Imminent Prospects for Additional Finance: What Might Be Done Now or Soon and Under What Conditions

foreign aid, taxation, subsidies, revenue, international economic order

Political Economy of Additional Development Finance

The paper considers the political obstacles and supports for additional development finance and a number of possible devices through which advantage may be taken of the supports and the obstacles circumvented. It emphasizes the need for effective negotiating alliances among developing-country governments that will draw on support from outside their own ranks. It gives particular attention to the 'innovative' methods by which funds might be mobilized by transnational activity for global disposal within a strategy for the progressive reduction of poverty. In order to eliminate one difficulty it outlines a possible arrangement through which funds so raised might be allocated.development finance, aid, Tobin Tax, global governance

Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions

In 1988 non-Aboriginal Australians will celebrate two hundred years' occupation of a country which had previously been home to an Aboriginal population of about 300,000 people. They probably spoke more than two hundred different languages and most individuals were multilingual (Dixon 1980). They had a rich culture, whose traditions were centrally concerned with the celebration of three basic types of religious ritual-rites of fertility, initiation, and death (Maddock 1982:105-57). In many parts of Australia, particularly in the south where white settlement was earliest and densest, Aboriginal traditional life has largely disappeared, although the memory of it has been passed down the generations. Nowadays all Aborigines, even in the most traditional parts of the north, such as Arnhem Land, are affected to a greater or lesser extent by the Australian version of Western culture, and must preserve their own traditions by a combination of holding strategies. Thus in 1988 many Aboriginal Australians will be inclined to mourn the Bicentenary with its reminder to them of all they have lost.--Page 231-232.Margaret Clunies Ross, a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, has for some time had a special interest in the oral traditions of the Australian Aborigines. She has carried on fieldwork, particularly in North Arnhem Land, and has written numerous articles and monographs on this area

Development Finance: Beyond Budgetary Official Development Assistance

Budgetary appropriations by rich-country governments constitute the standard method of providing external funds for welfare and growth in developing countries. This source seems likely, however, to prove inadequate to meet the estimated external finance needed to contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals

Norse-Icelandic Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages - an electronic edition

This presentation aims to describe an international project to edit the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic skaldic poetry and to outline some issues related to electronic aspects of the project, both in its organisation and in its publication. Prof. Clunies Ross will outline the nature of the project and the place of the electronic edition. Tarrin Wills will present information relating to the electronic encoding of the corpus. This will include explanation and discussion of issues related to the collation of electronic facsimiles of the manuscripts and the encoding of skaldic verse, in particular, the encoding of the native poetic devices known as 'kenningar' and 'heiti'.Hosted by the Scholarly Text and Imaging Service (SETIS), the University of Sydney Library, and the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of Sydney

Music, Poetry and the Natural Environment

The article surveys Australian poets and composers from Barron Field and Henry Handel Richardson to Les Murray, Percy Grainger and Peter Sculthorpe, arguing that the land of Australia challenged the acoustical imagination of European settlers and their descendants and that re-imagining it from within has inspired innovation in musical composition

‘The flowing-haired friend of the fire of altars’

ABSTRACT: There are very few sources, other than material remains and spatial arrangements revealed by archaeological excavation, that can give modern researchers access to the thought-world of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion. Some skaldic poetry presumed to have been composed before the Conversion may offer a window onto this thought-world. This article investigates how a single kenning from a stanza composed by the tenth-century Icelander Egill Skallagrímsson conceptualised the relationship between the dominant Viking-Age deity Óðinn and the conduct of religious ritual. RESUME: Der findes meget få kilder, bortset fra materiel kultur og spatiale organiseringer afdækket gennem arkæologiske udgravning, der kan give moderne forskere adgang til førkristen nordisk religions tankeverden. Nogle skjaldedigte, som antages at være komponeret før konverteringen til Kristendom, kan give et indblik i denne tankeverden. Denne artikel undersøger hvordan en enkelt kenning fra en strofe komponeret af islændingen Egill Skallagrímsson i det tiende århundrede konceptualiserer forholdet mellem den dominerende vikingetidsguddom, Óðinn, og udførelsen af religiøse rituale

Two Aboriginal Oral Texts from Arnhem Land North Australia, and their Cultural Context

 This study examines two Aboriginal oral texts, recorded on tape and 16mm. film during the course of a mortuary ritual in Arnhem Land during August, 1978.1 Their subject-matter is similar but their nature as utterance is different, as each belongs to a different oral register. Both texts concern two related sacred forces: the first is a spirit-being, or totem, as it would be called in the older anthropological literature, which takes the shape of a sea-bird named Mulanda and the second is a large black rock, Ngaliya, Mulanda's home. Text 1 is an oration, made by one of the senior men present at the ritual, to a gathering of male participants, shortly after he had supervised the execution of two icons, representing the two sacred forces, on the hollow log ossuary which had been prepared to house the bones of the man in whose honour the mortuary ceremony was held. The speaker has a double audience: he directs himself at times to the eye of the camera, but more often to his Aboriginal hearers. Text 2 is a single song-verse, which belongs to the standardised oral form~ that Aborigines from North-East and North-Central Arnhem Land call manikay.3 The word is usually translated as "clan-song series". The song-verse in this instance, which also celebrates the same two sacred forces as the oration, formed part of the conventional musical and choreographic accompaniment to the mortuary ritual, whose nature will be described briefly below

Concepts of Truth and Falsehood, Fair Description and Misrepresentation in Medieval Icelandic Writings

Medieval Icelanders were a linguistically energetic people. They accorded high status but not permanent public office to poets and developed a complex legal system which was based on that of Western Norway, from where many of the early settlers had migrated in the late ninth and early tenth centuries. Yet many characteristics of the Icelandic law code had no counterpart in the Norwegian model. These were developed in Iceland to deal with the consequences that followed from the fact that the Icelanders, alone among medieval European societies, had no kings and centralized political institutions. They established a General Assembly (alping), which met each summer at the same place, Pingvellir ('Assembly Plains'), near modern Reykjavik, under the presidency of an elected lawspeaker, who held office for a period of three years. During his term of office, it was his duty to recite the corpus of the laws and to give members of the public information on specific articles of law (Dennis et aJ.: 1980: Introduction). In such a society it can be assumed that the forensic arts would be highly prized

The United Kingdom's Experience with North Sea Oil and Gas

SUMMARY Oil has been important but not dominant in the UK economy. Extraction has been done mainly by private firms. Allocation of leases has been discretionary, and there has been little obvious attempt to slow the release of blocks. Oil taxation has been complex, mainly profit?based, and frequently changed, but not unsuccessful. Stabilisation, however, has failed; the country went into slump and high unemployment as oil sales and revenue boomed. The mistake was a failure to ‘lean against’ the factors producing a great rise in real effective exchange rate between 1977 and 1980. RESUME L'Expérience de la Grande Bretagne avec le Pétrole et le Gaz de la Mer du Nord Le pétrole a été important mais pas dominant dans l'économie de la Grande Bretagne. L'extraction a été effectuée essentiellement par des compagnies privées. L'allocation des bails s'est fait à discrétion et il y a eu très peu de tentative évidente de ralentir la vente de tranches d'actions. L'imposition du pétrole a toujours été très complexe essentiellement basée sur profit, et fréquemment changée, mais elle n'a pas été néanmoins sans succès. La stabilisation néanmoins a échoué. Le pays est retombé dans le marasme avec un haut niveau de chômage tandis que les ventes et revenus pétroliers montaient en flèche. L'erreur, c'était d'avoir manqué de ‘prendre appui’ sur les facteurs qui avaient produit la considérable hausse dans le taux d'échange réel effectif entre 1977 et 1980. RESUMEN La experiencia del Reino Unido con el petróleo y el gas del Mar del Norte En la economia del Reino Unido, el petróleo ha sido importante, pero no dominante. La extracción la han realizado principalmente firmas privadas. La concesión de usufructos ha sido discrecional y ha habido pocos intentos obvios para disminuir la liberación de obstáculos La tributación al petróleo ha sido compleja, principalmente basada en las utilidades, frecuentemente modificada, pero no carente de éxito. Sin embargo, la estabilización ha fracasado, el país cayó en una depresión y alto desempleo a medida que las ventas y utilidades del petróleo florecian. El error fue una falla en apoyarse en los factores que produjeron una gran alza an la tasa real de cambio efectiva entre 1977 y 1980