The political economy of economic reform in North Korea

For over 10 years, North Korea has undergone a severe economic crisis, including food shortages, which has inflicted great suffering upon the North Korean people. Given such dire realities, it is beyond all doubt that the North Korean government should actively carry out comprehensive economic reforms as quickly as possible which aim to transform North Korea's present inefficient socialist planned economic system into a market economic system. Many argue that such reforms would give rise to successful economic growth in North Korea, which could enhance the legitimacy of the North Korean regime. Yet, the North Korean regime has consistently avoided implementing economic reforms, even though it has had a number of opportunities to do so. The July 1st reforms, which were introduced in 2002, have been half-hearted and inconsistently applied. This then raises an important question: Why has the North Korean government avoided adopting comprehensive economic reforms? In other words, what is the crucial barrier that has hindered North Korea's implementation of economic reforms? This article pinpoints North Korea's unique political system—i.e. its monolithic system of political control and policy making which exhibits the highest level of power concentration in one individual among all political systems—as the biggest barrier to economic reforms. No doubt North Korea desperately needs comprehensive economic reforms, in light of its economic crisis and food shortages. Nonetheless, the current North Korean regime has avoided adopting such reforms since they will undermine North Korea's monolithic system. In conclusion, North Korea's monolithic system has been the biggest obstacle to North Korea's economic reforms.     

The marginalisation of Paralympic heritage

The impact of the Paralympic Games and disability sport upon the lives of people with disabilities and the perceptions of non-disabled society regarding people with disabilities has been immense. Yet examples of this disability sport and Paralympic heritage are all but invisible amongst the wider area of sports heritage. This paper will attempt to outline some of the possible reasons why this might be the case and cite some examples of how this apparent marginalisation of Paralympic heritage might be overcome as we move forward beyond the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.     

The political economy of dive tourism: precarity at the periphery in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

Using a critical political economy approach and the concept of labour precarity, the international dive tourism industry in Sabah, Malaysia and its workers’ vulnerabilities are interrogated. Fieldwork data highlights dive tourism's socio-economic impacts and the precarity of labour within the international tourism sector and also critiques it as a development strategy for a peripheral region. The paper challenges the optimistic views of labour precarity found in the existing political economy literature. Rather than identifying labour empowerment, evidence demonstrates significant worker vulnerability, uncertainty, and contingency – especially among ethnic minorities – resulting from Malaysia's state-led rentier economy.     

Social,economic and political dilemmas of reform in Yugoslavia

All of the communist party‐ruled states of Eastern Europe, from the elder brother of the ‘socialist family’, the Soviet Union, to non‐aligned, sui generis Yugoslavia, are in some degree of economic crisis. Gone are the once loudly trumpeted assurances that the socialist ‘economic formation’ by its very nature — its centrally planned and directed economy, its leadership by a communist party armed with the ‘scientific’ social and economic theory of Marxism‐Leninism and its foundation on the principles of proletarian social justice — excluded the possibility of economic ailments such as sluggish growth rates, inflation, social inequality and unemployment. It is now admitted that precisely these problems currently threaten virtually all communist systems. The principal issue for the political elites in these countries (with the perhaps temporary exception of relatively prosperous East Germany and Czechoslovakia and perennially contrary Romania) is not whether radical reform is necessary, but how to implement the requisite economic, social and quasi‐political reforms without undermining the foundations of ‘socialism’ and of the communist party's domination that they identify with it Yugoslavia is a valuable test case of the general project of reform in communist systems, since it consciously undertook to dismantle the of Stalinist system it had been establishing under Soviet tutelage at the end of World War II in response to Stalin's ostracism of Tito in June 1948. From its inception the Yugoslav reform process was informed by a commitment to return to the sources of Marxian social and economic theory in order to build an authentic socialist system untrammeled by the structures and immoral practices of Stalinist ‘etatism’. Worker self‐management, ‘market socialism’, the decentralisation of political and economic decision‐making, periodic rotation in office, and a number of other formally democratic, participatory socio‐political processes, most of which Gorbachev and his supporters have been discussing under the rubric of perestroika, glasnost’ and demokratizatsiia, have all been tried in one form or another in Yugoslavia during the past four decades.     

Women's collective economic strategies and political transformation in rural South Africa

This article examines the economic processes and socio‐political institutions that shape women's involvement in community projects. Feminist materialism and postcolonial theory provide the framework to analyze these livelihood strategies as they are grounded in the material conditions of women's lives. The empirical study is based in a rural northern province of South Africa where colonialism and apartheid have contributed to extreme economic and social hardships. Fieldwork was conducted in Limpopo to analyze how community projects contribute to livelihood strategies. In an area where migrant remittances remain one of the main sources of income for rural households, women have increasingly engaged in collective economic strategies such as pottery making, sewing, and agricultural production. These strategies are embedded in a complex set of patriarchal institutions that reinforce unequal access to resources and have historically marginalized rural black women. Despite these barriers, findings from this study demonstrate that community projects provide the potential for economic and social empowerment, especially among rural women.     

The dark side of cultural policy: economic and political instrumentalisation,white elephants,and corruption in Valencian cultural institutions

Cultural policy is usually assessed as a positive element for socio-economic development and therefore, its criticism is generally confined to poor implementation and discussion of its social effects. However, it is occasionally analysed as an instrument that produces unsustainable development, as a generator of white elephants, or as a means of waste, corruption, and clientelistic domination of the political sphere. This is what we might call the ‘dark side’ of cultural policy. Our case study of the city of Valencia (Spain), focussing on two of its major cultural institutions, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art and the Palace of Arts, exemplifies this cultural policy dimension. This article aims to analyse the systemic and contextual causes of this phenomenon of cronyistic behaviour and to elucidate in what sense it can be understood as a contingent drift specific to a particular territory or as a structural condition of cultural policy.     

The political geography of macro-level turnout in American political development

Aggregate turnout rates are among the central indicators of democratic performance in the American polity. Despite the considerable implications of macro turnout, however, most studies of turnout focus instead on the micro level. As a consequence, we know little about how local, political, and historical influences have impacted turnout over the course of American political development. The result is a somewhat impoverished conception of turnout that often removes the political from political participation. In this article, I argue for a new, macro-level perspective that highlights the political dimension of turnout by placing turnout in the local political settings in which it has taken place. I contrast two competing explanations of macro turnout variation across local electorates, a political account and Elazar's cultural thesis, and discuss their implications for the political geography of macro turnout in American electoral history. I then examine this political geography by employing a local indicator of spatial association (a LISA statistic) to identify the spatial structuring of macro turnout in the United States from 1828 through 2000. I demonstrate that a political perspective provides greater leverage than Elazar's cultural perspective in explaining the political geography of macro turnout in the United States.     

New world complex societies: Recent economic,social, and political studies

Archaeologists working on the complex societies of Latin America have made impressive empirical advances on a number of fronts during the past five years. This article focuses on economic, social, and political issues, using the following topics for organization: intensive agriculture, demography, exchange, households, urbanism, chiefdoms, and state-level polities. For each topic, I review recent archaeological research and summarize pertinent theoretical issues. Unfortunately, the heavy accumulation of new archaeological results is not matched by the conceptual advances that are needed to explore the analytical significance of the data.     

The South Stream versus Nabucco pipeline race: geopolitical and economic (ir)rationales and political stakes in mega‐projects

The plan for the southern energy corridor delivering a new secure supply of natural gas to the European Union is shaped by projects for two pipelines—Nabucco and the South Stream. Economic rationales for both projects are far from solid as the prospects for returns on massive investments are doubtful due to uncertainty about demand. Much political effort has nevertheless been expended on advancing these competing ‘mega‐projects’, which have acquired symbolic status in different approaches to securitization of energy matters. The continuing recession has not added much weight to common economic sense, which dictates that the most efficient way to bring Russian and Caspian gas to Europe is modernization and joint management of Ukrainian gas infrastructure. Parallel construction of both pipelines remains the most probable outcome of their ‘race’, while simultaneous cancellation could have saved resources and political faces.