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While economic globalization has altered the geography of international migration and introduced an array of new sources and destinations, our understanding of the specific mechanisms that link economic globalization to migration remains limited. In this article, I attempt to extend previous research by undertaking an empirical case study of Mexican migration to the USA. Using a unique dataset, I construct multivariate models to test whether, in the context of economic integration, occupations channel migration between similar sectors of the Mexican and US economies. I focus on the food-processing sector because of its role in the geographic dispersal of Mexican immigration. The results show a strong channelling of Mexican immigration along an occupational line linking the Mexican and US food-processing sectors. The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which ushered in a period of intensive political and economic integration, strengthened this occupational channel. By seeing the changing geography of Mexico-US migration in the context of economic globalization, this study casts light on the micro-level foundations of the globalization-migration nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We empirically investigate whether the persistence of politicians in political institutions affects the innovation activity of firms. We use 12,000 firm-level observations from three waves of the Italian Observatory over Small and Medium Enterprises, and introduce a measure of political persistence defined as the average length of individual political careers in political institutions of Italian municipalities. Using death of politicians as an exogenous source of variation of political persistence, we find a robust negative relation between political persistence and the probability of process innovation. This finding is consistent with the view that political stability may hinder firms' incentive to innovate to maintain their competitiveness, as long as they can extract rents from long-term connections with politicians. ( JEL D22, D72, O31) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the 'food desert' concept has captured the public imagination and spurred public policy efforts in many North American cities, the term has been critiqued by academics for being definitionally and methodologically vague, and for providing an incomplete picture of the complexity of food access. Rather than dismiss the study of urban, inner-city food deserts, however, scholars can study disparities in retail food access through a historical, critical political economy lens to understand underserved retail landscapes as a product of capital formation and rescaling over time. The purpose of this article is to conduct such an analysis, using the case study of a low-income community in Kingston, Ontario. Using historical research and qualitative interviews, the major finding of this analysis is that the physical accessibility of retail food appears to have declined over time in relation to the capitalization of the retail food sector. An imperfect relationship can be outlined over three phases of Canadian urban economic history to suggest that the food desert problem emerged largely in the transition from a decentralized, small-scale, and neighbourhood-embedded retail food industry to the scaled-up, disembedded industry that now dominates the landscape. This industry-level rescaling is contributing to a new urban politics of class and consumption through subtle, everyday activities such as food shopping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that there is a paradox at the heart of Hall's 'Policy Paradigms' framework stemming from the desire to see both state and society as generative of social learning while employing two different logics to explain how such learning takes place: what I term the 'Bayesian' and 'constructivist' versions of the policy paradigms causal story. This creates a paradox as both logics cannot be simultaneously true. However, it is a generative paradox insofar as the power of the policy paradigms framework emerges, in part, from this attempt to straddle these distinct positions, producing an argument that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the second part of the article, I discuss the recent global financial crisis, an area where we should see third-order change, but we do no not. That we do not strengthens the case for the constructivist causal story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voters who perceive the economy to be weak are generally less likely to support the incumbent government. Yet there is a debate over whether all people respond equally to economic shifts or if the state of the economy is more salient for those who feel economically vulnerable. This article examines whether insecure employment situations and employability concerns strengthen responses to the government's economic record. Data from Latin America and Eastern Europe confirm that workers who feel anxious about being fired or who believe it would be difficult to find a new job place significantly greater weight on sociotropic evaluations than do those with more secure employment situations. Thus incumbents who create risks for vulnerable workers are sanctioned, while those who create opportunities are rewarded most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature has shown that the long established link between economic performance and electoral outcomes is conditioned by a country's institutions and government, what is often termed 'clarity of responsibility'. In this article two distinct dimensions of the clarity of the political context are identified: institutional and government clarity. The first captures the formal dispersion of government power, both horizontally and vertically. The second captures the cohesion of the incumbent government. Analysing survey data from 27 European countries, it is shown that voters' ability to hold governments to account, for both the economy and management of public services, is primarily influenced by the extent to which there is an identifiable and cohesive incumbent, whereas formal institutional rules have no direct impact on performance voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W. Arthur Lewis, originario de la isla de Santa Lucía, fue profesor de economía política en varias universidades y trabajó para las Naciones Unidas en el decenio de 1950, tras lo cual continuó el ejercicio de su carrera en la Universidad de Princeton. Fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Economía en 1979, junto con T. W. Schultz, por sus trabajos sobre economía del desarrollo. Su contribución más importante a esta rama de la disciplina, todavía balbuceante en 1954, fue un trabajo publicado en dicho año en el que presenta un modelo simplificado según el cual la economía de los países pobres está dividida en dos sectores, el tradicional y el moderno. El primero comprende la agricultura de subsistencia, el trabajo por cuenta propia y diversas actividades urbanas, y el segundo está constituido por las grandes plantaciones, la agricultura comercial y la industria. Esta dualidad, que se conceptualiza en la actualidad en términos de sector formal e informal, ha perdurado, ya que la transición del sector tradicional al sector moderno, que en aquel entonces se daba por descontado, no ha adoptado la forma esperada. Destacaremos asimismo el pesimismo de Sir Arthur Lewis en relación con la posibilidad de que el comercio internacional sea el motor del crecimiento en los países poco desarrollados. En esto difería de Jan Tinbergen1, como puede verse en el artículo que reproducimos a continuación, en el que Lewis resume las conclusiones de una reunión de economistas convocada por la Oficina Internacional del Trabajo en 1969 con el fin de recabar asesoramiento en cuestiones de investigación para el Programa Mundial del Empleo que acababa de iniciarse. Los economistas reunidos analizaron las posibles causas macroeconómicas del desempleo en los países poco desarrollados: superpoblación, restricciones a las exportaciones, sobrevaluación de la moneda, productividad escasa del trabajo y propensión excesiva a la importación. Las cosas han cambiado bastante desde entonces, pero siguen manteniéndose ciertos elementos en el debate sobre economía y desarrollo, concretamente las cuestiones de los tipos de interés y del papel de los intercambios. Destacaremos asimismo la conclusión de Sir Arthur Lewis de que «la solución del problema, en su mayor parte, depende de la política macroeconómica, y no de expedientes aislados». [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michal Kalecki es un economista polaco cuya contribución a la macroeconomía ha tenido una gran influencia en los economistas de inspiración keynesiana. Tras terminar sus estudios de ingeniería civil en las escuelas politécnicas de Varsovia y Gdansk, comenzó su carrera en el Instituto de Investigación de los Ciclos Empresariales de Varsovia, del cual pasó al Instituto de Estadística de Oxford. Después de trabajar durante un año en la OIT (1945), se incorporó a las Naciones Unidas en Nueva York en donde se encargó de los informes económicos mundiales. Prosiguió su vida profesional en dos entidades de su país: la Academia Polaca de Ciencias y la Escuela Central de Planificación y Estadística. Los trabajos de Kalecki versan sobre la demanda agregada y las teorías de los beneficios, del ciclo económico y de la competencia imperfecta. Su contribución ha tenido una profunda influencia en los economistas keynesianos de Cambridge, así como en la economía postkeynesiana. Suele plantearse incluso la posibilidad de que Kalecki se haya anticipado a la teoría general del Keynes. En el artículo que reproducimos a continuación Michal Kalecki examina la política económica encaminada a mantener el pleno empleo. Su análisis se funda en una presentación contable muy sencilla de los ingresos públicos y en el concepto de producto nacional neto. Utiliza estos instrumentos teóricos para dilucidar cuál sería la política presupuestaria óptima en el Reino Unido y en los Estados Unidos a efectos de lograr el pleno empleo después de la guerra. Kalecki, que ya disfrutaba en 1945 de una fama reconocida gracias a su labor sobre los ciclos económicos, hizo posteriormente una contribución importante a la teoría del crecimiento y el funcionamiento de las economías capitalista y socialista. Analizó asimismo los aspectos políticos y económicos del logro y mantenimiento del pleno empleo en otros escritos de ese período. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En 1935 muchos países ricos sufrían una depresión económica profunda, caracterizada por un desempleo masivo y por un alto índice de deflación. En Suecia, por el contrario, el retroceso había sido menor y la recuperación más rápida, lo cual suscitaba en aquel entonces un interés considerable, como cabe imaginar. Bertil Ohlin, que con anterioridad había preparado informes sobre la depresión mundial y el desempleo en Suecia (y que más tarde recibió el Premio Nobel de Economía), analiza en el artículo que presentamos a continuación las causas de la recuperación de este país. En resumidas cuentas, Suecia había aplicado un modelo keynesiano antes de Keynes, en parte gracias a la contribución de Ohlin al análisis de la política macroeconómica. La clave fue una combinación de flexibilidad del tipo de cambio, de política monetaria encaminada a bajar los tipos de interés real y a alentar la inversión, de política fiscal expansionista con empréstitos públicos para financiar déficits sustanciales, de obras públicas productivas y de políticas estatales de apoyo a la agricultura, combinación que contribuyó a reducir el desempleo, a aumentar la inversión y a evitar que los ingresos disminuyeran de forma importante. Ohlin examina en el artículo las medidas capaces de contrarrestar los problemas de empleo y desempleo, y afirma que es muy importante que el Estado y las administraciones locales tengan preparada una política económica adecuada que aplicar en caso de necesidad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amartya Sen fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Economía en 1998. Con una obra que se sitúa en el punto de encuentro entre economía y filosofía, se trata sin duda de uno de los autores más creativos del momento presente. Abordó la cuestión del empleo en un libro que se ha convertido en referencia obligada titulado Employment, technology and development (Empleo, tecnología y desarrollo) que había preparado por encargo de la OIT en el marco del Programa Mundial del Empleo en 1975 y que sirvió de base para un artículo de la Revista (vol. 92, núm. 1) publicado ese mismo año: «Empleo, instituciones y tecnología. Algunos problemas de política». Su análisis de las funciones esenciales del empleo, a saber, el reconocimiento social, los ingresos y la producción, ha sido una contribución definitiva a la comprensión del papel del trabajo en la vida moderna. La Revista publicó un segundo artículo de este autor en 1997 (vol. 116, núm. 2), titulado «Desigualdad y desempleo en la Europa contemporánea». En él aborda concretamente los problemas que el desempleo genera, los cuales no se limitan a la pérdida de ingresos que supone, compensable mediante prestaciones sociales. El desempleo merma asimismo las calificaciones de la persona que lo sufre, así como su motivación, su equilibrio psíquico y su vida familiar, su lugar en la sociedad y su contribución ciudadana. Tiene además efectos aún más insidiosos: tiende a acentuar las desigualdades entre mujeres y hombres y entre diferentes comunidades étnicas, obstaculiza el cambio y la innovación tecnológica y empuja prematuramente a la jubilación a personas perfectamente aptas aún para trabajar. Su costo social es, pues, descomunal. El autor compara las posiciones europea y americana en relación con el empleo y aborda la cuestión de la responsabilidad individual. La reducción del desempleo masivo que sufre Europa no solo es imperativa, sino también una condición previa al ejercicio de dicha responsabilidad. En apoyo de esta tesis, el autor concluye el artículo con una advertencia contra una idea muy en boga en aquel momento: antes de instar a las personas desempleadas a volver al trabajo en nombre de la responsabilidad individual con incentivos diversos (entre ellos coercitivos), es necesario que existan suficientes empleos. La Revista publicó un tercer artículo de Amartya Sen en 2000 (vol. 119, núm. 2), titulado «Trabajo y derechos», que es el que reproducimos a continuación. En dicho año, la OIT lanza su concepto de trabajo decente para todos, materia obligada para todo el que se niege a disociar economía y filosofía moral. En dicho artículo el autor define cuatro condiciones para garantizar un trabajo decente en el contexto de la globalización. La primera es analizar los diversos problemas que se plantean conjuntamente, desde una perspectiva universal, en lugar de concentrarse en los problemas de ciertos grupos de trabajadores. La segunda supone el reconocimiento de los derechos generales que trascienden el orden jurídico. La tercera consiste en abordar el trabajo desde una perspectiva amplia, a un tiempo económica, política y social, que tenga en cuenta los valores democráticos. La cuarta es la exigencia de superar los límites de las relaciones «internacionales» adoptando un enfoque verdaderamente mundial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent evidence has linked illegal peat and forest fires in Indonesia to commercial oil palm plantations. Fire is the most cost-efficient way to clear land for planting, but these fires release smoke causing transboundary haze pollution. The countries worst affected by the haze are neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore. Malaysian and Singaporean investors control more than two-thirds of the Indonesian oil palm plantation sector and they have been implicated in the fires alongside local plantations. Using information obtained from interviews with individuals linked to the sector, this paper aims to explain why these companies continue to burn despite the dire consequences of the haze. It identifies patronage politics as a common business culture in Southeast Asia, and argues that because these Malaysian and Singaporean investors are already familiar with patronage practices at home, they have easily inserted themselves into existing patronage networks in Indonesia. Hence, these companies enjoy the protection of their Indonesian patrons during their operations. Furthermore, in a business atmosphere defined by patronage politics, clients are largely motivated by material gain. This explains why Malaysian and Singaporean investors continue to clear land by fire in the interests of cost-efficiency, despite their home countries suffering the worst effects of haze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Running through Bernard Crick's In Defence of Politics is an implicit faith in the ability of liberal democracy to deliver progress. From the perspective of 1962 such optimism seems well founded. After the years of post war austerity there had been more than a decade of steady growth, the middle class was expanding fast providing unprecedented levels of absolute social mobility (more benign and less complicated than the relative social mobility which today's politicians disingenuously claim to pursue). Matthew Taylor explores the case for 'social politics'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1962, the late Professor Sir Bernard Crick published his seminal work In Defence of Politics. Fifty years on, formal political processes have never been in greater need of defending. In this article, former Home Secretary David Blunkett MP argues that in order to defend politics we need to change the way in which we 'do' our politics. In a 21st century response to Professor Crick's challenge to defend the role of politics in providing a counterweight to the financial markets and economic imperialism, Blunkett considers how it is possible to renew political democracy as a force for progressive change. The last five years of political and financial turmoil have seen politics smeared and even, in the case of Greece and Italy, elected governments removed and replaced by technocrats. With the power of government behind the people, it would be possible to foster a whole new spirit of seeing the political process as a way of organising, advising and yes funding a demand for something better from big institutions both public and private. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does rural China's political economy determine the motivations and constraints that drive small farmers and agribusiness companies into contract farming and shape its practice and impact? This paper identifies three distinctive features of contract farming in China - varied impact on rural inequality, unstable contractual relations and lack of competitiveness with other alternatives - and proposes tentative explanations linked to three features in rural China's political economy: strong collective institutions, active state support for agriculture and strong domestic markets. The recent turn in China's agrarian transition towards vertical integration of agriculture with industries is, however, undermining these conditions and may move China towards more convergence with other countries. Studying contract farming in China's unique political economy context shows not only how variations in the political economy can alter its practice and impact, but also how it needs to be evaluated in comparison with competing alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For contemporary constitutional theory, the key challenge posed by globalization undermines the traditional link between constitutionalism and the state: in response to multi-level governance, theories of constitutionalism beyond the state have been advanced. This focus on levels obscures more fundamental epistemological questions raised by globalization about the nature of constitutionalism itself. Critical analysis of three leading schools of constitutionalism beyond the state - supranational, societal, and new constitutionalism - highlights their shared assumptions with state-based thought regarding the separation between economics and politics, and the necessarily hegemonic character of constitutionalism. However, globalization intensifies critique of these assumptions, and questions their translation to the transnational context. An alternative scholarly fault line to the state/non-state cleavage emerges between working within and transcending the politics of constitutional knowledge produced during the nation-state era. A broader globalization perspective reveals the extent to which such processes of constitutional rethinking are under way through developments in the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective We investigate whether voters in communities with high rates of foreclosure will find it more difficult to participate in elections, given social disruptions associated with home loss in their neighborhoods. Methods We estimate the community-level effects of foreclosure on turnout rates in California ZIP Codes during the 2008 presidential election and an individual-level turnout model using housing data merged with California voter data. Results Foreclosure rates are associated with reduced participation independent of local economic conditions, rates of education, ethnic composition, or individual partisanship, age, and habitual participation. Conclusion Given the relationship between the foreclosure crisis and political participation, this research suggests the need for further investigation. We are especially interested in the potential that housing foreclosure further exacerbates ethnic and economic inequality due to the preponderance of subprime loans, distressed mortgages, and foreclosures in communities of color and lower socioeconomic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substantial prior literature has established that subjects in laboratory experiments are typically willing to sacrifice their own well being to make financial allocations more equal among participants. We test the applicability of this result in an environment that contains some of the key contextual issues that are usually excluded from more abstract games, but which might be important in situations involving income redistribution. Our general finding is that votes for a redistributive tax are almost entirely in accordance with self-interest: above-average earners vote for low tax rates and below-average earners vote for high tax rates. A measure of subjects' preferences for fairness or equality, their self-reported economic ideology, is not directly related to their voting behavior in this experiment. Because the ideology measure should be correlated with any intrinsic preferences regarding inequality aversion, we conclude that any preferences for fairness or inequality that our subjects possess are not strong enough to overcome self-interest in this context. We do, however, find evidence for a possible indirect effect of ideology on choice behavior in that more conservative subjects tend to be more responsive to their self-interest than the more liberal subjects. ( JEL C90, D63) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does anthropology have to offer for making sense of the events that have come to be known as the 'Arab Spring'? In this article, I use this question to organize my discussion of the prominent scholarly conversations occurring in cultural anthropology for the year 2011. The topics I consider in this review are the critical study of secularism and liberalism; affect, intimacy, and care as registers of politics and economy; space, place, and time; and indigeneity. I will suggest that last year's publications, while by no means anticipating such revolutionary transformations, do offer us a rich body of conceptual approaches and methodological innovations for productively engaging the emergent conceptual and worldly horizons being associated with the 'Arab Spring.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution discusses Ron Martin's Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography, 'Rethinking Regional Path Dependence: Beyond Lock-in to Evolution'. The lecture offered original ideas on how to avoid some of the pitfalls associated with path dependence theories and the equilibristic understanding of the temporality of economic change. This contribution addresses the question of co-evolution of the economic and the political in regional and local industrial evolution. It questions the conception of temporality that seems implicit in the framework. It is suggested that the notion of punctuated co-evolution may be a way forwards, avoiding some of the difficulties in Martin's model. The contribution concludes by discussing the analytical limits of path dependence models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this contribution is to respond to the three preceding critiques of my Roepke Lecture on 'Rethinking Regional Path Dependence: Beyond Lock-in to Evolution'. Each critique raises some pertinent and challenging issues: specifically that Marxist regional political economy is a more powerful perspective with which to 'take history seriously'; that I should have given due recognition to the idea of 'punctuated evolution'; and that my attempt to revise and extend the concept of path dependence has ontological problems. I welcome these commentaries, as they contribute to the very debate that my Roepke Lecture was intended to initiate. But I argue that these critiques are themselves contestable, and that none of them undermines the main thrust of that lecture. My aim in the latter was to suggest that we need to widen and revise the concept of path dependence if it is to function as a an evolutionary concept, to set it free from the overly restrictive and conservative interpretation (of 'lock-in') that it has all too often been given in economic-geographic applications. I defend that aim here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Max Weber's concept of routinization offers a useful framework for understanding the relationship between political economy and the organization of religious movements. Here, we apply this concept to a comparison of Hopewell and Mississippian, two of the most important religious movements in the precolonial Eastern Woodlands. We focus on two archaeological contexts in particular-Mound 25 at the Hopewell site and Mound C at Etowah-to illustrate how Weber's concept allows for a more nuanced comparison than concepts associated with a more traditional neoevolutionary logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides comments on the controversies involving Germany's Bundesbank and Great Britain's Bank of England. Topics discussed include pressure on European nations to modernize their financial institutions due to the proposed single currency in the region, the need for the Bundesbank to surrender some power to Europe and the Bank of England's need to regain some power over the use to which money it nominally controls is actually put.

Remarkably, the most serious financial crisis in living memory has had few political consequences. Diane Coyle argues that one of the reasons is a method of calculating GDP that overstates the value of the financial sector to the UK economy, helping to shield it from sensible reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No abstract is available for this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The table of contents for the April-June 2016 issue of the journal "Political Quarterly" is presented.

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including political economy, depressions and financial crisis.

This paper reviews changing contemporary approaches to geographies of incarceration, the penal system, and the institution of the prison. Firstly, it suggests a propensity to position spaces of imprisonment within thematics of containment and exclusion, which removes from consideration the particular contextual issues of reform and rehabilitation. By highlighting emerging literature within and beyond the discipline, which focuses upon both the development of the prison as a purposeful form of punishment and the complex interlinkages between prison and society, I have noted geography's tendency to concentrate upon political economy analyses, with other disciplines providing a different register of interest. This paper concludes by calling for intervention from the repertoire of cultural geography with such things as performance, media, embodiment and spectacle, to open up the political at a more 'personal' level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]