Kazakh president hemmed in by his predecessor

Significance Since resigning as president in 2019, Nazarbayev wields considerable power thanks to the concentration of political levers in his hands. On November 23, he announced his intention to step down as chairman of the ruling Nur Otan party in favour of President Kassym Zhomart Tokayev. Impacts The Kazakh leadership will offer Russia sympathy but no more in its confrontation with the West. Daily COVID-19 cases and deaths have fallen significantly since an August peak but the Omicron variant presents new threats. The current power-sharing model weakens the authorities' ability to deal with the root causes of economic stagnation.

Post-Soviet Russia as a Product of Half-Disintegration of the USSR: Facts and Interpretation

The article shows the interconnection in the development of social and economic institutes of the USSR and post-soviet Russia and that on the post-Soviet space and in the Russian Federation a system of the semi-peripheral oligarchic bureaucratic capitalism has occurred, of which an economic stagnation is typical. The author proposes a review of the statistical data of three post-soviet evolution stages (1992–1998, 1999–2007, from 2008 until now), the causes of the economic decline of the 1990s, with accentuating the degradation of the technological basis and growing social contradictions, negative economic, and demographic consequences. The causes of negative evolution of Russia’s economy and society are shown. The answer is given to the questions: (1) what social forces were behind the reforms in the USSR and what social forces took over the power after the USSR vanished and (2) why Russia became a dependent, semi-peripheral part of the global economic system.

Secular stagnation and Google Trends – can we find out what people think?

The main aim of the study was to verify the thesis that the US economy is measured against the spectre of secular stagnation by determining the mood of American society using Google Trends. While performing the analysis, the authors used data on the American market for the years 2004-2018. The study comprised 42 entries, including 19 entries from the category “social” and 23 entries from the category “financial”. The analyses do not allow for a clear statement that the US economy is facing the spectre of secular stagnation, but they allow us to formulate the observation that the mood of the society is moderately pessimistic, which undoubtedly translates into economic activity and may be the cause of the persisting economic stagnation.

Love in the Time of Corona: Heterosexual Romance, Space, and Society in Japanese Fiction on COVID-19

I will examine representations of heterosexual romance in Japanese pandemic fiction published during COVID-19, so as to scrutinize the employment of pandemic in the discussion of social issues and dynamics between the public and private interests. Ueda Takahiro uses the protagonist’s love dilemma to question the postmodern condition, where the digital attempts to replace everything, disturb the master narratives, and transform our society. Tsukui Itsuki’s story has a rather optimistic view of technological responses to the pandemic. In his work, the protagonist’s romantic pursuit realizes individual development as well as civil society building. Kanehara Hitomi incorporates the element of pandemic in the representations of anti-sociability and precarity of youths in post-bubble Japan. Furthermore, the element of pandemic enriches the depictions of anxieties and issues of contemporary Japanese society from before the emergence of COVID-19: techno-induced postmodern crisis, ideological disputes, and socio-economic stagnation. Keywords: COVID-19, pandemic, heterosexuality, reproduction, space, science fiction, Kanehara Hitomi

From the post-industrial prophecy to the de-industrial nightmare: Stagnation, the manufacturing fetish and the limits of capitalist wealth

The post-2008 era saw a return of the manufacturing fetish, the idea that manufacturing constitutes the flywheel of growth without which no nation can thrive. Across the Global North and South, voices are calling to reverse deindustrialization and revive manufacturing. While today deindustrialization is met with anxiety, in the 1930s economists predicted deindustrialization but interpreted it as a liberating process leading to a post-industrial age based on material abundance and widespread economic security. Far from delivering this vision, deindustrialization actually produces a precarious economic order driven by labour precarity, economic stagnation and lost development opportunities for the Global South. What can be termed the Baumolian and Kaldorian frameworks, attribute this precarious reality to services’ inability to replace manufacturing as a growth engine given their technologically stagnant nature. However, this article argues that, by focusing on the technical aspects of service economies, such views overlook the social limits of the capitalist economy and its historically specific conception of wealth, value. As capitalism matures, productivity becomes an increasingly inadequate form of augmenting social wealth as it results in great increases in physical output but counterintuitively undermines the expansion of value. Capitalism is underpinned by a secular movement towards declining dynamism, as it increasingly struggles to maintain its former economic vigour. Stagnation and heightened labour precarity are not merely the product of tertiarization but symptoms of capitalism’s declining trajectory.

Patterns and Predictors of Taiwanese Adult Children’s Intergenerational Exchanges Before and After Economic Stagnation

This study explores whether cultural norms and economic performance shape the differences in the patterns of intergenerational exchanges, and analyzes whether structural, normative, or emotional dimensions of intergenerational solidarity predict the derived typology of intergenerational exchange in Taiwan before and after economic stagnation. Data derives from nationally representative samples of adult children with at least one parent alive in 2006 and 2016. Latent class analysis (LCA), measurement invariance with LCA, and multinomial logistic regression analysis are applied to analyze data. The results demonstrate how filial norms and economic stagnation influence the intergenerational exchange patterns. The study identifies five classes of intergenerational exchanges. There was a higher proportion of the high-exchange membership in the period of salary growth, while there was a higher proportion of the memberships of emotion-oriented exchanges during the wage stagnation period. Results reveal that geographic distance exerts a stronger and more consistent association with various exchange patterns.

Mergers

Recent research indicates that labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation. Although the antitrust laws prohibit firms from restricting competition in labor markets as in product markets, the government does little to address the labor market problem, and private litigation has been rare and mostly unsuccessful. This is a particular problem for mergers, which the government has never reviewed for labor market effects. One reason is that the analytic methods for evaluating labor market power in antitrust contexts are less sophisticated than the legal rules used to judge product market power. To remedy this asymmetry, the government can draw on insights from labor economics and use tools that have been developed for measuring labor market concentration.