Suchergebnisse

For several decades, public political discourses on 'welfare dependency' have failed to recognise that welfare states are not the source of economic dependence, but rather reconfigure economic dependencies in a specific way. This article distinguishes four senses of 'economic dependence' that can help to clarify what is missing from these discourses, and what is at stake in political and legal decisions about how we may economically depend upon one another. While feminist, republican and egalitarian philosophical work has examined the problems of dependence on states, in families and in markets, the present approach adds a further dimension to our cultural and political concerns with economic dependence: it argues that it is reasonable and useful to consider the economic dependence of the economically powerful. Doing so requires a clarification of the 'varieties of dependence' that exist in contemporary societies and economies, and the recognition that legal and political choices regarding social and economic justice are often about choosing between varieties of dependence, not about escaping dependence entirely.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Foreign Policy and Economic Dependence -- 1. Introduction -- 2. International Economic Dependence -- 3. Foreign Policy Compliance -- 4. United States Economic Dependencies -- 5. Compliance in the General Assembly -- 6. Theoretical and Policy Implications -- Notes -- Index

This analysis attempts to examine the ability of one nation to induce other nations to follow lines of policy which they might otherwise not pursue, as a result of their economic dependence on the former. To explore this relationship between economic dependence and political compliance, this study focuses on U.S. and Soviet economic exchanges with 24 nations as they relate to estimates of compliance. Moreover, this study develops a model for examining the relationship between dependence and compliance for differing categories of issues in order to determine under what situations economic dependence will be most successful in influencing political compliance.

Patrick McGowan has recently attempted to examine the relationship between 'Economic Dependence and Economic Performance in Black Africa' in this Journal, Vol. xiv, No. I, March 1976, pp. 25–40. His article reemphasised the need for concrete analysis since the generalities of 'dependence' have been more extensively studied than their concrete expressions. However, a fundamental problem of his analysis is that the criteria for verifying the theory of dependence are unrelated to the theory itself: the 'test' devised is a series of correlations between measures of dependence and indicators of economic performance, since 'the theory [of dependence] predicts that dependence is negatively associated with indicators of economic growth and development' (p. 27). Part of the problem is that McGowan does not really define 'dependence', but in addition it is not at all clear why this is expected to be negatively associated with indicators of economic growth.

Samir Amin has recently argued that black African countries are all characterised by extreme forms of underdevelopment. In his view, this situation is produced by the dependency of African states on more developed countries that is a consequence of the continent's common historical experience of economic exploitation by European-organised mercantilism, the slave trade, imperialism, and colonialism. Moreover, via the mechanisms of western-based neo-colonialism, African under-development has been perpetuated, and perhaps even increased, during the achievement of political independence over the past 25 years.