Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Political Economy

"Ireland Now" is an accessible guide to understanding how Ireland and the Irish people have changed during the past fifteen years. Largely as a result of the country's rapidly expanding economy, Ireland has been transformed from one of the poorest to one of the richest countries in the European Union.William Flanagan uses personal, first-hand stories from a wide range of Irish citizens, including the elderly, farmers, people in small towns and rural areas, and new immigrants, to illustrate how various segments of the population are coping with a shifting social landscape.Flanagan...

Going beyond the usual state-centric approach to the study of the politics of neoliberal reform, Moises Arce emphasizes the importance of understanding the interaction between state reformers and collective actors in society. In Market Reform in Society he helpfully focuses our attention on how various societal groups are affected by different types of reform and how their responses in turn affect the state's subsequent pursuit of reform.

As a country characterized by strong state autonomy and widespread disintegration of civil society and representative institutions during...

Understanding development in Latin America today requires both an awareness of the major political and economic changes that have produced a new agenda for social policy in the region and an appreciation of the need to devise better conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing the social impact of these changes. Using as a reference point the issues and theories that dominated social science research on Latin America in the period 1960-80, this volume contributes to "rethinking development" by examining the historical events that accounted for the erosion or demise of once-dominant...

The new poverty is about the economic fall of individuals and countries who used to be affluent and who once dreamed that their affluence would go on forever. It is about the experience of free-falling, without a parachute and without much of a safety net. The new poverty is about people who lose their jobs when their company downsizes. It is about people whose hours of employment are cut in half when the work runs out. And it is about couples who separate, thereby plunging one of them--and probably their children--into a low income level that they had never anticipated.

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What do the trickster Rabbit, slave descendants, off-the-books economies, and French citizens have to do with each other? Plenty, says Katherine Browne in her anthropological investigation of the informal economy in the Caribbean island of Martinique. She begins with a question: Why, after more than three hundred years as colonial subjects of France, did the residents of Martinique opt in 1946 to integrate fully with France, the very nation that had enslaved their ancestors? The author suggests that the choice to decline sovereignty reflects the same clear-headed opportunism that defines...

Rural Development in Eurasia and the Middle East: Land Reform, Demographic Change, and Environmental Constraints

The security environment of Northeast Asia is increasingly affected by developments in the Russian Far East, including a longstanding economic crisis, changes in Russia's military policies, and the devolution of power to regional governments. Continuing poverty in the Russian Far East, the pervasiveness of organized crime, and weak state authority have provided a fertile breeding ground for illicit activities that may prove harmful to Russia's Pacific neighbors. Hopes that resource development and integration into the Asia-Pacific economy would fuel regional recovery have been frustrated...