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This document contains abstracts of papers presented at an academic conference. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to economics, history, and social development. Each paper presents empirical evidence and analysis to shed light on specific phenomena or historical events. The research is conducted using different methodologies and data sources, providing valuable insights into these complex subjects. The summaries provide a brief overview of each paper's main findings and contribute to the understanding of various social and economic phenomena. [Extracted from the article]

Miguel Antonio Caro is known as one of the most lucid conservative thinkers of nineteenth-century Latin America. His antiliberal thinking came to define what it meant to be a Catholic man of letters in Colombia and beyond. Today, he is mostly remembered for his work on linguistics, Latin translations, and the 1886 Colombian Constitution. However, Caro was also the most recalcitrant defender of paper money of his time. In press articles, he developed what can be described as a Hispanic Catholic theory of monetary signs. While he is often portrayed as an anti-modern ideologist, the financial dimensions of his writings reveal a very different picture. Vindicating a Spanish tradition of currency debasement that went back to Alfonso the Wise, the Colombian ultramontane conciliated his traditionalism with capitalism's global accumulation drive by equating paper money with God's infinite gift: the divine grace. He hence proposed a Catholic view of capitalist modernity that rejected the "evils" of utilitarianism but embraced Colombia's agro-exporter economic model as part of God's providential design. In his political-religious project, money is thus imagined as a key tool of the Christian oikonomia , that is, God's government of earthly affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Civitas - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of EDIPUCRS - Editora Universitaria da PUCRS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Cambodia is one of the first two countries that adopted a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) in October 2020. The design of the CBDC, called the Bakong, is a bit unique. We find a few design flaws that could potentially damage the central bank and then the Cambodian economy as a whole. We show some key statistics from our own survey in 2022 to support our arguments. The Bakong is offered in two currencies, the Khmer Riel (KHR) and the US dollar (USD), as Cambodia has been highly dollarized. We discuss theoretical predictions for the CBDC based on three kinds of substitutes: paper money, bank deposits, and foreign currencies. The third one is specific to the Bakong. Unlike a typical local currency CBDC, the USD Bakong may substitute for the KHR more. Moreover, it has been announced that the retail Bakong is legally not a liability of the central bank, but from the viewpoint of the underlying technology and economics, it is a central bank liability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews Bram Büscher's book The Truth about Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-truth Politics and Platform Capitalism (2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Review of Radical Political Economics is calling for papers for a special issue on climate change and capitalism. The journal is seeking manuscripts that provide a range of critical political economic perspectives on the topic, as well as a variety of methods, approaches, and geographic focuses. They particularly encourage submissions from climate activists, scholars in the Global South, early career researchers, and scholars from historically excluded groups. The journal provides a list of possible subjects for the special issue, including theoretical and empirical interventions, historical or contemporary analyses, critiques of economic analysis, and models of climate justice and anti-capitalist struggles. Submissions must adhere to the journal's guidelines and will undergo peer review. [Extracted from the article]

This contribution examines Sismondi's money, banking and credit theories and explores his public debt analysis (1803–1838) to connect the instability of market economy with his vision of the social contract. A detailed analysis is offered of the evolution in Sismondi's opinion on the nature of money and the banking system, and the part it plays in his trade cycle theory. Sismondi's monetary thought is then contextualised with a discussion of his policy-mix in relation to the Napoleonic war financing in Continental Europe. Connections with the upcoming flood of literature in England on the bullion controversy are also offered. Remarks are then suggested on the progressive emergence of an "art of public borrowing" according to which the people who provide the money also control the government. Finally, some reflections are proposed on the explicit connection established by Sismondi between budget deficits, the (ab-)use of inconvertible paper money and the partial collapse of the social contract initiated by banks and the governments using it. The entrenched instability of a market economy (discussed in an earlier article) is reinforced by the banking/credit system that works along similar line than any wealth-producing firm. Hence, thanks to the financial system, wealth does grow faster but at the expense of social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Recherches Sociographiques is the property of Recherches Sociographiques and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the Saudi government's refusal to introduce paper currency until 1956 against the backdrop of two developments: First, the composition of a number of treatises written by Muslim scholars in the late Ottoman and early Saudi Hijaz and Najd permitting use of the medium; second, the unsuccessful effort by several Muslim entrepreneurs to create formal banking facilities in the Hijaz between the 1920s and 1950s. Throughout these decades, as the Saudi regime repeatedly claimed that paper currency violated Islamic orthodoxy because it was a bearer of interest, these scholars argued forcefully for the medium's legitimacy by mobilizing the legal sources of their particular school of law (madhhab). This contrast reflects how the religious politics of the kingdom departed from both Ottoman precedents and other contemporary Islamic contexts in which paper currency was widely assimilated via the assent of Muslim legal scholars. The regime's tepid support for, or outright obstruction of, the creation of formal banking facilities that issued paper currency further exacerbated this divergence. In the end, because of such inconsistency it required technocratic institutions like the IMF and ARAMCO to introduce paper currency and a formal banking system into the kingdom from the mid-1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the nexus between the roots of modern capitalism and the rise of the first networks of pedestrian couriers known as scarsella , arguing that they both emerged simultaneously during the thirteenth century in the context of the Champagne fairs. This claim is based upon the premise that the essential feature of the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages—the rise of the sedentary merchant—would have been literally unthinkable without the establishment of reliable communication channels and the mastering of paper manufacturing in northern Italy. Paper represented a light and affordable medium that revolutionized business by enabling merchants to carry out not only long-distance communication but also extensive record-keeping. However, this study proposes that the earliest public postal operations in Europe were driven not by merchants' desire to conduct epistolary exchange but by the need of the commercial banks to execute long-distance money transfers through bills of exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Condition of the Working Class in England (hereafter, CWCE) by Friedrich Engels is a masterpiece of urban research not only for its explicit descriptions of the living and working conditions of members of the Victorian-era working class and their effects on health but also its insights into the sources of these conditions through a political economy analysis. For Engels, the capitalist economic system, with the support of the state apparatus, prematurely sickened and killed men, women and children in its unrestrained pursuit of profits. Our reading of CWCE in 2023 concludes that Engels identified virtually every social determinant of health now found in contemporary discourse with his insights into how their quality and distribution shape health clearly relevant to present-day Canada. Revisiting CWCE directs our attention to how the same economic and political forces that sickened and killed members of the English working class in 1845 now do so in present-day Canada. Engels's insights also suggest means of responding to these forces. We place these findings within Derrida's concept of spectre and Rainey and Hanson's concept of trace to show how ideas from the past can inform the present., (© 2023 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness.)

Focusing on the construction of London's West India Docks in 1802, I argue that this project established a feedback loop with conditions of production in the Caribbean. Through an analysis of committee minutes, letters, parliamentary papers and visual art, I move beyond economic accounts of slavery's impact to demonstrate how geographies of security and surveillance—first developed on the sugar plantation—were imported into the design and function of London's port. As such, I argue that London's docks produced a geography of segregation which offers a unique insight into the workings of racial capitalism and its exploitation of group‐differentiated vulnerabilities. Positioning my discussion alongside London's contemporary landscape, I excavate Britain's repressed memories of slavery to illustrate how they still scar the urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic and social transformation of China during the past 40 years is without precedent in human history. While the economic transformation was extensively studied, social transformation was not. In this paper, we use for the first time harmonized household surveys covering the period 1988-2013 to study the changes in the characteristics of the richest 5 percent of China's urban population. We find that it changed from being composed of high government officials, clerical staff, and workers in 1988 to professionals and small and large business owners in 2013. The educational level of the top group increased substantially. Membership in CCP has a positive (albeit small) effect on one's income but is particularly valuable to large business owners., (© 2021 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

The problems of digitalization in the higher education system are considered in the paper; modern digital tools as the mechanisms for enhancing the financial autonomy of universities in Ukraine are revealed. The authors assume that the main direction of digitalization and development of digital technologies is the creation of digital infrastructures (e-infrastructures), which provide primary processing, storage and data exchange, distributed computing, and automated analytics of a higher education institution activity. However, it is noticed that in the digital world data maturity – the compliance of data with the requirements of the mentioned digital infrastructures – is essential. Digital tools for the financial sector of the economy are commonly called FinTech. This term is used to describe the technological innovations in financial services, which can lead to the emergence of new business models, applications, processes, and products; they also may have a corresponding material impact on financial markets, institutions, and ways of providing financial services. The authors are based on the main provisions of institutionalism and neo-institutionalism, financial capitalism as the theoretical foundations of modern economic relations of universities. The author's definition of the institutional autonomy of a university as an institutional unit of the modern economy, as well as the main mechanisms and instruments for regulating the limits of their institutional autonomy, are proposed. In this context, the authors describe the main FinTech technologies, which have significant prospects as components of the mechanisms of Ukrainian universities' financial autonomy, i.e.: cloud technologies, artificial intelligence technologies, the internet of things, peer-to-peer transaction technologies, digital banking, and blockchain. Analyzing the features of digital financial technologies, much attention is paid to the blockchain, in particular, smart contracts as the most accessible for Ukrainian universities in the near future. The perspective directions of introducing blockchain technology in the digital systems of Ukrainian universities are outlined. It is noted that digitalization in the university sphere stipulates establishing mandatory rules (standards), the creation and functioning of digital technologies, which act as institutional constraints to almost all the proposed mechanisms and instruments of university institutional autonomy, including the university funding mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]