Suchergebnisse

Introduction: Two lynchings : a microcosm -- Todos Santos -- A postwar phenomenon? -- Vigilantism, dissonance & the Guatemalan state -- Scapegoats, gossip & rumour -- Dissemination : vigilantism & the media -- The blurred boundaries of violence -- Concluding thoughts/lingering problems.

Introduction: The insurrection : the first battle in a new war -- Nostalgia matters -- The cartography of the new white nation -- Close the borders : constructing higher education as liberal -- Rationalizing innovation vacuum -- Contain the minorities : policies to ensure isolation of minorities -- Trust in the age of compliance -- The attempted coup, Black Lives Matter, and COVID-19 -- Conclusion: Context and for examining discourses of higher education in relation to American and racial theories.

AbstractIt is generally regarded that a robust global financial safety net is a global public good. Yet public goods models that explain the existence of the global financial safety net cannot also explain why it is highly fragmented and provisioned so inequitably. This study shows that the global financial safety net's existence, fragmentation, and inequitable coverage can be explained by modeling the global financial safety net as a global club good. The primary finding of the model is that when a state has a monopoly on the provision of a non-rival and excludable good (i.e., a club good), separate multilateral and bilateral club governance structures emerge, each with a unique structure and cost. Brief case studies of the global financial safety net provisioned by the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve, and the Bank for International Settlements support the model.

This paper uses agent-based modeling to investigate the philosophy of Adam Smith. During his lifetime, Smith published two books. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), he argued that market behavior was dictated primarily by self-interest. However, his earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), placed sympathy and benevolence at the center of human social psychology. Reconciling these apparently contradictory views is known as the Adam Smith Problem. This study uses an agent-based model to combine Smith's theories, exploring how social norms affect economic behavior, and vice versa. Although they share many basic assumptions, Smith's works leave important questions unanswered: Theory of Moral Sentiments offers a strong model of how social norms consolidate but lacks a coherent explanation for how norms change over time, and, on the other side, Wealth of Nations does not account for the influence of social norms on commercial transactions nor for the durability of seemingly irrational norms in a context of market competition. Considering both theories together in a single model sheds light on their underlying tensions and exposes instabilities that Smith did not anticipate.

America Latina se ha colocado a la vanguardia en los procesos de reorientacion de las politicas economicas. El ritmo de las reformas se acelero a mediados del decenio de 1980 y, en los primeros anos del decenio de 1990, casi todas las economias de la region habian por lo menos iniciado un programa de estabilizacion economica y reformas estructurales en los sectores de politica comercial, sistemas tributarios, regulacion del mercado financiero, privatizacion, mercados laborales y sistemas de pensiones. En el presente documento el autor se pregunta si las reformas de los anos 1980 y 1990 han aumentado la vulnerabilidad en las economias de la region y, por lo tanto, han propiciado la inestabilidad macroeconomica. (Pensam Iberoam/DÜI)

The Mexican oil boom was characterized by a period of high investment, followed by capital flight. The private sector and households responded to the 1977-1981 windfall by attaining high savings rates. On the other hand, the Mexican government, the proprietor of the state oil company and the principal beneficiary of the oil boom, used windfall revenues to finance unsustainable spending and even engage in dissaving. These policies produced macroeconomic dislocations that made Mexico highly vulnerable to the inevitable external shocks.

Although central bank independence is a core tenet of monetary policy-making, it remains politically contested: In many emerging markets, populist governments are in frequent public conflict with the central bank. At other times, the same governments profess to respect the monetary authority's independence. We model this conflict drawing on the crisis bargaining literature. Our model predicts that populist politicians will often bring a nominally independent central bank to heel without having to change its legal status. To provide evidence, we build a new data set of public pressure on central banks by classifying over 9000 analyst reports using machine learning. We find that populist politicians are more likely than non-populists to exert public pressure on the central bank, unless checked by financial markets, and also more likely to obtain interest rate concessions. Our findings underscore that de jure does not equal de facto central bank independence in the face of populist pressures.

Recent economic developments highlight Latin America`s vulnerability to economic and financial turmoil that is triggered by events in distant corners of the globe. The Asian financial crisis that began in 1997 and the more recent Russian crisis have left the region profoundly shaken, and living in fear of a full-scale collapse. This contagion has occurred through a number of channels. The collapse of Asian demand has contributed to the recent slide in world commodity prices, cutting into the commodity-dependent region`s export income and undermining the public finances in a number of countries. The Russian devaluation has raised the spectre of sovereign default, making investors around the globe more wary of increasing their cross-border exposure. The financial crises in Asia and Russia have also severely undermined balance sheets of emerging-market investors, reducing their capacity to invest in the region, and forcing them into fire sales of their Latin American investments. In this paper we lay out the fiscal and financial policies that can help protect economies from the kind of global financial turbulence the world is now experiencing. Exchange rate policies are discussed in a separate paper.