Structural Adjustment and Poverty Alleviation: An Interpretative Survey

There are few simple generalizations about the effects of adjustment programmes on poverty. There remain many data and methodological problems, and outcomes are complex and varied. Poverty groups often are harmed by adjustment programmes, especially the urban working poor, but there has been a tendency to over-emphasize negative outcomes. There are many other influences on poverty. In the long term, adjustment is essential to the eradication of poverty. The principal responsibility for achieving anti-poverty objectives must lie with national governments but they do not always display much concern with the poor. However, the international financial institutions must share the responsibility and could do more to design structural adjustment programmes within a cost-minimizing framework. The principal policy tasks are to formulate a long-term anti-poverty strategy and ensure that adjustment policies are consistent with that, without detracting from the imperative of adapting the economy to changing circumstances.     

Charity and Justice in Global Poverty Relief

Peter Singer's message in One World: The Ethics of Globalisation is that we must now consider the whole of the world and all of its peoples our home. The penultimate chapter ‘One Community’ argues that there are no good reasons why those individuals who have the means should not donate to organisations that address the problems of global poverty relief. This, however, is not an adequate ethic; it does not provide the foundation we need in order to construct a sustainably just world order. Singer's recommendations may well lead to the construction of a world in which there is a significant reduction in the level of global poverty. However, Singer's route to poverty reduction is via charity, not justice. Global justice is not the same as individualist practical ethics, even if the latter is applied on a global scale. Singer's concerns for long-term global poverty relief will be better served by an agenda that promotes global institutional change, rather than one that is limited to hoping against donation fatigue among the world's affluent.     

Global Poverty and Inequality: Change and Continuity in Late Development

This contribution assesses the ‘converging divergence’ thesis that global inequality is falling and national inequality is rising. The article argues that falling global inequality is primarily due to China's development and that national inequality has risen in some developing countries and fallen in others. In light of the dominance of China's development in the global picture, questions arise as to what has changed and what has not changed outside of China. A set of changes and continuities is presented. It is then argued that these changes and continuities provide for the contemporary relevance an older conceptual lens — that of ‘late development’.     

New Beginnings: Towards a National Folklore Survey

The study of folklore in England stands at a crossroads. Is it content with its current activities and achievements, or should it make a determined effort to move forward? A subject pioneered in this country, which gave it its name and early academic reputation, seems in danger of losing momentum. Its mission lacks a common purpose, and tends to be fragmented, and the discipline as a whole has largely been ineffectual in asserting its social and cultural importance. One way to redress these shortcomings is for the leading organizations concerned to undertake a comprehensive survey of the rich variety of traditions in our present-day multicultural society. This will generate a new impetus in efforts to document these aspects of English cultural heritage.     

Imperial versus National Discourse: The Case of Russia

Abstract. It is inaccurate and misleading to apply the term ‘nationalism’ to Russia prior to the present day. Both Tsarist and Soviet leaders sought to maintain an empire and not a nation‐state, and their national consciousness was imperial rather than national. The lack of Russian nationalism was crucial for Russian history since it explains the failure of both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. Modern societies cannot be successfully constructed upon the basis of imperial thinking. The absence of Russian nationalism also has significance for nationalism theory. Russia possessed the social, political and cultural characteristics that have been adduced as ‘causes’ of nationalism by a wide variety of scholars, yet Russia failed to develop a nationalist movement. This suggests that what is crucial to modem nationalism is the appearance of a particularist, secular ideology, since the most notable aspect in which Russia differed from Europe was Russia's universalistic, religious and imperialist discourse of national identity.     

The Form and Function of Poverty: Examining National Identity through Public Housing Architecture

Abstract

Lawrence J. Vale tells us that “grand symbolic state buildings need to be understood in terms of the political and cultural contexts that helped to bring them into being,” ¹ 1. Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. and that these buildings can help us understand our national identity. But all buildings are part of a broader political and cultural context. Even unimpressive state-funded buildings express meaning about the politics, power, and priorities of a nation. Because these buildings are not purposefully symbolic, their symbolism has the potential to provide a less contrived—though perhaps less appealing—portrayal of the nation in which they are built. Public housing provides an example of this idea. Public housing in the United States is latent with negative meanings that are reinforced and perpetuated by its architecture, siting, and design. This article examines three historical and iconic public housing communities and analyzes the meanings of these spaces through Goodman's four frames of reference—denotation, exemplification, metaphorical expression, and mediated reference—to determine what these spaces, as architecture, say about the American national identity and our relationship with public housing.     

Global Rhetorics, National Politics: Pursuing Bank Mergers in Canada

In the neoliberal reconfiguration of both national and international political economies during the 1980s and 1990s, the interests of North American financial capital have apparently reigned supreme. Having ceded sovereignty to financial markets and financial institutions, national states seem to have lost their power to control them: the genie appears to be well and truly out of the bottle. Drawing upon an analysis of political debates in Canada over plans by the country's largest banks to merge, this article critically engages with literatures that imply that liberal strategies and corporate politics are doomed to prevail. In exploring the reasons for the Canadian government's rejection of the mergers, the article demonstrates the complex relationships between geography, politics and economics in the discursive representations of the national interest. Not only did the banks fail to understand the need to lobby effectively, the paper argues, but bank finance has gone from occupying a privileged role in the Canadian body politic to one in which its interests must now compete openly against others, highlighting important political changes in a globalising world.     

全球史：民族历史记忆中的全球史

全球化呼唤着全球史。但是,就如同不存在“文化全球化”一样,也不存在“全球化”的全球史。文化的多样性决定了全球史的多样性,即每个国家和民族都有自己心灵中的全球史。历史是一种记忆的形式,在任何一个国家或民族中,历史研究和历史著述的基本功能是保存和传承自己的历史记忆。全球化和“全球史”并没有中断每一个民族自己的历史记忆的延续。任何一个独立的民族,都有自己独立的历史记忆。这种记忆既包括对本民族历史．也包括对其他民族及整个世界历史——全球史的认知和判断。     

Global Governmentality and graduated sovereignty: National belonging among poor migrants in ecuador

Questions about the transformation of governance and national identity are being re‐examined in the context of contemporary economic globalisation. Scholars are debating the ways in which globalisation is reworking national identities through the shifting of economic governance away from ‘... the territorially defined boundaries of the nation‐state ... [and into] “unbundled” space for which there is not yet a name’ (Gupta, 1998: 321). Much of the work that has examined these questions of national identity and belonging under globalisation have emphasised questions of mobility, memory and identity in diasporic communities. In this paper, by contrast, I work with economic migrants within Ecuador to emphasise how contemporary globalisation processes reach inside national territories and work to reconstitute and reinvigorate pre‐existing social hierarchies and spatial identities. I develop these arguments in the context of Ecuador's economic crisis of the last two decades, drawing on in‐depth interviews with migrants to Quito.     

Assessing Poverty and Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from West Bengal

Recent interest in poverty and poverty relief has included debates that have moved beyond narrow concerns of consumption and income generation. Sen's research on entitlements and capabilities revolutionized approaches to poverty in the 1980s, and his work has itself been open to critical appraisals that have stressed empowerment and vulnerability as issues of equal importance. Some of these theoretical debates are briefly reviewed here, after which the frameworks for analysis that they suggest are applied to the study of rural poverty in West Bengal. The two tasks that the paper then sets itself are to illustrate the empirical value of broader conceptualizations of poverty, and to highlight the methodological difficulties that they raise.     

Survey,Shovel Probes,and Population Estimates: Studying Regional Demography in the Intermediate Area Using Subsurface Sherd Deposits

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - Shovel probes are a common form of archaeological data collection in densely vegetated landscapes. They were once the subject of critical analyses that...     

Poverty,Emigration And Family: Experiencing Childhood Poverty In Late Nineteenth-Century Manchester

The Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuge offered a place of sanctuary for destitute children. It expanded rapidly during the late-nineteenth century and established a number of homes that catered for a range of childhood needs. This article focuses on the experience of children admitted to the Refuge and subsequently emigrated from one of its orphan home. It considers the processes of child migration by examining the relationships between the home and the family. The analysis questions middle-class ideas about the parenting of poor families, the economic motives behind emigration, and introduces a number of case studies to evaluate whether emigration achieved its goal of leading children towards a respectable life away from the city.     

The Poverty Trap: Or,Why Poverty is Not About the Individual

Poverty is often thought of as an inevitable social condition, and the blame for any shortcomings in governmental welfare policies is frequently placed upon the failings of individuals, markets, and demography. By exploring the influence of neoliberal politics on archaeologies of slum-life this article makes the case that less emphasis should be placed upon the perceived failings of individuals and more effort should be placed on recovering the complex social networks which sustained community-life within Hungate and other so-called urban slums.