Comparative Analysis of Tariffs-Restricted Trade Wars between the United States and China Under the Recent Past Four Presidents: Did they Achieve Their Objectives?

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the tariffs-restricted trade wars between the United States and China under the recent past four presidents of the United States by using the difference-in-differences estimator framework. The overarching objective of three of the four presidential administrations that engaged in trade wars was to reduce the United States’ trade deficits with China. This raised some research questions. Did each administration achieve its objective of reducing the trade deficits with China? If so, which administration more effectively reduced the trade deficits in comparison to their immediate predecessor? What lessons can future administrations and governments around the world draw from the outcomes of the tariffs-restricted trade wars between the United States and China? To determine which president – Trump, Obama, and Bush – most effectively utilized import tariffs to reduce the trade deficits with China, we specified and tested three different sets of hypotheses. In sync with a controlled experiment, we tested another three sets of hypotheses in which we compared Presidents Trump, Obama, and Bush to President Clinton who did not impose tariffs on China. Based on our estimated results, we rejected all the null hypotheses in favor of the alternative hypotheses, which suggest that Presidents Trump, Obama, and Bush did not achieve any significant reduction in the United States’ trade deficits with China through the use of tariffs relative to President Clinton. The important lesson drawn from these findings is that tariffs are counterproductive and ineffective policy strategy.

Children's Literature as a Front in the War on Terror: Ineffective Policy, Ineffective Literature

Morocco is often praised for its proactive and innovative CVE (countering violent extremism) programme. This article analyses a three-part Arabic-language book series, Maʿ Naṣir wa Basma [With Nasir and Basma], produced by an organ of the Moroccan religious bureaucracy, the Mohammedan League of Religious Scholars, that ostensibly seeks to discourage adolescents from being susceptible to recruitment to VE (violent extremist) organisations. Starring two young Moroccan children, these books portray jihadists as old, ridiculous, or inept and the main characters as in need of protection by a paternalistic state, leaving children, especially young men, underprepared for the recruiting efforts of such organisations. The books emphasise state intervention over child action, suggesting the books are directed more at Western investors in need of reassurance than at children, supporting the critique made by some observers that CVE is more about security theatre than preventing violence.

Social Work, Disasters and Communities—Challenging the Boundaries of the Profession

Disasters caused by natural phenomena are ubiquitous world over in terms of their occurrence. Myths and folklore are testament to this. The transition of natural phenomena into ‘natural’ disasters occurs only when humans are introduced. ‘Natural’ disasters have a social gradient to them, which differs vastly across societies. Epistemologically, disasters have been the forte of technocrats with social workers at best remaining at the fringes. This article is based on an empirical study undertaken with two communities who live in the flood affected Brahmaputra valley. It reveals a gap in the knowledge of the local realities—social, political, geographical resulting in grand and ineffective policy making. The current policies have a large imprint of the colonial with little being done in terms of developing alternate, localised and participatory methods of flood management. It demonstrates how the community’s efforts transcend a spectrum of stages moving from prevention and adaption to mitigation. For the Brahmaputra floods, the reality is extremely tenuous. Hence, it is not feasible for one knowledge system to understand the whole reality. Rather it needs to be acknowledged that multiple knowledge systems exist, and social workers need to be stakeholders in this process of knowledge creation and building of resilient communities.

Love at first sight? Populist attitudes and support for direct democracy

Do citizens who strongly exhibit populist attitudes support direct democracy? Existing studies tend to claim that populists support direct democracy because of their stealth-democratic orientation or argue that stealth democrats want direct democracy due to the populist nature of stealth-democratic attitudes. Yet, albeit both populists and stealth democrats reject elite rule, they prefer direct democracy for different reasons. Populists support direct democracy as a means to implement the volonté générale, whereas stealth democrats view it as holding politicians accountable for ineffective policy solutions. Our analysis of representative survey data in four European democracies (France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) reveals that individuals with stronger populist attitudes indeed support direct democracy more than citizens with no strong populist attitudes. This effect is observed when controlling for stealth-democratic orientations and when using a measure separating the feature populism shares with stealth democracy – anti-elitism – from the one unique to populism, people-centrism.

E-Government for Rural Development in Tanzania

This chapter presents the importance of developing rural areas with an emphasis on good governance and poverty alleviation through the use of electronic government in Tanzania. With such concern, the authors show that rural areas are as significant as the economy of most of the developing countries, including Tanzania. As such, putting sufficient efforts on rural development is unavoidable for rapid development. Further, the authors note how Tanzania improves its rural areas through the use of e-government, but efforts are constrained by the existence of poor Information Communication Technology service providers, ineffective policy, and unreliability of rural electricity. In order to address such shortfalls, the authors propose several solutions that could motivate the increase in the use of rural e-government and revise rural development policy.

THE CRIMEAN CONFLICTING KNOT: COLONIAL DIMENSIONS

The article is devoted to outlining and exploring a number of important stories of the history and present situation of the Crimea. The author turns to the study of Russian colonial policy on the peninsula. This policy resulted in the annihilation of the Crimean Tatar people and the deliberate settlement of Crimea by specific categories of population from "mainland" Russia, and subsequently - from Soviet Ukraine. The colonial pressure of the tsarist authorities was changed after 1917 for a short period with the assertion of Crimean Tatar national communism as a modernizing anti-colonial movement. However, from the second half of the 1930s, colonial policy on the peninsula resumed, and in 1944 it became embodied in the forced deportation of indigenous peoples, especially the Crimean Tatars. Up until the second half of the 1980s, the Kremlin tried not to allow the Crimean Tatars to return to their historical homeland at all. Only at the time of perestroika the authorities of the USSR agreed to allow such a return, but simultaneously tried to dispense it in every possible way. At the same time, the Kremlin launched a special operation aimed at removing Crimea from Ukrainian jurisdiction and securing its status as a Russian colony. Also this attempt failed because of the collapse of the USSR, but the goal remained unchanged; Russia's annexation of Crimea was carried out in 2014. The author analyzes the reasons that enable the Russian propaganda to influence a large part of the Crimean population effectively. The article illustrates the ineffective policy of official Kyiv to minimize the effects of Russian colonialism on the Crimean Peninsula in 1991-2014. The article also examines the newest stage of colonization of Crimea by Russia, which began in 2014. The author concludes that in recent years, new conflicting factors on the Crimean peninsula have been added to the traditional ones, and they all require further special studies.

English on the Rise: Access and Resources in Internationalization

The data presented in this chapter highlight the Indonesian state’s influence on citizens’ access to education as it implements policies that simultaneously aim to secure a national identity through enforcing Indonesian as medium of instruction in public schools and categorizing English as a Foreign Language. The state is in a double bind, and its policies are ineffective: in globalization, English cannot be avoided, but the state lacks the resources needed to meet internationalized standards with language and curriculum content appropriate to the needs of Indonesia’s student populations and the skills of its teachers. Because of these dynamics, the English language is accessed mostly by those who already have access to mobility, wealth, and “international standard” educations. The national categorization of English as a Foreign Language combined with a contradictory rush to get citizens English alone by increasing its distribution throughout educational curricula, promises nothing more than to reinforce levels of English fluency as indicators of individuals’ access to or marginalization from wealth and state-distributed educations. Beliefs that English alone will earn the Indonesian state and its citizens prosperous positions in national and global society act to conflate the English language with the other important material factors alongside which this symbol of wealth “hitchhikes” (Mendoza-Denton, 2011), and this has led to rushed and ineffective policy implementation on many levels.

Multiple measurements muddle global inequality debate

Subject The impact of the proliferation on inequality measurements. Significance The gap between the rich and everyone else has become a political battleground across economies. Studies evaluating the distribution of income, its determinants and its changes have proliferated and the number of measures used have expanded. In particular, new indicators have been proposed to reflect income concentration at the top. However, the proliferation of indicators and inequality dimensions has resulted in confusion regarding what we are measuring and why -- even as populist calls for policy measures to reduce income and wealth inequalities increase. Impacts A multitude of inequality measurements can result in contradictory findings and obfuscate the most significant problems. This can lead to ineffective policy-making. Distinguishing more clearly between inequality at the top and other types of inequality would help produce better studies.

E-Government for Rural Development in Tanzania

This chapter presents the importance of developing rural areas with an emphasis on good governance and poverty alleviation through the use of electronic government in Tanzania. With such concern, the authors show that rural areas are as significant as the economy of most of the developing countries, including Tanzania. As such, putting sufficient efforts on rural development is unavoidable for rapid development. Further, the authors note how Tanzania improves its rural areas through the use of e-government, but efforts are constrained by the existence of poor Information Communication Technology service providers, ineffective policy, and unreliability of rural electricity. In order to address such shortfalls, the authors propose several solutions that could motivate the increase in the use of rural e-government and revise rural development policy.