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Economic Decline (economic + decline)
Selected AbstractsManagerial failure in late Victorian Britain?: Land use and English agricultureECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 2 2001E.H. Hunt This article focuses upon the neglected role of agriculture in Britain's relative economic decline. Landlords and farmers stand accused of responding inadequately to the flood of American cereal imports. Land-use changes are analysed by soil type and access to urban markets, revealing a range of opportunities and restraints, and an appropriate variety of responses. Other aspects of agriculturalists' responses to depression remain to be examined, but this exercise finds no evidence of significant managerial shortcomings. Rather, the interim verdict is similar to that on the performance of those British industrialists whose once-savaged reputations have been partly redeemed by the researches of McCloskey, Sandberg, et al. [source] ,MOVING AROUND': THE SOCIAL AND SPATIAL MOBILITY OF YOUTH IN LUSAKAGEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2008Katherine V. Gough ABSTRACT Claims have recently been made for a ,mobilities paradigm' which is challenging the relative ,a-mobile' focus of much of the social sciences. The agenda drawn up for this mobilities paradigm is clearly based on Northern trends with little consideration of the South. African populations have always been mobile but little is known about the mobility of urban populations and in particular of the youth, who constitute a large proportion of the population. This paper explores the daily and residential mobility of young people in Lusaka building upon interviews held with low- and middle-income youth. The aim is to contribute to discussions of: how mobility varies by gender and class; the links between spatial mobility and social and economic mobility; the nature of the relationship between patterns of mobility and residential structure; and how examining mobility can illuminate many other aspects of young people's lives. Overall the picture emerging from Lusaka is rather bleak. In a context of spiralling economic decline and rising HIV/AIDS rates, the social mobility of youth is predominantly downwards which is reflected in the residential and daily mobility patterns of the young people. There is a strong link between young people's mobility and their livelihoods, an aspect of mobility that is widespread in the South but largely overlooked by the emerging mobilities paradigm. [source] Alternative Pathways to Community and Economic Development: The Latrobe Valley Community Partnering ProjectGEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2005JENNY CAMERON Abstract Conventional approaches to development in areas that are experiencing economic decline invariably focus on business growth through interventions such as incentives, infrastructure development and job readiness training. This paper reports on a pilot project aimed at developing an alternative approach to community and economic development in the context of the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, a resource region that has experienced downsizing and privatisation of its major employer, the state-owned power industry. The project was shaped by a poststructuralist concern with the effects of representation. It sought to challenge familiar understandings of disadvantaged areas, the economy, community and the research process in order to open up new ways of addressing social and economic issues. The resulting four-stage research project was informed by the techniques of asset-based community development and action research, as well as by discourses of the diverse economy and communities of difference. During the two-year span of the project, four community enterprises were developed. The varying degrees of success they have met with in the four years since the project concluded highlight the critical role of local agencies such as the council in providing ongoing support for such endeavours. [source] Ethnicity, Economic Polarization and Regional Inequality in Southern SlovakiaGROWTH AND CHANGE, Issue 2 2000Adrian Smith This paper examines the relationships between ethnicity and regional economic transformation in Slovakia. It takes as its focus the position of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia in the uneven process of regional change. The paper places these issues within the context of struggles over ethnicity and ,nation' in post-independence Slovakia. The paper argues that ethnicity has been a thoroughly contested issue since the collapse of ,communism' in Slovakia and a variety of struggles have been waged over enhancing the rights and position of the Hungarian minority population. The concentration of the Hungarian minority in the southern Slovak border regions with Hungary is examined within the context of the uneven economic impacts of the ,transition to capitalism'. It is argued that, while the economic decline seen in many of these ,Hungarian' regions has impacted negatively on the local populations, the roots of these changes lie within the ways in which such regions were integrated into the state socialist regional division of labor. In particular, the role of peripheral industrialization in such regions prior to 1989, in attempting to reduce economic differences among various ethnic groups, resulted in the establishment of branch plant economies which have had difficulty in surviving since 1989. It is therefore the interweaving of the economics of regional decline and the politics of ethnicity that help us to understand the complex place of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. [source] Japanese management, enterprise unions and company performanceINDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOURNAL, Issue 3 2006John Benson ABSTRACT The success of the Japanese company has often been attributed to a range of management practices and enterprise unionism. These claims, however, have been based on research that was conducted during periods of high economic growth where a major objective of the company was increasing market share. This article extends this research by assessing the impact of these factors on the financial performance of Japanese companies over the period 1991,2001, a period of economic decline and change. The findings of the research challenge the conventional view of the value of Japanese management practices and enterprise unions, and illustrate the need to consider these practices within a wider economic context. [source] Bankruptcy prediction: the influence of the year prior to failure selected for model building and the effects in a period of economic declineINTELLIGENT SYSTEMS IN ACCOUNTING, FINANCE & MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2005Paul P. M. Pompe Using large amounts of data from small and medium-sized industrial firms, this study examines two aspects of bankruptcy prediction: the influence of the year prior to failure selected for model building and the effects in a period of economic decline. The results show that especially models generated from the final annual report published prior to bankruptcy were less successful in the timely prediction of failure. Furthermore, it was found that economic decline coincided with the deterioration of a model's performance. With respect to the methods used, we found that neural networks had a somewhat better overall performance than multiple discriminant analysis. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] High incidence of rheumatic fever and Rheumatic heart disease in the republics of Central AsiaINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RHEUMATIC DISEASES, Issue 2 2009Nazgul A. OMURZAKOVA Abstract The epidemiological situation involving rheumatic fever (RF) and rheumatic heart disease (RHD) not only remains unresolved but is also a cause of serious concern due to the rapid increase in the incidence of RF/RHD in many developing countries. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the republics of Central Asia experienced an economic decline that directly affected the public health sector of this region. This is the main cause of the high prevalence of many infectious diseases in Central Asia, including streptococcal tonsillopharyngitis, which carries the risk of complications such as RF. The difficulty involved in early diagnosis of RF and the development of RHD among children and adolescents causes early mortality and sudden death, leading to economic damage in these countries due to the loss of the young working population. Among all the developing countries, Kyrgyzstan, which is located in the heart of Central Asia, has the highest prevalence of RF/RHD. The increase in the prevalence of RF in Central Asia can be attributed to factors such as the low standard of living and changes in the virulence of streptococci and their sensitivity to antibiotics. [source] Re-imaging the City Centre for the Middle Classes: Regeneration, Gentrification and Symbolic Policies in ,Loser Cities'INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2009MAX ROUSSEAU Abstract This article aims to show how the governments of two industrial cities in France and the UK have now come to the view that middle-class reinvestment in the city centre offers a solution to urban economic decline, and so have encouraged the middle class to move in by implementing ,symbolic policies'. Their objective is to transform the image of the post-industrial city through cultural and urban planning policy, in order to adapt it to the supposed taste of potential gentrifiers. This development in strategy results from both external constraints and internal political changes in these cities. The failure of earlier redevelopment strategies is also a factor in explaining this paradoxical phenomenon, in which a social group that is, in fact, almost absent from the central spaces of these cities has now been accorded the status of ,systematic winners'. Résumé Cet article a pour objectif de montrer comment les gouvernements de deux villes industrielles, en France et en Grande-Bretagne, considèrent désormais que le réinvestissement du centre-ville par les classes moyennes constitue une solution au déclin économique urbain, et en viennent ainsi à favoriser leur arrivée par la mise en oeuvre de «politiques symboliques»: par des actions sur la culture et l'urbanisme, l'objectif est de transformer l'image de la ville postindustrielle pour l'adapter au goût supposé des gentrifieurs potentiels. Cette évolution stratégique est tout à la fois le résultat de contraintes externes et de transformations politiques internes aux villes. L'échec des précédentes stratégies de re-développement est également un facteur explicatif de ce phénomène paradoxal qui rend «systématiquement gagnant» depuis peu un groupe social pourtant quasiment absent de l'espace central de ces villes. [source] Diverting with Benevolent Military Force: Reducing Risks and Rising above Strategic BehaviorINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2007EMIZET F. KISANGANI Research on the diversionary use of force has burgeoned in recent years, but the literature remains divided. This paper attempts to reconcile extant findings by advancing a new theoretical framework for diversionary force centered on the agenda-setting literature. It expands the conventional conception of diversionary behavior and distinguishes the benevolent use of force over low politics issues (which we term socioeconomic interventions, SEI) from belligerent force used over high politics issues (which we term politico-strategic interventions, PSI). This expansion also refines our understanding of strategic conflict avoidance (SCA). Using Zero-Inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression on 140 countries from 1950 to 1996, we find that democracies and mixed regimes tend to use SEI for diversion even though strategic conflict avoidance does not prevent them from using PSI. We further find that autocracies do not externalize their internal problems with either type of armed force and that, surprisingly, strategic conflict avoidance may constrain autocracies suffering economic decline. These outcomes suggest that our theory has utility and that research on both diversion and SCA would benefit from further theoretical refinement. [source] Why some regions will decline: A Canadian case study with thoughts on local development strategies,PAPERS IN REGIONAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2006Mario Polèse Regional development; local development; periphery; location; economic decline Abstract., The authors present the case of five Canadian peripheral regions, which they argue are destined to decline. The explanation of the reasons why future decline (in absolute population and employment numbers) is inevitable constitutes the article's central focus. The authors suggest that regional decline will become an increasingly common occurrence in nations at the end of the demographic transition whose economic geographies display centre-periphery relationships. Such broad structural trends cannot be easily altered by public policy. The authors reflect on the implications of regional decline for the formulation of local economic development strategies. Local economic development strategies should not, they argue, be advanced as a means of arresting population and employment decline. To suggest that the regions studied in this article will decline because of a lack of social capital or insufficient number of local entrepreneurs, is not only misleading but may also be counterproductive. [source] Front and Back Covers, Volume 23, Number 3.ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 3 2007June 200 Front & back cover caption, volume 23 issue 3 PARTISAN ,ANTHROPOLOGY' The cover of this issue reproduces a Republican Party campaign poster from 1900, which claims that between 1896 and 1900 the American flag was being planted on foreign soil not ,to acquire more territory' but ,for humanity's sake'. The poster contrasts an image of economic decline at home and poverty in the Spanish colony of Cuba, alleged to be the Democratic legacy in 1896, with one of prosperity in the US and progress in its new dominion after four years of Republican rule. The next US presidential elections will take place in November 2008, and campaigning for nomination is already under way. Partisan proclamations that territories are occupied for ,humanity's sake' suggest good intentions, but anthropology researches and seeks to connect with humanity as a whole, not to serve one party or one nation over another. Bush's ,war on terror' has divided the world, generating a renewed interest in partisan use of the social and behavioural sciences, including anthropology, in the hope that these might help succeed where force has failed. The 2007 annual meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists resolved that a research proposal by our principal research funding agency endangered lives and was in violation of our professional ethics. History will not judge us kindly if funding agencies proceed unilaterally, or if our professional associations fail to give clear guidance on the circumstances under which it is appropriate for professional anthropologists to be involved in such activities, if at all. Everyone supports non-partisan use of academic research for ,humanity's sake'. However, since anthropologists cannot research without first gaining and then retaining the trust of the peoples they engage with in the course of fieldwork throughout the world, in open and willing long-lasting relationships, partisan deployment of our research in war constitutes a potentially life-threatening development for the peoples we befriend, for ourselves, our students, our profession and for our family and colleagues. As part of an ongoing engagement with how our research, and that of other social and behavioural sciences, is being appropriated in war, this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY features discussions on their use in two areas of warfare, with contributions on counterinsurgency, by Roberto González, David Kilcullen and Montgomery McFate, and unwitting input into interrogation techniques, by David Price. [source] | |||||||||||||