Where Have All the Realists Gone?

Book reviewed in this article:
Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the "American Century."     

Government and the economy in Japan: the Japanese model of development

Craig Freedman (ed). Economic Reform in Japan: can the Japanese Change? Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, in association with the Centre for Japanese Economic Studies, Macquarie University, Australia, 2001. xii, 231 pp. A$55.00, hardcover.

Dengjian Jin. The Dynamics of Knowledge Regimes: technology, Culture and Competitiveness in the USA and Japan. London and New York: Continuum, 2001. xiv, 321 pp. £65.00/US$89.95, hardcover.

Yoshiro Miwa, Kiyohiko G. Nishimura and J. Mark Ramseyer (eds). Distribution in Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. x, 212 pp. £45.00, hardcover.

Makoto Ohtsu and Tomio Imanari. Inside Japanese Business: a Narrative History, 1960–2000. Armonk and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2002. xxviii, 459 pp. US$29.95, paper.

Michael E. Porter, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Mariko Sakakibara. Can Japan Compete? Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000. xi, 208 pp. £19,99, hardcover.

Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura (eds). The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. xvii, 261 pp. £29.50, hardcover.

Malcolm Trevor, Japan: restless Competitor. The Pursuit of Economic Nationalism. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001. xxv, 274 pp. £45.00, hardcover.     

Zukunft Ruhr 2030 Regionalstrategien der Wirtschaft in einer europ?ischen Metropolregion

 Regionale Entwicklungsstrategien werden in der Regel ohne substanzielle Beteiligung der Wirtschaft entwickelt. Das war im Projekt „Zukunft Ruhr 2030“ anders. Hier hat der „Initiativkreis Ruhrgebiet“, die Vereinigung gro?er Unternehmen in der Metropolregion Ruhr, Entwicklungsperspektiven für die Region aus Sicht der Wirtschaft entworfen. Sechs führende Unternehmensberatungen haben in Zusammenarbeit mit Experten aus Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft verschiedene Themenfelder untersucht, eine Vision entwickelt und daraus eine Entwicklungsstrategie für die kommenden Jahre abgeleitet.     

The decline and shifting geography of violence in Russia’s North Caucasus, 2010-2016

Abstract

A spatial analysis of the geography of insurgency in the North Caucasus of Russia from 1999 through the end of 2016, focused on the period since 2010, corroborates other work on the incidence of violence in the region. A sharp drop in the absolute number of conflict events over the past half-decade occurred as violence diffused from Chechnya in the mid-2000s and is attributable to a range of domestic and international factors. Domestically, the decline is broadly linked to the securitization of the region around the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the return to the use of the Kremlin power vertical as a system of political management after an interlude focused on economic development as a mitigation strategy, and the wider adoption of harsh management tactics at the regional and republic scales. Internationally, potential insurgents have left Russia to fight in the Middle East and Ukraine. Using a conflict-event data-set (N = 18,960) from August 1999 through the end of 2016 and focusing on the period since the creation of the North Caucasus Federal District in January 2010, the paper identifies a set of notable trends within the decline and shift in violence. Key findings include a percentage increase in arrests carried out by Russian security services, a decline in retaliation across conflict actors, and the failure of federal subsidies to contribute to declines in violence in the region. The long-term prospects for continued insurgency in the North Caucasus, specifically in light of the collapse of the Islamic State and Russia’s domestic challenges, remain uncertain and should acknowledge the recent decline in violence in the region.     

TESTING FOR SPATIAL EQUILIBRIUM USING HAPPINESS DATA

Happiness data are rarely used in regional and urban analysis, but it is a prime data set for testing the assumption of spatial equilibrium, the key assumption in the field of urban economics. In this paper, we explore the relationship between regional happiness and one‐year lagged change in population growth rates for the nine census regions in the United States using data on reported well‐being from National Opinion Research Center's annual General Social Survey. We observe that, while there is evidence of spatial disequilibrium during recessions and in the long run, happier regions generally experience higher population growth rates indicating a movement (or tendency) toward spatial equilibrium.