Exploring student mobility and graduate migration: undergraduate mobility propensities in two economic crisis contexts

This article explores the issue of mobility propensity among undergraduates, focusing on plans for long-term and short-term movement, including migration after the completion of present course of study. We also assess the strength of the relationship between a decision to move abroad and the personal impact of the ongoing economic crisis, using evidence from two recent surveys conducted with students in the capital cities of Portugal and the Republic of Ireland. Results provide an indication of the popularity of moving abroad and identify justifications for seeking an exit, potential destinations and anticipated lengths of stays. Regression analysis further confirms that the crisis is having a significant bearing on mobility decisions among respondents in Portugal but not the Republic of Ireland, with the concluding discussion integrating the main findings into existing debates on international student mobility.     

Immigration,the Celtic Tiger and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article addresses the puzzle of why Ireland has proved so open to immigration. It compares responses to immigrants in the Republic of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger era and during the post-2008 economic crisis and finds no evidence of a political backlash during the latter period even though opinion polls suggest that opposition to immigration had increased and other evidence suggested that there had been an increase in racist incidents within Irish society. Nor did the resumption of large-scale emigration trigger political hostility to immigrants. The outcome of the 2004 Referendum on Citizenship, which removed a constitutional right to Irish citizenship to the Irish-born children of immigrants, suggested that that nationalism still matters hugely and a latent tendency towards ethnic chauvinism amongst the host population. Yet, a decade after the 2004 Referendum it looked as if the old mono-ethnic sense conception of the Irish nation had been disrupted, at least a little bit.     

Heritage spectacles: the case of Amphipolis excavations during the Greek economic crisis

This article explores the ways in which the archaeological excavations at Amphipolis, Northern Greece, were transformed into a ‘heritage spectacle’ during the summer of 2014. The article argues that the spectacularisation of Amphipolis excavations constituted a powerful, political medium for dis-orientating the wider Greek public from issues related to the severe economic crisis of the country. Although the practice of heritage spectacularisation is not new, the media spectacle of Amphipolis introduced an advanced mechanism for spectacularizing archaeological research and the past. The article deconstructs this mechanism through a thematic content analysis of about 100 newspaper articles published in the Greek press, filtered through the lenses of spectacle theory. As it is demonstrated, the spectacularisation process of Amphipolis excavations is embodied by emotive dramatisation, banal cultural symbols, escapism and power imbalances. The article concludes with an interpretive framework for heritage spectacles while highlighting ethical and practical implications regarding the role of archaeologists and heritage practitioners towards political ‘abuse’ of heritage in times of socio-economic and political crises.     

Second home conversion during the economic crisis: the case of Artemida,Greece

The conversion of second to primary homes is a known phenomenon; yet, its emergence as a result of necessity in an era of economic crisis has not been adequately addressed in the literature. To fill this gap, the article discusses an interview study of younger adults who have made this conversion, conducted in a second home area near Athens, Greece. The study explores the factors that influenced respondents to move permanently to their second home and perceptions of their relocation. Given the ongoing economic crisis in Greece, the research is placed in a unique socioeconomic context, allowing the investigation to delve into the effects of the economic crisis on these housing choices, by comparing perspectives on conversions having taken place before and during the crisis. Findings depict second home mobility as a complex phenomenon linked to tourism, changing housing needs, social factors, economic pressures, but also new potential urban functions arising from the current economic depression in Greece.     

巴西政府的经济政策和债务危机的形成(1974-1985)

由于经济发展的周期性和国际石油价格的上涨,20世纪70年代中期,巴西"经济奇迹"结束.但是,出于政治因素的考虑,70年代后期盖泽尔政府推行了"负债增长"的战略,进入80年代后,费格雷多政府依然拒绝实行经济紧缩政策,结果最终导致了巴西的债务危机和经济的全面衰退.     

Migration and tertiary educated youth: a reflexive view of mobility decision-making in an economic crisis context

Despite the popularity of student and graduate migration as research topics, mobility decision-making among tertiary educated youth is relatively neglected, resulting in under-appreciation of the complexity of this process. This article seeks to overcome this shortcoming through taking a reflexive view, recognising the significance of personal considerations alongside economic motives as potential mobility drivers. Evidence is drawn from a survey of 400 undergraduates aged 25 and under conducted in Dublin during 2014, with results illustrating anticipated destinations, durations of stays abroad and the bearing of the economic crisis. Using logistic regression, the influence of a range of subjective level factors is explored in relation to different mobility choices. This analysis leads towards a concluding summary that posits a reflexive view on student and graduate mobility decision-making, illustrated with qualitative case study evidence.     

Determinants of regional resilience to economic crisis: a European perspective

The impact of the economic crisis has been highly asymmetric across the European regions. The objective of this paper is to investigate the determinants of resilience to economic crisis across European regions. Regional economic resilience was assessed based on employment changes during 2008–2013, while socioeconomic determinants were analysed pre-crisis (2002–2007). A highly heterogeneous pattern of resilience was observed within countries, while significant differences were also revealed between the continental northern-central regions and the southern periphery. A multilevel logistic regression model indicated the magnitude of country-effects on the performance of regional employment during crisis periods. Both EU-referenced and country-referenced regional resilience identified the positive effect of accessibility and the negative effect of a large manufacturing sector in the ability of regions to withstand recessionary shocks. Education and economic development level positively affected the resilience of both large and small regional European economies. Investing in education enhances the spatial homogeneity across Europe in terms of its ability to react to economic shocks. The results reveal the importance of narrowing disparities among regions and formulating targeted and differentiated regional development policies at country level, taking into consideration the size of the economy of the regions.     

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.     

A generational attitude: young adults facing the economic crisis in Milan

Abstract

For almost 10 years there has been talk of the economic crisis affecting the European area, with more evident effects in the Mediterranean countries. Yet the expression ‘economic crisis’ has become too wide and blurred to be useful for describing how the current socio-economic conjuncture is affecting different categories of young people in different ways. Precariousness and reduced job opportunities, with their consequences for social mobility, constitute only the more explicit and raw evidence of the lived experience of the crisis among young people. Although families remain the all-solving institution, the consequences of the crisis are diversified according to the economic, cultural and social capital of each individual, to gender and generation position, and to subjective and contextualized perceptions. This article presents research conducted to investigate how young people living in the urban area of Milan locate, react, readapt and reinvent themselves in the present economic context by analysing their aspirations, expectations and practices. We develop a comparative analysis of the main structural bias (gender, education, social class position) in order to shed light on the effects and perceptions of the crisis among young people in the city of Milan.     

Persistence of innovative activities in times of crisis: the case of the Basque Country

By drawing on a large sample of Spanish manufacturing and service sector firms, the changes in firms’ innovation expenditures that have taken place since the onset of the 2008 economic crisis are analysed, as is the relationship between such changes and the location of the company. Special focus is placed on firms in the Basque Country. Compared to other Spanish regions, the Basque Country differs in terms of its fiscal status, its earlier experience of crises, its innovation performance and its greater focus on innovation-related policies. Our results show that the impact of the crisis on firms’ innovation expenditures in the Basque Country has indeed differed from that in comparable Spanish regions. Even after controlling for sectoral differences and for detailed characteristics at the firm level, firms with R&D employment in the Basque Country showed a significantly lower probability of abandoning innovation activities and even a somewhat higher probability of increasing their innovation efforts. This regional effect is especially significant for small and medium-sized enterprises.     

Regional economic resilience: the role of national and regional policies

In recent years, economic resilience has become a popular term in both theory and policy practice. This interest was triggered by the fact that some regional economies were extremely vulnerable, while others have managed to overcome, more or less effectively, the worse consequences of the current economic crisis. Within this context, questions arise regarding the role that policies at both the national and subnational levels can play in shaping regional economic resilience. Although high in the academic and political agenda, understanding the policy and governance aspects of resilience still remains a relatively underdeveloped area. The paper contributes to this debate focusing on an area which has been most severely hit by crises, the Region of West Macedonia, in Greece. The case study builds on the historical trajectory of the region in order to explain how different types of policies have influenced the ability of West Macedonia to respond to economic slumps and crises of the last 30 years. Evidence suggests that national protectionist policies largely explain not only resilience of the region against previous crises, but also its vulnerability towards the still ongoing economic crisis.     

Contemporary Irish theatre,the new Playboy controversy,and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the economic crisis on contemporary Irish theatre. More specifically, I contend that the legal controversy surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s second production of Playboy of the Western World: A New Version in 2008 provides a case study of how professional theatre productions that dramatised stories of immigrant empowerment during the Irish economic boom were profoundly inhibited by the bust that followed. Their collaborative version of the new Playboy was widely regarded as Ireland’s most successful intercultural play and a commercial success when it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2007. The subsequent breakdown in their relationship and ensuing legal dispute is more symptomatic of Celtic Tiger Ireland in economic collapse, I suggest, than the content of the play itself, or most other productions mounted in the period. I argue that this dispute did not simply reflect but also reinforced the social effects of the economic crisis, through its prolonged litigation, enormous expense, and especially the missed opportunity that it represented to position the multicultural and migrant themed Playboy within the Irish theatrical mainstream. More broadly, I suggest that the economic crisis has been marked by the disappearance of immigrants from the professional Irish stage, a void which was only partially filled by community theatre productions. A case in point is Adigun and Arambe’s most recent adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), a play which I positively appraise as an example of successful “intercultural re-appropriation”.     

Putting the crisis to work: The real estate sector and London's housing crisis

The idea of ‘crisis’ plays an important role in academic and policy imaginations (Heslop and Ormerod, 2020), particularly since the global financial crisis. Across major western cities, at the same time as policy-makers have had to respond to ‘the (economic) crisis’, many have also experienced intense ‘housing crises’ and the acute divergence of average incomes and house prices. In response, cities such as London have become central sites in debates around housing acquisition by the ultra-wealthy, land value extraction and growing levels of unaffordability. However, much critical geography research on housing crises is state-centred or focused on civil society impacts, with relatively little reflection on the real estate sector and the work that crisis does as a narrative in shaping institutionalised and actor-centred practices. In this paper, we draw on in-depth research with developers, investors, and advisors in London to argue that crisis-driven policy responses have created political risk which is differentially experienced by actors across the sector, with large housebuilders and advisors benefitting whilst smaller niche developers move out. Moreover, we show how consultants, investors and developers have used the crisis situation to create new geographies, products and investor types in the housing market. These, in turn, require regulatory support and demonstrate the inherently political nature of crisis narratives' use. We use the London case to broaden understandings of the impact that conceptualisations of ‘crisis’ have on urban and regional planning practices, and how these influence and shape processes of contemporary urban development.     

An overview of recent research on modern Chinese economic history

China formally adopted the policy of reform and opening up to the outside world in 1978. Since then, both economic practice and economic theory in China have undergone profound changes, and the academic study of modern Chinese economic history has been encouraged to expand its research horizons under the rubric of “liberating the mind and seeking truth in the facts”. A number of important monographs and essays have been produced and the study of modern Chinese economic history has entered a flourishing period. Current research focuses on two major topics: China's New Democratic economy and the planned economy during the period 1949–78; and, China's socialist market economy from 1978–2006. The study of these two areas shows numerous interconnections, points of comparison and causal links. The many and important lessons to be drawn from these studies both exhibit Chinese characteristics and have universal implications.     

Averting a global financial crisis: the US,the IMF,and the Mexican debt crisis of 1976

This article explains the politics and diplomacy of the initial use of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) adjustment program as a tactic in a strategy to avert a possible global banking crisis. Scholars typically date the strategy to the Reagan administration's response to the sovereign debt crises in Eastern Europe and Latin America in the early 1980s. This article demonstrates that the approach originated instead during the 1976 Mexican debt crisis – the first potential postwar default by a developing country that threatened international bank failures. Key US and Mexican officials recognized that an IMF program of currency devaluation and austerity would probably fail in its stated objective of reducing Mexico's balance of payments deficit. Nevertheless, US Treasury and Federal Reserve officials, fearing that a Mexican default might lead to bank failures and subsequent global financial crisis, intervened to an unprecedented degree in the negotiations between the IMF and Mexico. The United States offered direct financial support and worked through diplomatic channels to insist that Mexico accept an IMF adjustment program, as a way of bailing out US banks. Mexican president Luis Echeverría's administration consented to IMF adjustment because officials perceived it as the least politically costly option among a range of alternatives.     

Economic crises in the ASEAN area: types and responses

Southeast Asia, the world region covering the countries of ASEAN, lies at the crossroads between China and India. Since early times it has been part of the global economy, going through cycles of boom and bust at least from the nineteenth century onwards. This essay compares three successive economic crises during the 1880s, 1930s and late 1990s. It shows how different types of crisis reflected as well as produced changes in the connectivity between production factors and institutional arrangements. Whereas the crisis of the 1880s was ‘local’, that of the 1930s was both ‘national’ and ‘delegated global’ and that of the 1990s ‘regional’ in nature. The types of crisis and the ways in which they were handled reflected structural changes in the institutional architecture of the global economy.     

The State Legislature in American History: A Review Essay

Abstract

The author discusses a very rich resource for studying the Great Depression: the Censuses of Manufactures from 1929, 1931, 1933, and 1935. He highlights the strengths and weaknesses of this source in terms of the information available on the schedules and the quality of the data. In terms of information collected, these censuses compare favorably with the modern Census of Manufactures with some limitations. The author also draws on some published studies to argue that the records held at the National Archives are (in general) complete enumerations of the establishments existing at the time. He then conducts tests for the presence of measurement error and finds a limited role.     

Coupling national geo-political economic strategies and the Belt and Road Initiative: The China-Belarus Great Stone Industrial Park

The joint development by Belarus and China of the Great Stone Industrial Park (GSIP) is designed to establish a high-tech industrial zone and an eco-friendly satellite city of Minsk as a key node on the Eurasian Land Bridge linking China with the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union. The development and organization of the GSIP are explained in the light of a coupling of the strategic goals of the two countries in the context of a new Chinese model of external engagement called an emergent geo-political economic culture. These goals include Belarus' desire to reduce its dependence on Russian gas and oil, upgrade and diversify its economy, strengthen its integration with Eurasia and find new partners, by attracting Chinese and other foreign direct investment in the context of China's Going Out and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). An analysis of the roles of national leaders Aliaksandr Lukashenka and Xi Jinping and of different stakeholders in the predominantly top-down design, development and governance of the park reveals the way in which a BRI cooperation platform permits the coupling of Chinese and Belarusian interests and strategies in ways through which each side expects to benefit.     

宪法危机与1919年南北和谈

1919年议和前后南北政府混乱的宪法依据,以及双方各利益集团的不同考虑,凸显出南北议和的一个难点:宪法问题.也正因此导致第二次南北和谈缺乏一个能够统摄各方的中心,并使南北军阀在和谈前期达成的利益妥协不能实现,和谈最终陷于瘫痪.     

Ambivalent desires: State formation and dispossession in the face of climate crisis

In this paper, we analyze the politics, experiences and dynamics of state formation in a particular context of climate crisis. Through the study of the implementation of state-led adaptation and mitigation projects in two rural localities of northern Colombia, we interrogate the ways in which these interventions shape the everyday lives of those who happen to be located in the targeted areas. We found that, in spite of the different goals and particular configurations of the adaptation and mitigation interventions, these climate projects engendered the same contradiction. They promised a resilient and environmentally sound future, but the path towards that future has not been available to everyone. Furthermore, we show that the subjects of climate interventions do not embrace state promises in the same way. Local expectations, desires and engagement with the state are ambivalent and heterogeneous, and cannot be taken as a given. This paper develops these ideas by way of three arguments. First, we argue that exclusion, dispossession and marginality are inherent to the promises of climate mitigation and adaptation in the cases we study in the Colombian Caribbean. Secondly, the goals of state-led adaptation and mitigation programs we study are at odds with the material and social conditions of the areas of implementation. And thirdly, paying attention to the dynamics of state formation in the Colombian Caribbean in relation to climate change challenges common binaries opposing state absence/presence, failure/success, and retreat/return.