A Search for Standards to Monitor Labor Conditions Worldwide - Monitoring International Labor Standards: Techniques and Sources of InformationNational Research Council Washington: National Academies Press, Paperback, 291 pages; ISBN: 0309091349, $43

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-287
Author(s):  
S. Prakash Sethi
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
International Labor Standards ◽  
Strong Argument ◽  
Labor Conditions ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The Past ◽  
International Labor ◽  
The Social

A strong argument can be made that globalization and the unrestricted flow of capital, goods, and services leads to the creation of wealth and prosperity among participating nations. Comparative advantage allows both the industrially advanced nations and developing countries to maximize their gains from trade and investments. The current wave of globalization is not the first, nor is it likely to be the last. There have been waves of globalization in the past: in the United States (1870–1890 and circa 1970), Western Europe (1890–1913 and 1950–1992), and Japan (1913–1938). They all eventually petered out because of their adverse impact on the social infrastructure of the countries involved.

Anne O. Krueger, Constantine Michalopoulos and Vernon W. Ruttan. Aid and Development. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1989. xiv + 386 pp.Price: U.S. $ 52.00

1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-217
Author(s):  
Mir Annice Mahmood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
International Development ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Development Assistance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
Low Literacy ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact

Foreign aid has been the subject of much examination and research ever since it entered the economic armamentarium approximately 45 years ago. This was the time when the Second World War had successfully ended for the Allies in the defeat of Germany and Japan. However, a new enemy, the Soviet Union, had materialized at the end of the conflict. To counter the threat from the East, the United States undertook the implementation of the Marshal Plan, which was extremely successful in rebuilding and revitalizing a shattered Western Europe. Aid had made its impact. The book under review is by three well-known economists and is the outcome of a study sponsored by the Department of State and the United States Agency for International Development. The major objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of assistance, i.e., aid, on economic development. This evaluation however, was to be based on the existing literature on the subject. The book has five major parts: Part One deals with development thought and development assistance; Part Two looks at the relationship between donors and recipients; Part Three evaluates the use of aid by sector; Part Four presents country case-studies; and Part Five synthesizes the lessons from development assistance. Part One of the book is very informative in that it summarises very concisely the theoretical underpinnings of the aid process. In the beginning, aid was thought to be the answer to underdevelopment which could be achieved by a transfer of capital from the rich to the poor. This approach, however, did not succeed as it was simplistic. Capital transfers were not sufficient in themselves to bring about development, as research in this area came to reveal. The development process is a complicated one, with inputs from all sectors of the economy. Thus, it came to be recognized that factors such as low literacy rates, poor health facilities, and lack of social infrastructure are also responsible for economic backwardness. Part One of the book, therefore, sums up appropriately the various trends in development thought. This is important because the book deals primarily with the issue of the effectiveness of aid as a catalyst to further economic development.

Weighting of Votes in an International Assembly

1944 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 1192-1203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis B. Sohn
Keyword(s):  
International Organizations ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Labor Organization ◽  
World Government ◽  
The Past ◽  
International Labor ◽  
Small Countries ◽  
World Organization ◽  
The Right

All the plans for future world organization, whether they envisage a world government or are limited to providing agencies for better collaboration between the peoples of the world, are built around two main conceptions—a small council and a larger assembly. But the different plans disagree widely upon the powers and the make-up of these bodies. The purpose of the present article is to analyze the difficulties relating to the structure of the larger body, the assembly, and to outline a tentative method for surmounting them.The structure of the different international organizations existing in the past was based on two principles: equality of representation and unanimity. That meant, first of all, that in the assemblies of nations the United States of America (population, 131 million) and Luxemburg (population, 300 thousand) had the right of equal representation. For instance, in the Conferences of the International Labor Organization, both countries have been equally entitled to appoint four delegates. Secondly, when an international assembly has tried to arrive at a Decision, not only the largest but also the smallest country could block such a Decision by casting a negative vote. While sometimes a little country has been forcibly persuaded to abandon its opposition, in many instances small countries have been able to frustrate the efforts of international assemblies and conferences otherwise unanimous.

The Trilateral Era

Worldview ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 21-23
Author(s):  
Jeremiah Novak
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
Henry Kissinger ◽  
George Bush ◽  
The Past ◽  
Corporate Executives ◽  
The U.S

For the past four years right-wing and left-wing organizations in the United States have been aware of a new foreign policy establishment known as the Trilateral Commission. This group, founded by David Rockefeller, is comprised largely of corporate executives from Western Europe, Japan, and the U.S. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Cyrus Vance, as well as seventeen other members and former members of the Carter administration, belonged to this group before they took office. Key political figures in the governments of Japan and Western Europe also belong, as do John Anderson, George Bush, and Henry Kissinger.

Collective Memory

Sociology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Simko
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
State Legitimacy ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Borders ◽  
Monuments And Memorials ◽  
The Relationship

Collective memory encompasses both the shared frameworks that shape and filter ostensibly “individual” or “personal” memories and representations of the past sui generis, including official texts, commemorative ceremonies, and physical symbols such as monuments and memorials. Sociological work on collective memory traces its origins to Émile Durkheim and his student, Maurice Halbwachs. In the United States, the contemporary sociology of memory coalesced in the 1980s and 1990s, after Barry Schwartz brought renewed attention to Durkheim’s focus on commemoration as well as Halbwachs’s interest in how the past is reconstructed in the present, in the service of present needs, interests, and desires. Though this line of research initially emphasized heroic pasts—particularly national commemorations that bolstered state legitimacy with reference to triumphant episodes—scholars quickly began to address the ways that collectivities grapple with “difficult pasts,” or episodes that evoke shame, regret, and/or dissensus, and that threaten to “spoil” national identity. What is the relationship between memory and forgetting, and related concepts such as silence and denial? Can the increasingly pervasive language of “trauma” help us understand the current preoccupation with difficult pasts in both scholarly literature and public culture? More recently, scholars have critiqued the field’s overwhelming focus on national memory from two angles. First, studies of micro-level memories have revived Halbwachs’s initial interest in the social frameworks that structure (seemingly) individual memories. Second, globalization facilitates connectedness and identification beyond and/or outside of national frames of reference, and thus scholars have pointed to the emergence of “cosmopolitan” memories that create community and solidarity beyond and outside formal political borders.

scholarly journals Ageing-friendly communities and social inclusion in the United States of America

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW E. SCHARLACH ◽  
AMANDA J. LEHNING
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Older Adults ◽  
Social Capital ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Basic Needs ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
Significant Relationships ◽  
The Social

ABSTRACTSynthesising the social capital and ageing-friendly communities literature, this paper describes how efforts to make communities more ageing-friendly can promote social inclusion among older adults. Making existing communities more ageing-friendly involves physical and social infrastructure changes that enable older adults to pursue lifelong activities, meet their basic needs, maintain significant relationships, participate in the community in personally and socially meaningful ways, and develop new interests and sources of fulfilment. Such efforts can enhance bonding, bridging and linking capital, and thereby promote social inclusion. The authors discuss the link between ageing-friendly communities and social inclusion, and provide examples of programmes with potential to change existing communities into ones that promote the social inclusion of older adults.

Explaining the Unexpected: Political Science and the Surprises of 1989 and 2011

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 394-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Morjé Howard ◽  
Meir R. Walters
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regime Type ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Transformations

Political scientists have been caught by surprise by some of the world’s most dramatic political transformations. To assess how the discipline fared in explaining two of the most large-scale and unexpected developments of the past decades, we compare scholarship around the time of popular mobilization in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Arab world in 2011. We argue that while scholars cannot be expected topredictutterly extraordinary events such as revolutions and mass mobilization, in these two cases disciplinary trends left scholars ill-prepared toexplainthem. Political scientists used similar paradigms to study both regions, emphasizing their failure to develop politically and economically along the lines of Western Europe and the United States. Sovietologists tended to study the communist bloc as either anomalously totalitarian or modernizing towards “convergence” with the West. Likewise, political scientists studying the Arab world focused disproportionately on the prospects for democratization or the barriers to it, and they now risk treating the 2011 protest movements essentially as non-events if they are not clearly tied to institutional democratic reform. By broadening their research agendas beyond a focus on regime type, political scientists will be better prepared to understand future changes in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Provincializing memory studies: Polish approaches in the past and present

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kornelia Kończal ◽  
Joanna Wawrzyniak
Keyword(s):  
Memory Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms

The history of memory studies has usually been told through research perspectives advanced in France, Germany and the United States. This well-established cartography and, thus, chronology of the field can be challenged while taking into account other provinces of thought. The example of Polish sociology and history shows that the Western memory boom took off just at the time when the golden age of the biographical method reached its apex in Poland and most research on historical consciousness had already been carried out. Furthermore, the Polish case illustrates how since 1989 researchers have been abandoning key terms previously used in the social sciences and humanities in favour of terminology related to memory. On the whole, the article argues for the exploration of continuities, ruptures and transformations of categories developed in non-mainstream research traditions to question the beaten tracks of the history of ideas.

Unequal Societies: Income Distribution and the Social Contract

2000 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Bénabou
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Education Finance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Insurance Markets ◽  
Redistributive Policies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Persistent Inequality

This paper develops a theory of inequality and the social contract aiming to explain how countries with similar economic and political “fundamentals” can sustain such different systems of social insurance, fiscal redistribution, and education finance as those of the United States and Western Europe. With imperfect credit and insurance markets some redistributive policies can improve ex ante welfare, and this implies that their political support tends to decrease with inequality. Conversely, with credit constraints, lower redistribution translates into more persistent inequality; hence the potential for multiple steady states, with mutually reinforcing high inequality and low redistribution, or vice versa. (JEL D31, E62, P16, O41, I22)

Industrialization, Hubs, and Catch-up

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-161
Author(s):  
Deepak Nayyar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The World ◽  
Catch Up

This chapter analyses the striking changes in the geographical distribution of manufacturing production amongst countries and across continents since 1750, a period that spans more than two-and-a-half centuries, which could be described as the movement of industrial hubs in the world economy over time. Until around 1820, world manufacturing production was concentrated in China and India. The Industrial Revolution, followed by the advent of colonialism, led to deindustrialization in Asia and, by 1880, Britain became the world industrial hub that extended to northwestern Europe. The United States surpassed Britain in 1900, and was the dominant industrial hub in the world until 2000. During 1950 to 2000, the relative, though not absolute, importance of Western Europe diminished, and Japan emerged as a significant industrial hub, while the other new industrial hub, the USSR and Eastern Europe, was short lived. The early twenty-first century, 2000–2017, witnessed a rapid decline of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan as industrial hubs, to be replaced largely by Asia, particularly China. This process of shifting hubs, associated with industrialization in some countries and deindustrialization in other countries in the past, might be associated with premature deindustrialization in yet other countries in the future.

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