Burst of the property bubble and Hong Kong’s changing land and housing policies post-1997

Momentous events have characterized the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region since its founding in 1997. Among these were drastic and repeated changes in housing and policies, shifting from one emphasizing the role of the state to one purportedly relying primarily on market forces, and then back to a more proactive stance of the state. Associated with these changes were roller-coaster movements in residential prices and housing completions. These developments took place in the context of phenomenal upheavals within and beyond Hong Kong: the Asian financial crisis and the burst of Hong Kong’s property bubble; the contestation of Hong Kong’s autonomy under “one country, two systems”; and the flooding of “hot money” consequent upon repeated rounds of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve of the United States to counteract the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the Great Recession that followed.     

Canadian Political Economy and the Great Recession of 2008–9: The Politics of Coping with Economic Crisis

The emerging comparative political economy literature on the Great Recession of 2008–9 has devoted an increasing amount of time analyzing how domestic politics and the economic crisis were jointly determined. This article seeks to explore certain aspects of this dynamic relationship in the context of Canada, a country that has received little coverage in the comparative literature so far.     

STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN LABOR DEMAND AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN LOCAL LABOR MARKETS*

ABSTRACT. It seems quite clear that the US. economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s was exposed to an accelerated rate of structural change resulting from energy price shocks, increased international competition and technological change. It is of considerable interest, then, that previous attempts to examine structural unemployment in this period find that structural shift in employment generally were not Significant determinants of the unemployment rate. This paper revisits this issue using a measure of structural job shifts drawn from the literature on establishment job creation and destruction. The results show that changes in the structure of labor demand across industry by establishment-size sectors had a statically significant and empirically important positive effect on the unemployment rate in a sample of 200 metropolitan labor markets during the 1976 to 1984 period.     

Nordic Lights - Education for Nation and Civic Society in the Nordic Countries, 1850-2000

In historical studies of the labour market, one of the most extensively debated subjects has been unemployment during the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to a new panel data, the unemployment rate among construction workers in Helsinki was 45% in spite of extensive relief work. At the same time, real hourly wages dropped 25–35% and piecework rates 40–60%, which was an even more exceptional phenomenon. The main reasons for these phenomena were difficulties in financing construction work, the weakness of the trade union and the lack of unemployment benefits.     

International order after the financial crisis

The Great Recession has brought a structural break in international economic and political order. The geography of power is at present being dramatically transformed, notably by the rapid economic rise of China. What makes international order legitimate in a world in which political and economic foundations are rapidly shifting? This article examines analogies and lessons from a previous transition, from a world order centered on Britain, to a US dominated global order. That transition saw two moments of crisis, or turning points, the 1931 financial crisis at the height of the Great Depression, and the diplomatic and military catastrophe of Suez. The article looks at two interpretations of the transition, one by E. H. Carr focusing on the destruction in the Great Depression of a liberal economic and political order and its replacement by a world of brutal Great Power politics; the other by Charles Kindleberger, stressing the need for a benevolent hegemonic power to provide public goods for the world economy and the world political system. China is beginning to behave in the way expected of a Kindleberger hegemon, but also sees the possibilities of asserting power in a world that in the aftermath of 2008 looks much more like the chaotic and crisis‐ridden interwar period as interpreted by E. H. Carr. The challenge for the management of the new international order will lie in the ability of China to embrace the universalistic vision that underpinned previous eras of stability, in the nineteenth century and in the late twentieth century.     

Out of the crisis: an empirical investigation of place-specific determinants of economic resilience

This article attempts to isolate the structural characteristics that affect the resilience of a regional economy. It focuses on the role played by related/unrelated variety and differentiated knowledge bases as drivers for regional resilience and originally explores their interdependences. Italy is the empirical setting, and Italian local labour systems the unit of analysis. Regional resilience is measured as growth of the employment rate after the Great Recession that began in 2008. Results confirm the importance of related variety and of differentiated knowledge bases as drivers for regional resilience. We found support of the creative capacity of culture argument, providing evidence that a moderate concentration in symbolic knowledge-based economic activities contributes to resilience. Synthetic and analytical knowledge-based activities provide positive and no support to regional resilience, respectively. Finally, the relatedness of the symbolic knowledge-based activities increases regional economic resilience. Some policy implications are then derived from these findings.     

Weathering the Storm: Social Policy and the Great Recession

This review discusses recent challenges to the welfare state arising from the Great Recession (GR). The GR was a significant event for social policy analysts, as it tested the responsiveness of welfare systems in the midst of a recent trend toward austerity politics in advanced economies. Social policy changes were part of the toolkit advanced democracies used to respond to the GR, and the welfare state mitigated the consequences of the GR. However, a stark limitation of the social safety net in the United States was the failure to assist immigrant households. The nexus of immigration and social policy is likely to be a significant controversy as we consider the meaning of social citizenship.     

The Other Green Revolution: Land Epistemologies and the Mexican Revolutionary State

This paper explores the development of Mexican Revolutionary land epistemologies in the years following the global Great Depression. Demonstrating how ideas about agrarian life informed national development efforts across multiple spheres, including public education, state‐sponsored media, and governmental conservation projects, it argues that human–nature relations were constitutive of state visions of Revolutionary citizenship. Scholarly work interrogating the role of scientific knowledge in land politics has focused on the ways that territorial dispossessions are routed through expert truth claims; this study deviates from that work by asking how resource conflicts can also produce new knowledge to support progressive platforms for change.     

Forecasting Australian elections: 1993, and all that

The link between economic conditions and election outcomes is a pillar of social science. Voters prefer ‘better times’ to worse and reward or punish incumbents accordingly. We investigate the extent to which this truism holds in the Australian context, with particular emphasis on the 1993 result. While Australian election outcomes are generally not well predicted by prevailing economic conditions, we are impressed by the extent to which the 1993 election outcome is at odds with the state of the economy. In particular, we find Labor performed up to five percentage points better than expected in 1993, making this result one of the most exceptional election results ever observed in Australia. The sizeable electoral penalty typically accompanying large increases in unemployment was effectively nullified in 1993. We accurately predict the 1993 result (ex post) only if unemployment is considered electorally irrelevant. We conclude by suggesting a research agenda for better understanding the link between economic context and election outcomes in the Australian setting.     

论20世纪初英国现代社会保障制度的初步确立

20世纪初英国逐步建立了现代社会保障制度.贫困和失业等社会问题的严重化和济贫法制度的失效是这一制度建立的根本原因;来自工人阶级的政治压力是其建立的一个重要原因;费边社会主义、集体主义和新自由主义为这一制度的建立提供了理论基础;德国保险型社会保障制度的建立起了先导作用.英国政府通过一系列的社会立法逐步形成了涉及到养老、失业、医疗、儿童等方面比较完善的福利体系,标志着英国现代社会保障制度的初步确立.它是英国社会保障制度史上一次根本性的转折.     

Urban Unemployment and Migrants in Africa: Evidence from Harare 1985–1994

Unemployment is a major problem in urban centres in sub‐Saharan Africa. The impact of policies associated with structural adjustment programmes has frequently meant major formal job losses in both the public and private sectors. Although it is widely recognized that there has been a major (further) shift into the informal sector, it is also often claimed that ‘unemployment’ rates have greatly increased. When it is also assumed that net rural–urban migration has continued at a rapid pace, this is believed to be a significant contributor to the rise in unemployment. However, because ‘unemployment’ and ‘underemployment’ are hard to measure and to keep discrete when studying urban Africa, it is apparent that there is much confusion over current levels and trends in unemployment. This article discusses the problems of analysing African urban unemployment, drawing in particular on a recent ILO report, and presents evidence from long‐term research on migrants in Harare which casts doubt on the extent to which net in‐migration is a major factor contributing to unemployment in contemporary, economically adjusting sub‐Saharan Africa.     

RURAL–URBAN MIGRATION AND UNEMPLOYMENT: THEORY AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS*

ABSTRACT We develop a regional model where, in the city, unemployment prevails because of too high (efficiency) wages, while, in the rural area, workers are paid at their marginal productivity. We characterize the steady‐state equilibrium and show that it is unique. We then consider two policies: decreasing urban unemployment benefits and subsidizing urban employment. We find that decreasing the unemployment benefit in the city creates urban jobs and reduces rural–urban migration since new migrants have to spend some time unemployed before they can find a job in the city. On the other hand, raising employment subsidies increases urban employment but may also increase urban unemployment because it triggers more rural–urban migration. In this respect, the employment subsidy policy can backfire by raising rather than reducing urban unemployment.     

Local employment growth patterns and the Great Recession: The case of Spain

The 2008 financial and economic crisis has led to widespread destruction of employment in Spain. Using municipality data, I examine employment growth differences between urban cores, urban hinterlands, and rural areas during the pre‐crisis period and the recession period. The data show that patterns of growth and decline have been very uneven across different types of areas. While in the boom years, hinterlands and rural areas experienced higher growth, urban core areas have done better during the recession years. I then test three strands of explanations for local growth differences: (i) the role of the local sectoral composition, (ii) the role of human capital, and (iii) the role of access to urban core areas. Estimations for employment growth in the two periods show that the crisis has altered some of the drivers of local employment growth and that human capital has been a key determinant of local resilience during the Great Recession.     

Social Policy Perspectives on Economic Inequality in Wealthy Countries

This essay reviews the policy‐oriented literature on economic inequality in wealthy countries published from 2008 to 2018. We focus on this decade because it is a period bookended by both the beginnings of the Great Recession of 2008–2009 as well as the recovery. During this timeframe, attention to inequality by social policy scholars grew substantially, which we argue reflects an interest in both inequality trends as well as redistributive social policy. We observe in the literature sustained efforts to understand both the relationship between social policy and economic inequality, as well as determinants of changes to redistributive social policy. We also note substantial variation in research traditions, as well as opportunities to address substantive, methodological, and theoretical gaps. Our review summarizes the approaches and findings from the literature and discusses the implications of the findings for the study of economic inequality within the academic field of public policy.     

What kind of region reaps the benefits of a currency union?

What is the economic impact of joining a currency union? Is this impact heterogeneous across regions? And how does it change in case of a recession? We answer these questions by investigating the economic impact of joining the euro area for the latecomers, that is, the eastern European countries that adopted the euro after 2002. Differently from previous literature, we use NUTS-2 regions as units of analysis. This novelty allows us to investigate the theoretical predictions of a currency union impact at a more appropriate geographical level. Using a recently developed counterfactual approach, we estimate the overall as well as the disaggregated impact of joining the euro area. We find that the adoption of the euro brought about a small positive effect, which was, however, dampened by the Great Recession. Individual regional estimates suggest heterogeneous returns with benefits accruing mostly to core regions.     

Welfare Caseload Change: An Alternative Approach

In the last decade, caseloads in AFDC/TANF have shifted dramatically up, then down. Of existing studies based on time series or state panel data, some tend to underplay the role of welfare reform. All say little about what policies drove the decline or about the role of governmental quality. An approach using cross-sectional models explains interstate differences in caseload change rather than the national trend but allows more discussion about the role of policy and government. Results suggest that grant levels, work and child support requirements, and sanctions are important explainers of change, along with some demographic terms and unemployment. These policies in turn are tied to states' political opinion, political culture, and institutional capacity. Moralistic states seem the most capable of transforming welfare in the manner the public wants.     

Mapmaking,science and state building in Russia before Peter the Great

While Peter the Great (ruled c1694–1725) can be credited with a concerted attempt to introduce modern European science, technology and other achievements to Russia, the fact that he built upon earlier processes of change which tended in the same direction is frequently underemphasized. The paper challenges the idea that Russia was totally isolated and static before Peter, but emphasizes the very different context in which science, technology and related pursuits developed there by comparison with Europe. It is asserted that the effects of state building in both the European and Russian cases gave rise to certain parallels and similarities. Using mapmaking as an example the paper suggests that its growing importance in both regions during this period was a reflection of the requirements of state building and not merely a product of the rise of commercial capitalism (the latter being as yet relatively insignificant in Russia). The frequently postulated links between commercial capitalism, the rise of mathematical sciences and a growing interest in mapmaking are questioned as being largely inapplicable to Russia before Peter and sometimes overstressed in the case of Europe. The paper presents an analysis of the early seventeenth century Book of the Great Map, a written artefact of pre-Petrine cartography which reflects the priorities and also some of the limitations of Russian mapmaking during the period.     

Economic resilience of metropolitan,old industrial,and rural regions in two subsequent recessionary shocks

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we focus on the question of how particular types of regions react to economic shocks. Drawing on a case study of Czech microregions, we aim to determine if the old industrial regions differ significantly from other types of regions (metropolitan, urban, rural) in (post)crisis economic development. Two aspects of regional resilience (measured by unemployment growth) were considered: recession and recovery. We focused on the comparison of two subsequent recessionary shocks: the 2008–2010 global recession and the 2012–2013 austerity crisis. Metropolitan regions showed relatively stable economic development. Old industrial regions were more resilient than expected. Rural regions exhibited highly diverse reactions: lower resistance was characteristic for regions specialized (mostly) in automotive and some labour-intensive industries. The first wave of recession increased unemployment mostly in (rural) regions dependent on export-oriented manufacturing, the second wave especially hit larger cities with metropolitan functions. Regions that experienced a sharp unemployment increase in the first recession were generally more resistant in the second wave. All types of regions were internally highly diverse in their reactions to economic crises, which points to the importance of micro-regional variations of economic resilience, the performance of individual local firms and subsidiaries, and extra-regional factors of regional development.     

The G20 as an improvised crisis committee and/or a contested ‘steering committee’ for the world

Arguably the most important catalytic effect of the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008–2009 has been the creation of the G20 at the leaders’ level. As a form of improvised diplomacy the G20 merits extensive scrutiny, revealing as it does the degree of adaptation possible in the international system. The G20 links a significant ideational component, a new dynamic between established and emerging powers, and a complex set of issues. The innovative quality of the G20, however, rests on two very distinct strands of activity and tests of accomplishments. The G20 can be viewed as a ‘recession‐buster’ with a vital but momentary purpose. Alternatively, the G20 can be taken to be an embedded ‘steering committee’ for the world. Both of these interpretations have validity. The crisis committee scenario highlights a technical regulatory‐driven agenda. The steering committee scenario by way of contrast showcases the connection between the G20 and a new type of global settlement. Passing the test as a crisis committee hinges on very specific deliverables. Passing the test as a steering committee is even more demanding as any move toward a new state‐specific ‘concert’ is highly contested. This article examines these debates, locating the G20 in a historical/comparative perspective and in terms of the wider context of shifting power structure at the beginning of the twenty‐first century.     

Disparities in entrepreneurial activity and attitude across EU countries

The levels and characteristics of entrepreneurship differ widely across EU countries and regions. Taking as reference data provided by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor on entrepreneurial activity and entrepreneurial attitude, this paper analyses the disparities in entrepreneurship indicators among EU member countries in 2007 and 2013, highlighting the most significant changes that occurred during the Great Recession. Some of the major indices of inequality are calculated (Gini, Theil and Atkinson) and the change in the Gini coefficient between these two years is additively decomposed into mobility and progressivity components. Overall, we find that cross-national inequalities tend to increase in the procyclical aspects of entrepreneurial activity and attitude, while they tend to decrease in the countercyclical aspects. For entrepreneurial activity indicators, we reveal that heterogeneity increases in indicators such as opportunity-driven entrepreneurial activity and total entrepreneurial activity, while necessity-driven entrepreneurial activity becomes more homogeneous across countries. Regarding entrepreneurial attitudes, disparities among countries decrease in all indicators, except in perceived opportunities, for which cross-national inequality grows considerably during the crisis period.