策的制定特别是对汇率制度的改革,具有非常重要的现实意义。本文首先通过估计我国的货币错配水平,分析我国的货币错配现状,指出全球金融危机背景下的风险挑战,进而提出相应的风险防范措施。     

When food regimes become hegemonic: Agrarian India through a Gramscian lens

The concept of food regimes, as developed by Friedmann and McMichael, has proven useful in analysing how systems of food production, distribution, and consumption are linked to cycles of global capital accumulation and identifying the contradictions and conflicts that underlie them. A question that food regime analysis is relatively less able to address, however, is how food regimes become established and endure with the apparent acquiescence of those who are the victims of their contradictions and inequities. In this paper, I argue that a deeper engagement with Gramsci's theory of hegemony may help to address this lacuna in food regime analysis. To illustrate my case, I draw on studies of rural India from the colonial period to the present day, highlighting the ways in which the hegemonic mechanisms of consent and coercion have been crucial to the consolidation of each of the three food regimes identified by Friedmann and McMichael.     

U.S. Money Supply and China’s Business Cycles

This article models the U.S. dollar as a world currency in a global DSGE framework, and investigates the spillover effects of the U.S. money supply shock on China’s economy. Exchange rate targeting and capital controls in the context of dollar hegemony are investigated. Given a positive U.S. money supply shock, both the inflation and real GDP of China will be below their steady-state levels in the medium term; while for the U.S. there is no inflation pressure. The spillover of liquidity effect exists. Cost-push effects and relative price effects are employed to discuss the transmission mechanism. Under the U.S. money supply shock, a fully liberalizing reform with no capital controls and a floating exchange rate of Renminbi is not the best reform for China.     

Lost in intervention. The Harrod–Balassa–Samuelson effect on the peseta/dollar real exchange rate (1870–1998)

We have decomposed the peseta/dollar real exchange rate (1870–1998) into its trend and cyclical components and used the former to proxy its time-varying equilibrium. Then, we have compared changes in the equilibrium with changes in the Spanish and the USA productivity differentials to identify years that do not fit with the Harrod–Balassa–Samuelson (HBS) hypothesis. The greatest maladjustment is found in the 1940s and 1950s, decades of strong exchange rate intervention in Spain. Conversely, the link between equilibrium and differentials adjusts to the hypothesis when using the non-intervened peseta/dollar exchange rate on the Tangier black market. These contrasting results back up the idea that exchange rate intervention, so common in developing countries, might explain their scanter evidence in favour of the HBS effect.     

从“特里芬难题”看美元的扩张及其影响

随着世界经济贸易的不断扩展和国际货币需求的日益增加,美元对国外的供给将不断扩大,但如果美国国际收支持续出现顺差,则美元的供给就将减少,难以满足国际需求;如果美国国际收支持续出现逆差,则又不利于美元价值的稳定,就要导致美元的贬值,这一点,罗伯特·特星芬早在20世纪60年代就做出了准确的预测。发生在美国的金融危机与美国半个多世纪以来的周期性国际收支失衡和美元极度扩张密切相关,美元的不稳定使国际金融体系变得更加脆弱。美元扩张已经积累了巨大的全球金融体系的风险,使全球经济面临上世纪大萧条以来最为严重的金融和经济危机。     

美元汇率变动对中国经济影响分析

美元汇率变动是影响中国经济发展的一个重要外部原因。由于2005年之前人民币实施的是钉住美元的固定汇率制度,美元贬值加大了人民币升值的压力,使得货币政策陷于两难境地。实证分析表明,美元汇率变动对中国进出口、利用外资、物价水平和就业具有明显的影响。2005年美元汇率升值,中国贸易收支顺差将缩小。美元企稳将促进中国稳定利用外资,并对抑制国内生产资料价格上涨将起到积极的作用,从而有利于我国的宏观经济调控。但今年美元的升值走势将不利于我国就业状况的改善。     

Performative global finance: bridging micro and macro approaches with a stratified perspective

Theories of performativity can enhance the study of global finance. Taking everyday financial practices seriously, they emphasise the potentially structuring effects and disciplinary nature of finance, and foreground the performative role of economics, financial models, and formulas. It has remained largely overlooked to date that the literature on the performativity of finance can be divided into two distinct approaches. ‘Microperformativity’ is the more actor-oriented approach, beginning its analysis with the exploration of agencements and their practices, or the examination of the social history of mathematical formulas in finance. ‘Macroperformativity’, in contrast, takes its point of departure from the social structure of finance itself, often in relation to national, international, or global power structures. Neither approach provides for an intermediary concept that more explicitly links the micro and macro level. Nor does either approach give adequate analytical consideration to social conflicts and power struggles. To fill these gaps, the paper applies poststructural hegemony theory to reconceptualise performativity as an articulatory logic which accounts for the transition of a particularity towards a universality within a framework of stratified hegemony. Framed accordingly, the concept of performativity accounts more strongly for the social and political processes, ruptures, contestations and contradictions in global finance.