Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa

The paper proposes that reports of pervasive competition and conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa belie a current image of negotiable and adaptive customary systems of landholding and land use but, instead, reveal processes of exclusion, deepening social divisions and class formation. Cases of ambiguous and indeterminate outcomes among claimants over land do occur, but the instances of intensifying conflict over land, deepening social rifts and expropriation of land beg for closer attention. More emphasis needs to be placed by analysts on who benefits and who loses from instances of 'negotiability' in access to land, an analysis that, in turn, needs to be situated in broader political economic and social changes taking place, particularly during the past thirty or so years. This requires a theoretical move away from privileging contingency, flexibility and negotiability that, willy-nilly, ends by suggesting an open field, to one that is able to identify those situations and processes (including com-modification, structural adjustment, market liberalization and globalization) that limit or end negotiation and flexibility for certain social groups or categories.     

CAP Forum on E‐Business: E‐Commerce and Tax Planning: Canadian Experiences*

This paper explores the deployment of e‐commerce by Canadian firms in the global marketplace, with an emphasis on the implications of e‐commerce for tax planning. The business press and various government task forces have discussed challenges raised by e‐commerce for traditional “source‐based” tax systems; however, these discussions have presented little evidence of firms' reliance on e‐commerce for tax‐planning purposes. Similarly, academic research has seldom examined whether firms' decisions to implement e‐commerce are by tax‐planning considerations. It is thus largely unknown whether firms actively consider taxation issues when evaluating e‐commerce, how the factors that have been identified as influencing decisions to implement e‐commerce systems are balanced against tax‐planning considerations, and what barriers might exist in practice to using e‐commerce for tax planning. We choose a qualitative interview‐based approach to explore these issues. Our findings suggest that tax planning is not considered by most of our respondent companies in their decisions to deploy e‐commerce. The companies we interviewed tended to implement e‐commerce over several years, starting with back‐office technologies like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Accordingly, the ability to perform online sales transactions, which is a key component of using e‐commerce for tax planning, often was not yet in place. One implication of these results is that if concerns over tax revenue losses are realistic, tax policymakers may have some time to refine tax legislation to address the challenges raised by e‐commerce.     

小是新的大:箭厂艺术空间

在过去的几年中,中国当代艺术的发展势如破竹。如果中国当代艺术存在根基的话,其在商业上的迅速崛起以及官方对它暧昧的宽容则造就了这个根基的易渗漏和不稳固。扫视今日中国的艺术空间和艺术机构会让人看到一个当代中国的艺术世界。这个艺术世界有着极大的要建立制度化,专业化,教育化系统的野心。这些系统将使得中国当代艺术可以与其世界邻居并驾齐驱,然而这样便忽略了对这些结构的长期基础建设。此外,近来在商业上的迅速成功以及市场的主导地位不仅危害了上述系统也阻止了那些更富于冒险精神的艺术实验和讨论模式的出现。如果798和草场地已经变成了中国当代艺术与文化产业新近发展的同义语,那么     

Incentive and Redistributive Effects of Private-Sector Union Pension Plans in Canada

Using data for pension plans in the private sector for males in Canada, this paper examines flat benefit plans, which predominate in the union sector, documenting their work and retirement incentives, the extent to which retroactive enrichments redistribute wealth within union membership, and the impact of anticipated enrichments on the timing of early retirement decisions     

The Political Construction of the City-Region: Notes from Sydney

City-region theory — fuzzy as the boundaries of such a theory may be — centres on the claim that the territorial basis and organizational architecture of the global economy is now a mosaic of globally connected city-regions rather than nations. Despite some intuitive appeal, there is a growing body of critique which targets specific frailties arising from the theoretical reliance in such arguments on a global capitalist-logic and, relatedly, the focus on global exchange relations. In exploring the limits of these theoretical tendencies, this paper provides a critical account of the processual and practical formation of Sydney (NSW, Australia) as a city-regional space of governance. It pays particular attention to the contingent emergence of Sydney’s metropolitan policy regionalism through political mediations of the particular and complex politics elicited by the spatial distributional consequences of city-region development. Its concluding argument is that city-region formation must be understood as an ongoing and multiscalar process without autonomy from the national political economy or from its territory.     

The economics of marital status: a Canadian analysis

Estimates of an economic model of Canadian women's marital status are derived using time-series provincial data. Results are compared with earlier work using 1960 U.S. Census data. Findings prove consistent in sign with theoretical predictions and previous research.