The Social Value of Employment and the Redistributive Imperative of Development

__Abstract__ Evaluating the inherently relative and subjective social value of employment needs to be placed within a broader inquiry about the conditions under which a sufficient and sustained perception of social value might be cultivated within particular employment settings, in a manner that is adaptive and resilient to the often profound structural transformations associated with socio-economic development. This paper contends that these conditions are intricately related to redistributive processes within societies. A vital role of public policy is to strengthen progressive redistributive institutional mechanisms as a means to cultivate resilience and positive synergies between the social values of employment, and human and economic development. This argument is made in four sections, including: some stylized facts of contemporary population growth and labour transitions across the global South; the limitations of standard economics approaches in dealing with issues of labour market intermediation and employment regulation as well as a variety of alternative socially and institutionally embedded views; the valuation of labour, drawing from the example of care work to illustrate the importance of redistributive mechanisms to socialize the costs of relatively skilled service sector employment; and lastly, some examples of the redistributive imperative in contemporary development. The conclusion offers some reflections on structural vulnerabilities in a context of labour transitions and human development

The geopolitics of politico-religious protest in Eastern Tibet

It is clear that the recent wave of self-immolations and protests taking place in southern Amdo and northern Kham in eastern Tibet is a reflection of an extreme form of defiance in response to an increasingly repressive atmosphere. The atmosphere is epitomized by the intensification of patriotic education campaigns in monasteries and is framed within a broader political context of discriminatory rule by authorities who generally see only variants of assimilation as the solution to the so-called ‘Tibet Question.’ However, it is less clear why this particular form of protest – self-immolation – is happening in this particular part of Tibet. The explanation is probably not found in differences of governance styles across this eastern Tibetan region, which has been fragmented, absorbed and ruled by the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and the Tibet Autonomous Region. Additionally, there are large Tibetan areas in these provinces, under similar conditions of rule, where self-immolations have not taken place. Rather, local histories in these Tibetan areas need to be carefully considered, especially with respect to the evolving fusion between religious faith, political dissidence, and rapid dislocating social change

Educating for Exclusion in Western China: Structural and institutional dimensions of conflict in the Tibetan areas of Qinghai and Tibet

This paper examines the conflictive repercussions of exclusionary processes in the Tibetan areas of western China, with a focus on Qinghai Province and the Tibet Autonomous Region. In both provinces, the implementation of competitive labour market reforms within a context of severe educational inequalities is argued to have accentuated exclusionary dynamics along linguistic, cultural and political modes of bias despite rapid urban-centred economic growth and increasing school enrolments since the mid-1990s. These modes of bias operate not only at lower strata of the labour hierarchy but also at upper strata. The resultant ethnically exclusionary dynamics, particularly in upper strata, offer important insights into conflictive tensions in the region. At a more theoretical level, these insights suggest that exclusion needs to be differentiated from poverty (even relative poverty) given that exclusionary processes can occur vertically throughout social hierarchies and can even intensify with movements out of poverty. Indeed, the most politically contentious exclusions are often those that occur among relatively elite and/or upwardly aspiring sections of a population. Therefore, the methodological challenge that faces studies of exclusion (as with the horizontal inequality approach) is to find ways of measuring structural asymmetries and disjunctures and institutional modes of integration that move beyond either absolute measures, as per mainstream human development approaches, or relative measures, given that both are only capable of identifying potential exclusions occurring at the bottom of a social hierarchy

The great China currency debate: for workers or speculators?

Everyone is talking about China’s currency, it seems. Amidst months of building tension, there is an apparent consensus among most economists, the financial press, and leading economic policy makers in the West that the renminbi is hugely undervalued, making China’s exports unfairly competitive. The global imbalances created by such ‘mercantilist’ and ‘protectionist’ exchange rate strategies, it is argued, have been a central cause of global financial instability. China must therefore revalue, for the good of both itself and the world

The Political Economy of Boomerang Aid in China’s Tibet

This article examines how rapid growth in the Tibetan areas of West China since the mid-1990s has been a key factor exacerbating the unresolved contestations of Chinese rule in these areas. Amidst the continued political disempowerment of Tibetan locals, Beijing has used recent development strategies to channel massive amounts of subsidies through the government itself or through Chinese corporations based outside the Tibetan areas, thereby accentuating the already highly-externalised orientation of the local economy. These processes offer important insight into the recent explosion of tensions

Towards Genuine Universalism within Contemporary Development Policy

Abstract It is very difficult to know the impact of the MDGs on poverty reduction. On the one hand, poverty measurements are ambiguous, arbitrary and contested, even in the best of cases such as China and India. On the other hand, the mechanisms by which MDGs might have effected poverty reduction are not at all clear, particularly in light of the major global structural processes that condition the impact of aid flows and development more generally. Moreover, the emphasis in the MDGs on absolute measures and the implicit bias towards targeting quite possibly undermine poverty reduction in many contexts. Hence, this article argues that the MDGs should be replaced by a re-politicisation of the mainstream development agenda, together with a genuine revival of emphasis on universalistic modes of social policy as viable means of dealing simultaneously with poverty and inequality

Aid and the symbiosis of global redistribution and development: Comparative historical lessons from two icons of development studies

This study examines the question of aid effectiveness through a comparative historical analysis of the external financing constraints of two icons of development studies: South Korea and Brazil. The selection of these contrasting cases is based on a method of difference, designed to examine the predicaments of two countries attempting similar developmentalist strategies of sustained industrial policy through successive stages of industrialization, but with differences in amounts of aid supporting such strategies. This approach differs from the standard approach in the literature of examining economic performance among aid recipient countries and it is adopted as a means to highlight the challenges that some of the most successful and advanced late industrialisers of the post-war era have faced in the absence of aid. The comparison draws on an analytical framework that locates aid effectiveness in the interaction of both aid absorption (via current accounts deficits) and development strategy (via industrial policy), the latter based on the premise that unconstrained strategies of post-war late industrialisation have exhibited inherent structural tendencies to generate merchandise trade deficits. The interaction establishes an important, yet mostly overlooked, symbiosis between global redistribution and development. This symbiosis is then demonstrated by the historical analysis of the external accounts of the two cases, which constitutes the original empirical contribution of the article given that inductive historical analysis of actual interactions between aid flows (or lack thereof) and external accounts has been essentially absent in the aid literature. Similarly, the literatures on industrial policy and developmental states tend to exhibit a domestic productionist bias that has also shunned serious analyses of the role of aid in supporting successful late industrialisation experiences. Accordingly, the case of South Korea clearly illustrates the crucial role that aid played in buttressing rapid late industrialisation against structural external constraints and financial vulnerabilities. The contrasting case of Brazil clearly demonstrates the constraints faced by late industrialising countries in the absence of generous supplies of aid and/or stable, secure and affordable finance. The conclusion reflects on some of the wider implications of these insights and also offers some comparative reflections on China as an alternative model for dealing with similar constraints

Demographic perspectives on agrarian transformations and 'surplus populations': supply-side banalities versus redistributive imperatives

This paper frames the discussion of agrarian transformations and 'surplus populations' in the Global South within a political economy and macro-structural consideration of the developmental challenges faced in the context of contemporary rapid population growth. The case is made that the prospect of an additional two billion people by mid-century needs to be urgently pre-empted by a radical trajectory shift towards (or back towards) strong redistributive institutional mechanisms, within which universal social policy needs to play a central role alongside other developmentalist initiatives aimed at retaining wealth in countries of the Global South and circulating wealth among increasingly tertiarised labour forces. Short of such radical shifts, the predominant supply-side emphasis in contemporary mainstream development policy – as represented, for instance, by much of the World Bank sponsored work on th

Hard lines help no one

Well-intentioned protests in the west, most recently during the Olympic torch relay, could prompt a hardline crackdown in China that would do the Tibetan cause no goo