We are shocked when violence erupts in schoolyards or when a six year-old child kills another in cold blood. But the headlines, which sensationalize such tragedies, reveal only the tip of what appears to be a larger problem that, given our present priorities, will only intensify. Youthful violence is symptomatic of something much bigger evident in diffuse anger, despair, apathy, the erosion of ...

Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As political, economic, and social systems transform themselves into distributed networks, a new human dynamic is emerging: peer to peer (P2P). As P2P gives rise to the emergence of a third mode of product...

This article examines the driving forces of the magnitude, composition and duration of refugee movements caused by conflict and persecution. The decision to seek temporary or permanent refuge in the region of origin or in a more distant asylum destination is based on inter-temporal optimization. We find that asylum seeking in Western countries is rather a phenomenon of comparatively less persec...

Stephan Haggard & Robert R. Kaufman: Development, Democracy, and Welfare States is published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 2008, by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from...

Growing income inequality within a country is caused by socioeconomic factors and inadequate government policies and ultimately leads to social and political instabilities. The ideology of supply-side economics in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1980s, for instance, induced policies of inequality which were then perceived as a way to stimulate economic growth. The demise of ...

background this article looks at the long-term, structural determinants of environmental and public health performance in the world system.   methods in multiple standard ordinary least squares (ols) regression models, we tested the effects of 26 standard predictor variables, including the ‘four freedoms’ of goods, capital, labour and services, on the following indicators of sustainable develop...

The development of Indigenous political organizations in the Ecuadorian Amazon is illustrative of the state of affairs throughout the region. The moral economy that had governed inter-ethnic relations until recently has given way to a political economy in which Indigenous groups have come to understand the importance of defining the issues surrounding their relations with government agencies. T...

We study the structure of non-linear taxes in a dynamic economy subject to political economy problems. In contrast to existing literature, taxes are set by a self-interested politician, without any commitment power, who is partly controlled by the citizens. We prove that: (1) a version of the revelation principle applies; and (2) the provision of incentives to politicians can be separated from ...