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 ‘bodily goodness’ are represented graphically and how perceptions of migrant workers influence the recruitment of workers from Latvia. The analysis results in a schema of the ‘filtering’ processes that are enacted to ‘produce’ the ‘ideal’ migrant worker

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 problem—distinct from the specific question of why particular units have disintegrated—this is still largely unexplored territory.

Infrastructure, Human Capital, and International Trade

It is by now a trite commonplace that we live in an increasingly integrated global economy, in which the barriers to the free movement of goods and capital, though not labor, are rapidly disappearing as a result of both policy reforms and the progress of technology in transport and communications. The rhetoric as well as the substance of national economic policy is now preoccupied with the problem of how each country can hope to survive and prosper in a world where capital controls and trade restrictions are off the agenda. Is the simple laissez-faire principle of simply doing nothing correct, or is there anything an activist government might usefully strive to accomplish? With the global pool of capital at any instant restlessly searching for the highest return, regardless of borders, a popular prescription has come to be the provision of public infrastructure and the training and education of the labor force. With these measures the nation can attempt to secure for itself a higher share of the global capital stock and thus ensure for itself higher wages and better quality jobs for its own labor force

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.

Towards a factor proportions approach to economic history: Population, precious metals and prices from the Black Death to the price revolution

In the history of economic doctrine the name of Bertil Ohlin is inseparable from that of Eli Heckscher. The origin of the famous Heckscher-Ohlin theorem is the seminal article by Heckscher (1919) in the special 1919 David Davidson Festschrift issue of Ekonomisk Tidskrift, later developed by Ohlin in his doctoral dissertation (1924) and his monumental Interregional and International Trade (1933). Together, these three works established the factor proportions approach to international trade

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