From Idealism to Realism: Women,Feminism and Empowerment in Nicaraguan Tailoring Co-operatives

Co-operatives have been widely promoted as the ideal type of project for women. Because of the focus on income earning, they have been seen as less threatening than more explicit attempts to organize feminist consciousness-raising groups. Based on field research conducted in 1988, this article discusses the experience of women in the Nicaraguan tailoring co-operatives. After the 1979 Revolution, these were set up on a large scale as part of a wider economic policy and grassroots political mobilization. After an initial period of expansion in which many women benefited both in improved income and access to training and management experience, the co-operatives found themselves in serious difficulty by 1988. It is argued that even without the wider economic crisis in Nicaragua, they would have faced serious problems without extensive and probably unsustainable state support. Although co-operative employment has considerable potential, the Nicaraguan case highlights the need for new thinking on ways to resolve basic tensions between economic efficiency and worker participation. It also casts doubt on their viability as a development alternative for women, without specific attention to basic gender inequalities.     

Bronze Age Globalisation and Eurasian Impacts on Later Jōmon Social Change

Journal of World Prehistory - From northern China, millet agriculture spread to Korea and the Maritime Russian Far East by 3500–2700 BC. While the expansion of agricultural societies across...     

Representing Structural Change in U.S. Migration Patterns

This paper focuses on the identification of three sets of relationships exhibited by a time series of age-specific national migration rates and multiregional transition probability matrices: the relationship across time for the same age group, as defined by period (temporal) transformation coefficients or matrices; the relationships across age at a particular moment in time, as defined by age transformation coefficients or matrices; and the relationships across time and age, as defined by cohort transformation coefficients or matrices. Given any two of these relationships one can solve for the third. This feature of age-period-cohort relationships has a practical application in the development of improved methods for representing structural change in migration patterns over time and for indirectly estimating migration patterns using inadequate data.     

Explaining A Paradox: The Alberta-California Natural Gas Trade Dispute

For over 3 years the Alberta government and the California Public Utilities Commission engaged in a bitter dispute over the future of the Alberta-California natural gas trade. This article examines how both sides sought to use their regulatory authority to control the substance of gas trade restructuring. It assesses the dispute as an exercise in deregulatory policymaking and suggests the need for increased study of the role and motivations of subnational regulatory actors.     

Inward investment and economic development in Poland

This paper summarizes results of a research project funded by the Overseas Development Administration of the UK Government. Its aims were to explore the nature and extent of foreign direct investment in Poland, and to assess the extent of integration of such investment with the indigenous economy. The research involved interviews with Polish government ministries, banks, development agencies, inward investors and indigenous firms. It concludes that there are numerous financial and technical obstacles to indigenous business development. The majority of inward investors aim to serve the Polish and other Central and Eastern European markets rather than simply selling cheaply produced products to the West. Moreover, most have already developed significant local sourcing from Polish suppliers.