This paper examines the American Dust Bowl to understand the political impacts of the catastrophe which devastated the American Plains during the 1930s. I use county-level panel analysis to analyze whether the Dust Bowl led to a change in voting patterns in more eroded counties compared to less eroded counties. I look to see whether, in the years following the Dust Bowl, there was shift in vote shares against the Democratic Party who were typically the incumbents during the period of the Dust Bowl. I use presidential, congressional, senatorial and gubernatorial election return for approximately the three decades following the Dust Bowl, i.e. between 1940 and 1968. My results show that the Dust Bowl is associated with a shift away from the Democratic Party for more affected counties. I find these effects to last for at least a decade (throughout the 1940s). I also look at the potential effects of the net migration and New Deal expenditure in the Plains. I find that less net migration may have been one of the reasons behind this change in voting behavior of counties and that New Deal expenditure could potentially have been a strong mitigative tool for the Democratic Party. / Graduate

Jamaican family structures have long felt the impact of unstable internal economic conditions and high volume of labor demands originating from England, Canada, the United States, and other larger societies. In response to the economic conditions and labor demands, increasing numbers of Jamaican women have migrated away from home, both within Jamaica and to other countries. Subsequently, many Jamaicans' households are restructured using a method called child shifting. This refers to "the relocation of children between households." Using three major theoretical paradigms: cultural diffusion, social pathology, and structural functionalism, this study explores the literature of child shifting to understand how economic conditions influence matrifocal families and in particular their child rearing practices. This study employs the structural functionalism paradigm's focus on "adaptive responses" to find plausible explanations for child shifting patterns. The primary premise of the "adaptive responses" approach is that economic marginality leads to certain adaptive responses in residential, kinship, and child rearing patterns. This study finds certain adjustment problems associated with child shifting. These include shifted children developing feelings of abandonment, of anxiety, of loss, and having difficulty trusting after the shifting occurs. These costs may outweigh the benefits of child shifting.

The main aim of this thesis is to explore the operation of the ideological discourse in Turkey that 'liberalisation in economy brings liberalisation in politics'. This early claim of the modernization theorists has been renewed in the age of globalization with the assumption that the state is in decline; statism in the economy is corning to end and as a result of this, democracy, civil society and citizenship are flourishing.

The goal of this dissertation is to explore the effects of large agricultural investments on food systems change around Nanyuki, Kenya and in the Nacala corridor, Mozambique. Specifically, the effects of these investments on land, the food supply chains, food environments, and food consumption were studied. In Africa, food systems already change against a backdrop of global food system pressures, such as the inroads of supermarkets, and local drivers, such as demographic and economic changes. The large agricultural investments likely intersect with these changes, but if the investments amplify them, and to what degree, is less known. Methodologically, a postpositivist mixed-methods approach was used for an instrumental case study design with study areas in Kenya and Mozambique. Multiple data collection techniques were used, including (un)structured interviews and a household survey, and data were analysed through inductive thematic analysis and between-groups analysis. The results show myriad effects of the investments to food systems, including to land, self-production, agricultural engagement, food distribution and food environments. Overall, the investments linked with more modern food systems that were characterised by lower self-production and higher diet diversity. This change occurred through ‘hybrid modernity’ rather than linear modernity as certain traditional dynamics strengthen alongside modernisation processes. In the end, more inclusive food governance arrangements, such as food sovereignty, can counteract some of the adverse effects of large agricultural investments. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Political Sciences / PhD / Unrestricted

The conditionality agreements of the International Monetary Fund have received a significant amount of criticism from the 1980s and 1990s and into the 2000s.  Critics have found little reassurance from the IMF\'s attempts to reform conditionality after 2000.  The 1980s marked a time where conditionality on IMF loans required structural adjustment and the imposition of austere fiscal measures.  The streamlining initiative in 2000 possessed only slight quantitative modification to lending conditionality.  However, recent changes in the Fund\'s lending policy occuring between 2007 and 2012 may finally display the institution\'s ability to listen, learn, and adapt policy toward a conditionality regime utilizing policy outside of the neoliberal framework.  This thesis examines these new policies and their implications for neoliberalism where the term represents an approach to economic growth that demands privatization, deregulation, and  weakening the role of the public sector.  It provides a history of conditionality reforms and positions the most recent reforms in lending policy in the evolving neoliberal context. / Master of Arts

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No / This book seeks to analyse the development of the European Union (EU), which was founded upon the principle of the free movement of capital, goods, services and people in 1957. Its central thesis is that, from a practical and theoretical point of view, such a basis is fundamentally at odds with the creation of an interventionist regime that the construction of a social Europe would require.

This thesis will examine some of the basic principles of Classical and Marxian Political Economy. At the center of the project is an examination of two distinct but related subjects: 1) value and 2) internal critique. I begin with a broad overview of the methodological and theoretical principles integral to the study of Marxian political economy and highlight its link to the content of Marx's work. I demonstrate the riven-ness of the concept of value throughout the thesis and show that this riven-ness is integral to rather than accidental to the concept of value itself. In essence, I propose that in order to fully grasp how Marx is taken up by political economists, feminists, ecologists, and critical race scholars in order to understand exploitation and oppression, it is necessary to return to the basic premises of political economy as the foundation of many of these theories. / Master of Arts / Value is a concept which carries with it many different meanings and connotations. It is central to our everyday language and to various fields of study. This thesis aims to examine value and its role as a fundamental concept in the history of economics. To do this, I map out how value emerges as a crucial category in the work of economic theorists. By carefully following these theorists, I seek to uncover what they call attention to and what remains hidden within their work. Another crucial part of this thesis is how to investigate, how to read, and how to think. While the content of the thesis is focused around "value" and what constitutes value, a larger project consumes it. I propose that in order to get to the substance of value, how we think directly affects what we think.

The philosopher James Mylne (1757-1839) vindicated the rational powers of humanity against the sceptical and “common sense” philosophies of his Scottish predecessors and earned the trust of his contemporaries for his Whig politics. He and the largely neglected philosophy and political economy classes he taught in Glasgow clearly merited closer study. My thesis thus contains a biography of Mylne and interpretative essays on his lectures on moral philosophy and political economy and his political views. James Mylne attended St Andrews University where he acquired a liberal education in the Scottish tradition and a particular knowledge of theology. He became a Deputy-Chaplain with the 83rd Regiment of Foot during the American War of Independence and his experience sheds light on his later advocacy of a militia. Thereafter he served for 14 years as a Minister in Paisley where he was exposed to the literary culture of Glasgow and the radical tinged politics of the French revolutionary era. From 1797 until his death he was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, where he delivered effective lectures on moral philosophy and political economy. His impact of his teaching was enhanced by student exercises in essay-writing, following the method of George Jardine. He was also active and influential in the Whig politics of the day. Mylne broke with the political caution of Adam Smith, Thomas Reid (1710-96) and James Beattie. Smith’s warning of a “daring, but often dangerous spirit of innovation” in politics contrasts with the “speedy and substantial reform” advocated by Mylne, who extended the Whig thought of John Millar (1735-1801). The lectures contain material common to Scottish traditions of mental philosophy. However, Mylne’s philosophy is anchored in a tradition of “rational piety” that places individual judgements at the core of mental life and in a philosophy of history that sees intellectual progress at the heart of social, economic and political developments. In place of the scepticism of David Hume (1711-76) and the common sense of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), he proposed a constructive account of experience, developing directly from John Locke (1632-1704) and his French follower Condillac (1714-80). In two particular respects, Mylne’s thought diverges from the ‘moral sense’ and ‘common sense’ traditions associated with Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid in Glasgow. These are his doctrine of the external world and his account of free will and providence. Mylne draws on Condillac to argue that there is no need to draw on common sense to explain belief in an external world as this is explicable by an analysis of touch. He considers that the mind is determined to act by rational motives and the concept of freedom without motive is incoherent. As a result of these views, Mylne reinstates reason as the guiding principle of conscience and argues for utility as the predominant criterion of morality. His views of political reform and the concept of value in his political economy lectures on the emerging market economy are related loosely to these features of his philosophy. The influence of Mylne’s teaching was extensive both in Scotland and the English-speaking world. This can be documented by acknowledgements and reminiscences by his students, many of whom who went on to teach themselves and by comparison of their published works with the content of Mylne’s teaching. More distantly, I argue that Mylne had an indirect influence on the ethos of the early Idealist movement in Glasgow. Mylne’s philosophy evinces a sense of the unity of experience, drawn initially from the universal elements of sensation and judgement, but with religious overtones. His commitments to inquiry and social reform and critique of the common sense school prepared the ground for the Glasgow idealists.

Analyzing crimes through the scope of economics, this thesis explores the correlation between unemployment rate and crime rate, and other possible causes of surging crimes in China by using a fixed-effect regression model. Using provincial level panel data from 2000 to 2010, we did not find significant correlation between arrest rate and prosecution rate to unemployment rate. We found evidence that the Chinese government might intentionally controlled the unemployment rate at an artificially low and stable rate. Additionally, the set of ‘stern punishment’ campaigns during the 2008 Beijing Olympic games, causing a huge increase in arrest rate and police expenditure, could distort the overall trend of crime and unemployment. Moreover, we find a significant positive correlation between GDP per capita level, rural-urban income inequality and floating population to crime. Therefore, we recommend that the Chinese government should create social safety net that targets specifically at rural migrant workers. Not only that, reform and increase job opportunities in rural area is also urgent to close the income gap in rural and urban areas.