Political institutions and the development of telecommunications

It has traditionally been argued that the development of telecommunications infrastructure is dependent on the quality of countries' political institutions. We estimate the effect of political institutions on the diffusion of three telecommunications services and find it to be much smaller in cellular telephony than in the others. By evaluating the importance of institutions for technologies rather than for industries, we reveal important growth opportunities for developing countries and offer policy implications for alleviating differences between countries in international telecommunications development. Keywords: Political constraints, telecommunications, GMM, economic development. JEL codes: O1, O3.

The Experience of European Integration and the Potential for Integration in South America

The experience of the European Union is the most significant and far-reaching among all attempts at regional integration. It is, therefore, the most likely to provide some lessons for those world regions that are just beginning this complex process. In turn, the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) and the Andean Community (CAN) are among the regional integration projects that have reached the greatest level of formal accomplishment after the EU. MERCOSUR is a customs union that aspires to become a common market, while avowing the commitment to advance towards political integration. For its part, CAN is a customs union that has already developed supranational institutions such as a Commission, a Parliament and a Court of Justice. In both cases, however, words have progressively tended to wander far from deeds. One reason underlying this phenomenon may be a misunderstanding of the European experience with integration. In this article, we discuss the theories that have been developed to account for integration in Europe and may prove useful to understand integration elsewhere and put forward a set of lessons that could be drawn from the European experience. Subsequently, we introduce a description of the experience of integration in South America and reflect (critically) on how the theories and lessons drawn from the EU could be applied to this region –and beyond.

Rosca participation in Benin: a commitment issue

In the light of first-hand data from a Beninese urban household survey in Cotonou, we investigate several motives aiming to explain participation in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations. We provide anecdotal pieces of evidence, descriptive statistics, FIML regressions and matching estimates which tend to indicate that most individuals use their participation in a rosca as a device to commit themselves to save money and to deal with self-control problems.

Political elites in federalized countries: the case of Spain (1980-2005)

This paper explores the social profile of the regional elite that has emerged in Spain since the federalization of the State. For the first time, researchers present data about crucial variables like gender, place of birth, age, education, and profession. They make interregional comparisons, and try to explain some unexpected findings like the behavior of political elites in some regions like Catalonia. The authors compare also the social profile of MPs of the two largest parties.

Political institutions and the development of telecomunications

It has traditionally been argued that the development of telecommunications infrastructure is dependent on the quality of countries’ political institutions. We estimate the effect of political institutions on the diffusion of three telecommunications services and find it to be much smaller in cellular telephony than in the others. By evaluating the importance of institutions for technologies rather than for industries, we reveal important growth opportunities for developing countries and offer policy implications for alleviating differences between countries in international telecommunications development.

Political alliances and organisational change in political parties: a framework for analysis

This article sets out a theoretical framework for the study of organisational change within political alliances. To achieve this objective it uses as a starting point a series of premises, the most notable of which include the definition of organisational change as a discrete, complex and focussed phenomenon of changes in power within the party. In accordance with these premises, it analyses the synthetic model of organisational change proposed by Panebianco (1988). After examining its limitations, a number of amendments are proposed to adapt it to the way political alliances operate. The above has resulted in the design of four new models. In order to test its validity and explanatory power in a preliminary manner, the second part looks at the organisational change of the UDC within the CiU alliance between 1978 and 2001. The discussion and conclusions reached demonstrate the problems of determinism of the Panebianco model and suggest, tentatively, the importance of the power balance within the alliance as a key factor.

The Political Economy of Resource Rent Distribution

I model the link between political regime and level of diversification following a windfall of natural resource revenues. The explanatory variables I make use of are the political support functions embedded within each type of regime and the disparate levels of discretion, openness, transparency, and accountability of government. I show that a democratic government seeks to maximize the long-term consumption path of the representative consumer, in order to maximize its chances of re-election, while an authoritarian government, in the absence of any electoral mechanism of accountability, seeks to buy off and entrench a group of special interests loyal to the government and potent enough to ensure its short-term survival. Essentially the contrast in the approaches towards resource rent distribution comes down to a variation in political weights on aggregate welfare and rentierist special interests endogenized by distinct political support functions.

Water scarcity, social power and the production of an elite suburb: the political ecology of water in Matadepera, Catalonia

This article investigates the history of land and water transformations in Matadepera, a wealthy suburb of metropolitan Barcelona. Analysis is informed by theories of political ecology and methods of environmental history; although very relevant, these have received relatively little attention within ecological economics. Empirical material includes communications from the City Archives of Matadepera (1919-1979), 17 interviews with locals born between 1913 and 1958, and an exhaustive review of grey historical literature. Existing water histories of Barcelona and its outskirts portray a battle against natural water scarcity, hard won by heroic engineers and politicians acting for the good of the community. Our research in Matadepera tells a very different story. We reveal the production of a highly uneven landscape and waterscape through fierce political and power struggles. The evolution of Matadepera from a small rural village to an elite suburb was anything but spontaneous or peaceful. It was a socio-environmental project well intended by landowning elites and heavily fought by others. The struggle for the control of water went hand in hand with the land and political struggles that culminated – and were violently resolved - in the Spanish Civil War. The displacement of the economic and environmental costs of water use from few to many continues to this day and is constitutive of Matadepera’s uneven and unsustainable landscape. By unravelling the relations of power that are inscribed in the urbanization of nature (Swyngedouw, 2004), we question the perceived wisdoms of contemporary water policy debates, particularly the notion of a natural scarcity that merits a technical or economic response. We argue that the water question is fundamentally a political question of environmental justice; it is about negotiating alternative visions of the future and deciding whose visions will be produced.

Still in the Era of Area Studies? Political-Scientific Perspectives on European Competition Policy in the 2000s

This note reviews the political-scientific literature on European competition policy (ECP) in the 2000s. Based on a data set extracted from four well-known journals, and using an upfront methodology and explicit criteria, it analyzes the literature both quantitatively and qualitatively. On the quantitative side, it shows that, although a few sub-policy areas are still neglected, ECP is not the under-researched policy it used to be. On the qualitative side, the literature has greatly improved since the 1990s: Almost all articles now present a clear research question, and most advance specific theoretical claims/hypotheses. Yet, improvements can be made on research design, statistical testing, and, above all, state-of-the-art theorizing (e.g. in the game-theoretical treatment of delegation problems). Indeed, it is paradoxical that ECP specialists do not pay more attention to theoretical questions which are so central to the actual policy area they study.

Perceptions of Europe in political and economic elites: a geographical compared analysis of Germany, Spain and Poland

Elite perceptions about Europe are a very important point in order to understand the current European integration process, as well as the future perspectives for the continent. This study makes a comparison between the perceptions which political and economical elites in some European countries have about the European Union process and its mechanisms. The main goal is to identify the differences in positions of each type of elites, as well as the variations among three key countries. The database built thanks to the INTUNE (Integrated and United? A quest for Citizenship in an ¨ever closer Europe¨) Project Survey on European Elites and Masses, funded by the Sixth Framework Programme of the EU [Contract CIT 3-CT-2005-513421] have being used. The questionnaire was applied between February and May 2007, in a total of 18 European countries. The national teams got a total of almost 2000 valid responses at European level. In the analysis we have showed some general descriptive statistics about the perception of Europe taking as a reference two dimensions of the INTUNE project: identity (attachment to the national level, the meaning of being a truly national, and the threats from Turkey that EU is facing at this moment) and representation (trust in European and national institutions, preferences for a national or an European army). The results are presented distinguishing between political (national MP’s in low chambers) and economical elites (presidents of corporations, general managers…) and, at the same time, among three countries: Germany as an original member of the European Union; Spain, incorporated in 1986; and a new member, Poland, joining the EU in 2004.

The political ecology of Jatropha plantations for biodiesel in Tamil Nadu, India

Jatropha curcas is promoted internationally for its presumed agronomic viability in marginal lands, economic returns for small farmers, and lack of competition with food crops. However, empirical results from a study in southern India revealed that Jatropha cultivation, even on agricultural lands, is neither profitable, nor pro-poor. We use a political ecology framework to analyze both the discourse promoting Jatropha cultivation and its empirical consequences. We deconstruct the shaky premises of the dominant discourse of Jatropha as a “pro-poor” and “pro-wasteland” development crop, a discourse that paints a win-win picture between poverty alleviation, natural resource regeneration, and energy security goals. We then draw from field-work on Jatropha plantations in the state of Tamil Nadu to show how Jatropha cultivation favors resource-rich farmers, while possibly reinforcing existing processes of marginalization of small and marginal farmers.

The Impact of democratization: a preliminary investigation on social policies and political violence in Latin America

The recent strides of democracy in Latin America have been associated to conflicting outcomes. The expectation that democracy would bring about peace and prosperity have been only partly satisfied. While political violence has been by and large eradicated from the sub-continent, poverty and social injustice still prevail and hold sway. Our study argues that democracy matters for inequality through the growing strength of center left and left parties and by making political leaders in general more responsive to the underprivileged. Furthermore, although the pension reforms recently enacted in the region generated overall regressive outcomes on income distribution, democratic countries still benefit from their political past: where democratic tradition was stronger, such outcomes have been milder. Democratic tradition and the specific ideological connotations of the parties in power, on the other hand, did not play an equally crucial role in securing lower levels of political violence: during the last wave of democratizations in Latin America, domestic peace was rather an outcome of political and social concessions to those in distress. In sum, together with other factors and especially economic ones, the reason why recent democratizations have provided domestic peace in most cases, but have been unable so far to solve the problem of poverty and inequality, is that democratic traditions in the subcontinent have been relatively weak and, more specifically, that this weakness has undermined the growth of left and progressive parties, acting as an obstacle to redistribution. Such weakness, on the other hand, has not prevented the drastic reduction of domestic political violence, since what mattered in this case was a combination of symbolic or material concessions and political agreements among powerful élites and counter-élites.

Civil war and foreign influence

We study a symmetric information bargaining model of civil war where a third (foreign) party can affect the probabilities of winning the conflict and the size of the post conflict spoils. We show that the possible alliance with a third party makes peaceful agreements difficult to reach and might lead to new commitment problems that trigger war. Also, we argue that the foreign party is likely to induce persistent informational asymmetries which might explain long lasting civil wars. We explore both political and economic incentives for a third party to intervene. The explicit consideration of political incentives leads to two predictions that allow for identifying the influence of foreign intervention on civil war incidence. Both predictions are confirmed for the case of the U.S. as a potential intervening nation: (i) civil wars around the world are more likely under Republican governments and (ii) the probability of civil wars decreases with U.S. presidential approval rates.

Integración de políticas medio ambientales: Transformaciones institucionales en España

La Integración de la Políticas Ambientales (IPA) consiste en la incorporación de los objetivos ambientales en todos los estadios de elaboración e implementación de las políticas no ambientales (o sectoriales), con un reconocimiento específico de dicho objetivo como principio director de la programación y la puesta en práctica. Se complementa con la previsión de las consecuencias ambientales mediante una evaluación de conjunto de la política con objeto de minimizar las contradicciones entre las políticas ambientales y no ambientales dando prioridad a las primeras. La naturaleza transversal de la IPA no se ajusta a la forma tradicional de gobernanza jerárquica basada en la autoridad del Estado, la diferenciación sectorial, y los instrumentos típicos de dirección y control. Por ello, no es extraño que la IPA se encuentre a menudo asociada a los llamados "nuevos modos de gobernanza". Esta tesis propone analizar empíricamente el estado de la cuestión en España con respecto a la Integración de la política ambiental , tanto a nivel estatal como autonómico (Cataluña, País Vasco), yendo más allá de los compromisos políticos a favor de un mayor grado de integración de los factores ambientales en las demás políticas. En particular, los ámbitos de investigación seleccionados para esta finalidad son el de las políticas de mitigación de las causas y los efectos del cambio climático, y las políticas de desarrollo sostenible. En términos de ‘variable independiente’ La hipótesis que se quiere comprobar es que la acción llevada a cabo por la Unión Europea ha generado profundos cambios en las estructuras de las instituciones mencionadas y en los procesos de elaboración y implementación de determinadas políticas (energía y transporte) así como en las relaciones entre sectores de la administración pública y entre el sector público y el privado.

Lessons of peace in Aceh: administrative decentralization and political freedom as a strategy of pacification in Aceh

This working paper shows the evolution of the Aceh conflict until its peaceful resolution in 2005. The key factors in the success of this peace process have been the confluence of several factors related to the internal and external dynamics of the country, including the new political leadership, the decreasing role of the military power, the international support and the meeting of the objectives of both groups, and so on. The end of the conflict in Aceh shows that the administrative decentralization and the promotion of the political participation of the main actors involved have made possible the development of a solid alternative to the arms strategy of conflict resolution used for years in Indonesia.