Regional competitiveness, economic growth and stages of development

This paper positions the concept of regional competitiveness within theories concerning regional economic growth and stages of economic development. It examines the sources of regional competitiveness encompassing an analysis based on the particular stage of economic development that the nations within which regions are situated have reached. As a means to achieve this, the paper undertakes an empirical analysis of data stemming from the World Competitiveness Index of Regions, and identifies regional competitiveness as a dual concept that explains relative differences in rates of economic development across regions, as well as an understanding of the future economic growth trajectories of regions at a similar stage of economic development. As with endogenous growth and development theory, the notion of regional competitiveness presented here places knowledge, innovation and entrepreneurship at the forefront of conceptualisations of regional economic differentiation.

Migration and identity in a post-national world

What does post-national identity mean for the control of migration? Katherine Tonkiss engages with the post-national theory of 'constitutional patriotism' and argues in favour of both post-national identity and relaxed migration controls. She explores the implications of such liberalised migration for the dynamics of identity and belonging in local communities, drawing on qualitative research on Eastern European migration to the UK. Illustrated with rich case study material, this book offers a novel contribution to the post-nationalism literature.

Neither security nor development? Czech and Hungarian identities and interests in the provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan

This article builds on the securitisation and post-development literature and it scrutinises the Czech and Hungarian legitimising discourses of the two countries’ respective Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in the Logar and Baghlan provinces of Afghanistan from 2007 to 2013. In spite of the hybrid civil–military character of the PRTs, their security–development nexus was absent and they were respectively securitised and “developmentalised” only indirectly and to a varying extent. The PRTs were mostly justified by the Czech Republic's NATO membership as an identity issue and they were justified as a Hungarian national interest and as both an obligation and an opportunity. Rather than merely importing NATO's arguments as suggested by the previous literature, the depoliticisation and positive connotation of the intervention in Afghanistan was constructed by the domestic NATO-related identities and interests in the Czech Republic and Hungary.

A magyar átalakulás és fejlődés néhány általánosítható elméleti tanulsága = Some generalizable theoretical lessons of the Hungarian transformation and development

A világgazdasági válság óta eltelt nyolc évtizedben Magyarországon számos rendszerváltozás ment végbe a gazdaságban és a politikában. Sokak szerint a szabadpiactól a szabadpiacig vezető kör bezárult, és ismét rendszerválság előtt állunk. Míg a jövő természetesen bizonytalanságokkal terhes, és így értelemszerűen nem kiszámítható, a múlt egyértelmű tanulsága az, hogy a közéletet végig formáló felzárkózási törekvés egészében sikertelennek bizonyult. Ennek alapja elemzésünk központi rejtélye egy régi fejlődéselméleti feladvány: miért van az, hogy Argentínához vagy újabban Olaszországhoz és Portugáliához hasonlóan a jó politika rossz eredményekkel jár(t), és fordítva? Miért szakadt el végletesen és történetileg is a gazdasági és a politikai ésszerűség egymástól? __________________ Hungary has undergone several changes of economic and political system in the eighty years since the Great Depression. According to many, the circle from market economy to market economy has closed and we face another systemic crisis. Although the future is naturally full of uncertainties and is not by its very nature predictable, the clear lesson from the past is that the effort to catch up, which shaped public life throughout, has been unsuccessful on the whole. The basis for this and the central riddle in this analysis is an old puzzle in development theory: how is it that good policies had bad results and vice versa, as was the case in Argentina, and recently in Italy and Portugal? Why did economic and political rationality part company for good, even in historical terms?

An investigation of the strategies used by organizations participating in the welfare-to-work network program and correlation of the strategies with the retention data to determine best practices for job retention among former welfare recipients

This ex post facto study (N = 209) examined the relationships between employer job strategies and job retention among organizations participating in Florida welfare-to-work network programs and associated the strategies with job retention data to determine best practices. ^ An internet-based self-report survey battery was administered to a heterogeneous sampling of organizations participating in the Florida welfare-to-work network program. Hypotheses were tested through correlational and hierarchical regression analytic procedures. The partial correlation results linked each of the job retention strategies to job retention. Wages, benefits, training and supervision, communication, job growth, work/life balance, fairness and respect were all significantly related to job retention. Hierarchical regression results indicated that the training and supervision variable was the best predictor of job retention in the regression equation. ^ The size of the organization was also a significant predictor of job retention. Large organizations reported higher job retention rates than small organizations. There was no statistical difference between the types of organizations (profit-making and non-profit) and job retention. The standardized betas ranged from to .26 to .41 in the regression equation. Twenty percent of the variance in job retention was explained by the combination of demographic and job retention strategy predictors, supporting the theoretical, empirical, and practical relevance of understanding the association between employer job strategies and job retention outcomes. Implications for adult education and human resource development theory, research, and practice are highlighted as possible strategic leverage points for creating conditions that facilitate the development of job strategies as a means for improving former welfare workers’ job retention.^

What is this thing called Historical Archaeology?

Historical archaeology, in its narrow temporal sense -as an archaeology of the emergence and subsequent evolution of the Modern world- is steadily taking pace in Spanish academia. This paper aims at provoking a more robust debate through understanding how Spanish historical archaeology is placed in the international scene and some of its more relevant particularities. In so doing, the paper also stresses the strong links that have united historical and prehistorical archaeology since its inception, both in relation to the ontological, epistemological and methodological definition of the first as to the influence of socio-political issues in the latter. Such reflection is partly a situated reflection from prehistory as one of the paper’s authors has been a prehistorian for most of her professional life.

El dinero en la historia del pensamiento económico: la teoría monetaria postkeynesiana y su confrontación con la ortodoxia

Las disputas en torno a determinados aspectos del dinero, como su neutralidad y el carácter endógeno o exógeno de la oferta monetaria, han sido permanentes entre las distintas escuelas de pensamiento y autores, estando su origen, probablemente, en la época de desarrollo del pensamiento escolástico. En este artículo pretendemos, en primer lugar, realizar un recorrido cronológico e histórico sobre el tratamiento científico económico del dinero, para, en segundo lugar, poner sobre la mesa la macroeconomía ortodoxa a la que han dado lugar las interpretaciones al respecto, así como los enfoques alternativos frente a este pensamiento dominante. Finalmente, intentamos poner en valor los desarrollos monetarios post-keynesianos, integrados en lo que denominan “Economía Monetaria de Producción”, confrontándolos con la llamada Nueva Síntesis Neoclásica.

Leave it to the Amateurs: A Career Development Explanation of Political Inexperience among Members of the Canadian Parliament:MA Thesis

In many advanced democracies, political scientists have lamented the rise of professional politicians as a challenge to the effective representation of diverse electorates. In contrast, their relative absence from Canadian federal politics gives rise to concerns over high levels of political amateurism among Canadian MPs. This study, thus, seeks to account for the numerical weakness of individuals with an occupational background in politics in the Canadian Parliament. It utilizes both individual-level quantitative data on MPs serving between the 35th and 41st Parliaments, inclusive, as well as material from qualitative interviews with over seventy former MPs. Conceptualizing the field of politics as a career in itself, and drawing on career development theory, the study finds that at the key stages of establishing, maintaining, and disengaging from a federal political career, there are specific challenges that are not significantly ameliorated by the possession of professional experience in politics itself. Professional politicians, therefore, have no major advantage over those with non-political occupational backgrounds in their career development. Furthermore, by acknowledging the existence of different types of professional politician, it finds that those whose primary occupational background was in politics itself to be in a distinct minority, but the extent of political amateurism is challenged by a much larger minority of MPs whose primary occupation was non-political but who still possess some secondary or electoral experience prior to entering Parliament.

Desenvolvimento e políticas culturais de base comunitária na América do Sul : estudo comparado Brasil-Argentina

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Centro de Estudos Avançados Multidisciplinares, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Desenvolvimento Sociedade e Cooperação Internacional, 2016.

Official development assistance and impact assessment, theoretical and practical frameworks

Official Development Assistance (ODA) remains the most prominent development instrument for allocation of foreign aid with the aim of promoting prosperity in developing countries. This includes economic, political, and social development, and most significantly poverty alleviation. However, it needs to be noted that the positive impact of ODA on recipient countries economic, social, political, and other forms of development is not a foregone conclusion. As such it is subject to diverse interpretations, value claims, perceptions, and a range of indicators. Thus, ODA has it proponents and opponents. As such the need for an assessment of the impact of ODA, be it positive or negative, remains a subject of discourse amongst academics, practitioners, aid agencies, politicians, governments, and other stakeholders. The purpose of this chapter is to bring to the fore and to unpack some overarching issues, which will be taken up in following contributions from different vantage points. The focus will be on foreign aid, and development theory and practice in the contemporary social, political, and economic environment.

Impact assessment: from theory to practice

Foreign aid is intended to be a major contributor to poverty reduction. However, significant questions arise as to the capacity for development funding to contribute to human development, through service provision, through advocacy, through actions and interventions that change power relations, change the social and institutional arrangements that reinforce inequality, threaten or reproduce well-being, and prevent the fulfillment of human rights. In conjunction with questions about what aid “does,” there is equal focus on how it does it. Questions of efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, accountability, social license to operate, relevance, and many others are all embedded in contemporary aid discourse and practice. The aim of this volume was to contribute to a critical understanding of Impact Assessment (IA) clearly informed by contemporary development theory and practice. There is a significantly increasing push for impact assessment, across the whole aid architecture. This is exacerbated by a much stronger focus on value for money, and accountability – to taxpayers specifically in the context of public funds, and donors in an increasingly competitive NGO environment. As was noted by many authors, since the GFC, a significant number of donor governments have reduced or are considering funding reduction for bilateral aid agencies and their contributions to multilateral aid agencies. At the same time they imposed a more stringent and rigorous requirement focusing on “aid-for-trade” and “value-for-money” strategies. There is a drive to ensure the positive impacts of the grant or loan in a sustainable manner.

Community development today:engaging challenges through cosmopolitanism?

This article begins by outlining some of the challenges and opportunities for community development theory and practice today. Some of these have been present from the 1960s and 70s, some have been evident for several decades, others are new and some demand urgent attention. The second part of the paper notes three types of responses to the challenges. It argues the case for embracing one specific response, namely a deepening of a cosmopolitan outlook in both the theory and practice of community development. While acknowledging that community development is in someways already a cosmopolitan endeavour, the paper concludes with a call for exploration of the ways in which embracing a broader and deeper cosmopolitanism might enhance community development as it responds to contemporary challenges.

Complex adaptive systems as a valid framework for understanding community level development

Complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory is gaining mainstream recognition in development policy and management. This article looks to the correlations between development theory and CAS theory to support an argument for the validity of community level development as a complex adaptive system. The article describes some theoretical and practical implications of using CAS theory as a framework for community level development. This includes a call for researchers and practitioners to understand more thoroughly the contextualised nature of development, and the communities in which development interventions are implemented.

Gender inequality and education: changing local/global relations in a ‘post-colonial’ world and the implications for feminist research

This chapter explores the relationship between education reform and gender equity, both within and between nation states. Utilising feminist critical policy analysis and post-colonial theory, it examines how education reform over the past decade has impacted on gender equity and how educational reform is itself gendered. It considers the nature of gender restructuring, maps significant shifts in gender equity policy in the wider context of educational and social inequality debates and, through an analysis of recent research on gender identity, schooling and leadership, argues that gender can no longer be privileged when identifying and responding to educational inequality. Key assumptions underpinning how social change and education reform deliver equity are questioned, concluding with feminist theorising about how social justice may inform equity policy and practice in culturally diverse educational contexts.