Suchergebnisse

High modernism, the dominant sociotechnical imagination in postwar Taiwan, manifested in tacit answers to the questions of what a better society would look like and the most pragmatic and viable approach to make the particular dreamed-of future become reality. This article explores the exclusion of alternative energy futures brought about by a high modernist imaginary. This imaginary underlies a strategy of emphasizing shortage at present and prosperity in the future—as long as the current shortage is solved in a reliable way. Focusing on the contention over energy supply between 2011 and 2015, this article provides an analysis of how power shortages are presented in discursive ambiguity, how the claimed crisis over the electricity shortage moves to the center of public debate via the institutional practices of power rationing, and how its public authority is established through collective witness. Renewable energy is continually represented as an "immature" and "unviable" technology when it comes to satisfying the nation's need, through particular routinized practices in the calculation of "reserve margins" in electricity planning and the collective witnessing of (limited) operating reserves. We argue that both of these come with their own assumptions and political implications and therefore invite scrutiny.

This Translations contribution synthesises critical environmental social science research produced in Taiwan and published largely in Chinese. Taiwan is distinctive in east Asia in that it has had, over several decades, a relatively large and prolific community of scholars engaged with environmental justice and sustainability. This research tradition is linked to the emergence of grassroots environmentalism in response to environmental issues faced during Taiwan's rapid industrialisation, and to the democratisation of Taiwanese society from the 1980s onwards. Fuller understanding of research produced and published within in Taiwan hence yields insights for the role of social science within newly industrialising and democratising nations. Although the story of Taiwanese society's relation to environmentalism is to an extent understood in English-language literature, less prevalent are the diverse ways Taiwanese social scientists have engaged with environmental issues, the empirical case studies which have shaped their thinking, and the influences of Western environmental sociology and science and technology studies (STS) within Taiwan. By synthesising Chinese-language environmental social science literature from Taiwan, we characterise three strands of scholarship: activism and social movements; environmental controversies; and environmental governance, policy and institutions. We identify (a) the ability of communities and civil societies to affect change from within extant governance processes and (b) the local-level implications of national sustainable development rhetoric as two areas where Taiwanese scholarship may make particularly valuable contributions to work at the sustainability-environmental justice interface.

This Translations contribution synthesises critical environmental social science research produced in Taiwan and published largely in Chinese. Taiwan is distinctive in east Asia in that it has had, over several decades, a relatively large and prolific community of scholars engaged with environmental justice and sustainability. This research tradition is linked to the emergence of grassroots environmentalism in response to environmental issues faced during Taiwan's rapid industrialisation, and to the democratisation of Taiwanese society from the 1980s onwards. Fuller understanding of research produced and published within in Taiwan hence yields insights for the role of social science within newly industrialising and democratising nations. Although the story of Taiwanese society's relation to environmentalism is to an extent understood in English-language literature, less prevalent are the diverse ways Taiwanese social scientists have engaged with environmental issues, the empirical case studies which have shaped their thinking, and the influences of Western environmental sociology and science and technology studies (STS) within Taiwan. By synthesising Chinese-language environmental social science literature from Taiwan, we characterise three strands of scholarship: activism and social movements; environmental controversies; and environmental governance, policy and institutions. We identify (a) the ability of communities and civil societies to affect change from within extant governance processes and (b) the local-level implications of national sustainable development rhetoric as two areas where Taiwanese scholarship may make particularly valuable contributions to work at the sustainability-environmental justice interface.

This study empirically tests the contagion effects in stock and real estate investment trust (REIT) markets during the subprime mortgage crisis by using daily stock- and REIT-markets data from the following countries and international bodies: the United States, the European Union, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and the global REIT market. We found a significant and positive dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) coefficient between stock returns and REIT returns. The results revealed that the REIT markets responded early to market shocks and that the variances were higher in the post-crisis period than in the pre-crisis period. Evidence supporting the contagion effects includes increases in the means of the DCC coefficients during the post-crisis period. The Japanese and Australian REIT markets possess the lowest time-varying downside systematic risks. We also demonstrated that the "DCC E-beta" captures more significant downside linkages between market portfolios and expected REIT returns than does the standard CAPM beta.