Outsourcing the Business of Development: The Rise of For-profit Consultancies in the UK Aid Sector

While much attention has been paid to the ways in which the private sector is now embedded within the field of development, one group of actors — for-profit development consultancies and contractors, or service providers — has received relatively little attention. This article analyses the growing role of for-profit consultancies and contractors in British aid delivery, which has been driven by two key trends: first, the outsourcing of managerial, audit and knowledge-management functions as part of efforts to bring private sector approaches and skills into public spending on aid; and second, the reconfiguration of aid spending towards markets and the private sector, and away from locally embedded, state-focused aid programming. The authors argue that both trends were launched under New Labour in the early 2000s, and super-charged under successive Conservative governments. The resulting entanglement means that the policies and practices of the UK government's aid agencies, and the interests and forms of for-profit service providers, are increasingly mutually constitutive. Amongst other implications, this shift acts to displace traditional forms of contestation and accountability of aid delivery.     

Making EMU a success

One year has elapsed since the European Monetary Union was created between eleven of the fifteen European Union member states. During 1999 the economic prospects for euroland have dramatically improved, with projected growth in 2000 and 2001 well above earlier expectations. This article argues that the recovery, by itself, cannot solve Europe's unemployment problem, neither can monetary union per se, despite its substantial benefits. The authors discuss these benefits and assess the current economic situation in Europe. They recommend a bold, coordinated approach, a growth pact for Europe, based on the three complementary legs: substantial tax cuts; an accommodating monetary policy; and structural reform. They discuss the conditions in which such a pact would be successful.     

William Rufus: myth and reality

The commonly accepted view of the reign of William II (1087–1100) is a political myth, primarily the work of Eadmer, who depicted the king as the villain against whom St Anselm strove to impose the revolutionary Gregorian reform programme in England. Henry I, moreover, denigrated his brother's regime as a cover for furthering William's harsh but constructive policies. Eadmer's writings were quarried by subsequent twelfth-century writers in the mainstream of the English monastic historical tradition, who added their own literary embellishments. Nineteenth-century historians uncritically accepted these accounts and Henry I's gloss on the reign. They then contributed moral judgements of their own, which passed without qualification into modern secondary works.This paper re-evaluates William II's political and governmental achievements, and his ecclesiastical policy. His character is considered in the light of recent work on twelfth-century intellectual and psychological attitudes, and the accounts of more favourable chroniclers. It is concluded that the king developed his father's strong policies in every direction with considerable success, making possible the more publicized but essentially imitative work of Henry I. William's expansion and consolidation of national frontiers, his legal and financial developments, and his maintenance of royal control over the Church are revealed under the distortions of ecclesiastical and Henrician historiography.     

The institutionalisation of ‘colonial geography’ in France, 1880-1940

Between 1880 and 1900, the conjunction of the development of higher education in France with the renewal of colonial expansion resulted in the creation of the ‘colonial sciences’. ‘Colonial geography’ played a key role in the development of these new disciplines, alongside ‘colonial history’, ‘ethnology’, ‘colonial economics and legislation’ and ‘colonial psychology’. This paper considers the social history of this field and of the institutions in which colonial geography was formed. This involves examination of the study of the teaching of ‘colonial geography’ in the universities and French grandes écoles, the gradual professionalisation of scholarship, and the increase in the number of doctoral theses and book publications, which all serve to demonstrate the vigour of the subdiscipline, leading to the emergence of a veritable research community. Under the Third Republic, ‘colonial geography’ in the universities was characterised by great diversity, irreducible to a single or homogenous ‘colonial discourse’.     

A SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL AUTOREGRESSIVE LOCAL ESTIMATION FOR THE PARIS HOUSING MARKET

ABSTRACT This original study examines the potential of a spatiotemporal autoregressive Local (LSTAR) approach in modeling transaction prices for the housing market in inner Paris. We use a data set from the Paris Region notary office (Chambre des notaires d’Île‐de‐France) which consists of approximately 250,000 transactions units between the first quarter of 1990 and the end of 2005. We use the exact X–Y coordinates and transaction date to spatially and temporally sort each transaction. We first choose to use the STAR approach proposed by Pace et al., 1998 . This method incorporates a spatiotemporal filtering process into the conventional hedonic function and attempts to correct for spatial and temporal correlative effects. We find significant estimates of spatial dependence effects. Moreover, using an original methodology, we find evidence of a strong presence of both spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the model. It suggests that spatial and temporal drifts in households socio‐economic profiles and local housing market structure effects are certainly major determinants of the price level for the Paris Housing Market.