Economic growth in West Bank and Gaza (WB&G) slowed in the first quarter (Q1) of 2012. The real growth rate is estimated to have reached 5.6 percent, more than three percentage points lower than the Q1 2011 growth figure and almost one percent lower than the growth forecast contained in the Palestinian Authority's (PA's) budget. This decline is attributed to a major slowdown in Gaza, where real growth decreased from 21.3 percent to 6 percent on a year-on-year basis. The slowdown in Gaza during Q1 of 2012 was mainly attributed to a major decline in the agriculture and fishing sector, which offset much of the growth witnessed in other sectors. This sector shrank by 43 percent in Q1 2012 due to frequent power outages resulting from the lack of fuel in Gaza. Nevertheless, other sectors in Gaza expanded and the highest growth levels were witnessed in the construction, and hotels and restaurants sectors. In the West Bank, growth in Q1 2012 was broadly unchanged from its 2011 level. Most of the growth was from an expansion of services, which contributed around 2.2 percentage points of the 5.4 percent total growth in Q1 2012. The recent slowdown in economic growth is also reflected in higher unemployment levels. Overall unemployment in WB&G was 20.9 percent in the second quarter of 2012 compared to 18.7 percent during the same period in 2011. A serious concern in WB&G is the high level of youth unemployment that is accompanied by low youth participation in the labor force.
Doing business sheds light on how easy or difficult it is for a local entrepreneur to open and run a small to medium-size business when complying with relevant regulations. It measures and tracks changes in regulations affecting 10 areas in the life cycle of a business: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency. In a series of annual reports doing business presents quantitative indicators on business regulations and the protection of property rights that can be compared across 183 economies, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, over time. This economy profile presents the doing business indicators for Italy. To allow useful comparison, it also provides data for other selected economies (comparator economies) for each indicator. The data in this report are current as of June 1, 2011 (except for the paying taxes indicators, which cover the period January December 2010).
These regional highlights present some of the key trends in developing countries, drawn from the data presented in World Development Indicators 2012, the World Bank's annual compilation of relevant, high-quality, and internationally comparable statistics about development and the quality of people's lives. Charts and short narratives highlight the state and progress of various development topics such as poverty, health, education, the environment, the economy, governance, investment, aid, trade, and capital flows. A global review of progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is presented in the introduction to the world view section of World Development Indicators 2012. The high income economies are the largest emitters of carbon dioxide, but East Asia and the Pacific produces the largest share of global carbon dioxide emissions among developing regions-more than a quarter of total global emissions. As the global economy becomes more integrated, air transport is increasingly important for delivering not only perishable goods such as flowers, but also highly specialized component parts used in transnational production networks. Agriculture is a declining industry in Europe and Central Asia. The share of agriculture in regional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell from 19 percent to 7 percent over the last two decades. People in the developing economies of Europe and Central Asia have greater access to commercial bank branches and automated teller machines than people in other developing regions-about 18 commercial bank branches and 45 ATMs per 100,000 adults. Governments and citizens in Latin America and Caribbean spend more on health care as a share of GDP than other developing regions, which is reflected in generally good health outcomes. Poverty is falling in the Latin America and Caribbean, most notably in Brazil-the most populous country in the region. South Asia has the second lowest business start-up costs among developing regions.
Macroeconomic growth and incomes have been on the rise since the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC), but health service utilization and health outcomes in Indonesia have been slower to improve. Jamkesmas could provide valuable benefits by allowing cardholders to acquire preventative, curative, and catastrophic health care services without fees. When it promotes healthy households, keeps students active, alert, and participating in their education, returns adults to work sooner, and saves households from the high costs of healthcare, Jamkesmas' sizeable individual benefits should be matched by increased social benefits resulting from a healthy and productive population. Jamkesmas has been provided to poor households, but many non-poor have also received Jamkesmas benefits due to dual central and local targeting processes which have led to frequent mismatches and errors in coverage. Health service providers find Jamkesmas difficult and costly to implement resulting in fewer services provided, and funds spent, on Jamkesmas beneficiaries. Local regulations regarding public health center management often conflict with Jamkesmas mandates, leaving health service providers confused and unwilling to use Jamkesmas funds to provide Jamkesmas beneficiaries with planned services. The future costs of an improved Jamkesmas program have not been adequately publicized and Jamkesmas' financial, fiscal, and political sustainability is uncertain.
This toolkit is the first of its kind to provide information on promoting and protecting the nutritional status of mothers and children in crises and emergencies. Latin America and the Caribbean is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to major crises and emergencies. This toolkit aims to improve the resilience of the most vulnerable in times of intensified nutritional needs, most notably pregnant and lactating mothers as well as children less than two years of age. Its principal objective is to offer countries, when faced with the transition from stable times into and out of crisis, clear guidance on how to safeguard the nutritional status of mothers and children during times of stability, crisis, and emergency. The principal objective of this toolkit is to offer clear guidance, in a single-source compilation, that will assist countries in safeguarding the nutritional status of mothers and children during times of stability, crisis, and emergency. It aims to inform changes in countries' policies and practices and to guide their attempts to deal with persistently high prevalence rates of malnutrition among their poorest, least educated, and indigenous populations. This toolkit has been crafted so that it can be readily used by non-nutrition specialists.
This paper identifies four primary drivers of proactive disclosure throughout history. The first is the need to inform the public about laws and decisions and the public's right to be informed, to know their rights and obligations. The second is the public's demand for the information needed to hold governments accountable both at and between elections. The third is the demand for information in order to participate actively in decision-making. The fourth is the provision to the public of information needed to access government services, which has expanded significantly in the past decade with growth of electronic access to services or 'e-government.' This paper attempts to advance the debate around that question by analyzing the multiple proactive disclosure provisions in national law and international treaties in order to identify the emerging global consensus on the classes of information which should be included in a proactive disclosure regime. The paper examines the practical challenges related to the implementation of proactive disclosure regimes and some of the lessons learned from which principles for making proactive disclosure work in practice can be derived. It concludes by identifying some future challenges and areas where additional research is needed.
On August 25, 2009, the 13th Government of the Palestinian Authority (PA) presented a program entitled "Palestine: ending the occupation, establishing the state" (hereafter referred to as the program) outlining several national goals, including the achievement of 'economic independence and national prosperity'. The program accords high priority to the development of the public institutions of the PA in order to achieve the stated national goals. It acknowledges that maintaining an efficient and effective public sector that provides citizens with high quality services and value for money is a constant challenge. No amount of well-functioning institutions, will, however, lead to economic growth in the absence of access to markets, whether within the West Bank and Gaza, in Israel, or in the rest of the world. In this regard, the recent developments in easing of movement and access restrictions by the Government of Israel (GoI) represent a welcome first step. The GoI has taken steps to ease movement restrictions in the West Bank and to allow greater access to West Bank markets for Arab citizens of Israel. In the first half of 2009, the political stalemate in Gaza continued and the economy stagnated. The West Bank economy is showing signs of new growth, so that it is possible that for the first time in years, West Bank and Gaza (WB&G) may have positive per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in 2009.
This assessment of accounting and auditing practices in Ukraine is part of a joint initiative of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to prepare Reports on the Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC). The assessment focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of the accounting and auditing environment that influence the quality of corporate financial reporting and includes both a review of both mandatory requirements and actual practice. The report uses International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and International Standards on Auditing (ISA) as benchmarks and draws on international experience and good practice in the field of accounting and auditing regulation. All the key economic sectors in Ukraine rely on high quality financial information, which requires high quality private sector accounting and auditing. As Ukraine moves towards further reforms, liberalization and deregulation in efforts to foster an investment-friendly business environment enhanced financial transparency and improved accounting and auditing practices must support this. In this context, this report sets out policy recommendations to enhance the quality of corporate financial reporting and foster a financial reporting platform conducive to sustainable private and financial sector growth, thus increasing access to global financial markets and other tools of the market economy.
In the past decade, Tanzania has experienced high economic growth and it is in the global limelight as a recent success story in Africa. A variety of factors have contributed to this success, including liberalized policies and reforms, infusion of external capital from development partners and the private sector, debt cancellation, and a strong performance by emerging sectors such as mining, tourism, and fisheries. Its social policies, largely influenced by the First President Julius Kambarage Nyerere, including a single national language and relative political stability have contributed to a strong sense of nationhood, which sets it apart from many of its neighbors and has provided an unusual degree of stability that has facilitated major economic transformation without a significant social backlash.
The literature on the economics of happiness in developed economies finds discrepancies between reported measures of well-being and income measures. One is the so-called Easterlin paradox: that average happiness levels do not increase as countries grow wealthier. This article explores how that paradox and survey research on reported wellbeing in general can provide insights into the gaps between standard measures of economic development and individual assessments of welfare. Analysis of research on reported wellbeing in Latin America and Russia finds notable discrepancies between respondent assessments of their own wellbeing and income or expenditure based measures. Accepting a wide margin for error in both types of measures, the article posits that taking such discrepancies into account may improve the understanding of development outcomes by providing a broader view on wellbeing than do income or expenditure based measures alone. It suggests particular areas where research on reported well-being has the most potential to contribute. Yet the article also notes that some interpretations of happiness research psychologist set point theory, in particular may be quite limited in their application to development questions and cautions against the direct translation of results of happiness surveys into policy recommendations.
Infrastructure is crucial for generating growth, alleviating poverty, and increasing international competitiveness. For much of the twentieth century and in most countries, the network utilities that delivered infrastructure services such as electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railroads, and water supply were vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. But this approach often resulted in extremely weak services, especially in developing and transition economies and especially for poor people. Common problems included low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and shortfalls in investment. Over the past two decades many countries have implemented far-reaching institutional reforms restructuring, privatizing, and establishing new approaches to regulation. This article identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection within the historical, economic, and institutional context of developing and transition economies. It also reviews the outcomes of these policy changes, including their distributional consequences especially for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. Drawing on a range of international experiences and empirical studies, it recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance.
This article takes an integrated approach to evaluating the interaction of initial conditions, political change, reforms and economic performance in a unified framework covering 28 transition economies in East Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Former Soviet Union (FSU). Initial conditions and economic policy jointly determine the large differences in economic performance among transition economies. Initial conditions dominate in explaining inflation, but economic liberalization is the most important factor determining differences in growth. Political reform emerges as the most important determinant of the speed and comprehensiveness of economic liberalization, raising the important question of what determines political liberalization. Results suggest the importance of the level of development in determining the decision to expand political freedoms.
Introducción o motivación de la tesis: Esta Memoria se enmarca dentro de los estudios sobre Historia de las matemáticas en la España decimonónica, en particular de su presencia en las instituciones docentes, desarrollados en el Seminario de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Técnica de Aragón bajo la dirección del Prof. Dr. Mariano Hormigón en la Universidad de Zaragoza. A lo largo de más de tres décadas han sido abordados distintos aspectos de la matemática y de la Ciencia española, principalmente en el periodo que va desde la Ilustración a la Guerra Civil. Continuando con esta línea de trabajo en torno al estudio de la evolución de las matemáticas dentro de las Fuerzas Armadas españolas, en esta Memoria se presenta un estudio global del desarrollo de la enseñanza de las matemáticas en la Armada española a lo largo del siglo XIX, especialmente en los centros de formación de Guardias Marinas. Desarrollo teórico: A lo largo de la Memoria se realiza un análisis de contenidos de los textos de matemáticas ¿ manuales, tratados o compendios para la formación de los oficiales ¿ utilizados en la Armada española en el siglo XIX, debidamente contextualizados en su uso docente en los diferentes centros y planes de estudio. La agrupación de todos los textos seleccionados por disciplinas matemáticas presenta un total de seis obras sobre Aritmética, nueve sobre Álgebra, seis sobre Geometría elemental, tres sobre Geometría Descriptiva, cuatro sobre Geometría Analítica, cinco sobre Análisis Matemático, seis sobre Trigonometría Rectilínea, ocho sobre Trigonometría Esférica y cinco obras españolas y siete extranjeras para el estudio comparado de la obra de Pedro José Rodríguez Riola. Cuatro apéndices recogen la sistematización realizada para el estudio de estas obras. Se presentan en los dos primeros las Portadas e Índices de los libros seleccionados, reconstruyendo los índices de las obras que carecen de ellos. Un tercer apéndice muestra en siete subapartados las tablas que resumen los datos generales de las obras seleccionadas y el análisis comparativo de sus contenidos para las diferentes disciplinas matemáticas. El último apéndice recopila los Reglamentos, órdenes y programas de los exámenes de ingreso en la Escuela Naval Flotante, a fin de determinar el nivel matemático exigido a los Aspirantes al ingreso en este centro. El primer capítulo de la Memoria, Marco institucional y legal: centros docentes y Planes de Estudio, está conformado por dos apartados. En el primero, Presencia de las Matemáticas en la Armada a finales del s. XVIII, se repasan los antecedentes de la formación básica y superior de las Academias de Guardias Marinas en cuanto a planes de estudio y textos de matemáticas. En el segundo apartado, Las Matemáticas en la organización y estructura de los estudios desarrollados en la Armada en el siglo XIX, se revisan cronológicamente las cinco etapas en que se ha divido el siglo en relación al centro de formación existente: Academia de Guardias Marinas (1802-1824), Colegio Real y Militar de Caballeros Guardias Marinas (1825-1828), sin centro docente (1828-1844), Colegio Naval Militar (1844-68) y Escuela Naval Flotante (1869-1909). Para cada etapa se realiza una síntesis del periodo y se analizan los desarrollos de la formación básica y superior (si la hay): planes de estudio, disciplinas matemáticas y textos matemáticos utilizados. El segundo capítulo, Las Matemáticas en los textos de formación náutica militar, se compone de diez apartados. En el primer apartado, Revisión de la producción matemática en la Armada en el siglo XIX, se seleccionan aquellas obras de cuyo uso para la formación de los Guardias Marinas o para la preparación de las pruebas de ingreso en la Escuela Naval Flotante tenemos constancia. En los seis siguientes apartados se realizan los estudios comparativos del tratamiento y desarrollo de la Aritmética, el Álgebra, la Geometría elemental, la Geometría Descriptiva, la Geometría Analítica y el Análisis Matemático en la Armada durante el siglo XIX. Para cada una de las materias se examinan las obras utilizadas, se determina la presencia en los textos de los principales contenidos de la materia y se formulan conclusiones sobre la evolución y grado de actualidad de la materia a lo largo del siglo XIX. Entre los autores revisados destacan Gabriel Ciscar y Ciscar, Saturnino Montojo y Juan Cortázar, tanto por su número de obras como por su prestigio científico a nivel nacional. Son las personalidades más influyentes a lo largo del siglo XIX en la formación de los oficiales, por lo que se realizan estudios comparativos en las materias que fueron tratadas por los tres autores: Aritmética, Álgebra y Geometría elemental. En los apartados octavo y noveno se presenta un estudio más detallado y pormenorizado de los tratamientos y desarrollos de la Trigonometría Rectilínea y Esférica, al ser ambas materias de especial importancia en la formación de los Guardias Marinas por sus aplicaciones a la navegación. En el décimo y último apartado se revisa la vida y obra de Pedro José Rodríguez Riola, un autor singular cuya obra estaba pendiente de localización y estudio. Este mahonés ejerció como Professor of Mathematics and Navigation of Midshipmen of the U. S. Navy Yard, Gosport, en el estado norteamericano de Virginia, desde 1827 hasta su fallecimiento en 1838. Su principal obra, Elements of spherical trigonometry, designed as an introduction to the study of nautical astronomy, es ampliamente examinada al objeto de determinar qué obras, tanto españolas como extranjeras, pudieron influir en su elaboración. Conclusiones: En el transcurso del siglo XIX cabe distinguir tres periodos en cuanto a lo que a la enseñanza de las matemáticas en la Armada Española se refiere. En un primer periodo, correspondiente a la formación en las Academias de Guardias Marinas (1802-1824) y en el Colegio Real y Militar de Caballeros Guardias Marinas (1825-1828), la formación básica en matemáticas sufre un retroceso respecto del nivel alcanzado en el último tercio del siglo XVIII, limitándose al estudio de la Aritmética, la Geometría elemental, la Trigonometría Rectilínea y algunas nociones sobre los círculos, líneas y puntos en la esfera. El Plan de Estudios sigue el Curso de Estudios Elementales de Marina, obra que Ciscar adapta plenamente a las necesidades del momento en la Armada, de manera que los cadetes puedan asimilar todos los contenidos durante su formación. Mediante esta obra, Ciscar delimita claramente lo que un Guardia Marina debe o no debe conocer a lo largo de sus estudios. En Aritmética y Geometría elemental se presentan unos conocimientos básicos bajo un enfoque eminentemente práctico, utilizando desarrollos sintéticos en el caso de la Geometría. En Trigonometría Rectilínea se mantiene una concepción geométrica de las expresiones trigonométricas heredada de las líneas trigonométricas utilizadas en el siglo XVIII, mientras que en Trigonometría Esférica Ciscar presenta un reducido número de definiciones y propiedades básicas, apoyándose en figuras geométricas y triángulos rectilíneos, lo que supone un retroceso de contenidos respecto al siglo anterior. En cuanto a la formación superior durante este periodo, las obras de La Caille y Bézout muestran concisamente los principales contenidos sobre el Cálculo diferencial e integral y tratan de forma reducida las Ecuaciones diferenciales. La Caille sigue un enfoque geométrico, mientras Bézout se apoya principalmente en herramientas algebraicas. En el segundo periodo, correspondiente a la formación impartida en el Colegio Naval Militar (1844-1868), se produce un avance sustancial en la instrucción matemática bajo la influencia de Saturnino Montojo, figura clave durante esta etapa por su elaboración de tratados para la formación en el centro sobre Aritmética, Álgebra y Trigonometría. En el Colegio aumentan tanto las asignaturas como el nivel de la formación matemática básica: se instruye a los Aspirantes en Aritmética, Álgebra, Geometría elemental, rudimentos de Geometría Analítica, Trigonometría Rectilínea y Trigonometría Esférica. En Aritmética Montojo realiza un tratamiento más amplio y algebraico que Ciscar, aunque con un manejo básico de los números irracionales y las aproximaciones numéricas. El Álgebra elemental y superior aparece por primera vez como materias propias de los estudios básicos en la obra de Montojo, siendo reseñable la introducción de Series. En cuanto a la Trigonometría Rectilínea, se pasa de un enfoque puramente geométrico a otro algebraico y analítico. Desde una concepción geométrica de las expresiones trigonométricas heredada de las líneas trigonométricas, Montojo evoluciona hacia un enfoque algebraico-analítico basado en las funciones trigonométricas y construye las tablas trigonométricas logarítmicas mediante desarrollos en serie. Si bien la evolución es menos significativa en cuanto a métodos de resolución de triángulos rectilíneos, cabe destacar la incorporación del Teorema del Coseno y de las fórmulas de Briggs como herramientas de resolución. Los contenidos sobre Trigonometría Esférica evolucionan considerablemente durante este periodo de la mano de Montojo. El manejo de los triángulos esféricos, junto con sus propiedades básicas, pierde protagonismo, aumentando la importancia de la resolución de triángulos esféricos. El Teorema del Seno y el método del Perpendículo dejan de ser los pilares del enfoque geométrico, que es sustituido por un nuevo enfoque algebraico basado en el Teorema del Coseno para los lados. Montojo introduce también esta orientación algebraica en el estudio de los triángulos oblicuángulos, apoyándose en las analogías de Gauss-Delambre y de Neper. Incorpora además nuevos contenidos, entre los que destacan el cálculo de áreas de triángulos, las analogías diferenciales y diversas relaciones entre la Trigonometría Esférica y la Rectilínea, como el Teorema de Legendre. En cuanto a la formación superior, también se eleva el nivel en matemáticas al incluirse en los Cursos de Estudios Sublimes el Cálculo diferencial e integral, la Geometría Analítica, la Geodesia y la Geometría Descriptiva. En el tercer periodo, correspondiente a la formación impartida en la Escuela Naval Flotante (1869-1909), se produce un incremento del nivel matemático exigido a los Aspirantes a Guardias Marinas. En las pruebas de ingreso destacan la cantidad y calidad de los contenidos matemáticos que se exigen en Aritmética, Álgebra, Geometría elemental, Geometría Descriptiva, Geometría Analítica, Trigonometría y Cálculo diferencial e integral. Entre los autores de obras utilizadas para la preparación de las pruebas de ingreso destaca Juan Cortázar, tanto por la variedad de materias que trata como por el nivel de los contenidos presentados. Muchos de ellos, anteriormente contemplados en la formación de las academias y colegios precedentes, pasan a ser requisito de acceso a la Escuela Naval Flotante. Respecto a la formación ofrecida en la Escuela, las materias presentan un mayor nivel, en correspondencia con la acrecentada base matemática de acceso de los aspirantes. Las asignaturas impartidas son Análisis (Cálculo diferencial e integral, junto con nociones básicas de Ecuaciones diferenciales y Series), Complemento de Álgebra, Trigonometría Rectilínea, Trigonometría Esférica, Geometría Descriptiva y Geometría Analítica. Se eliminan pues la Aritmética, el Álgebra elemental y la Geometría elemental, cuya evolución se sigue en las obras preparatorias. Así, en Aritmética Cortázar muestra un enfoque algebraico, similar al de Montojo, en el que profundizan a finales de siglo las obras de Terry y Rivas, Serret y Salinas y Benítez, especialmente en cuanto al estudio de la divisibilidad, los logaritmos y las aproximaciones numéricas. Por otra parte, el Álgebra elemental se va entrelazando con contenidos propios del Álgebra superior en las pruebas de ingreso. No obstante, los contenidos no son introducidos de forma gradual durante el último tercio del siglo, sino que varían de un curso a otro, lo que muestra la ausencia de criterios fijos sobre los conocimientos de Álgebra superior necesarios para la formación de los Guardias Marinas; es destacable el tratamiento de los Determinantes por parte de Salinas y Benítez para los exámenes de ingreso de 1900. En cuanto a la Geometría elemental, Cortázar y Terry y Rivas ofrecen un tratamiento más teórico y profundo que Ciscar, que se acentúa a finales de siglo en las obras de Rouché y Comberousse y Ortega y Sala. La Geometría Descriptiva pasa a integrarse por primera vez en la formación de los Guardias Marinas en la Escuela Naval Flotante, especialmente en las pruebas de ingreso, aumentando a lo largo del periodo los elementos tratados y la profundidad con que son estudiados. En los primeros años de la Escuela, un capítulo de la obra de Bielsa y Ciprián o el texto de Ibáñez y Valera cubren todos los contenidos necesarios para la prueba de acceso, que aumentan significativamente con el texto de García Villar. También la Geometría Analítica es tratada por primera vez de forma independiente en la Escuela, tanto en las pruebas de ingreso como en su formación, ampliándose paulatinamente los contenidos a lo largo del último tercio del siglo mediante un enfoque cada vez más algebraico. En los primeros años la obra preparatoria de Meunier-Joannet presenta unos contenidos básicos sobre Geometría Analítica en dos dimensiones. Posteriormente, las obras de Merás y Uría y Salmon, también preparatorias, aumentan de forma considerable los contenidos; el primero estudia principalmente el plano bajo un enfoque geométrico y el segundo el espacio basándose plenamente en el Álgebra. Más tarde, la obra de De María, de uso en la formación de la Escuela, supone un aumento considerable de contenidos respecto a las anteriores obras, especialmente en dos dimensiones, bajo un planteamiento algebraico. El Cálculo diferencial e integral presenta un enfoque plenamente analítico en las obras de Meunier-Joannet y Miranda; ambos textos, adaptados para la enseñanza en escuelas navales, recogen la mayoría de los contenidos del Cálculo diferencial e integral, junto con conceptos básicos de Series y Ecuaciones diferenciales; el texto de Miranda tiene un mayor equilibrio en el tratamiento de los contenidos. En Trigonometría Rectilínea se sigue un enfoque algebraico-analítico basado en las funciones trigonométricas, aunque no todos los autores dejan atrás las líneas trigonométricas, coexistiendo ambos enfoques durante la parte final del siglo. En la elaboración y uso de las tablas trigonométricas logarítmicas del Seno, Tangente y Secante hay un retroceso respecto a la obra de Montojo por parte de algunos autores que, como Cortázar y Barreda y García, estudian los desarrollos en serie aunque sin aplicarlos directamente a la construcción de las tablas. Por otra parte, el manejo por parte de Cortázar del Teorema del Coseno ¿que aparece en la obra de Cortázar antes que en la de Montojo¿y las fórmulas de Briggs facilitan los procesos de resolución de triángulos rectilíneos, sin que esto suponga un cambio metodológico; simplemente cada autor aporta su toque personal a la hora de clasificar y resolver los distintos casos. La Trigonometría Esférica continúa con el enfoque algebraico seguido por Montojo y Cortázar en el estudio de los triángulos oblicuángulos. Adicionalmente, van adquiriendo importancia otros contenidos, como el cálculo de áreas de triángulos y las relaciones entre la Trigonometría Esférica y la Rectilínea. Por otra parte, y dada la singularidad del autor, se ha revisado la vida y obra de Pedro José Rodríguez Riola, mahonés que ejerció como Professor of Mathematics and Navigation of Midshipmen of the U.S. Navy Yard, Gosport, en el estado norteamericano de Virginia, desde 1827 hasta su fallecimiento en 1838. Su obra más importante, Elements of spherical trigonometry, designed as an introduction to the study of nautical astronomy, reunió el conjunto de conocimientos trigonométricos necesarios para la práctica de la Astronomía náutica, presentados de forma que pudieran ser estudiados por personas escasamente versadas en Matemáticas ¿esto es, Aritmética elemental, Geometría Plana, principios de Trigonometría Plana y rudimentos de Álgebra. La obra, influenciada principalmente por Ciscar y Keith, incorpora también elementos procedentes de Keill, Simson y Playfair. A partir de estos autores, Rodríguez realizó, con un estilo personal, un destacable trabajo de selección y síntesis en forma de prontuario destinado a la formación introductoria básica de los niveles inferiores de acceso a la Marina estadounidense. Bibliografía consultada: ARROYO, R. (1994) ¿Las enseñanzas de náutica en el siglo XVIII¿. Revista de Historia Naval, 46, 7-30. AUSEJO, E. & MEDRANO, J. (2012) ¿El Cálculo Infinitesimal en Gabriel Ciscar (1760-1829)¿. Llull, 35(76), 305-315. BARREDA, J. A. & GARCÍA M. (1917) Trigonometría elemental: obra declarada de texto para el ingreso en la Escuela Naval. San Fernando, Iris. BÉZOUT, E. (1770) Cours de Mathématiques a l'usage des Gardes du Pavillon et de la Marine, Quatrieme partie, contenant les Principes généraux de la MÉCHANIQUE, precedes del Principes du Calcul qui fervent d¿introduction aux Sciences Phyfico-Mathématiques. París, J. B. G. Musier fils. BÉZOUT, E. (1771) Cours de Mathématiques a l'usage des Gardes du Pavillon et de la Marine, Seconde partie, contenant le élemens de Géométrie, la Trigonométrie Rectiligne & la Trigonométrie Fphérique. París, D. Mussieer fils. BIELSA Y CIPRIÁN, J. (1857) Tratado de geometría descriptiva, sombras, topográfico y sistema de acotaciones. 2ª edición. Segovia, Imprenta de los sobrinos de Espinosa. BLANCA, J. M. (1979) ¿Cuerpo de Pilotos de la Armada¿. Revista General de Marina, 197, 165-173. BLANCA, J. M. (1991) ¿La Escuela Naval Militar. Su origen histórico¿. Revista de Historia Naval, 32, 11-43. BLANCA, J. M. (1993) ¿Los colegios de Pilotos, la Academia de Guardias Marinas y otros centros docentes de la Armada¿. Revista de Historia Naval, 40, 41-57. BLANCO, J. M. & FERNANDEZ, P. (2008) La Escuela Naval Flotante. Ferrol 1781/1912. Ministerio de Defensa, Centro de Ayudas a la Enseñanza de la Armada española. BRIOT, C. (1880) Lecciones de álgebra elemental y superior / de Ch. Briot ; traducidas, ampliadas y completadas con numerosas notas y extensos apéndices por C. Sebastian y B. Portuondo. Madrid, Imprenta de la viuda é hijos de D. E. Aguado. BRUMMELEN, G. V. (2013) Heavenly Mathematics. The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press. CASTILLO Y CASTRO, M. (1834) Sumario de Trigonometría Esférica para uso de los principiantes en la carrera de la navegación. Madrid, Miguel de Burgos. CISCAR, G. (1796) Tratado de Trigonometría Esférica para la instrucción de los Guardias Marinas. Cartagena, En la Oficina de Marina de este Departamento. CISCAR, G. (1803a) Curso de estudios elementales de Marina Tomo I Aritmética y Tomo II Geometría. Madrid, Imprenta Real. CISCAR, G. (1811) Curso de estudios elementales de Marina Tomo III Cosmografía. Palma, Imprenta Real. CISCAR, G. (1817) Curso de estudios elementales de Marina Tomo III Cosmografía. 2ª edición. Madrid, Imprenta Real. CORTÁZAR, J. (1857) Tratado de Álgebra elemental. 8ª edición. Madrid, G. Alhambra. CORTÁZAR, J. (1859) Tratado de Trigonometría Rectilínea y Esférica, y de Topografía. 6ª edición. Madrid, M. F. Sánchez. CORTÁZAR, J. (1860) Tratado de Aritmética. 12ª edición. Madrid, M. F. Sánchez. CORTÁZAR, J. (1864) Tratado de Geometría Elemental. 12ª edición. Madrid, Imprenta de A. Peñuelas. CORTÁZAR, J. (1865) Tratado de Trigonometría Rectilínea y Esférica, y de Topografía. 10ª edición. Madrid, A. Peñuelas. FERNÁNDEZ, A. G. (1784) Trigonometría Esférica, que dispuso Don Antonio Gabriel Fernández, Maestro de Matemáticas que fue de la Real Academia de Guardias Marinas de Cádiz, y se reimprime para uso de la Compañía de Guardias Marinas de Cartagena. Murcia, Imprenta de la Viuda de Felipe Teruel. GARCÍA VILLAR, M. (1883) Tratado elemental de Geometría Descriptiva escrito por encargo de la Junta Facultativa de la Escuela Naval para servir en ella de texto. Madrid, Establecimiento Tipográfico de los sucesores de Rivadeneyra, Imprenta de la Real Casa. GUILLÉN, J. (1918a) ¿La enseñanza naval militar en España¿, Parte 1ª. Revista General de Marina, 83, 605-627. GUILLÉN, J. (1918b) ¿La enseñanza naval militar en España¿, Parte 3ª. Revista General de Marina, 84, 179-196. GUILLÉN, J. (1919) ¿La enseñanza naval militar en España¿, Parte 2ª. Revista General de Marina, 83, 49-64. HORMIGÓN, M. 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Wilmot on the Blind-Kev. KEITH, T. (1826) An introduction to the theory and practice of Plane and Spherical Trigonometry, and the Stereographic Projection of the sphere; including the theory of Navigation. 5ª edición. London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, Paternoster-Row. LA CAILLE, N. L. (1784) Leçons élémentaires de mathématiques. París, Chez la Veuve Desaint. LACROIX, S. F. (1802) Traité élémentaire de calcul différentiel et de calcul intégral: précédé de réflexions sur la manière d'enseigner les mathématiques, et d'apprécier dans les examens le savoir de ceux qui les ont étudiées. Paris, Chez Duprat. LACROIX, S. F. (1803) Traite Élementaire de Trigonométrie Rectiligne et Sphérique, Et d¿appliation de l¿Algébre a la Géometrie. 3ª édition, Paris, Chez Courcier. LACROIX, S. F. (1820) Tratado elemental de trigonometría rectilínea y esférica y de la aplicación del álgebra a la geometría, Volumen 4. 6ª edición, Madrid, Imprenta Real. LAFUENTE, A. & SELLÉS, M. A. (1986) ¿El proceso de institucionalización de la Academia de Guardiamarinas de Cádiz. (1717-1748)¿. En: J. Echevarría y M. de Mora (coords.) Actas del III Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias: San Sebastián, 1 al 6 de octubre de 1984. San Sebastián, Editorial Guipuzcoana, Vol. 2, 153-175. LAFUENTE, A. & SELLÉS, M. A. (1988) El Observatorio de Cádiz (1753-1831). Madrid, Ministerio de Defensa-Instituto de Historia y Cultura Naval. LAFUENTE, A. & SELLÉS, M. A. (1989) ¿Sabios para la Armada: El curso de estudios mayores de Marina en la España del s. XVIII¿. En: J. L. Peset. Ciencia, vida y espacio en Iberoamérica, 3. Madrid, CSIC, 485-504. LISTA Y ARAGÓN, A. (1823) Elementos de Trigonometría esférica y Geografía astronómica: para el uso de la casa de educación sita en la calle de San Mateo de esta corte. Madrid, Imprenta de Don León Amarita. LÓPEZ SÁNCHEZ, J. F. (1994) Astronomía, Náutica y Metrología en la España Ilustrada: la obra de Gabriel Ciscar (1760-1829). Tesis doctoral. Universidad de Murcia. LÓPEZ SÁNCHEZ, J. F. & VALERA CANDEL, M. & LÓPEZ FERNÁNDEZ, C. (1995) ¿La Academia de Guardias Marinas de Cartagena (1776-1824)¿. Antilia. Revista Española de Historia de las Ciencias de la Naturaleza y de la Tecnología, I, Artículo nº 3. DL: M-34954-1995, ISSN: 1136-2049 [Consultado 7-1-2005]. MARÍA, J. L. de (1900) Lecciones elementales de Geometría Analítica redactadas con arreglo al programa vigente en la Escuela Naval. Ferrol, Imprenta y librería de hijos de R. Pita. MARTÍNEZ GARCÍA, M. A. (2004) Las matemáticas en la ingeniería: las matemáticas en los planes de estudio de los ingenieros civiles en España en el siglo XIX. SEHCTAR, Universidad de Zaragoza. MERÁS Y URÍA, J. (1879) Lecciones de geometria analítica: redactadas para uso de los aspirantes á guardias-marinas. Ferrol, Imprenta de El Correo Gallego. MEUNIER-JOANNET, P. J. 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Keith Hart on the Informal Economy, the Great Transformation, and the Humanity of Corporations
International Relations has long focused on the formal relations between states; in the same way, economists have long focused exclusively on formal economic activities. If by now that sounds outdated, it is only because of the work of Keith Hart. Famous for coining the distinction between the formal and the informal economy in the 1970s, Hart is a critical scholar who engages head-on with some of the world's central political-economic challenges. In this Talk, he, amongst others, discusses the value of the distinction 40 years after; how we need to rethink The Great Transformation nearly a century later; and how we need to undo the legal equivalence of corporations to humans, instituted nearly 150 years back.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?
I think it is the lack of fit between politics, which is principally national, and the world economy, which is global. In particular, the system of money has escaped from its national controls, but politics, public rhetoric aside, has not evolved to the point where adequate responses to our common economic problems can be posed. At this point, the greatest challenge is to extend our grasp of the problems we face beyond the existing national discussions and debates. Most of the problems we see today in the world—and the economic crisis is only one example—are not confined to a single country.
For me, the question is how we can extend our research from the local to the global. Let the conservatives restrict themselves to their national borders. This is not to say I believe that political solutions to the economic problems the world faces are readily available. Indeed, it is possible that we are entering another period of war and revolution, similar to 1776-1815 or 1914-1945. Only after prolonged conflict and much loss might the world reach something like the settlement that followed 1945. This was not only a settlement of wartime politics, but also a framework for the economic politics of the peace, responding to problems that arose most acutely between the wars. It sounds tragic, but my point in raising the possibility now is to remind people that there may be even more catastrophic consequences at stake that they realize already. We need to confront these and mobilize against them. When I go back in history, I am pessimistic about resolving the world's economic problems soon, since the people who got us into this situation are still in power and are still pursuing broadly the same policies without any sign of them being changed. I believe that they will bring us all into a much more drastic situation than we are currently facing. Yet in some way we will be accountable if we ignore the obvious signs all around us.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?
My original work in West Africa arose out of a view that the post-colonial regimes offered political recipes that could have more general relevance for the world. I actually believed that the new states were in a position to provide solutions, if you like, to the corrupt and decadent political structures that we had in the West. That's why, when we were demonstrating outside the American embassies in the '60s, we chanted the names of the great Third World emancipation leaders—Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro, and so on.
So for me, the question has always been whether Africans, in seeking emancipation from a long history of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and postcolonial failure, might be able to change the world. I still think it could be and I'm quite a bit more optimistic about the outcome now than I have been for most of the last fifty years. We live in a racialized world order where Africa acts as the most striking symbol of inequality. The drive for a more equal world society will necessarily entail a shift in the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world. I have been pursuing this question for the last thirty years or more. What interests me at the moment is the politics of African development in the coming decades.
Africa began the twentieth century as the least populated and urbanized continent. It's gone through a demographic and urban explosion since then, doubling its share of world population in a century. In 2050, the UN predicts that 24% of the world population will be in Africa, and in 2100, 35% (read the report here, pdf)! This is because Africa is growing at 2.5% a year while the rest of the world is ageing fast. Additionally, 7 out of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are now African—Asian manufacturers already know that Africa holds the key to the future of the world economy.
But, besides Africa as a place, if you will, a number of anti-colonial intellectuals have played a big role in influencing me. The most important event in the twentieth century was the anti-colonial revolution. Peoples forced into world society by Western Imperialism fought to establish their own independent relationship to it. The leading figures of that struggle are, to my mind, still the most generative thinkers when we come to consider our own plight and direction. My mentor was the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James, with whom I spent a number of years toward the end of his life. I am by temperament a classicist; I like to read the individuals who made a big difference to the way we think now. The anti-colonial intellectuals were the most important thinkers of the 20th century, by which I mean Gandhi, Fanon and James.
But I've also pursued a very classical, Western trajectory in seeking to form my own thinking. When I was an undergraduate, I liked Durkheim and as a graduate student Weber. When I was a young lecturer, I became a Marxist; later, when I went to the Carribbean, I discovered Hegel, Kant and Rousseau; and by the time I wrote my book on money, The Memory Bank, the person I cited more than anyone else was John Locke. By then I realized I had been moving backwards through the greats of Western philosophy and social theory, starting with the Durkheim school of sociology. Now I see them as a set of possible references that I can draw on eclectically. Marx is still probably the most important influence, although Keynes, Simmel and Polanyi have also shaped my recent work. I suppose my absolute favorite of all those people is Jean-Jacques Rousseau for his Discourse on Inequality and his inventive approach to writing about how to get from actual to possible worlds.
What would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
In your 20s and 30s, your greatest commitment should be to experience the world in the broadest way possible, which means learning languages, traveling, and being open to new experiences. I think the kind of vision that I had developed over the years was not one that I had originally and the greatest influence on it was the time I spent in Ghana doing my doctoral fieldwork; indeed, I have not had an experience that so genuinely transformed me since!
Even so, I found it very difficult to write a book based on that fieldwork. I moved from my ethnographic investigations into a literature review of the political economy of West African agriculture, and it turns out that I am actually not an ethnographer, and am more interested in surveying literature concerning the questions that interest me. I am still an acute observer of everyday life; but I don't base my 'research' on it. Young people should both extend their comparative reach in a practical way and dig very deeply into circumstances that they encounter, wherever that may be. Above all, they should retain a sense of the uniqueness of their own life trajectory as the only basis for doing something new. This matters more than any professional training.
Now we see spectacular growth rates in African countries, as you mentioned, one of which is the DRC. How can we make sense of these formal growth rates: are they representative of the whole economies of these countries, or do they only refer to certain economic tendencies?
The whole question of measuring economic growth is a technical one, and it's flawed, and I only use it in the vaguest sense as a general indicator. For example, I think it's more important that Kenya, for example, is the world leader in mobile phone banking, and also a leader in recycling old computers for sale cheaply to poor people.
The political dispensation in Africa—the combination of fragmented states and powerful foreign interests and the predatory actions of the leaders of these states on their people -- especially the restrictions they impose on the movements of people and goods and money and so on – is still a tremendous problem. I think that the political fragmentation of Africa is the main obstacle to achieving economic growth.
But at the same time, as someone who has lived in Africa for many years, it's very clear that in some countries, certainly not all, the economies are very significantly on the move. It's not--in principle—that this will lead to durable economic growth, but it is the case that the cities are expanding fast, Africans are increasing their disposable income and it's the only part of the world where the people are growing so significantly. Africa is about to enter what's called the demographic dividend that comes when the active labor force exceeds the number of dependents. India has just gone through a similar phase.
The Chinese and others are heavily committed to taking part in this, obviously hoping to direct Africa's economic growth in their own interest. This is partly because the global economy is over the period of growth generated by the Chinese manufacturing exports and the entailed infrastructure and construction boom, which was itself an effect of the greatest shift from the countryside to the city in history. Now, the Chinese realize, the next such boom will be—can only take place—in Africa.
I'm actually not really interested in technical questions of how to measure economic growth. In my own writing about African development, I prefer anecdotes. Like for example, Nollywood—the Nigerian film industry—which has just past Bollywood as the second largest in the world! You mention the Congo which I believe holds the key to Africa's future. The region was full of economic dynamism before King Leopold took it over and its people have shown great resilience since Mobutu was overthrown and Rwandan and Ugandan generals took over the minerals-rich Eastern Congo. Understanding this history is much more important than measuring GDP, but statistics of this kind have their uses if approached with care.
Is it possible to understand the contemporary economic predicament that we are seeing, which in the Western world is referred to as the "crisis", without attributing it to vague agencies or mechanisms such as neoliberalism?
I have written at great length about the world economic crisis paying special attention to the problems of the Eurozone. My belief is that it is not simply a financial crisis or a debt crisis. We are actually witnessing the collapse of the dominant economic form of the last century and a half, which I call national capitalism—the attempt to control markets, money and accumulation through central bureaucracies in the interests of a presumed cultural community of national citizens.
The term neoliberalism is not particularly useful, but I try to lay out the history of modern money and why and how national currencies are in fact being replaced. That, to my mind, is a more precise way of describing the crisis than calling it neoliberal. On the other hand, neoliberalism does refer to the systematic privatization of public interests which has become normal over the last three or four hundred years. The bourgeois revolution claimed to have separated public and private interests, but I don't think it ever did so. For example, the Bank of England, the Banque de France, and the Federal Reserve are all private institutions that function behind a smokescreen of being public agencies.
It's always been the case that private interests corrupted public institutions and worked to deprive citizens of the ability to act purposefully under an ideological veil of liberty. But in the past, they tried to hide it. The public wasn't supposed to know what actually went on behind the scenes and indeed modern social science was invented to ensure that they never knew. What makes neoliberalism new is that they now boast about it and even claim that it's in everyone's interest to diminish public goods and use whatever is left for private ends—that's what neoliberalism is.
It's a naked grab for public resources and it's also a shift in the fundamental dynamic of capitalism from production for profit through sales tow varieties of rent-seeking. In fact, Western capitalism is now a system for extracting rents, rather than producing profits. Rents are income secured by political privilege such as the dividends of patents granted to Big Pharma or the right to control distribution of recycled movies. This has got nothing to do with competitive or free markets and much opposition to where we are now is confused as a result. Sometimes I think western capitalism has reverted to the Old Regime that it once replaced—from King George and the East India Company to George W and Halliburton. If so, we need another liberal revolution, but it won't take place in the North Atlantic societies.
In your recent work, you refer to The Great Transformation, which invokes Karl Polanyi's famous analysis of the growth of 19th century capitalism and industrialization. How can Polanyi help us to make sense of contemporary global economy, and where does this inspiring work need to be complemented? In other words, what is today's Great Transformation in light of Polanyi?
First of all, the Great Transformation is a brilliant book. I have never known anyone who didn't love it from the first reading. The great message of Polanyi's work is the spirit in which he wrote that book, regardless of the components of his theory. He had a passionate desire to explain the mess that world society had reached by the middle of the 20th century, and he provided an explanation. It's always been a source of inspiration for me.
A central idea of Polanyi's is that the economy was always embedded in society and Victorian capitalism disembedded it. One problem is that it is not clear whether the economy ever was actually disembedded (for example capitalism is embedded in state institutions and the private social networks mentioned just now) or whether the separation occurs at the level of ideology, as in free market economics. Polanyi was not against markets as such, but rather against market fundamentalism of the kind that swept Victorian England and has us in its grip today. The political question is whether politics can serve to protect society from the excesses produced by this disembedding; or whether it lends itself to further separation of the economy from society.
And I would say that Polanyi's biggest failure was to claim that what happened in the 19th century was the rise of "market society". This concept misses entirely the bureaucratic revolution that was introduced from the 1860s onwards based on a new alliance between capitalists and landlords which led to a new synthesis of states and corporations aiming to develop mass production and consumption. Polanyi could not anticipate what actually happened after he wrote his book in 1944. An American empire of free trade was built on a tremendous bureaucratic revolution. This drew on techniques and theories of control developed while fighting a war on all fronts. The same war was the source of the technologies that culminated late in the digital revolution. Karl Polanyi's interpretation of capitalism as a market economy doesn't help us much to understand that. In fact, he seems to have thought that bureaucracy and planning were an antidote to capitalist market economy.
If you ask me what is today's great transformation, I would prefer to treat the last 200 years as a single event, that is, a period in which the world population increased from one billion to seven billion, when the proportion of people living in cities grew from under 3% to around half, and where energy production increased on average 3% a year. The Great Transformation is this leap of mankind from reliance on the land into living in cities. It has been organized by a variety of institutions, including cities, capitalist markets, nation-states, empires, regional federations, machine industry, telecommunications networks, financial structures, and so on. I'm prepared to say that in the twentieth century national capitalism was the dominant economic form, but by no means all you need to know about if you want to make a better world.
I prefer to look at the economy as being organized by a plural set of institutions, including various political forms. The Great Transformation in Polanyi's sense was not really the same Great Transformation that Marx and Engels observed in Victorian England—the idea that a new economic system was growing up there that would transform the world. And it did! Polanyi and Marx had different views (as well as some common ideas), but both missed what actually happened, which is the kind of capitalism whose collapse is constitutes the Great Transformation for us today. The last thirty years of financial imperialism are similar to the three decades before the First World War. After that phase collapsed, thirty years of world war and economic depression were the result. I believe the same will happen to us! Maybe we can do something about it, but only if our awareness is historically informed in a contemporarily relevant way.
The distinction between states and markets really underpins much of what we understand about the workings of world economy and politics. Even when we just say "oh, that's not economic" or "that's not rational", we invoke a separation. How can we deal with this separation?
This state-market division comes back to the bourgeois revolution, which was an attempt to win freedom from political interference for private economic actors. I've been arguing that states and markets were always in bed together right from the beginning thousands of years ago, and they still are! The revolution of the mid 19th century involved a shift from capitalists representing workers against the landed aristocracy to a new alliance between them and the traditional enforcers to control the industrial and criminal classes flocking into the cities. A series of linked revolutions in all the main industrial countries during the 1860s and early 70s—from the American civil war to the French Third Republic via the Meiji Restoration and German unification—brought this alliance to power.
Modernity was thus a compromise between traditional enforcers and industrial capitalists and this dualism is reflected in the principal social form, the nation-state. This uneasy partnership has marked the relationship between governments and corporations ever since. I think that we are now witnessing a bid of the corporations for independence, for home rule, if you like. Perhaps, having won control of the political process, they feel than can go ahead to the next stage without relying on governments. The whole discourse of 'corporate social responsibility' implies that they could take on legal and administrative functions that had been previously 'insourced' to states. It is part of a trend whereby the corporations seek to make a world society in which they are the only citizens and they no longer depend on national governments except for local police functions. I think that it is a big deal—and this is happening under our noses!
Both politicians and economic theorists (OliverWilliamson got a Nobel prize for developing Coase's theory of the form along these lines) are proposing that we need to think again about what functions should be internal to the firm and what should be outside. Perhaps it was a mistake to outsource political control to states and war could be carried out by private security firms. The ground for all of this was laid in the late 19th century when the distinction in law between real and artificial persons was collapsed for business enterprises so that the US Supreme Court can protect corporate political spending in the name of preserving their human rights! Corporations have greater wealth, power and longevity than individual citizens. Until we can restore their legal separateness from the rest of humanity and find the political means of restricting their inexorable rise, resistance will be futile. There is a lot of intellectual and political work still to be done and, as I have said, a lot of pain to come before more people confront the reality of their situation.
What role do technological innovations play in your understanding and promoting of shifts in the way that we organize societies? Is it a passive thing or a driver of change?
I wrote a book, the Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (read it here, with the introduction here), which centered on a very basic question: what would future generations consider is interesting about us? In the late '90s, the dot com boom was the main game in town. It seemed obvious that the rise of the internet was the most important thing and that our responses to it would have significant consequences for future generations.
When I started writing it, I was interested in the democratic potential of the new media; but most of my friends saw them as a new source of inequality – digital exclusion, dominance of the big players and so on. I was accused of being optimistic, but I had absorbed from CLR James a response to such claims. It is not a question of being optimistic or pessimistic, but of identifying what the sides are in the struggle to define society's trajectory. In this case the sides are bureaucracy and the people. Of course the former wish to confine our lives within narrow limits that they control in a process that culminates as totalitarianism. But the rest of us want to increase the scope for self-expression in our daily lives; we want democracy and the force of the peoples of world is growing, not least in Africa which for so long has been excluded from the benefits of modern civilization. Of course there are those who wish to control the potential of the internet from the top; but everywhere people are making space for themselves in this revolution. When I see how Africans have moved in the mobile phone phase of this revolution, I am convinced that there is much to play for in this struggle. What matters is to do your best for your side, not to predict which side will win. Speaking personally, Web 2.0 has been an unmitigated boon for me in networking and dissemination, although I am aware that some think that corporate capital is killing off the internet. A lot depends on your perspective. I grew up learning Latin and Greek grammar. The developments of the last 2-3 decades seem like a miracle to me. I guess that gives me some buoyancy if not optimism as such.
It's obvious enough to me that any democratic response to the dilemmas we face must harness the potential of the new universal media. That's the biggest challenge. But equally, it's not clear which side is going to win. I'm not saying that our side, the democratic side, is going to beat the bureaucratic side. I just know which side I'm on! And I'm going to do my best for our side. Our side is the side that would harness the democratic potential of the new media. In the decade or more since I wrote my book on money and the internet, I have become more focused on the threat posed by the corporations and more accepting of the role of governments. But that could change too. And I am mindful of the role the positive role that some capitalists played in the classical liberal revolutions of the United States, France and Italy.
Final Question. I would like to ask you about the distinction between formal and informal economy which you are famous for having coined. How did you arrive at the distinction? Does the term, the dichotomy, still with have the same analytical value for you today?
Around 1970, there was a universal consensus that only states could organize economies for development. You were either a Marxist or a Keynesian, but there were no liberal economists with any influence at that time. In my first publication on the topic (Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana, read it here, pdf)—which got picked up by academics and the International Labor Organization—I was reacting against that; the idea promoted by a highly formal economics and bureaucratic practice that the state as an idea as the only actor. In fact, people in Third World cities engaged in all kinds of economic activities, which just weren't recognized as such. So my impulse was really empiricist—to use my ethnographic observations to show that people were doing a lot more than they were supposed to be doing, as recorded in official statistics or discussed by politicians and economists.
Essentially, I made a distinction between those things which were defined by formal regulation and those that lay outside it. I posed the question how does it affect our understanding in the development process to know more what people are doing outside the formal framework of the economy. And remember, this came up in West Africa, which did not have as strong a colonial tradition as in many other parts of Africa. African cities there were built and provisioned by Africans. There were not enough white people there to build these cities or to provide food and transport, housing, clothing and the rest of it.
In my book on African agriculture, I went further and argued that the cities were not the kind of engines of change that many people imagined that they were, but were in fact an extension of rural civilizations that had effectively not been displaced by colonialism, at least in that region. Now if you ask me how useful I think it is today, what happened since then of course is neoliberal globalization, for want of a better term, which of course hinges on deregulation. So, as a result of neoliberal deregulation, vast areas of the economy are no longer shaped by law, and these include many of the activities of finance, including offshore banking, hedge funds, shadow banking, tax havens, and so on. It also includes the criminal activities of the corporations themselves. I've written a paper on my blog called "How the informal economy took over the world" which argues that we are witnessing the collapse of the post-war Keynesian consensus that sought to manage the economy in the public interest through law and in other ways that have been dismantled; so, it's a free-for-all. In some sense, the whole world is now an informal economy, which means, of course, that the term is not as valuable analytically as it once was. If it's everything, then we need some new words.
The mistake I made with other people who followed me was to identify the informal economy with poor slum dwellers. I argued that even for them, they were not only in the informal economy, which was not a separate place, but that all of them combined the formal and informal in some way. But what I didn't pay much attention to was the fact that the so-called formal economy was also the commanding heights of the informal economy—that the politicians and the civil servants were in fact the largest informal operators. I realize that any economy must be informal to some degree, but it is also impossible for an economy to be entirely informal. There always have to be rules, even if they take a form that we don't acknowledge as being bureaucratically normal like, for example, kinship or religion or criminal gangs. So that's another reason why it seems to me that the distinction has lost its power.
At the time, it was a valuable service to point to the fact that many people were doing things that were escaping notice. But once what they were doing had been noticed, then the usefulness of the distinction really came into question. I suppose in retrospect that the idea of an informal economy was a gesture towards realism, to respect what people really do in the spirit of ethnography. I have taken that idea to another level recently in mywork on the human economy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Here, in addition to privileging the actors' point of view and their everyday lives, we wish to address the human predicament at more inclusive levels than the local or even the national. Accordingly, our interdisciplinary research program (involving a dozen postdocs from around the world, including Africa, and 8 African doctoral students) seeks ways of extending our conceptual and empirical reach to take in world society and humanity as a whole. This is easier said than done, of course.
Keith Hart is Extraordinary Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship and Co-Director of the Human Economy Program at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is also centennial professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE.
Related links
Faculty Profile at U-London
Personal webpage
Read Hart's Notes towards an Anthropology of the Internet (2004, Horizontes Antropológicos) here (pdf)
Read Hart's Marcel Mauss: In Pursuit of a Whole (2007, Comparative Studies in Society and History) here (pdf)
Read Hart's Between Democracy and the People: A Political History of Informality (2008 DIIS working paper) here (pdf)
Read Hart's Why the Eurocrisis Matters to Us All (Scapegoat Journal) here (pdf)
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Enter the DragonWhen I first read that Naomi Klein wrote a book about being confused for her doppelgänger, Naomi Wolf, I was initially amused. I had written earlier about the doppelgänger as the monster of our times, and it seemed that Klein was confirming that thesis. Klein dealing with Wolf seemed like it might be a fun distraction, but as I read the book, I was immediately struck with the fact that Klein is taking on more than a particular case of mistaken identity. Her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, is in some sense an attempt to make sense of the world we are living in a world dominated by social media doppelgangers in which the work of political and social criticism has its own dark doppelganger in the world of conspiracy theories. It is not just that Naomi Wolf gets confused with Naomi Klein, both are women who wrote mainstream "big idea" books, The Beauty Myth and No Logo, have similar physical appearances, and their husbands are even both named Avi, but that this confusion reveals another doppelgänger, another double, our online or virtual self. As Klein writes, we live in "a culture crowded with various forms of doubling, in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgängers--virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others. A culture in which many of us have come to think of ourselves as personal brands, forging a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, a doppelgänger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy." Klein's struggle with being confused with Wolf is also a recognition, that Klein, the author of No Logo, has another double, her "brand." This is what most people know her as, the author of critical books on the culture, politics, and economy of capitalism. Klein is aware that it is ironic to point out that the author of No Logo has a brand, but such a brand, an identity, are increasingly indispensable factors of living and working as a writer. As she puts it, the idea of a personal brand seemed like a dystopian future when it was proposed in the late nineties, but now it is a dystopian reality, anyone with a social media account has a double, a brand, that they can manage, and some need this brand to survive. The Lady From Shanghai Klein's book is not just about Wolf usurping her digital identity, but about Wolf's own descent into what Klein calls the "mirror world." the world of conspiracy theories, especially those that have metastasized in American culture since Trump and Covid. Wolf's descent into this world is very much a dive of the deep end. Wolf has tweeted about vaccinated people losing their smell, they no longer smell human, about the risk of the feces of the vaccinated contaminating drinking water, and most famously about vaccine passports and contact tracing being the end of human freedom. It is easy to mock all of this, but Klein does not play this for the laughs, she tries to understand the causes and crises underlying the paranoid fantasies. One common retort to the paranoid fears of contact tracing, vaccine passports, and even microchips hidden in vaccines is to simply say, "wait until they hear about cellphones," to point out that the surveillance that is feared is already here and for the most part broadly accepted. Klein supposes instead that they, those who spread such theories, already know about cellphones, already know about surveillance and the loss of a certain kind of anonymity and freedom. It is this awareness that appears backwards and distorted in the fears of vaccines laden with nanotechnology to monitor and control us. Their fears about vaccines, about being tracked and monitored, is in some sense a fantasy that they can do something about this increase of surveillance. They can refuse the vaccine, and thus opt out of what many of us find it impossible to opt out of, a world where our every motion, every transaction, is monitored. Klein's concept of a mirror world is both a reflection and refraction of our existing world. In some sense it reflects our world, but through a kind of distortion, shaped by our illusions and fantasies. Conspiracy theories are right to point to the control of a powerful elite, but wrong in thinking that this elite is secret, or that its motives are anything other than daily life under capitalism. As Klein writes, "There was no need for histrionics about how unvaccinated people were experiencing "apartheid" when there was a real vaccine apartheid between rich and poor countries, no need to cook up fantasies about Covid "internment camps" when the virus was being left to rip through prisons, meat packing plants, and Amazon warehouses as if the people's lives inside had no value at all."The fears of the Covid alarmists of a dark future to come are the reality of existing life under Covid. What Klein proposes is in some sense a symptomatic reading of conspiracy theories, finding their points of reflection and refraction of the existing world. The Man With the Golden Gun(In case it is not clear I am illustrating this with Hall of Mirrors scenes from films)With respect to the latter, the refractions and distortions, reading Doppelganger it is possible to find three causes or conditions underlying the distortions of the mirror world. Three aspects of existing ideology that distort and warp the way that this world responds to actual crises and problems. First, is idea of the individual, of the autonomous individual. This belief in autonomy and self reliance is the common core that connects the "wellness industry," yoga instructors, gym gurus, etc., who deny the need for vaccines and even masks for healthy people, with survivalists, who see them as an imposition by the state. Both insist on a purely individual response to a collective condition. Of course in doing so they are only acting on the basic premise of a capitalist society, which privatizes every social problem into a commodity. During Covid many doubled down on this, insisting that one could get through the pandemic with everything from Vitamin D supplements and essential oils to horse medicine. Yoga instructors, vegans, and Fox News audiences might seem to be politically opposed, but they all are different expressions of what Klein calls hyper-individualism, responding to social collapse with individual responses of wellness and self-protection. As absurd as all of these homegrown cures and remedies were they were perhaps not as absurd as the notion that the US as a society could shift its entire economy and ethics, transforming all of those people we do not think about, the people who grow, ship, make, and deliver our food into essential workers. As Klein writes, "With no warning, the message from much of our political and corporate classes change diametrically. It turned out that we were a society after all, that the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill; that we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, if not for ourselves; and that we should all applaud and thank the very people--many of them Black, many of them women, many of them born in poorer countries--whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted and demeaned before the pandemic."Many embraced conspiracies rather than adjust to this new concern for essential workers, the elderly, and the sick, but in doing so they followed to the letter the dominant image of our society, a society founded on isolation, self-interest, and competition. As Klein details, often suspicion of things like free vaccines stemmed from a deeper internalization of the fundamental idea of capitalism. Why would a society that charges for a visit to the emergency room give away a life saving vaccine?This idea of the individual has its own little doppelgänger, the child. A great deal of the opposition to vaccines, mask mandates, and shutdowns was framed as protecting children from the supposed threats these things supposedly represent, spectres like "learning loss" rather than the reality of a pandemic. These threats all stem from a particular idea of a child, a child as extension of the self, and possession of their parents. "So many of the battles waged in the Mirror World--the "anti-woke" laws, the "don't say gay" bills, the blanket bans on gender-affirming medical care, the school board wars over vaccines and masks--come down to the same question: What are children for? Are they their own people, and our job, as parents is to support and protect them as they find their paths? Or are they our appendages, our extensions, our spin-offs, our doubles, to shape and mold and ultimately benefit from? So many of these parents seem convinced that they have a right to exert absolute control over their children without any interference or input: control over their bodies (by casting masks and vaccines as a kind of child rape or poisoning); control over their bodies (by casting masks and vaccines as a kind of child rape or poisoning); control over their minds (by casting anti-racist eductions as the injection of foreign ideas into their minds of their offspring); control over their gender and sexuality (by casting any attempt to discuss the range of possible gender expressions and sexual orientations as "grooming")."If the focus on individual health and the wellbeing of one's offspring sounds like eugenics, that is not accidental. This brings us to the third condition for distortion, race. As Klein argues Naomi Wolf, like many of the anti-vaccination movement, regularly invoke the holocaust or the civil rights struggle in their rhetoric. Wolf has even had her own sit-ins opposing vaccine mandates at lunch counters, her term, even as she singles out Black owned businesses for her protests. Throughout the mirror world there is a desire to appropriate the signs and images of ethnic exclusion, (remember the store that sold yellow stars that said "Not Vaccinated?" ) and racial justice, from sitting in at lunch counters to using Eric Garner's famous cry "I can't breathe" to protest mask mandates. In the mirror world it is white people who are both the true victims of discrimination and the real protagonists of social justice.Us This appropriation of the terms and history of racial justice is coupled with an absolute indifference to its current status. The year of shutdowns and mandates was also the summer of some of the largest protests of the "Black Lives Matter" movement. "If you were a person concerned that Covid marked the dawn of a new age of CCP inspired mass obedience, surely it would be worth mentioning that the largest protests in the history of the United States happened in the Covid era, with millions of people willing to face clouds of tear gas and streams of pepper spray to exercise their rights to speech, assembly and dissent. Come to think of it, if you were a person concerned with tyrannical state actions, you would also be concerned about the murders and mass denials of freedom to incarcerated people that drove the uprising. Yet in all the videos Wolf has put out issuing her dire warnings about how the United States was turning into a nation of sheeple, I have seen her acknowledge neither the existence of this racial justice reckoning nor the reality that if a Black person had pulled the same stunt that she did at the Blue Bottle or Grand Central Station, they very likely would have ended up face down in cuffs--not because vaccine rules were tyrannical, but because of systemic anti-Black racism in policing, the issue that sparked the protests she has so studiously ignored. I would argue that while Naomi Wolf might not have mentioned Black Lives Matter, she definitely noticed it. Her "lunch counter sit in" at a Blue Bottle Cafe would seem to reveal that. It was definitely noticed by the larger mirror world for which the site of millions of people in the streets protesting racism when they could not go to the gym or to a restaurant was a wrong, a violation of the order of the world, that they could not tolerate. As Klein argues much Mirror World thinking is an attempt for white people to rewrite the history of the present--making them the true victims of repression and the true heroes. The real struggle was not in the streets fighting against police repression but screaming at the hostess at the restaurant asking for proof of vaccination. As much as Klein draws the lines of demarcation between "mirror world" thinking, between conspiracies and critical thought, any such division is going to be an unstable one. In the end it is not just that Naomi Wolf is confused for Naomi Klein but that theories about microchips in vaccines or vaccines rewriting our DNA are confused for criticisms of contemporary surveillance and the pharmaceutical industry. Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine has been appropriated and reappropriated by everyone from Second Amendment activists arguing about "false flags" to those that argue that global warming will produce a new global surveillance state. Klein's book ultimately is not just about her own struggle with a doppelgänger, but how any critical thinker, anyone on "the left," for lack of a better word, will always confront a doppelgänger. Every critic of the invasion of Iraq has to deal with "truthers" who claim that 9/11 was an inside job, every critic of the failure of the US to respond to the pandemic will ultimately have to deal with claims of microchips and genetic engineering. What starts out as one persons struggle with a very singular condition of mistaken identity ultimately is a story about all of us. We are all in the hall of mirrors now. Klein has also charted something of a path out, by showing the ideologies of individualism, the family, and the race, that distort any awareness of our conditions into its mirror world opposite. Lastly, Klein like Bruce Lee before her knew that you have to smash a few mirrors to escape a hall of mirrors, and this includes, for Klein, giving up on one's own image, one's brand, learning to think and act collectively rather than individually.
