scholarly journals Fragility – Sustainability: Two Conflicting Major Challenges of this Twenty-First Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 31-64
Author(s):  
Demetrios Argyriades ◽  
Pan Suk Kim

With the Great Recession receding, but crises still afflicting large swaths of the world and a climate of rampant distrust adversely affecting governance, it may be time to ask whether and, if so, how and where our field went wrong. Have we been willing victims of sleep-walkers using metaphors as models? This paper argues as much. Specifically, it contends that, foisted on the world as the one- size-fits-all prescription for good governance, nationally and internationally, it has ended turning governance and democracy on their heads, while also undermining the very foundations on which a global order, based on peaceful coexistence and constructive cooperation through the United Nations, was predicated. The prevalence of symptoms of hurt and discontent should lead us to conclude that the roots of our predicament and problems go much deeper, to a might counter- culture, which triumphed in the 1990s but still goes strong, in places.

Author(s):  
Louçã Francisco ◽  
Ash Michael

Chapter 11 assesses the growth prospects of the world economy. The history of global economic doomsaying is traced briefly, a frequently reasonable position that has not done well with the facts for the past hundred years. Capitalism has been adept at escaping from the pit and pendulum. A set of global imbalances is then reviewed that are seen as posing a severe threat to global economic stability and certainly to the prospects for sustainable and equitable growth. The Great Recession following the Crash of 2007–8 might be “different this time.” Historical and contemporary fears of “secular stagnation” are discussed but the speculative nature of stagnationist assessments is acknowledged.


Author(s):  
Ronen Palan

The chapter addresses the nature of the power relationships between the business world and the state as seen from the perspective of a relatively new field of study called international political economy. Theories of corporate power in a globalized economy evolved along two parallel lines. On the one hand, the globalization literature of the 1990s has tended to assume there was a marked shift of power from states to markets. Recent literature questions these assumptions, not least in light of the experience of the great recession of 2007–2008. In parallel, conceptualization of power has evolved from relatively simplistic theories of relational power to theories of structural power and, increasingly, arbitrage power. Arbitrage power is the ability to arbitrate legal systems against each other, or against themselves, for pecuniary purposes.


Econometrics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Candila

Recently, the world of cryptocurrencies has experienced an undoubted increase in interest. Since the first cryptocurrency appeared in 2009 in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the popularity of digital currencies has, year by year, risen continuously. As of February 2021, there are more than 8525 cryptocurrencies with a market value of approximately USD 1676 billion. These particular assets can be used to diversify the portfolio as well as for speculative actions. For this reason, investigating the daily volatility and co-volatility of cryptocurrencies is crucial for investors and portfolio managers. In this work, the interdependencies among a panel of the most traded digital currencies are explored and evaluated from statistical and economic points of view. Taking advantage of the monthly Google queries (which appear to be the factors driving the price dynamics) on cryptocurrencies, we adopted a mixed-frequency approach within the Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) model. In particular, we introduced the Double Asymmetric GARCH–MIDAS model in the DCC framework.


Author(s):  
Michael Berlemann ◽  
Vera Jahn ◽  
Robert Lehmann

AbstractIn a globalized world with high international factor mobility, crises often spread quickly over large parts of the world. Politicians carry a vital interest in keeping crises as small and short as possible. Against this background we study whether the type of company of owner-managed SMEs, in Germany well-known as Mittelstand firms, helps increasing an economy’s crisis resistance. We study this issue at the example of the Great Recession of the years 2008/2009. Using micro panel data from the ifo Business Survey, we study the comparative performance of Mittelstand enterprises and find supporting evidence for the hypothesis that Mittelstand firms performed more stable throughout the Great Recession than non-Mittelstand firms. We also show that owner-managed SMEs performed significantly better than SMEs and owner-managed large enterprises. Thus, it is rather the combination of firm size and owner-management that leads to more crisis resistance.


2017 ◽  
pp. 19-37
Author(s):  
Piotr Madajczyk

The commonly held truth is that the attitude of German society and the German elite to Russia is different to the attitude of Poland. This is not entirely true because due to Russian policy, the Germans have become more critical of Russia in the twenty-first century than before. Germany, however, pursues a more global policy than Poland. As Russia and Germany are of great significance in Polish politics, it is important to question the German vision of Russia’s place in today’s multipolar world. This is all the more important given that Germany, as the strongest country in Europe and the one that stabilized the euro zone, has difficulty in defining its role in the international arena. It is only as a result of the recent debate about the hybrid war, that Germany has overcome its unilateral geo-economic perception of the world. It is clear that the Germans are facing a new challenge, which they have not been prepared for.


Author(s):  
JoEllen DeLucia

A regular feature of eighteenth-century periodicals, travel narratives allowed magazine readers to imagine their relationship to the world outside of Britain. Via detailed accounts of a range of serialised, excerpted and abridged travel writings in the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), JoEllen DeLucia’s essay reveals the role mediation and magazine culture played in producing readers’ sense of women as both self-interested members of the British Empire. Reading texts such as the magazine’s serialisation of Cook’s voyages and the Embassy of Lord Macartney alongside oriental tales and exotic fashion plates, the chapter argues that, on the one hand, travel writing made the world a smaller place, while on the other, its discussions of global politics and theories of good governance, extended the parameters of the feminine sphere. In examining the complex horizontal identifications that magazine travel narratives fostered, DeLucia concludes that women’s magazines present an alternative to the well-worn scripts we have developed about women readers that revolve around the domestic and often very English novel.


Author(s):  
Chhanda Mandal ◽  
Anita Chattopadhyay Gupta

Effectiveness of governance is realised through its responses to any financial crisis. This was put in question as the Great Recession affected the core economies severely. This study empirically investigated the relationship between accountability, corruption, and government effectiveness during the period 2002-2012. Our main purpose was to highlight the sizable gap that exists in the performance literature on cross-country studies especially against the changing economic world scenario. A comparison of the World Bank governance indicators between three countries chosen on the basis of income differentials and hence different adaptive characteristics of each country to the economic recession has been studied. The behavior of the governance indicators in the context of the world has been examined against the background of the shock that the depression had brought and the resilience factors embedded within the indicators in the face of the shocks were studied.


2008 ◽  
pp. 3817-3820
Author(s):  
Mohamed El Louadi ◽  
Andrea Everard

The digital divide manifests itself on the one hand in the lag in Arab world nations vis-à-vis other more developed countries and on the other hand in the existing inequalities between men and women. Although the United Nations and the World Bank publish a variety of reports on the differences between developed and developing nations, very little data is available to fully grasp the meaning of the gap between genders. In terms of information and communication technologies (ICTs), there are two distinct gaps that need to be recognized: the gap between Arab men and Arab women and the gap between Arab women and women from other nations around the world (Figure 1). Much differs in the lives of men and women. For decades, researchers have published comparative reports, attempting to explain what distinguishes men and women in socio-professional environments. According to Meyers-Levy (1989) men tend to be more comfortable with ICTs and partake more often in gaming and programming. When they use computers, women are more inclined to use them as communication tools. Given women’s presumed lack of experience with technology, their upbringing which is different from men’s, and that the studies they most often pursue are not technology-oriented, it is not surprising that women are generally less inclined to adopt new technologies. Those who nonetheless have tried their hand at browsing the Web were either witness to or victims of offensive language used during interactive discussion sessions; in some cases, they were harassed via e-mail. In order to avoid this unpleasantness, some women assumed male aliases (Herring, 2003). However, since 2000, when men and women reached parity in Web use (Rickert & Sacharow, 2000), it would appear that using the Internet is presently no more intimidating for females than for males. An abundance of other differences between men and women exist. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) acknowledged that there does not exist a society in which women benefit from the same opportunities as men. Everywhere in the world, women are poorer, less educated, and less valued than men. These and other inequalities reduce women’s ability to take advantage of the potential benefits of ICTs and to consequently contribute to their nation’s economic and social development which is in fact facilitated by these same technologies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 35-64
Author(s):  
Jennie Germann Molz

This chapter explores why worldschoolers take their children out of formal schooling and educate them while traveling. On the one hand, parents are motivated by the shortcomings of institutional education, arguing that schools quash creativity, pathologize children’s embodied movements, for example with diagnoses of ADD/ADHD, and fail to equip them with twenty-first century skills. On the other hand, parents are propelled by a belief that travel, which sparks children’s curiosity, celebrates their mobility, and prepares them for the future, is a better way to learn. The chapter situates worldschooling within a longer historical trajectory of public education and educational travel and traces its connections to other alternative education movements such as homeschooling and unschooling. It documents a tendency among worldschoolers to adopt an unschooling approach to children’s learning, which means parents allow children to naturally absorb lessons from the world around them rather than administering a structured curriculum. The chapter argues that unschooling merges easily not only with the logistics of travel, but also with parents’ philosophies about selfhood and individual freedom. We see that parents approach their children’s education as a choice, one that contributes to the broader lifestyle project they are pursuing.


Author(s):  
Michael H. Fox

We, the teeming billions of people on earth, are changing the earth’s climate at an unprecedented rate because we are spewing out greenhouse gases and are heading to a disaster, say most climate scientists. Not so, say the skeptics. We are just experiencing normal variations in earth’s climate and we should all take a big breath, settle down, and worry about something else. Which is it? A national debate has raged for the last several decades about whether anthropogenic (man-made) sources of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and other so-called “greenhouse gases“ (primarily methane and nitrous oxide) are causing the world to heat up. This phenomenon is usually called “global warming,” but it is more appropriate to call it “global climate change,” since it is not simply an increase in global temperatures but rather more complex changes to the overall climate. Al Gore is a prominent spokesman for the theory that humans are causing an increase in greenhouse gases leading to global climate change. His movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth, gave the message widespread awareness and resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize for him in 2008. However, the message also led to widespread criticism. On the one hand are a few scientists and a large segment of the general American public who believe that there is no connection between increased CO2 in the atmosphere and global climate change, or if there is, it is too expensive to do anything about it, anyway. On the other hand is an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists who have produced enormous numbers of research papers demonstrating that increased CO2 is changing the earth’s climate. The scientific consensus is expressed most clearly in the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 by the United Nations–sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the fourth in a series of reports since 1990. The IPCC began as a group of scientists meeting in Geneva in November 1988 to discuss global climate issues under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document