What accounts for the differences in the performance of cooperatively-owned banks in the Dutch financial crisis of the early 1920s? This thesis measures and explains the (relative) performance of boerenleenbanken (rural Raiffeisen banks) and middenstandsbanken (urban Schulze-Delitzsch banks) during the Netherlands' interwar banking crisis by applying various economic methods to new historical evidence. The thesis asks: (1) what were the effects on risk-taking behaviour of differences in the religious attitudes of bankers and their customers? (2) what was the relationship between interbank competition and financial stability? and (3) what was the consequence of the liability choices made by shareholders for their banks' continued survival? Using a combination of economic theory, quantitative financial analysis and qualitative business histories, this thesis finds that: (1) banks serving small religious groups were less willing, despite being more able, to take on risks than those serving majority denominations; (2) those banks that were subject to the lowest competitive pressures enjoyed the most liquid investment portfolios; and (3) the choice of liability limitation available to bankers in uenced their balance sheet risks, for the worse. Together, these findings lead to the conclusion that social, organisational and institutional factors each explain part of the heterogeneity in the fate of the Netherlands' cooperative banks during a period which includes unprecedented debt- deflationary financial turmoil: hence, (1) strict membership criteria and the use of personal guarantors in loan agreements acted as strong devices to allow banks for minorities, regardless of their denomination, to screen and monitor their customers; (2) the switching costs associated with religious affiliation resulted in a competition- stability tradeoff during periods of extreme distress; and (3) the stakeholders of the banks which failed were probably less risk-averse than those of banks which did not, the consequence of endogenous group formation by risk type.

Financial liberalization programs have been adopted by many countries in Latin America during the past twenty years. Opening the economy to inflows and outflows of capital – ‘opening the capital account’ – has been a key part of these programs. Many economists have heralded capital account liberalization as a ‘fast track’ to economic growth and efficiency in developing countries, partly due to the way that it tightens the constraints on governments and disciplines them to avoid ‘bad’ policies. Others, however, have emphasized the dangers of capital account openness, such as its close relationship with financial crises and the substantial risks it poses for macroeconomic stability. While some governments have sustained the opening of their capital account over decades, others have reversed course after only a short time. The existing literature has focused on the adoption of capital account liberalization, but has neglected to consider the reasons for its durability or fragility. My dissertation addresses the question of why different countries have sustained their opening of the capital account to different degrees and for different periods. The central argument is that the sustainability of capital account openness is determined by domestic informal institutions. By informal institutions I refer to the shared understandings or rules among a country’s policymaking and business elites about legitimate economic policies. Whether capital account openness is sustained over time depends on the extent of domestic agreement as to whether capital controls continue to be effective and legitimate, or whether they have lost their effectiveness and legitimacy as instruments of macroeconomic policymaking. Not only is my dissertation the first study of the sustainability of capital account openness, it is the first to emphasize the importance of informal institutions as distinct from formal ones. The next question refers to the factors that determine the content of domestic informal institutions, such that they favor capital account openness in some countries, and are much more equivocal in others. My answer emphasizes the legacy of pre-liberalization state-business relations. Capital account openness is unlikely to be sustained over time if the export-oriented sector of the economy – concerned about a stable and competitive exchange rate – preserves its leverage over national policymaking. Conversely, capital account openness tends to become a durable policy if economic actors benefitting from capital mobility and largely unaffected by exchange-rate issues dominate state-business relations. After the introduction, Chapter 2 describes the essential elements of capital account policy and explains the methodological approach of the dissertation. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the literature to explain capital account policy. It distinguishes between interest-based, institutionalist, and ideas-based approaches located at different levels of analysis. This review highlights a notable gap in the literature. Analyses of the role of informal institutions at the domestic level are conspicuously lacking. My dissertation seeks to fill this analytical lacuna. Chapter 4 analyzes the international campaign for capital freedom, personified by the International Monetary Fund. How did the push for capital account liberalization come into being at the international level, and how has the capital account policy discourse within the IMF evolved until the present time? Ultimately, the attempt to transform capital freedom into an international norm was not successful. The effects of the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 within and outside the IMF undermined the international norm campaign, symbolized by the failure of the attempt to change the IMF’s Articles of Agreement in order to give the organization the legal mandate over member-states’ capital account policies. However, the IMF still subscribes to the idea that the free movement of capital is a desirable policy for all countries. Yet country responses have been very different. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the link between IMF prescriptions and domestic policy outcomes, fleshing out the central argument with case studies of Peru and Colombia, respectively, in the time period from 1990 to the present day. Both countries shared similar economic challenges, a national community of elite economists convinced of free-market principles, and outside pressure from the IMF. At the start of the liberalization period in the early 1990s, both switched from a largely closed to a largely open capital account. However, due to the effect of different informal institutions based on different state-business relations, Peru and Colombia then followed different paths. The two cases serve to illustrate that, in the broader context of financial liberalization, socially shared understandings about legitimate economic policies reinforce or constrain the impact of international norms, thus making – or breaking – attempts at economic reform. Scholars interested in explaining the sustainability of neoliberal economic reforms and the impact of international norms and ideas on domestic policy choices ignore the role of domestic informal institutions at their peril. Traditional approaches focused on material interests, formal political and economic institutions, and global norms and ideas fail to account for the variation of capital account policy in an age of mobile capital. Paying heed to the change and continuity of shared understandings about legitimate economic policies is key to understanding both the influence of international norms on domestic policy, and the durability or fragility of economic reforms. In order to become institutionalized in the domestic political economy, international norms setting out to diffuse free-market policies must encounter a social context in which alternative development strategies have lost their legitimacy.

<p> In this dissertation I present the first county-level estimates of deaths in the Confederate Army for eight of the former Confederate States (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia). As described in Chapter 2, I estimate the number of deaths by Confederate company (a unit of roughly 100 men) and map these back to the company's county of origin. Counties' death rates were driven by the battles in which their men fought, determined by generals for strategic reasons. This produces a wide distribution in county-level death rates, and it allows for causal inference in assessing the impacts of these losses on counties' later development.</p><p> In Chapter 3, I estimate the long-run effects of population loss on the economic geography of the South. Populations in counties with higher death rates caught up to neighboring areas within 15 years after the war, but then they kept growing. These increases were caused by migration, especially by African Americans: counties with ten percentage-point higher death rates had 14% larger black populations in 1900 and 27% larger in 1960. Migrants also increasingly went to counties that were less advantaged in Southern economy before the Civil War. The economic geography of the American South was thus changed significantly after the institutional shock from the Civil War. </p><p> In Chapter 4, I estimate the effects of relative labor scarcity on racial violence and political participation in the American South from 1865 to 1900. I find counties with 10 percentage-point higher death rates in the Civil War had 24-33% fewer lynchings of African Americans from 1866 to 1900. They also had 3.6-5.6% higher voter turnout despite a larger fraction of their population being black. These effects persisted for at least two decades after the counties' relative labor scarcity disappeared. However, in the very long run (100 years), counties with greater Civil War deaths saw a reversal, with much worse discrimination by the Civil Rights Era, likely due to their larger black populations and absence of economic incentives to prevent discrimination. This suggests relative levels of discrimination were not culturally determined and can change fairly quickly.</p>

The starting point of this thesis is that British television coverage of the developing world is increasingly limited, both in terms of quantity and the lack of background information. There tends to be very little coverage of developing countries, and what there is doesn't explain them very well. This thesis aims to use this starting point as a basis for exploring ways in which television coverage might be improved in order to develop public knowledge and enable audiences to place issues affecting developing countries in a wider context of globalisation. Television is the focus of this research because it remains the key source of news information in Britain. A key aim is to assess how far the neo-liberal ideology that supports globalisation is replicated in television reporting of the South. The other side of this assessment is the availability of alternative views and explanations. The analysis will examine these questions empirically. The empirical work undertaken for this research involved a detailed examination of television coverage of the global South, and of audience responses to it. One of the aims here is to identify the contextual information that helps make sense of such world affairs. To do this, the thesis is divided into three parts. Part One will discuss the context of capitalist globalisation, including economic, political and cultural aspects. The second part of this thesis examines how television covers the majority world and how it explains events and their relation to globalisation. Part Three consists of the audience reception component of this research.

The thesis examines the politics of economic policy-making during the Wilson / Callaghan administration with a specific focus on the 1976 IMF crisis. It offers a critique of existing accounts that are based on an artificial distinction between state and market, in which there is an assumed power relationship that allows market actors to discipline state managers when policies diverge from accepted principles and norms, and argue that the fall in the value of sterling and IMF conditionality were examples of this disciplinary potential at work during 1976. This thesis presents a substantial, archive-based re-assessment of events from an open Marxist perspective. It argues that the state is an inherent feature of the social relations of capitalist accumulation, and that whilst this means state managers must pursue policies generally favouring the reproduction of the social relations of production, this constraint is not disciplinary or deterministic. The thesis shows that the Labour government had long established preferences for deflationary policies and argues that they were implemented through the politics of depoliticisation. On this basis, the fall in the value of the pound and ultimately, IMF conditionality, are not understood to be the key determinants of policy outputs. Rather, market rhetoric and IMF conditionality are seen to have provided the Labour government with substantial room for manoeuvre to implement policies aimed at creating favourable conditions for accumulation whilst minimising political dissent by acting as a buttress between the government and its policies. The argument is developed in three phases. Firstly, it demonstrates how despite the manifesto commitments of the Labour Party, significant elements of the core executive had consistent and established preferences for the depreciation of sterling, a transfer of resources into the balance of payments, cuts in expenditure, and incomes policies. Secondly, it shows how austerity measures were justified during 1975 and the first half of 1976 by a slide in the exchange rate and expected external financing pressures, despite a wish to see the pound fall. Finally, it shows how in the final quarter of 1976, the core executive delayed taking fiscal action until after the IMF negotiations because of expectations of conditionality, that it broadly agreed with the Fund’s prescriptions, and argued that this course was preferable to an alternative strategy because if an alternative was implemented, financial markets would force an even greater degree of austerity.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, peasant smallholders in the Bengal delta – an alluvial tract formed out of the silt deposits of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna river-systems – expanded their cultivation of jute, a fibrous plant that was the world’s primary packaging material. Jute fibres were spun and woven into course cloths used to pack the world’s commodities – its grains, sugar, coffee, cotton, wool, and so forth – in their journey from farms and plantations to urban and industrial centres of consumption. The fibre connected the Bengal delta and its peasant smallholders to the vicissitudes of global commodity markets. This dissertation examines connections between the delta and international commodity markets from the 1850s to the 1950s – it is a local history of global capital. I explore how the commodity shaped the delta’s economic, political and intellectual history, how economic lives, social and cultural formations, and political processes in eastern Bengal were informed and influenced by the cultivation and trade of jute fibres. First, I look at how commodity production changed peasant households’ economic lives, particularly intensifying peasant interactions with markets. I focus on peasant households’ market-based consumption, and argue that consumption informed peasant politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, I look at how the circulation of the commodity transformed the physical and ecological landscape of the delta. I focus on the emergence of jute-specialized market towns along the delta’s rivers and railways, where jute was bulked, assorted and packaged before being dispatched to metropolitan Calcutta. Third, I look at how the commodity emerged as a political and intellectual concept, as imperialists, anti-colonial nationalists, post-colonial statesmen, intellectuals and poets imbued fibre with meaning – relating jute to ideas of poverty and prosperity, religious ethics and practice, economic development and modernization and territorial nationalism. / History

Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att undersöka hur delar av pengarna som kom idrotten till gagn efter grundandet av AB Tipstjänst 1934 fördelades. Den delen av pengarna som den här uppsatsen fokuserar på är de pengarna som gick till byggandet av olika idrottsanläggningar. Perioden som undersöks är 1935-1938. Under dessa fyra år betalades pengar som idag motsvarar en kvarts miljard ut till olika anläggningar. Anledningen till detta är att de första pengarna betalades ut 1935 och när andra världskriget startade 1939 ströps anslagen. Frågor som besvaras i uppsatsen är till exempel: Hur såg fördelningsprincipen för pengarna ut? Hur såg den regionala fördelningen av pengarna ut? Vilka enskilda projekt fick mest anslag och vika blev således vinnarna av grundandet av det statliga spelmonopolet? Källmaterialet som används i uppsatsen kommer från Riksidrottsförbundets (RF:s) arkiv (riksarkivet) i Arninge. Det består mestadels av RF:s idrottsplatskommittés protokoll och handlingar. Resultatet visar att storstadsdistrikten Stockholm, Skåne och Uppland fick mest pengar. Pengarna gick i första hand till att färdigställa redan påbörjade anläggningar och i andrahand till nya anläggningar. Huruvida anläggningen var av riksintresse eller om den var av betydelse för orten och eller hela idrottsdistriktet tycks ha haft betydelse. Pengarna gick bland annat till byggandet av Råsunda stadion i Solna. Stora summor kom också att gå tillbaka till staten. I form av anläggningsbidrag till Uppsala och Lunds universitet. Dessa bidrag var betydligt högre än medelbidragen under perioden.

No description available.

The inspiration for this study was the work of Karl Polanyi. The study therefore looks to an economics of which market economy is only part of a special case. On the basis of evidence from economic historians and economic anthropologists, it seeks to show that the wider economics of Polanyi can be given a unified basis that operates equally in simple and complex communities, ancient and modern communities, and in communities on either side of the "great transformation". A first charge on economic surplus is invariably the resources to perpetuate the social structure itself, and may be a charge so large as to exhaust almost all of the surplus and so variable in its expression that the charge on resources often passes unnoticed or is mistaken as irrational and non-economic. In its particulars, this study examines social, cultural and political determinants of economic activity from a selection of social systems and historical periods. It argues for a much expanded analytical framework than that of market-focussed theory. It draws attention to rarely noticed contributions by earlier writers, notably Carl Menger, and to important contemporary contributions by the substantivist school in economic anthropology.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2008.