Is Culture a Key to Development?

In the late 1980s the economy of the small African country of Equatorial Guinea was foundering. Macroeconomic adjustment hadn’t controlled corruption or strengthened the institutions of property, credit, and taxation. As a result, so-called free-market reforms had made little difference in, of all places, the market. Do reforms need to take account of local cultural conditions—including the possibility that what outsiders call development is not a priority? The finance minister explained to me the relevance, in cultures like his, of dictatorship, forced labor, and restrictions of freedom of speech and assembly. Indeed, he argued that Westerners can’t understand apparent torture without an appreciation of his country’s history and political culture. If not so stridently, other Africans agree that culture is a critical variable in advancing, or resisting, various forms of development. Some say, “We need to change our culture to move ahead.” Others argue, “At least we should adjust our policies to our cultural specificities.” How to take culture into account becomes a crucial practical question in development policy and management.

A Strong Judiciary as a Crisis for Democracy: A ‘Law and Development’ Study from Pakistan

By the late 1990s, international financial institutions prescribed a ‘good governance’ paradigm that sought to empower the judiciary to curb ‘state capture’ by the corrupt political elites of developing countries. Good governance was supposed to act as a midwife to economic development, providing the ‘rule of law’ for the free market reforms of structural adjustment programs that had hitherto failed to provide much success. This article examines the implementation of ‘good governance’ in Pakistan, arguing that empowering the judiciary served to weaken an already weak legislature. The tangible issues of popular political representation and economic redistribution were displaced by the discourses on the control of corruption and the rule of law. Based on this experience, the article encourages a shift in law and developmental theorizing to focus on forms of legislature and democratic rule and a redefined role for the ‘civil society’ within this.

School Choice and Inclusive Education

The reform of public education through the application of principles of free-market capitalism, particularly notions of competition and choice, has long enjoyed bipartisan support in the United States, reflecting trends in other industrialized countries. The basic assumption is that the competitive pressures of the market, instantiated through various forms of school choice and high-stakes accountability, will necessarily lead to more efficient and effective schools while honoring parents’ right to determine what is best for their children. Concurrently, another group of educational reformers, advocating for the rights of students with disabilities, have pushed for the transformation of schools, with the goal of creating spaces congenial to the range of human differences, including disability. The problem is that the basic assumptions that underpin free-market reforms and the principles of inclusion are incompatible. One of the requirements of school choice, for example, is the production and marketing of data based on standardized assessment practices and standardized curricula. This tendency toward standardization in market-oriented schools, saturated with the ideology of normality, is antithetical to the conception of diversity that informs the desire for inclusive schools.

Tales from Albarado

This book revisits times of excitement and loss in early 1990s Albania, in which about a dozen pyramid firms collapsed and caused the country to fall into anarchy and a near civil war. To gain a better understanding of how people from all walks of life came to invest in these financial schemes and how these schemes became intertwined with everyday transactions, dreams, and aspirations, the book looks at the materiality, sociality, and temporality of financial speculations at the margins of global capital. It argues that the speculative financial practices of the schemes were enabled by official financial infrastructures (such as the postsocialist free-market reforms), by unofficial economies (such as transnational remittances), as well as by historically specific forms of entrepreneurship, transnational social networks, and desires for a European modernity. Overall, these granular stories of participation in the Albanian schemes help understand neoliberal capitalism as a heterogeneous economic formation that intertwines capitalist and noncapitalist forms of accumulation and investment.

Lithuania

Since early 1990s, the electoral campaigns in Lithuania take place within the framework of long-term parliamentary party agreements on Euro-Atlantic integration (more specifically, in the context of fear of pernicious geo-political interference from Russia) and free market reforms (or, in other words, eagerness to integrate into the European market and to be part of the euro-zone). The overall distance between parties on the socioeconomic scale is fairly small and, among political elites, the pro-Western consensus is apparent. There are no real outcast parties in Lithuania. The Lithuanian society itself is not ravaged by deep socio-political cleavages and its ethnic, religious, or corporate divides are not sharp. Yet, electoral volatility is high and political parties are numerous. However, governments in Lithuania are relatively stable. The ministerial government model entrenches itself in Lithuania. Since 2000 the increasingly unstable multi-party system necessitates that the coalition governments are based on inter-party bargaining. The tendency is towards ‘oversized’ cabinets and surplus coalitions. As a rule, publicly available coalition agreements resemble rather memorandums of understanding than seriously thought-through documents of partnership for a particular policy agenda. Coalitions in Lithuania accommodate office-seeking parties and politicians. Commitment of the parties to the coalition in question is routinely maintained via the distribution of ministerial portfolios. The coalition management machinery produces personified accommodations, dubious compromises, delays, and postponements as typical modes of conflict resolution. These deficiencies in turn lead to erosion of political accountability, which further breeds frustration and political protest.

Social Progress in Britain

Social Progress in Britain examines how much progress has made in the years since Sir William Beveridge described the ‘five giants on the road to reconstruction’—the giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness. The book has chapters examining the progress which Britain has made in improving material prosperity and tackling poverty; in extending length of life and tackling disease; in raising participation in education and improving educational standards; in tackling the scourge of unemployment, especially youth unemployment; and in providing better-quality housing and tackling overcrowding. In addition to Beveridge’s five giants, the book also explores inequalities of opportunity (focussing on inequalities between social classes, men and women, and ethnic groups), and the changing nature of social divisions and social cohesion in Britain. Throughout, the chapters put British progress into perspective by drawing comparisons with progress made in other large developed democracies such as Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the USA. As well as looking at the average level of prosperity, life expectancy, education, and housing, the book examines the extent of inequality around the average and pays particular attention to whether the most disadvantaged sections of society have shared in progress or have fallen behind. It concludes with an assessment of the effect of policy interventions such as Margaret Thatcher’s free market reforms of the 1980s on different aspects of social progress.

Editorial: Austerity and some contemporary challenges for professionalism

The early post cold-war consensus - that bourgeois democracy has solved the riddle of history and a global capitalist economy will usher in worldwide prosperity and peace - lies in tatters; but no plausible alternatives of political and economic organization are in sight (Mishra, 2013). Globalisation has everywhere rapidly weakened older forms of authority. ‘Conservatives’ institute revolutionary free-market ‘reforms’; meanwhile technocrats slash employment and welfare benefits, and immiserate entire societies and generations. Both main UK political parties - Conservative and Labour - advocate continued austerity, albeit for the latter it has been defined as ‘austerity-lite’, with a mainstream position arguing for a slower reduction of debt, involving some combinations of spending and tax adjustments that would depend on the growth of the economy and tax revenues. This position however has proved to be not uncomfortable with people becoming very rich – putting the blame for the crash and the economic pressure for a recovery from the crash, on labour rather than the greed, avarice and shady practices of capital.

Neoliberal Forms of Capital and The Rise of Social Movement Partyism in Central America

Historical shifts in global economic formations shape the strategies of resistance movements in the global South. Neoliberal forms of economic development over the past thirty years in Central America have weakened traditional actors sponsoring popular mobilization such as labor unions and rural cooperatives. At the same time, the free market reforms produced new threats to economic livelihood and well-being throughout the region. The neoliberal measures that have generated the greatest levels of mass discontent include rising prices, privatization, labor flexibility laws, mining projects, and free trade. This article analyzes the role of emerging anti-neoliberal political parties in alliance with popular movements in Central America. Countries with already existing strong anti-systemic parties in the initial phases of the global turn to neoliberalism in the late twentieth century resulted in more efficacious manifestations of social movement partyism in the twenty-first century resisting free market globalization.

THE USE OF A MARSHALLIAN MACROECONOMIC MODEL FOR POLICY EVALUATION: CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA

Using a disaggregated Marshallian macroeconomic model, this paper investigates how the adoption of a set of “free market reforms” may affect the economic growth rate of South Africa. Our findings suggest that the institution of the proposed policy reforms would yield substantial growth in aggregate annual real GDP. The resulting annual GDP growth rate could range from 5.3% to 9.8%, depending on which variant of the reform policies was implemented.

The crisis in Greece and the EU-IMF rescue package: Determinants and pitfalls

The sovereign debt crisis in Greece represents a very interesting case in which the Greek government succeeded in transforming domestic fiscal deficit problem, overspending and fear of free market reforms into a European challenge consistent with justifiable concerns about the sustainability of the euro-project and its likely future. In this paper, the roots of the crisis and the way of addressing it are discussed. In particular the features, drawbacks, missed opportunities and pitfalls of the €110 billion EU/IMF rescue package granted to Greece are examined. It is argued that the government’s focus on taxation rather than on politically costly privatization and cutbacks in the public sector undermined economic activity in the country, decreased the government’s revenue, and spawned disincentives for investment, without generating growth and without improving competitiveness. In brief, rather than contributing to economic recovery, the opposite was achieved as a result of the measures implemented by the government.