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5482. Responsibility Sharing for Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants in Need of Protection
- Author:
- CMS
- Publication Date:
- 06-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Migration Studies of New York
- Abstract:
- The 2017 International Migration Policy Report is the first in an expected series of annual reports on international migration policy and refugee protection by the global network of think tanks or study centers founded by the Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Charles – Scalabrinians. These institutions are members of the Scalabrini International Migration Network (SIMN). The Scalabrini migration study centers consist of the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) in the United States, the Scalabrini Migration Center (SMC) in the Philippines, the Scalabrini Institute for Human Mobility in Africa (SIHMA) in South Africa, the Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos (CEMLA) in Argentina, the Centro de Estudios Migratorios (CEM) in Brazil, the Centre d’Information et d’Études sur les Migrations Internationales (CIEMI) in France, and the Centro Studi Emigrazione Roma (CSER) in Italy. The purpose of these reports will be to focus on pressing global migration and refugee protection challenges in all parts of the world and to offer policy suggestions to address them.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
5483. Global Debt Dynamics: What Has Gone Wrong
- Author:
- Andreas Antoniades and Stephany Griffith-Jones
- Publication Date:
- 01-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex
- Abstract:
- This paper analyses the nature and characteristics of global debt dynamics in the post global financial crisis (GFC) period. First, we attempt to map the ways in which debt has been moving from sector to sector, and from one group of countries to another within the global economy. By capturing this inter-sectorial, inter-national, inter-regional movements of global debt we aspire to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of global debt and its mode of operation. Second, we attempt to analyse what is wrong with global debt dynamics, i.e. we examine the broken link between what global debt was supposed to do and what it does. Here, we point to three interrelated dynamics: the accumulation of unproductive debt, growing inequalities of income and wealth, and the increase in privately-created, interest-bearing money.
- Topic:
- Debt, Economics, Global Recession, Financial Crisis, and Global Political Economy
- Political Geography:
- United States, Global Focus, and Global Markets
5484. The ebbing of the Pink Tide or permanent underdevelopment? Dependency theory meets uneven and combined development
- Author:
- Felipe Antunes de Oliveira
- Publication Date:
- 05-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex
- Abstract:
- Latin America is once again passing through a crisis. After initially showing promising results, the neodevelopmentalist strategy adopted in Brazil and Argentina has reached its limits. The attempt at 21st century socialism in Venezuela derailed, tearing the country apart. Finally, the neoliberal path dutifully followed by Mexico, Chile, Colombia and smaller countries perpetuated social inequalities, and is now menaced by President Trump's protectionist turn. The current Latin American crisis goes much beyond the reversion of the so-called "Pink Tide". It affects all ideological colours, raising again an old theoretical-political question that stood in the core of dependency theory: is development even possible in Latin America? The key to answer this question – a concept of development that captures non-converging transformation – was not available to Frank, Marini, Bambirra and Dos Santos, among other dependency theorists. Too easily conflating development with catching-up, they reached a dead end. Indeed, as they could see, Latin America was constantly changing, but not in the expected ways. In this paper, I suggest that the concept of uneven and combined development allows for a renewed engagement with dependency theory's core problem, by representing mixed forms of development as the norm, not the exception.
- Topic:
- Debt, Development, Economics, International Development, and Economic Growth
- Political Geography:
- Brazil, Colombia, Latin America, Venezuela, Mexico, and Chile
5485. Global Social Fascism: Violence, Law and Twenty-First Century Plunder
- Author:
- Lara Montesinos Coleman
- Publication Date:
- 05-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex
- Abstract:
- The intellectual authors of neoliberalism were aware of the lethal implications of what they advocated. For ‘the market’ to work, the state was to refuse protection to those unable to secure their subsistence, while dissidents were to be repressed. What has received less attention is how deadly neoliberal reforms increasing come wrapped in social, legal and humanistic rhetoric. We see this not only in ‘social’ and ‘legal’ rationales for tearing away safety nets in Europe’s former social democratic heartlands, but also in the ‘pro-poor’ emphasis of contemporary development discourse. This includes contexts where colonial legacies have facilitated extreme armed violence in service of corporate plunder. To expose these dynamics, I juxtapose the everyday violence of austerity in Britain with neoliberal restructuring in Colombia. The latter is instructive precisely because, in tandem with widespread state-backed terror, Colombia has held fast to the language and institutions of liberal democracy. It has, as a result, prefigured the subtle authoritarian tendencies now increasingly prominent in European states. The reconceptualization of law, rights and social policy that has accompanied neoliberal globalization is deeply fascistic. Authoritarian state power is harnessed to the power of transnational capital, often accompanied by nationalistic and racist ideologies that legitimize refusal of protection and repression, enabling spiraling inequality. Nevertheless, extending Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s discussion of ‘social fascism’, I suggest that widespread appeal to the ‘social’ benefits and ‘legal necessity’ of lethal economic policies marks a significant and Orwellian shift. Not only are democratic forces suppressed: the very meanings of democracy, rights, law and ethics are being reshaped, drastically inhibiting means of challenging corporate power.
- Topic:
- Human Rights, Social Stratification, Law, Fascism, and Neoliberalism
- Political Geography:
- Britain and Colombia
5486. Agitations for Separation and Non-Negotiability of Nigeria’s Unity: Bottling the Bomb?
- Author:
- Mbanefo Odum
- Publication Date:
- 09-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- African Heritage Institution (AfriHeritage)
- Abstract:
- The Nigerian state came into being through conquest and forceful imposition of foreign rule, which denied the indigenous peoples the opportunity to negotiate and choose what they wanted. Successive regimes have continued to hold the state together in a seeming forceful manner, creating the impression that the country must remain as crafted by the colonialists and that her unity is non-negotiable. However, the state has continued to experience swirling lava of agitations for self-determination. Relying on documentary evidence, observations, and descriptive analysis, this paper explores the nature of Nigeria’s unity; pattern of coexistence among the different groups within the Nigerian state vis-a-vis the extent they exhibit the proclivity for, as well as the factors that militate against, national integration; the manner the government promotes national unity; and the factors that ignite the separatist tendencies. The finding of this paper is that the inability to foster sense of common identity and national consciousness among the different groups, the continuing promotion of inter-ethnic hatred and unhealthy rivalry, as well as the bad governance rooted in corruption and divisiveness are the main factors that fuel the agitation for separation. The basic recommendation is that the government should reverse her non-negotiable stance about Nigeria’s unity and realize that any sincere move aimed at enthroning lasting peace and unity must begin with good governance and a general understanding and agreement reached by the constituent groups on how to proceed with the Nigerian project.
- Topic:
- Development, Politics, Separatism, Self-Determination, Peacebuilding, and National Integration
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Nigeria
5487. The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy and Capital Control in Nigeria
- Author:
- Nathaniel E. Urama and Emeka Charles Iloh
- Publication Date:
- 09-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- African Heritage Institution (AfriHeritage)
- Abstract:
- This paper examines the primary cause of the exchange rate management failure in Nigeria by evaluating the motivating factor for these changes and reviewing the role of politics and interest group in the Nigerian exchange rate management. The findings show that politics, institutional incentives, and group interest mostly play a significant role in Nigeria’s exchange rate regime determination, as evidenced in the habit of changing the exchange rate system by almost all the political regimes that have existed in the country. More so, the changes are attributed to factors such as different parties and regimes having different macroeconomic preferences, incumbents’ efforts to increase their re-election prospects, and by interest groups that lobby for strong or weak currencies.
- Topic:
- Foreign Exchange, Political Economy, Exchange Rate Policy, Economic Policy, and Capital
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Nigeria
5488. Evaluating Food Crop Sector Performance in Nigeria (1999-2016)
- Author:
- Nathaniel E. Urama and Denis Nfor Yuni
- Publication Date:
- 09-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- African Heritage Institution (AfriHeritage)
- Abstract:
- This study evaluates the performance of food crop sector in Nigeria from 1999-2016. The statistics show that Nigeria is having food insecurity problems: very low value of food production per capita; low and declining average dietary energy supply adequacy; very high variability in per capita food production and supply, and a high depth of food deficit that has been on the increase since 2006. The result also shows that agriculture’s contribution to Nigerian GDP has consistently declined from 37.5 percent in 2002 to 21.2 percent in 2016, and that food crop production declined from over 34 percent of the GDP in 2002 to 18.6 percent in 2016. Due to this high depth of food deficit, over 14 million people in the country are undernourished, and this has been increasing geometrically since 2005. Also, more than six million of the under-five children are stunted, and the consumer price of foods has been high and rising. Compared to other countries, there has not been any significant improvement in reducing the depth of food deficit in Nigeria.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Food, Children, Food Security, Economy, and Nutrition
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Nigeria
5489. The Clarity Incentive for Issue Engagement in Campaigns
- Author:
- Chitralekha Basu and Matthew Knowles
- Publication Date:
- 02-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP)
- Abstract:
- Although parties focus disproportionately on favourable issues in their election campaigns, it is also the case that parties spend much of the ‘short campaign’ addressing the same issues – and especially salient issues. This is surprising from the perspective of the theoretical literature, which has focused on parties’ incentives to campaign on ‘owned issues’ in order to increase the importance voters attach to these issues. We explain this behaviour by proposing that parties face an additional incentive to emphasise issues that are salient to voters: the need to clarify their positions on these issues for sympathetic voters. Leveraging the surprise election victory of the British Conservative Party in 2015—which prompted a hitherto unexpected referendum on EU membership—we show that, consistent with this hypothesis, voter uncertainty is especially costly for parties on salient issues. We formalise this argument using a model of party strategy with endogenous issue salience.
- Topic:
- Elections, Voting, and Campaigning
- Political Geography:
- Britain, Europe, and Global Focus
5490. Polarization and Corruption in America
- Author:
- Mickael Melki and Andrew Pickering
- Publication Date:
- 07-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP)
- Abstract:
- Using panel data from the US states, we document a robust negative relationship between state-level government corruption and ideological polarization. This finding is sustained when state polarization is instrumented using lagged state neighbor ideology. We argue that polarization enhances political accountability. Consistent with this thesis federal prosecutorial effort falls and case quality increases with polarization. The effect of polarization is dampened when there are other means of monitoring governments in particular strong media coverage of state politics. Tangible anti-corruption measures including the stringency of state ethics’ laws and independent commissions for redistricting are also associated with increased state polarization.
- Topic:
- Corruption, Media, Ideology, and Polarization
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America