I am interested in family secrets and the rules and mores that may constrain family behavior or adversely affect a member’s destiny. I make work that looks askance at the efforts to hide from the world those events or secrets that reflect badly on a family. I look at the places where I have discovered some of them: family furniture and objects around the house, which can shed, metaphorically, the secrets and stories that are part of family tradition. I focus light on the lives of my uncelebrated ancestors and bring them, however briefly, into the collective consciousness.

What explains IMF behavior in Europe between 2008 and 2012? Harshly criticized in Greece, yet tentatively praised in Hungary, the institution found itself playing different roles as it responded to a string of financial crises. Its programs varied substantially in terms of conditionality, financing, and private sector involvement. This thesis explores why, highlighting the changing global financial safety net, which is both expanding and becoming more decentralized due to the spectacular rise of regional financing arrangements (RFAs). Existing theories of IMF behavior assume the Fund to be a stand-alone institution and analyse financial assistance as the outcome from the interplay between creditors, borrowers, and staff. By focusing on dynamics within the IMF, however, they miss how developments outside the institution are increasingly shaping its behavior. This thesis brings in the role of changes in the institutional environment by drawing on the literature on regime complexity. The proliferation of RFAs alters the outside options of all actors, which affects their bargaining power. This opens the way for new strategies, through which creditors can entangle institutions by creating overlaps, borrowers can engage in confrontation between alternative financing institutions, and the IMF can find means to co-work with RFAs. These in turn affect whose preferences shape program design. This argument is tested empirically through process-tracing and comparing three cases of IMF-RFA cooperation in Europe. In Hungary, the IMF led the way in shaping a surprisingly 'generous' program with little constraint from the EU. However, in Latvia, the Fund found itself a 'junior partner' in a program driven by local authorities with the support of an European RFA. In Greece, the interests of creditors were paramount, securing IMF acquiescence through the threat of exclusion. These findings point to significant challenges for the Fund going forward. As RFAs continue to proliferate around the world, the IMF needs to avoid the temptation of striking even more Faustian bargains that keep it at the table of financial assistance at the cost of becoming a junior partner.

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Carleton University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 344-364). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This study attempts to present a comparative analysis of the implication of the IMF in Zambia and South Africa in its Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). In examining the IMF programme, the study focuses on the Fund's understanding of such economies and its prescriptions for development. It is argued that IMF's familiar orthodoxy will have disastrous consequences for South Africa's poor, disadvantaged and rural communities. Finally, the IMF's market-oriented policy prescriptions are likely to erode democracy and have devastating effects to people-centred development programmes such as the RDP.

Ghana’s government implemented the following World Bank programmes: SAP and PRSP. This thesis shows that SAP and PRSP have impacted Ghana in different ways. Sometimes SAP and PRSP worked. Other times both SAP and PRSP had problems and they did not work. SAP created more negative impacts or problems in Ghana than PRSP. The influence of neoliberalism on Ghana’s SAP cannot be ignored. This is because the tenets of neoliberalism include the withdrawal of government subsidies, high productivity, the cutting down of government expenditures or spending and privatization. The withdrawal of government subsidy was seen in the Education and Health sectors of Ghana. In the Education sector under SAP, the government cut down its subsidy to the Ghana Education Service. Then it introduced a programme called “Cost Sharing” in which students and their parents were asked to contribute to the payment of expenditures in providing education in Ghana. Many parents could not afford it, and this led to many school dropouts and a gap in the education of boys and girls. In the health sector, the Ghanaian government cut down its subsidy under SAP. It introduced the “Cash and Carry System,” in which Ghanaians were asked to contribute to the cost of health delivery services. This became a problem for many. Healthcare services became inaccessible for many Ghanaians as well. In the manufacturing sector, under SAP, the rate of productivity fell. Ghana’s products in the world market experienced volatility or fluctuations in prices. In the mining sector the influence of neoliberalism was on privatization. Based on this principle, the government privatized Ghana’s mining sector. It put in place policies that attracted investments into Ghana to do mining. These mining activities contributed significantly to Ghana’s economy. But these mining activities also caused the problem of dislocation of people, loss of farmlands, along with environmental and health problems. SAP had more negative impacts on Ghana. PRSP also impacted Ghana because it attempted to address the problems SAP created in many sectors, including Education, Health, mining, manufacturing sectors. I conclude by saying that although SAP made some contributions to Ghana’s economy especially in the mining sector, it created more problems in the Education, Health, Mining and Manufacturing sectors. PRSP attempted to address them. Thus it cannot be said that both SAP and PRSP impacted Ghana equally in a more positive way. But rather it can said that (1) SAP created more problems in Ghana and PRSP on the other hand attempted to address them.(2)The later developments taking place indicate that the civil society participation in PRSP is having an impact in Ghana.

No description available.

This study had two major purposes: (a) to investigate and compare the perceptions of District Education Officers, principals and teachers about the management of secondary school effectiveness in Zimbabwe and (b) to probe contextualised secondary school management initiatives that could trigger school effectiveness in Zimbabwe. The study is divided into six interlinked chapters. In the first chapter, the problem of intractability in the management of school effectiveness in Zimbabwe's secondary schools is focused upon. The second chapter attempts to highlight the resource, social, economic, political and cultural realities of secondary school life in developing countries (including Zimbabwe) from which any theories of school management and school effectiveness must derive. The third chapter, explores different ways to understand and interpret the realities described in chapter two. To do this, the chapter focuses on ways in which "modern" and traditional" practices intersect in secondary school in Zimbabwe to produce bureaucratic facades. The fourth chapter, which is largely imbedded In the context theory, emerges from chapters one, two and three and focuses on the methodology and methods used in this study. Chapter five, which subsequently matures into a suggested framework for managing secondary school effectiveness in Zimbabwe, contains perceptual data which were obtained from 16 District Education Officers, 262 secondary school principals and 5 secondary school teachers drawn from 8 provinces, 4 provinces and 1 province respectively. Factor analysis of the existing situation In Zimbabwe's secondary schools produced 7 major variables that were perceived to be associated with secondary school management intractability In Zimbabwe: • lack of clear vision about what should constitute secondary school effectiveness; • management strategies that lack both vertical and horizontal congruence; • inappropriate organisational structures; • rhetorical policies and procedures; • inadequate material and non-material resources; • lack of attention to both internal and external environments of secondary schools; and • inadequate principal capacity-building. These perceptual data, subsequently crystallized into the following suggested management initiatives: • establishment of goals and outcomes achievable by the majority of learners; • establishment of clear and contextualised indicators for secondary schooling goals and outcomes; • establishment of democratic and flexible organisational and secondary school management processes; and • replacement of ''ivory tower", rhetoria~l policies and procedures with contextualised ones / Teacher Education / D. Ed. (Education Management)

The dissertation addresses the causes and consequences of the 1973-1974 energy crisis. A new postcolonial concept of sovereignty, "permanent sovereignty over natural resources," challenged the structure of the international economy in the early 1950s. The proponents of permanent sovereignty identified the relationship between the industrial nations and raw material producers as a vestige of empire. By gaining control over national resources, Third World leaders hoped to reset the relationship between the developing and developed nations. The concept of permanent sovereignty authenticated new definitions and goals of decolonization and statehood. A new middle ground between U.S. diplomacy and Third World economic thought emerged in international oil politics. Chapters on the 1967 Arab oil embargo, Saudi and Iranian demands in the wake of imperial Britain's Persian Gulf withdrawal, the legal battles over the Iraqi Ba'ath regime's nationalized oil, and the reverberating effects of newly radical Libyan politics, explain how members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) remade permanent sovereignty between 1967 to 1972. OPEC underscored the salience of permanent sovereignty in the international political economy, but it also undermined it. The built-in tension culminated in the 1973-1974 energy crisis. The final chapters discuss how the impregnable sovereignty preached by OPEC and its transnational backers in the New International Economic Order engendered a strategic response from the United States: neoliberal diplomacy. OPEC's cartel politics became a scapegoat for policymakers who simplified and codified neoclassical economic ideas. Market-centered reform developed into an analytical refuge in the political-economic wreckage of the energy crisis. American strategy toward the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations reveal that neoliberal diplomacy became widely influential in U.S. foreign policy. / text

This thesis examines characteristics of the economic governance, its levels and changes that were made in response to events in Southeast Asia in 1997/1998. it describes in detail the role of levels of the economic governance during the solution of the asian financial crisis, that exposed its vulnerabilities. In response to the crisis many changes took place. In the region of Southeast Asia these changes were designed to reform the International Monetary Fund, the origin of regional cooperation in the area and reforms in particular countries of the region. The thesis also contains the evaluation of the development of the economic governance in particilar states of Southeast Asia regarding world governance indicators WGI.