Political crisis and suspension of duty-free access in Madagascar : assessment of impacts on the garment industry

The export-oriented garment industry in Madagascar has displayed robust growth, thus both contributing to the economy and creating formal employment opportunities. However, it experienced a critical situation after the political turmoil that occurred in 2009. Our investigation using the trade data demonstrates that suspension of duty-free access to the US market (AGOA) resulting from the turmoil had a greater impact on exports, 64%–78% reduction, than the turmoil itself. Our original factory-level data demonstrates that AGOA suspension increased the probability of closure by 57.8% for the factories supplying exclusively to US market, and reduced 6405 jobs for low-skilled positions during the post turmoil period. The factory-level adverse impacts are much less than those on export value at the industry level because of the maintained duty-free access to EU, which has provided an alternative market. It suggests that if EU also had cancelled duty-free access, adverse impacts would have been enormous. Given the general pattern of comparative advantage in low-income countries, unplanned cancellation of duty-free access for them hurts labor-intensive industries and low-skilled workers.

Bologna Process Bucharest Ministerial Conference Takes Place amid Political Crisis in Romania. EUMA Papers Series Vol. 12, No. 5, May 2012

During the last week in April the Ministers responsible for higher education from 47 countries convened in Bucharest, Romania for the Ministerial Conference of the Bologna Process. On April 26 and 27, 2012 the venue for the meeting was the Palace of the Parliament, which was constructed by the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1984 and completed the year before his death by execution on Christmas Day 1989. One of the largest civilian buildings in the world was location for the first ministerial conference to take place since the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) became effective in 2010. Originally the creation of the EHEA was envisaged by the Bologna Process Declaration in 1999 which had representatives from 29 countries as signatories. This essay will describe the proceedings of the Ministerial Conference, report on the negotiations among delegates in parallel sessions and plenary sessions, discuss the thematic sessions with emphasis on “Global academic mobility: Incentives and barriers, balances and imbalances” and review the adoption of the Bucharest Communiqué and the Bologna Policy Forum Statement.

The Impact of Spain’s Economic and Political Crisis on the European Elections. EPIN Commentaries No. 17, 2 April 2014

Despite the emergence of a critical debate against the EU-imposed austerity measures both at the level of the political elites and on the street, this EPIN Commentary by two Spanish political scientists based in Barcelona finds no sign that the upcoming European elections will have a more European focus than any of the previous ones. While there is no anti-European discourse among the Spanish mainstream political parties, they report that public trust in the European institutions is plummeting and Spanish turnout in European elections has been dropping in the last few years. In the authors’ view, the main reason for this is the low level of awareness of the functioning of the European Parliament but some responsibility also lies with the Spanish political parties and the way they deal with the electoral campaign to mobilise the discontented voters, who consider unemployment and the economic situation as the two most important issues that the country is facing at the moment.

Bosniacki chaos. Zrodla kryzysu politycznego we wspolczesnej Bosni i Hercegowinie. Prace OSW 31/2009. = Bosnia's chaos. Causes of the political crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. OSW Study 31/2009

A new form of 'transformational crisis' has been observed in Bosnia and Herzegovina since at least 2005. Politicians representing the three major ethno-political communities (Bosnians, Croats and Serbs) have successively been raising disputes and have employed various political tools to preserve the conflicts instead of resolving them. As a result, the central state institutions and organisations have been weakened and attempts to replace them with narrower ethnic structures have been made. This is increasingly paralysing the state, thus impeding its everyday operation and preventing its structures and legislation from being modernised; had this been achieved, it would have resulted in a real acceleration of the process of Bosnia's integration with the EU and NATO. The present crisis is also an effect of the disagreement between the key international players - the European Union, the United States and Russia - over the 'plan for Bosnia' and the role and duties of the Office of the High Representative, who acts on behalf of the international community in the country.

The political crisis in Haiti : hearings before the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundredth Congress, second session, March 8 and 23, 1988.

Bibliography: p. 174-177.

Análisis del rol de la ONUCI en la crisis política de Costa de Marfil. Periodo 2010 - 2011

El propósito de esta monografía es analizar el rol de la ONUCI en la crisis política de Costa de Marfil, en el periodo 2010-2011. Para ello se realizará, en primer lugar, un estudio histórico y político de la situación del país, con precisión en los años 2010-2011. Luego se indagará sobre los objetivos, la instauración de la Operación, las alianzas y la efectividad de su mandato en Costa de Marfil, para poder tener más claridad sobre el sujeto de estudio y su rol preciso. Finalmente, siguiendo con la teoría constructivista de Alexander Wendt y sus aportes conceptuales sobre la identidad y el interés, se examinará el rol de la ONUCI frente a sus dos dimensiones de trabajo: la paz y la lucha contra la violación de Derechos Humanos.

The political influence of the kurdish community in Syria and its possible transboundary Effects in the subregion of the Middle East, during the period 2011-2014

El interés de esta monografía es analizar las interacciones no-lineales con resultados emergentes que mantuvo la comunidad kurda en Siria, durante el periodo 2011-2014, y por las cuales se produjeron formas de auto-organización como resultado de la estructura compleja a la que pertenece. De esta forma, se explica cómo a raíz de la crisis política siria y los enfrentamientos con el Estado Islámico, se transformó el rol de los kurdos en Siria y se influenciaron las estructuras políticas del país y las naciones de la región con población kurda. Por lo tanto, esta investigación se propone analizar este fenómeno a través del enfoque de complejidad en Relaciones Internacionales y el concepto de Auto-Organización. A partir de ello, se indaga sobre las interacciones surgidas en estructuras más pequeñas, que habrían afectado un sistema mayor; estableciendo nuevas formas de organización que no pueden ser explicadas, únicamente, a partir de elementos causales.

Greek politics: economic crisis or crisis of democracy?

Greece’s economic instability has become the Western world’s longest-running monetary crisis. Will Germany allow the EU to keep propping up Greece’s unstable financial system? Will the country leave the eurozone? Will such a departure, if it occurs, unravel the idea of “Europe”? All valid questions. But behind them stands another equally profound social and political crisis that has made Greece the weak man of Europe.

Essays on the political economy of European integration

Recently, a rising interest in political and economic integration/disintegration issues has been developed in the political economy field. This growing strand of literature partly draws on traditional issues of fiscal federalism and optimum public good provision and focuses on a trade-off between the benefits of centralization, arising from economies of scale or externalities, and the costs of harmonizing policies as a consequence of the increased heterogeneity of individual preferences in an international union or in a country composed of at least two regions. This thesis stems from this strand of literature and aims to shed some light on two highly relevant aspects of the political economy of European integration. The first concerns the role of public opinion in the integration process; more precisely, how economic benefits and costs of integration shape citizens' support for European Union (EU) membership. The second is the allocation of policy competences among different levels of government: European, national and regional. Chapter 1 introduces the topics developed in this thesis by reviewing the main recent theoretical developments in the political economy analysis of integration processes. It is structured as follows. First, it briefly surveys a few relevant articles on economic theories of integration and disintegration processes (Alesina and Spolaore 1997, Bolton and Roland 1997, Alesina et al. 2000, Casella and Feinstein 2002) and discusses their relevance for the study of the impact of economic benefits and costs on public opinion attitude towards the EU. Subsequently, it explores the links existing between such political economy literature and theories of fiscal federalism, especially with regard to normative considerations concerning the optimal allocation of competences in a union. Chapter 2 firstly proposes a model of citizens’ support for membership of international unions, with explicit reference to the EU; subsequently it tests the model on a panel of EU countries. What are the factors that influence public opinion support for the European Union (EU)? In international relations theory, the idea that citizens' support for the EU depends on material benefits deriving from integration, i.e. whether European integration makes individuals economically better off (utilitarian support), has been common since the 1970s, but has never been the subject of a formal treatment (Hix 2005). A small number of studies in the 1990s have investigated econometrically the link between national economic performance and mass support for European integration (Eichenberg and Dalton 1993; Anderson and Kalthenthaler 1996), but only making informal assumptions. The main aim of Chapter 2 is thus to propose and test our model with a view to providing a more complete and theoretically grounded picture of public support for the EU. Following theories of utilitarian support, we assume that citizens are in favour of membership if they receive economic benefits from it. To develop this idea, we propose a simple political economic model drawing on the recent economic literature on integration and disintegration processes. The basic element is the existence of a trade-off between the benefits of centralisation and the costs of harmonising policies in presence of heterogeneous preferences among countries. The approach we follow is that of the recent literature on the political economy of international unions and the unification or break-up of nations (Bolton and Roland 1997, Alesina and Wacziarg 1999, Alesina et al. 2001, 2005a, to mention only the relevant). The general perspective is that unification provides returns to scale in the provision of public goods, but reduces each member state’s ability to determine its most favoured bundle of public goods. In the simple model presented in Chapter 2, support for membership of the union is increasing in the union’s average income and in the loss of efficiency stemming from being outside the union, and decreasing in a country’s average income, while increasing heterogeneity of preferences among countries points to a reduced scope of the union. Afterwards we empirically test the model with data on the EU; more precisely, we perform an econometric analysis employing a panel of member countries over time. The second part of Chapter 2 thus tries to answer the following question: does public opinion support for the EU really depend on economic factors? The findings are broadly consistent with our theoretical expectations: the conditions of the national economy, differences in income among member states and heterogeneity of preferences shape citizens’ attitude towards their country’s membership of the EU. Consequently, this analysis offers some interesting policy implications for the present debate about ratification of the European Constitution and, more generally, about how the EU could act in order to gain more support from the European public. Citizens in many member states are called to express their opinion in national referenda, which may well end up in rejection of the Constitution, as recently happened in France and the Netherlands, triggering a European-wide political crisis. These events show that nowadays understanding public attitude towards the EU is not only of academic interest, but has a strong relevance for policy-making too. Chapter 3 empirically investigates the link between European integration and regional autonomy in Italy. Over the last few decades, the double tendency towards supranationalism and regional autonomy, which has characterised some European States, has taken a very interesting form in this country, because Italy, besides being one of the founding members of the EU, also implemented a process of decentralisation during the 1970s, further strengthened by a constitutional reform in 2001. Moreover, the issue of the allocation of competences among the EU, the Member States and the regions is now especially topical. The process leading to the drafting of European Constitution (even if then it has not come into force) has attracted much attention from a constitutional political economy perspective both on a normative and positive point of view (Breuss and Eller 2004, Mueller 2005). The Italian parliament has recently passed a new thorough constitutional reform, still to be approved by citizens in a referendum, which includes, among other things, the so called “devolution”, i.e. granting the regions exclusive competence in public health care, education and local police. Following and extending the methodology proposed in a recent influential article by Alesina et al. (2005b), which only concentrated on the EU activity (treaties, legislation, and European Court of Justice’s rulings), we develop a set of quantitative indicators measuring the intensity of the legislative activity of the Italian State, the EU and the Italian regions from 1973 to 2005 in a large number of policy categories. By doing so, we seek to answer the following broad questions. Are European and regional legislations substitutes for state laws? To what extent are the competences attributed by the European treaties or the Italian Constitution actually exerted in the various policy areas? Is their exertion consistent with the normative recommendations from the economic literature about their optimum allocation among different levels of government? The main results show that, first, there seems to be a certain substitutability between EU and national legislations (even if not a very strong one), but not between regional and national ones. Second, the EU concentrates its legislative activity mainly in international trade and agriculture, whilst social policy is where the regions and the State (which is also the main actor in foreign policy) are more active. Third, at least two levels of government (in some cases all of them) are significantly involved in the legislative activity in many sectors, even where the rationale for that is, at best, very questionable, indicating that they actually share a larger number of policy tasks than that suggested by the economic theory. It appears therefore that an excessive number of competences are actually shared among different levels of government. From an economic perspective, it may well be recommended that some competences be shared, but only when the balance between scale or spillover effects and heterogeneity of preferences suggests so. When, on the contrary, too many levels of government are involved in a certain policy area, the distinction between their different responsibilities easily becomes unnecessarily blurred. This may not only leads to a slower and inefficient policy-making process, but also risks to make it too complicate to understand for citizens, who, on the contrary, should be able to know who is really responsible for a certain policy when they vote in national,local or European elections or in referenda on national or European constitutional issues.

Comportamiento y expectativas de los jóvenes frente a la crisis de la política

Es indiscutible la relevancia que tienen los jóvenes como sujetos políticos, por ser uno de los sectores más dinámicos de la sociedad, contribuyendo a través de sus orientaciones y prácticas a superar la crisis de la política y recuperar su centralidad. Se detectan en las nuevas generaciones manifestaciones de rechazo y distanciamiento hacia la política: desinterés, escasa adhesión a los partidos políticos y personalización de la opción electoral, crítica a la dirigencia y emergencia de nuevos actores sociales que amplían los canales de participación. Estos factores emergentes muestran el agotamiento de cierta concepción de la política y una redefinición de los sentidos de la misma.

Luchas y movimientos sociales en Mendoza 1993/2005 : respuestas a la desocupación, pobreza y crisis

Este artículo presenta las principales conclusiones de una investigación sobre el Movimiento de Desocupados en Mendoza. Describe cómo Ia crisis económica, social y política de fines de los noventa fue el escenario propicio para la aparición de nuevas organizaciones sociales y métodos de lucha. Analiza las formas de organización e intervención social del Movimiento y ensaya una periodización histórica. Afirma que las experiencias atesoradas por el Movimiento engrosan procesos subterráneos que están latentes y periódicamente emergen buscando nuevos cauces y soluciones definitivas para los graves problemas sociales que, pese a la recuperación y crecimiento económicos, aún subsisten.

Antiausteridad y protesta en el contexto de la crisis económica y política en España e Italia

The crisis affecting European Union, and especially Mediterranean countries, is both an economic and a political crisis. In a broad sense, we can look at the crisis as the result of an internal crisis of the neoliberal model, exacerbating the perceived subordination of politics to the economy, and therefore the deficit of legitimacy and involvement that characterizes both European and national institutions. The decline in support for traditional political organizations and reduction of conventional political participation is accompanied by a process of reinvention of politics, which takes form in grass-root, non conventional participation. New political actors challenge economic and political institution and claim for a renewal of democracy and for a new relation between economy and politics. The article, after comparing steps and dimension of crisis, explores the characteristics of anti- austerity movements in Spain and in Italy, analyzing differences and similarities. Finally, we locate the movilization occurred in these two countries within the context of the global cycles of protest.

Georgian drift. The crisis of Georgia's way westwards. OSW POINT OF VIEW 57, 2016-02-22

For several years Georgia has been experiencing processes which may be interpreted as symptoms of a deepening, multidimensional social and political crisis. Reforms have lost momentum, stagnation has set in, and in some areas the situation has begun to revert to the pre-revolution status (including rising crime levels). The Georgian political system has found itself in a serious crisis, while society has become increasingly frustrated and apathetic, mainly because people’s standards of living have been stagnating. This political and social malaise has been breeding Euro-scepticism and disenchantment with the West. A country that had been firmly navigating westwards, Georgia has now started drifting and slipping into malaise. This risks reversing what the country has achieved so far in the internal dimension, increasing instability and triggering a crisis in the pro-Western vector of Tbilisi’s foreign policy. While that may not necessarily mean a turn towards Russia, in the present situation it has been easier for Moscow to pursue its own interests in the region. Should Tbilisi’s pro-Western course become reversed or permanently stagnant, that would entail grave consequences for the country itself and beyond. It would be a defeat for the West and would undermine the European aspirations of countries like Ukraine or Moldova.

La respuesta liberal de Edmund Burke a la crisis de legitimidad política del siglo XVIII

Edmund Burke is both the greatest and the most underrated political thinker of the last three hundred years. We could not agree more with this assertion of Jesse Norman. Very few political-statesmen have attainted the enormous repercussion both in politics and in history that Burke had deployed over the last centuries. Nevertheless, Burke remains unfairly unknown for a wider public. And what it is more, the vast majority tend to think of him as a conservative, if not a liberal-conservative. A prior precision has to be made before continuing regarding the term liberal for the sake of accuracy. Burke was a prominent Whig, what in Spanish language we describe as a liberal, in the sense that both Hayek and Milton Friedman uttered, far from the meaning “kidnapped” of the word liberal by the Anglo-Saxon left. The object of this thesis is to investigate the non-solved controversy on Burke`s figure and the liberal answer he provided with to the political crisis of legitimacy of the 18th century. There is an existing shared opinion by the academia that prior to the Reflections on the Revolution of France, his masterpiece, he was an outstanding and prominent Whig. Champion of liberty, justice and good governance, guardian of liberal virtues and the authentic developer of the efficient policy put in place by the Marquis of Rockingham in order to curb the corruption and influence emanating from the court of George the Third and his double cabinet.