3,466 research outputs found
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The Philosophy of Locational Competition
"While Standortswettbewerb may be a familiar term in the German economics literature,
with a long tradition in location theory going back to von Thunen and Losch, its English
counterpart "locational competition" does not ring any bells, at least to me. One possible
meaning, it would seem, is the choice of sites by firms at which to locate various production or
marketing facilities to maximize their profits, given what their competitors are doing. It would
thus constitute the geographical dimension of competition between oligopolists and as such
would bring into play the full panoply of the location theorist's exotic arsenal of hexagons,
isodapones, and whatever else have you.
Somehow I do not think that this is what Professor Horst Siebert had in mind when he
invited me to write a paper on this subject, which is the theme of our conference. What he
appears to want us to understand by this phrase is rather competition between nations, not firms,
to attract within their borders as much as possible of global pools of internationally mobile
factors, thus raising the incomes of complementary immobile factors confined within those
borders. In any case, this is the sense in which I will interpret the term in this paper.
Imagining and producing the 'good' migrant: the role of recruitment agencies in shaping bodily goodness
This paper focuses on representations of labour migrants and interrogates how such imaginaries shape migrant recruitment and employment regimes. The recruitment and employment of labour migrants inevitably involves a range of knowledge practices which affect who is recruited, from where and for what purposes. In particular this paper seeks to advance understandings of how images of âbodily goodnessâ are represented graphically and how perceptions of migrant workers influence the recruitment of workers from Latvia. The analysis results in a schema of the âfilteringâ processes that are enacted to âproduceâ the âidealâ migrant worker
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Towards A Model of Territorial Expansion and the limits of empire
"The question of the size of political units never seems to attract among historians and
sociologists the attention which it deserves. What determines why states and empires have
expanded to the limits which they have historically achieved? What are the conditions under
which it has been possible to maintain those frontiers? Why have the larger states normally
broken up into fragments after a certain period of time? As a general problemâdistinct from the
specific question of why particular units have disintegratedâthis is still largely unexplored
territory.
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Notes on the Political Economy of Nationalism
"The resurgence of nationalism all over the world in
the last few years can be said to arise, in every case, from a
lack of congruence between "state" and "nation." While each of
these terms is highly complex and controversial, we all know
the main difference between them. The state is a political and
administrative unit, claiming the "monopoly of the legitimate
use of force" over all the inhabitants of a given territory.
The nation, on the other hand, is an "imagined community,"
including the dead and the unborn, who are bound together by
the ties of kinship, language, custom and shared myths that
separate it from other similar collectivities.-7 Thus we can
have a nation without a state, as in the case of the Kurds, or
states that comprise many nations, such as the former USSR and
Yugoslavia, and a nation divided between several states, as in
the case of the Italians and Germans before unification in the
nineteenth century, or the two Germanys and two Koreas of more
recent history.
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Tax-collection costs, public welfare and the predatory state
The collection of taxes, in any economic system, clearly requires the use of resources. In modern democratic states tax legislation is almost always controversial, and subject to extensive lobbying. In developing counties the wealthy often successfully avoid payment of taxes and the burden has to be borne by relatively impoverished rural classes, who are themselves not easy to tax directly because of poor record -keeping and difficulty of communications. In earlier times kings and princes often lacked the necessary means of direct taxation and were forced to rely on decentralized institutions such as feudalism. To convince the skeptical reader that the issue of tax-collection costs is neither trivial nor obvious, we pose the following question. What is the effect of greater efficiency in tax collection on the welfare of the tax-paying public? If the government is benign, taxing only to defray socially necessary public expenditure, a reduction in the costs of collecting these minimal taxes would clearly be a 'good thing'. What, however, if the state is inherently "predatory" in nature, as argued by Brennan and Buchanan (1980) and a number of others? In this case the state taxes not only to pay for public services but also to raise revenue for its own, possibly nefarious, purposes. Would an increase in the efficiency if tax-collection be undesirable under this alternative scenario
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The theory of the state: An economic perspective
The principle of laissez-faire, so closely associated with Adam Smith and the classical economists, should certainly not be considered an endorsement of anarchy as the ideal form of social order. Despite the theological overtones of divine providence in the imagery of the "invisible hand", Smith and his followers did not regard the market and the price mechanism as a spontaneous form of natural order that would prevail in any social group. Political organization in some form is necessary to provide the framework of law and order within which justice could be maintained and contracts enforced. Thus even one of their harshest critics, Thomas Carlyle, described their system not as anarchy, but as "anarchy plus the constable". The necessity of the "state" in the sense of the institution that claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of force over a given territory, or as Max Weber (1964, p. 154) defined it, for the proper functioning of "the market" and indeed of all forms of civilized human endeavor, can be traced back to the seminal influence of The Leviathan, the foundation of modern political thought laid by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
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