Imperfect Contract Enforcement

We model imperfect contract enforcement when repudiators and their victims default to spot trading. The interaction between the contract and spot markets under improved enforcement can exacerbate repudiation and reduce contract execution, harming all traders. Improved contract execution benefits traders on the excess side of the spot market by attracting potential counter-parties, but harms them by impeding their exit from contracts found to be unfavorable. Multiple equilibria and multiple optima are possible, with anarchy a local optimum, perfect enforcement a local minimum and imperfect enforcement a global optimum. LDCs exhibit parameter combinations such that imperfect enforcement is optimal from their side of international markets. The model thus rationalizes the internationally varying patterns of imperfect enforceability observable in survey data.

Trade Implies Law: The Power of the Weak

Without the rule of law, traders who incur trading costs can be held up by counter-parties who are stronger in anarchic bargaining. The favourable terms which the latter extract can overcrowd that side of the market, dissipating the benefits. We establish plausible necessary and sufficient conditions for a move from anarchy toward the rule of law to benefit all traders. The rule of law might be delayed, not only by the difficulties of setting up legal institutions, but by monopolistic traders that have meantime emerged to address the inefficiencies of anarchic trade. These monopolistic traders must also guarantee atomistic traders against holdup.

¿Fascistas o revolucionarios? Política de izquierda y de derecha entre los campesinos pobres

La expansión de la democracia en América Latina y su extensión en el tiempo ha puesto de manifiesto una tendencia sorprendente y preocupante. Muchos de los nuevos electores latinoamericanos han dado su apoyo a candidatos de derecha y no democráticos que una vez en el poder han atentado de diversas maneras contra la democracia. Dentro del electorado se constata que ese apoyo a las fuerzas antidemocráticas es mayor en la población rural. A la luz de la bibliografía de los años 70 y 80 sobre las revoluciones campesinas de Rusia, China, Cuba o Nicaragua, este derechismo campesino es un rompecabezas: ¿los campesinos son fascistas o revolucionarios? Para descifrar este enigma, el trabajo en primer lugar analiza cuatro casos de apoyo rural al fascismo o al autoritarismo populista en la primera mitad del siglo XX (Francia, Italia, Alemania y Argentina). Compara los factores explicativos que emergen de esa comparación con los resultados obtenidos de la investigación sobre el izquierdismo campesino en China, Rusia, Cuba y Nicaragua. La conclusión del trabajo es que hay dos conjuntos de factores que explican el apoyo de los campesinos a la izquierda o a la derecha. El primer tipo de factores, de transfondo, incluye el contexto económico y las relaciones sociales de propiedad y tenencia de la tierra. El segundo tipo de factores, de primer plano,incluye el tipo de liderazgo, el estilo organizativo y la habilidad política, así como el tipo de retórica que se usa para atraer el voto campesino. La población rural no es por naturaleza ni de derecha ni de izquierda, sino que su apoyo puede llevarse a cualquiera de los dos lados dependiendo del trasfondo económico-social y de la escena política. En América Latina hay que estudiar en detalle los estilos de liderazgo y las retóricas de los candidatos. Estas variables de primera instancia nos van a permitir dictaminar si el apoyo electoral dará lugar a panoramas fascistas o autoritarios como los de la Europa de la primera mitad del siglo XX.The spread of democracy beyond Western Europe to Latin America and the duration of Latin American democracies through one or more elections has revealed a surprising and disturbing trend in Latin America. Many new Latin American electorates have supported rightist and non-democratic candidates who, once elected president, have engaged in auathoritarian behavior, bypassing, corrupting or closing the legislature, undeterminig judicial autonomy, and attempting to extend their terms in office indefinitely. Examples of such presidential behaviour in Latin America include Carlos Menen in Argentina, Alberto Gujimori in Peru, and Arnoldo Aleman in Nicaragua. Within Latin American electorates, it is evident that the rural population is even more likely to support rightist candidates than is the electorate as a whole. Rural rightism is surpring, however, given a largebody of literature from the 1970s and 1980s where peasants and rural dwellers are seen primarily as leftists, such as in Russia, China, Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua. The presence of rightist rural electoral support in new Latin American democracies leaves a puzzle: are peasants fascists or revolutionaries? To unravel such a puzzle, the essay looks first at four cases of rural support for fascism or authoritarian populism in the early to mid-twentieth century, France, Italy, Germany, and Argentina. It compares factors explaining such rightist rural support with the knowledge we have about rural support for the left in Russia, China, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The essay concludes that two overall sets of factors are at play in explaining rural support and activism of a rightist or leftist nature. These are 1) background factors including the context of economic and social relations and the nature of land tenure and 2) foreground factors including thye nature of political leadership, organizational style and skill and the kind of rhetoric used to attract and motivate rural followers. Based upon these comparisons of rural political activism and scrutiny of the European and Latin American cases, the essay concludes that rural dwellers are neither naturally fascists nor naturalleyrevolutionaries. Rather, their activism and heir electoral support can be moved in either direction depending upon the preexisting social and economic background and upon the skill and style of leaders attempting to win rural support. We need to look carefully at the candidates running for office and at their organizational style and the nature of their rhetoric. Such foreground factors will be more likely to tell us whether or not their electoral support (and their behavior in office, for that matter) willresemble the cases of fascism and rightist authoritarianism of the early and midtwentieth century

Treatment of Undifferentiated Connective Tissue Disease with csDMARD’s through Primary Care Providers in the Absence of Intervention via Rheumatology

Undifferentiated connective tissue disease (UCTD) was first defined by Leroy over 30 years ago. UCTD is described as an autoimmune disease which presents similarly to other rheumatic diseases but fails to meet laboratory requirements which indicate a specific disease such as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematous, Sjogren\u27s or scleroderma. Common signs and symptoms manifested by patients with UCTD include arthralgias, myalgias, fatigue, fever, Raynaud’s phenomenon and sicca like symptoms in addition to having a positive antinuclear antibody (ANA) test. Often patients with these symptoms are referred to rheumatology. Unfortunately, there is a shortage of rheumatology providers across the nation. Although patients with UCTD have limited access to rheumatologists, there may be room for primary care providers to safely and adequately treat their symptoms with the use of disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) such as hydroxychloroquine. Evidence exists from recent studies that support the use of DMARDs, NSAIDs and low dose corticosteroids in UCTD patients to improve arthralgias, myalgias, fever, and functional limitations. Although the research indicates that the majority of rheumatologists and primary care providers feel UCTD patients should be referred to rheumatology, there is some evidence that primary care providers can also initiate and manage the treatment of UCTD patients. In the absence of rheumatology, primary care providers familiar with using DMARDs such as hydroxychloroquine can safely and effectively provide treatment for these patients

Industrializing the Corn Belt: Iowa farmers, technology and the Midwestern landscape, 1945-1972

From 1945 to 1972 Iowa farmers remade their landscape in the image of an industrial model characterized by large-scale production, the substitution of capital for labor, strict cost accounting, specialization, and efficiency. Farm families were leaders in adopting new technology to solve their problems in the post World War II period, a contrast to the pre-war years when experts such as college educated professionals, journalists, and industry leaders advocated the application of industrial ideals to agriculture. Many farmers industrialized production because of a persistent postwar farm labor shortage and a cost-price squeeze in which the prices farmers paid for products increased faster than prices they received for commodities. They used pesticides, fertilizer, and feed additives to boost yields and livestock gains as well as altered crop rotations and traditional cycles of livestock production. They purchased, borrowed, or hired new machines, remodeled existing structures or built new ones. Iowa\u27s landscape of the early 1970s was still dedicated to agriculture, but new agricultural production techniques resulted in changed land use patterns and work cycles that would have been unrecognizable to farmers who lived from 1900 to 1945.;By 1972 pesticides, fertilizers, feed additives, hay balers, and combines were common on Iowa farms. While a minority of producers used combines for harvesting shelled corn and confinement feeding systems, the value of these practices for lowering unit costs and maximizing production was proven. Many new techniques that increased production simultaneously created problems. Farmers learned that success in controlling pest species allowed new pest species that were resistant to pesticides to thrive. Public concern over pesticide, fertilizer, feed additives, and manure runoff also led to government regulation that limited farmers\u27 technological choices. Furthermore, as farmers invested more money in pesticides and fertilizer, they found that they needed expensive new harvesting and grain storage techniques to reduce harvest losses. The financial costs of field equipment, automated feeding systems, and storage facilities pressured farmers to increase production per acre and spread those costs over more acres. Farmers\u27 technological choices kept many families in agriculture but compelled many more to leave

Claims against States

In 1924, commencing a leading series of articles on Government Liability in Tort, Professor Edward M. Borchard referred to what he called the unexampled expansion of the police power in the United States. He wrote of the increasing risks which individuals in this country are left to bear from defective, negligent, perverse or erroneous administration of the functions of government. If those functions had increased at a considerable rate at the time of his article, what would one say of their extent today? Even the leaders of the New Deal discerned the risks to which increased governmental activity subjected people, and they supported the proposal of the American Bar Association that it was time for the Federal Government to waive its immunity from suit

THE DISPUTES ARTICLE IN GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS

An approach to the subject of government contracts requires some departure from the lawer\u27s usual concept of a legal right. In this field, departures from generally accepted principles of contract law have developed in no small part from administrative practice, and the concept of a legal right cannot be thought of simply from the angle of enforceability in court. In transactions between private parties, the fact that the United States Supreme Court in Chase Securities Corporation v. Donaldson recently treated a legal right as being in essence merely dormant after the running 6f the statute of limitations against it would be meaningless if it had not declared also that a statute passed later could revive the right to sue. It happens that claims against the United States, however valid they might be under the law of private contracts, can never be the subject of a lawsuit except to the extent that Congress consents. Until the establishment of the United States Court of Claims in 1855, Congress had denied suit against the government generally on contract claims. Even now, where suit against the government is permitted, the judgment creditor\u27s claim will not permit of a levy of execution for its enforcement. Having consented that the government be sued in any case or class of cases, Congress may choose not to pay the claim after it is reduced to judgment, or may let the judgment creditor wait until Congress has taken all the time it wants before it provides for payment. Nevertheless, usage justifies the claimant\u27s saying in the field of government contracts that he has a right, one supported by legal rules on which the federal courts do act whenever litigation against the government is properly before them