World Class Aspirations,Urban Informality,and Poverty Politics: A North–South Comparison

Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market-driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long-standing more-than-capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.     

Vietnam's Coastal Communities: An Assessment of Poverty

A Vietnamese geographer examines factors leading to the persistence of poverty in the coastal regions of Vietnam, against the backdrop of the country's overall recent success in poverty amelioration. After reviewing the spatial pattern of poverty for Vietnam as a whole, based on current government statistics, the author contrasts the situation in the country's interior relative to coastal locations, based on a detailed survey of over 200 households in Khanhhoa Province, located in south-central Vietnam. The changing labor market conditions in East Asia are discussed briefly in light of continued poverty reduction in the country. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: D31, I31, O15, P20. 4 figures, 5 tables, 33 references.     

Italy and the World Bank: The European Foundations of Development Lending, 1947–51

Foreign financial assistance for economic development and the discipline of development economics have traditionally been associated with US Cold War policy toward the Third World. This article, however, suggests that these practices were also shaped by the experiences of foreign aid for European reconstruction after the Second World War. The article traces loan negotiations between the World Bank and the Italian government, and argues that this process played a substantial role in shaping not only the World Bank's lending policies, but also the way its staff understood the institution's mission. The article emphasises Europe's significance as a site in the early history of development, suggesting new ways of understanding the evolution of development ideas, practices, and institutions after 1951.     

Postwar development in the Italian Mezzogiorno. Analyses and policies

Abstract

As Manlio Rossi-Doria wrote, in the early postwar years, the Southern Question was primarily an agrarian one. The debate and policies that addressed the Southern Question, however, did not remain confined solely to the agrarian dimension. The transformation of Southern agriculture was inextricably connected to two additional features of the Italian Mezzogiorno: first, the huge demographic expansion, and second, the lack of an industrial sector able to absorb the excessive agrarian population and to lead a process of economic diversification and internationalization. Above all, the solution to the Southern Question was interpreted as a truly national task. The development of the Mezzogiorno was at the basis of the collaboration between Italy and the World Bank throughout the 1950s. That experience became the subject of an intense debate over development policies that went beyond the Italian borders and embraced the question of postwar development worldwide. The Italian experience turned eventually out to be a failure. One feature of that experience remained vital, though, and has been underscored by contemporary scholars: the solution to the Southern Question is to be found at the national level, not just regionally.     

构建社会主义和谐社会任重道远

中国正处于经济社会的转型期,生态环境资源与经济社会快速发展的矛盾越来越凸显,经济发展不平衡带来的社会矛盾愈来愈复杂,这严重影响和制约了社会主义和谐社会的构建。如何建设21世纪中国和谐社会,提高经济社会的满意度,提升人们的生存质量是一个重大战略任务。     

International curriculum transfer in geography in higher education: an example

Internationalization of geography in higher education comes in many guises. This paper discusses some of these, with particular attention to curriculum development and transfer. The context is Bangladesh and a case study is presented of a link programme between three higher education institutions in that country and one in the UK. The British Council funded project INSPIRE provided funding and organizational support for a project that lasted 4 years and enabled 22 staff visits from Bangladesh to the UK and 6 in the other direction. As a result, curricula of 43 teaching modules in the general area of environmental hazard and risk, environmental change and climate change have been initiated or revised. While this type of transnational knowledge transfer has its drawbacks, we argue that there are specific circumstances in which it can work.     

构建和谐社会与优化多党合作的政治民主化功能

构建社会主义和谐社会的执政目标,必然要求达到政治民主的和谐状态.中国的现代化进程是在政党政治的强力推动下进行的,社会主义和谐社会的构建促使政党政治必须在这一进程中发挥主导性作用.加强执政党和参政党的建设,并实现两者的良性互动,以优化多党合作的政治民主化功能,对于构建社会主义和谐社会具有极其重要的意义.     

Income Transfers Alone Won't Eradicate Poverty

Even in the current economic situation, in developed countries, rhetoric about cutting "poverty" is misleadingly outmoded—because it implicitly suggests that government income transfers can be the vehicle for achieving substantial reductions in poverty. Almost all Americans already live far above subsistence poverty: most because of their earnings, and the rest because of government transfer programs. This decline in material poverty is obscured by weaknesses in how the official U.S. poverty measure counts income. What is now called poverty is really "income inequality." Reducing income inequality is also a vitally important social goal, but it cannot be accomplished through income transfers alone. The authors argue that, although income transfers have a role to play in lessening the impact of material deprivation, real progress in raising incomes will require building the human capital of the economically disadvantaged. This means both increasing the earnings capacity of lower-income workers and reducing the number of female-headed families.     

The Politics of Welfare Exclusion: Immigration and Disparity in Medicaid Coverage

The rapid growth of the immigrant population in the United States, along with changes in the demographics and the political landscape, has often raised questions for understanding trends of inequality. Important issues that have received little scholarly attention thus far are excluding immigrants’ social rights through decisive policy choices and the distributive consequences of such exclusive policies. In this article, we examine how immigration and state policies on immigrants’ access to safety net programs together influence social inequality in the context of health care. We analyze the combined effect of immigration population density and state immigrant Medicaid eligibility rules on the gap of Medicaid coverage rates between native‐ and foreign‐born populations. When tracking inequality in Medicaid coverage and critical policy changes in the post‐PRWORA era, we find that exclusive state policies widen the native‐foreign Medicaid coverage gap. Moreover, the effect of state policies is conditional on the size of the immigrant population in that state. Our findings suggest immigrants’ formal integration into the welfare system is crucial for understanding social inequality in the U.S. states.     

The World Bank–United States–Latin American Triangle: The Negotiations with Socialist Chile, 1970–1973

This paper sheds light on the largely unknown negotiations between Chile and the World Bank (WB) during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973). The prevalent understanding of the WB's involvement in Latin America portrays the Bank as a loyal ally of the U.S. government and as an institution with the power to impose its views on its borrowers. Yet, an in-depth analysis of previously unexamined primary sources demonstrates that rather than reflecting a dynamic in which the relationship was between Washington and the WB on the one hand, and Chile on the other hand, these relations constituted a WB–U.S.–Chile asymmetric triangle. Despite profound ideological discrepancies, multiple pressures, and constraints, Allende's government and the WB conducted high-ranking negotiations that challenged the U.S.-promoted economic embargo against Chile. The examination of this counterintuitive relationship sheds new light on Allende's positioning in the international arena and on the functioning of the World Bank, thereby providing a unique prism through which to reconsider dichotomist perceptions of the Cold War in Latin America.     

China’s Information and Communication Technology in Geographic Perspective

Two economic geographers analyze the unprecedented growth of China’s information and communication technology (ICT) industry over the past decade (2000–2010)—an industry increasingly important as a new engine powering exports and providing infrastructure and services critical to sustaining economic growth. Using agglomeration and inequality indices including the Herfindahl and the Gini, the authors show that the geographic concentration of ICT activities has decreased over time, in tandem with a decline in their regional inequality; however, a new ICT development index (IDI) designed for this study reveals a significant and persistent gap in ICT development between the country’s advancing and lagging provinces. The paper also explores a range of factors contributing to “leapfrog” ICT growth in some provinces, as well as the challenges likely to be faced by the industry in the future. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: L630, L960, O180, O330. 2 figures, 4 tables, 85 references, 1 appendix.