The 20th-century South African economy through a development lens

Based on Bill Freund’s latest book, this review essay critically reviews the author’s discussion of: the institutional and network fibres underlying the mid-20th-century South African developmental model; how and why it developed; how and why it transformed through the course of that century; and how it was dismantled by the end of that century. The essay also tries to assess the significance of that model for South African development in the post-1994 democratic era, as well as the economic and public policy choices exercised by the African National Congress (ANC)-led government under conditions of fiscal constraint.

Industrial Hubs and Structural Transformation in Latin America

A small, upper-middle-income country in Central America, Costa Rica has pursued a market-led development strategy since the debt crisis of the 1980s. Free trade zones (FTZs) aiming to attract foreign investment and diversify exports were a cornerstone of the strategy. The successful diversification of production and exports is the result of the country’s accumulation of social capabilities in the past, a highly effective institutional support structure, generous tax incentives, and specificities of time and location. While the Costa Rican experience shows that industrial hubs/FTZs can be important vehicles for the creation of dynamic comparative advantages, it also highlights that a focus on industrial hubs with insufficient attention to national productive capabilities exacerbates a dualistic production structure, and that generous tax incentives for foreign investors tighten the fiscal constraint significantly. Governments need an overarching development strategy that articulates the roles and interactions of industrial hubs and SMEs, providing integrated industrial policies and a level playing field for domestic and foreign producers.

GESTÃO DE COMPRAS EM ORGANIZAÇÕES PÚBLICAS: um estudo de caso a partir das aquisições da UFT entre os anos de 2012 a 2016

Business organizations are reorienting their practices to optimize their operating flows for more efficient management. This scenario of administrative rationalization is also impacting public organizations. In this perspective, the search for more effective management is leading public organizations to seek new answers to address their budgetary limitations. This work aims to study the purchasing management of the Federal University of Tocantins, between 2012 and 2016. This research is a qualitative case study and was conducted with the analysis of institutional documents and bibliographic research. Of the total volume contracted from 2012 to 2016, 72.05% of the total volume was destined to contract services. Hiring through direct contracting represents 73.85% of the number of processes, which may signal weakness in the control related to the fractioning of acquisitions. It was observed that UFT uses the electronic auction as its predominant form for its acquisitions, of the total financial volume contracted 73.91% was through this modality. Even with the fiscal constraint scenario, there was an increase in the global value of acquisitions from 2014. The results showed that the university still lacks robust improvements in the monitoring of procurement processes, especially with regard to the agility of processing orders. demands, which may be explained by the University’s multi-camp reality that makes coordinated actions between administrative units difficult.

Introduction

The economic and financial fallout of the Great Recession upended the belief that advanced economies enjoyed some kind of superior inoculation against deep crises. It presented EU states with the unanticipated and unprecedented challenge of coordinating fiscal crisis responses. The EU crisis framework laid out in the European Economic Recovery Plan (EERP) represented an attempt to coordinate not fiscal constraint but, for the first time, fiscal expansion. This chapter places this study within two intertwined crises, the international economic and financial crises and the European Debt Crisis, before going on to present the main empirical puzzle and research questions of the book.

Redistributing under fiscal constraint: partisanship, debt, inequality and labour market regulation

Labour market regulation varies significantly, both within and between developed democracies. While there has been extensive research and debate in economics on the consequences of labour market regulation, the political causes for levels and changes in labour market regulation have received less scholarly attention. This article investigates a political economy explanation for differences in labour market regulation building on a theoretical argument that labour regulation can be used as a nonfiscal redistribution tool. Consequently, partisanship, the demand for redistribution and government budget constraint jointly determine whether labour market regulation will increase or decrease. Consistent with this argument, panel analyses from 33 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries reveal that labour market regulation increases under left-wing governments that face increased market inequality and high government debt.

General practice evolution in New Zealand: hybridisation in action

ABSTRACT This viewpoint outlines a brief history of primary care health reforms over the last 25 years, and how this history has influenced the business of caring. It also suggests where we should next look to improve the provision of equitable patient-centred care in the current climate of fiscal constraint, while meeting the challenges of an ageing population and increasing multimorbidity.

Late neoliberalism: Delineating a policy regime

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, policy-making in post-industrial nations has been widely characterised in terms of austerity. Yet this provides an insufficient basis for an understanding of social policy-making at this time. I argue for a ‘late neoliberal’ phase distinguished by a change in the regime governing the emergence of public service formations. I work from the example of UK policy discourse to demonstrate how in late neoliberalism austerity, social investment and localism operate in conjunction. Beyond fiscal constraint, this conjunction serves to move social policy on from ‘quasi-marketisation’ to reflect more closely the logic and forms of finance capital. The effects of this change can be seen in the reconstitution of ‘value’ in public services, how capital is distributed, and in the subjectivating force of policy. Ultimately late neoliberalism serves to sustain and reproduce familiar relations of domination.