Militarization and social development in the Third World

In this study we integrated the modernization and dependency theories of development to suggest the ways whereby militarization can affect development. We examined the effects of three components of militarization highlighted in these theories on the social development of ninety-two developing countries. Overall, our findings support the dependency theory's emphasis on the detrimental impact of international trade on disadvantaged nations. There is a significant negative correlation between arms import and social development. Arms export and indigenous spending are correlated with social development in the expected directions but their beta coefficients are not significant. The diverse ways these three aspects of militarization have been shown to affect social development help to explain some of the conflicting findings in the literature and point to the need to study these variables in their disaggregated form.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69141/2/10.1177_144078339503100105.pd

Evaluating the effectiveness of agricultural adaptation to climate change in preindustrial society

The effectiveness of agricultural adaptation determines the vulnerability of this sector to climate change, particularly during the preindustrial era. However, this effectiveness has rarely been quantitatively evaluated, specifically at a large spatial and long-term scale. The present study covers this case of preindustrial society in AD 1500–1800. Given the absence of technological innovations in this time frame, agricultural production was chiefly augmented by cultivating more land (land input) and increasing labor input per land unit (labor input). Accordingly, these two methods are quantitatively examined. Statistical results show that within the study scale, land input is a more effective approach of mitigating climatic impact than labor input. Nonetheless, these observations collectively improve Boserup's theory from the perspective of a large spatial and long-term scale.postprin

Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between domestic political economy and interstate competition

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era, for others revenues stagnated or even declined, and these variations motivated alternative hypotheses for determinants of fiscal and state capacity. In this study we test the basic hypotheses in the existing literature making use of the large date set we have compiled for all of the leading states across the continent. We find strong empirical support for two prevailing threads in the literature, arguing respectively that interstate wars and changes in economic structure towards an urbanized economy had positive fiscal impact. Regarding the main point of contention in the theoretical literature, whether it was representative or authoritarian political regimes that facilitated the gains in fiscal capacity, we do not find conclusive evidence that one performed better than the other. Instead, the empirical evidence we have gathered lends supports to the hypothesis that when under pressure of war, the fiscal performance of representative regimes was better in the more urbanized-commercial economies and the fiscal performance of authoritarian regimes was better in rural-agrarian economie

The institutions of archaic post-modernity and their organizational and managerial consequences: The case of Portugal

The long march of modernization of the Western societies tends to be presented as following a regular sequence: societies and institutions were pre-modern, and then they were modernized, eventually becoming post-modern. Such teleology may provide an incomplete or distorted narrative of societal evolution in many parts of the world, even in the ‘post-modern heartland’ of Western Europe, with Portugal being a case in point. The concept of archaic post-modernity has been developed by a philosopher, José Gil, to show how Portuguese institutions and organizations combine elements of pre-modernity and post-modernity. The notion of an archaic post-modernity is advanced in order to provide an alternative account of the modernization process, which enriches discussion of the varieties of capitalism. Differences in historical experiences create singularities that may be considered in the analysis of culture, management and organization