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Political Economy Approach (political + economy_approach)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences70%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting30%

Selected Abstracts

State Support for Higher Education: A Political Economy Approach

POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL, Issue 3 2001
David R. Morgan
This research examines state support for higher education by first ascertaining the amount supplied and demanded of this service. The approach assumes that supply and demand occur simultaneously, and that each is affected by higher education spending policies among the states. We argue that enrollment is the most satisfactory proxy for both supply and demand. State policy is measured as expenditure effort. We estimate three time-series equations using two-stage least squares regression with data for the years 1986,95. In the final equation, supply/demand (enrollment) emerges as the strongest predictor of state spending effort. Commitment to higher education (effort) is also especially sensitive to variations in the number of employees (per student). Employee costs clearly are a major factor in fueling increases in state higher education spending effort. State per capita income exerts a negative effect on the final dependent variable. Poor states exert greater financial effort in support of their colleges and universities than do more affluent states. [source]

Cooperatives and the Commodity Political Agenda: A Political Economy Approach

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 4 2002
Ellen Goddard
Historically, major agricultural cooperatives in Canada have been intimately involved in commodity policy issues. Large cooperatives were created because farmers were upset about the perceived lack of competition in buying farm inputs or selling farm outputs. Often, the resulting cooperative was the organization farmers saw as the logical organization to represent their view of commodity policy or competition policy. As cooperatives grew and diversified, the ability to represent their members coherently across policy issues was hampered. For processing cooperatives in the supply-managed sector, the requirement that the cooperative be the political arm of industry, process product, and provide maximum returns to producer members made for a complicated objective function. This paper focuses on the twin objectives of providing efficient member services and performing political lobbying in a public choice framework. The results are illustrated by the recent history of a supply-managed further-processing cooperative and a diversified grain cooperative. [source]

Famines in (South) Asia

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2004
David Hall-Matthews
Most historical studies of South Asian famines have appropriately taken a political economy approach, allowing them to critique colonial governance and free trade policy. It would be useful to see more work on social and enviromental aspects of famine. There is a danger, however, typified by Mike Davis' recent book, that analysis of the role of climate in causing famine can depoliticise the problem. Further studies are still needed of the politics of famine, under communist as well as capitalist systems. [source]

The Clandestine Political Economy of War and Peace in Bosnia

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2004
Peter Andreas
Most contemporary intrastate military conflicts have a criminalized dimension: In various ways and to varying degrees they use smuggling networks and criminal actors to create and sustain the material basis for warfare. Despite its importance, the criminalized side of intrastate war and its legacy for postwar reconstruction is not a central focus of analysis in most scholarly accounts of armed conflict. A detailed examination of the Bosnian conflict illustrates the explanatory usefulness of a "bottom up," clandestine political economy approach to the study of war and post-war reconstruction. Drawing on interviews with former military leaders, local and international officials, and in-country observers, I argue that the outbreak, persistence, termination, and aftermath of the 1992,1995 war cannot be explained without taking into account the critical role of smuggling practices and quasi-private criminal combatants. The article suggests the need for greater bridging and broadening of the study of security, political economy, and crime. [source]

Issues in New Political Economy: An Overview

JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 5 2000
Stuart Sayer
A brief overview of the historical background, nature, and rapid growth in volume and scope of new political economy since the early 1980s is provided. the paper continues with some general reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the new political economy approach, illustrated by the other contributions to this special issue of the Journal of Economic Surveys. The final Section summarises these contributions. [source]

Beyond the High-Performance Paradigm?

BRITISH JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 1 2001
An Analysis of Variation in Canadian Managerial Perceptions of Reform Programme Effectiveness
Proponents of the high-performance paradigm often argue that the variable success of new forms of work organization is explained primarily by a failure to implement them comprehensively and to adopt complementary HRM practices. This paper argues that these explanations are inadequate and develops an alternative, political economy approach which accounts more fully for how conflicts embedded in the employment relation limit the effectiveness of reforms. It draws on a unique longitudinal data set representing 78 Canadian workplaces to analyse the extent to which reform programme content, pre-existing HRM conditions and workplace context variables are associated with reform programme effectiveness. [source]

Evolutionary Economic Geography, Institutions, and Political Economy

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2009
Jürgen Essletzbichler
abstract In this response to MacKinnon et al. (2009), I argue that the theoretical development of evolutionary economic geographies is necessary in order to evaluate its unique contribution to an understanding of the uneven development of the space economy; that the distinction between evolutionary and institutional economic geographies is overdrawn; that the neglect of class, power, and the state reflect empirical rather than theoretical shortcomings of the evolutionary approach; and that there is significant potential overlap between evolutionary and political economy approaches. [source]

Evolution, Path Dependence and Economic Geography

GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2008
Danny MacKinnon
This article provides a review of research on evolution and path dependence in economic geography. While economic geographers have long been interested in regional economic change, the period since the early 1990s has witnessed a more explicit concern with questions of evolution and adaptation. Indeed, the notion that the economic landscape is ,path-dependent' has been described as one of the most exciting ideas in economic geography. Evolutionary economic geography (EEG) can be seen as comprised of two main strands of literature, focusing on: path dependency, institutions and lock-in; and evolution, routines and complexity. Rather than viewing EEG as a separate enterprise, I suggest that there is a need to link evolution to institutional and political economy approaches within a theoretically plural economic geography. After outlining the contribution of evolutionary economics and the two key strands of EEG, the article discusses some key issues for evolutionary research in economic geography. [source]

Economic Development, Income Inequality, and Preferences for Redistribution,

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2010
Michelle L. Dion
Adopting a cross-regional and global perspective, this article critically evaluates one of the core assertions of political economy approaches to welfare,that support for redistribution is inversely related to income. We hypothesize that economic self-interest gives way to more uniform support for redistribution in the interest of ensuring that basic or relative needs are met in less developed and highly unequal societies. To test this hypothesis, we analyze individual-level surveys combined with country-level indicators for more than 50 countries between 1984 and 2004. Our analysis shows that individual-level income does not systematically explain support for redistribution in countries with low levels of economic development or high levels of income inequality. These findings challenge the universality of the assumption of economic self-interest in shaping preferences for redistribution that has been so pervasive in the literature. [source]

Power, Property Rights and the Issue of Land Reform: A General Case Illustrated with Reference to Bangladesh

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 1-2 2004
Mushtaq Husain Khan
The argument for land reform is most persuasive when the proposed land reform promises not only to improve distribution but also to increase growth and efficiency. Such is the promise in the GKI advocacy of radical redistributive land reform. In this paper, first (a) the Griffin, Khan and Ickowitz (GKI) and (b) World Bank positions on land reform are compared, and their points of agreement and disagreement identified. Secondly, the political economy of Bangladesh is examined to evaluate the appropriateness of these two competing neoclassical approaches for understanding the constraints in the agrarian sector. Thirdly, it is argued that the anomalous evidence on land transactions and productivity in Bangladesh cannot be easily accommodated within purely economic models of markets in the way that the neoclassical approach attempts. Paradoxically, both the World Bank's focus on institutional reform and GKI's focus on radical land reform are derived from such attempts and both suffer from similar empirical and theoretical problems. There is a strong case for going back to Brenner-type political economy approaches for understanding the dynamism and constraints facing agrarian transitions. Such an approach puts the analysis of class and power at the centre stage of an analysis of structure and change in the agrarian economy, and focuses on the distribution of power that prevents primitive accumulation in some countries leading to a capitalist transformation. [source]