Suchergebnisse

An influential body of scholarship in political science has investigated the impact of economic crisis on various political outcomes. The vast majority of these studies rely on annual growth rates (AGR) to specify economic crisis. I argue that this canonical approach comes with several logical shortcomings. It leads to misguided impressions of crisis severity; it makes no distinction between rapid expansion years and rapid recovery years; and it disregards the financial dimension of economic crises. I present and discuss three alternative approaches of measuring economic crisis, imported from economics: economic shocks, economic slumps, and measures of financial crises. Examples from the regime instability literature demonstrate that these alternative crisis measurements provide results that are theoretically more nuanced and empirically more robust. On this basis, the article encourages researchers to pay more attention to the way they measure economic crisis in general and to supplement the AGR approach with alternative crisis measures in particular.

The enormous financial and economic crisis unfolding in December 2008, combined with other urgent issues that can only be solved on a global level – the energy, food and climate crises – is a potential turning point toward an alternative system, perhaps another paradigm. But the actual form this will take is still unknown. Will it be a system based on global justice and sustainable development? Or will we fall back into a struggle of all against all, which is already happening in the fray of global society? Academics, NGOs and policymakers from the development cooperation field could and should seize the opportunities that the current wave of hope and high expectations offers. Although development aid is increasingly ill-equipped to tackle the problems that count, wider global answers and cross-border actions and responses are increasingly important. It is in this global realm that the big chances lie for real changes for the world's poor, for the millions affected by violent conflict and for the planet at large.

Gives a possible historical account from 2035 of the disintegration of the systems of welfarism and social security, due to the halt in growth during the 1970's and 1980's and the supposed crash of the world banking system in 1988 through Third World countries defaulting on their loans. (DCL)