Gini Coefficients for Subsidy Distribution in Agriculture

human development, aid, trade, security

Making financial history: The crisis of 2008 and the return of the past

The past does not simply provide conditions of possibility for capitalist finance; it also serves as a vital resource for those who might seek to understand or negotiate it in a particular present. However, scholars of finance and crisis have overlooked this point at precisely the same time that they themselves have sought to find clues or lessons in financial history. This article provides a reading of how and why the past has come to acquire such a strange presence within contemporary capitalism. Following Michel de Certeau, it approaches historiography as an operation, focusing on how the past has figured within three distinct but related fields of social science – namely, financial economics, economic history, and constructivist political economy. It demonstrates how each of these fields has been structured around an exclusion of the recollected past as an input into historical process, and argues that this has been revealed by the discursive response to the crisis of 2008, which in turn should be understood as a breakdown in the machinery of capitalist historiography. It concludes by suggesting that in order to grasp the potential productivity of such a breakdown, scholars of the global economy should begin to make a place for ‘the practical past’ within both their visions of history and methods of historical research

Openness and Growth: An Empirical Investigation

human development, aid, trade, security

Human Development: Beyond the HDI

This paper explores ways of enlarging the measurement and understanding of Human Development (HD) beyond the relatively reductionist Human Development Index. From the extensive literature on well-being, we derived eleven categories of HD. Within each category, we then identified a potential set of indicators which were measurable and reflect performance with respect to that category. In order to reduce the number of indicators representing each category, we included only one for any set highly rank order correlated with each other, as well as including indicators not correlated with any other indicator in that category. Our aim was to retain only indicators which are broadly independent of each other.Human Development, Quality of Life, Comparative Country Performance

First description of myxozoans from Syria: novel records of hexactinomyxon, triactinomyxon and endocapsa actinospore types

Oligochaete worms collected in late March and early April 2005 from 3 freshwater biotopes in Syria were surveyed over an 11 wk period for myxosporean parasites (Myxozoa). Three types of novel actinospore stages were identified from 1 host species, Psammoryctides albicola. A hexactinomyxon was found in 6 P. albicola (7.5%) collected from a branch of the River Orontes, north of the city of Hama. A triactinomyxon and an endocapsa were found in single P. albicola specimens from the Al-Thaurah region of the Euphrates River (Lake Assad). No oligochaetes collected from Al-Ghab fish farm (Orontes region) released actinospores during the observation period. The present study is the first description of myxosporeans, including actinospore stages, from Syria. The 3 types described herein differ morphologically and molecularly (18S rDNA) from published records

Introduction: Money's other worlds

Since at least the nineteenth century, economists have imagined the market as a profoundly rational way of organizing society. Unlike other modes of economic organization, the market is governed by natural laws that ensure the most efficient possible allocation of resources. Modern financial economists take this logic even further, seeing new financial instruments as a means of efficiently managing risk. These visions betray a mechanical conception of economy. Like a well-oiled machine, buyers and sellers play their part in a larger whole, balancing each other out and enabling practical reason to lead societies to ever-greater levels of prosperity

Country Patterns of Behaviour on Broader Dimensions of Human Development

The paper adopts a more expansive definition of Human Development than that encompassed by the Human Development Index and explores alternative patterns of country behavior in terms of this broader definition. We categorize countries according to their behavior on basic human development, and economic, social and political dimensions, and then examine their performance relative to one another and across categories. We identify countries which seem to do particularly well on one dimension and less well on others, or particularly badly on one dimension and better on others, as well as managing to do well on all, or failing to do well on any. The analysis reveals that not all good things go together, i.e., only seven out of 130 countries with data for all four categories were categorized in the same way across categories - while half of the sample exhibited deficiency or superiority in a particular category. The many patterns of behavior indicate that while countries are constrained by history, culture and initial conditions, they also have choices. Even low income countries can achieve well in all categories, and high income countries, poorly.