1985: Volume 16
Volume 16 Number 1 January 1985
Edited by: David Evans and Raphie Kaplinsky
By late October 1929 the Wall Street stock-market had crashed, announcing to an astonished world that the post-World War ¡ recovery was not quite as robust as many public figures had appeared to behave.
This accepted view that all was well in the US economy had persisted right through the years of portent; indeed as late as mid-September 1929 the Wall Street Journal proclaimed that 'price movements in the main body of stocks yesterday continued to display the characteristics of a major advance temporarily halted for technical readjustment'.' At this time of uncertainty in global economic performance in the l980s, it is therefore appropriate to exercise caution in prognostications of future growth. Public figures, for perfectly obvious reasons, have a vested interest in allaying public concern and massaging indicators of profound structural disturbance in economic and political systems. So how are we to interpret the significance of current assessments when we are often assured - as in the late 1920s that economic recovery, whether short, medium or long run, is around the corner?
To what extent is slowdown and unemployment a sign of major structural disequilibria? Views on this matter are divided along a wide continuum, perhaps reflecting the degree of incorporation of individual observers in the wider social process. In this Bulletin we offer a range of views on the topic - broad church, involving different levels of discourse, and drawing alternative policy prescriptions.
The canvas is the world political economy which can be roughly divided into three parts - the industrial market economies. Eastern European non-market economies, and the developing countries. For simplicity, we will often refer to these groups as West. East and South. This Bulletin focuses heavily on an analysis of West,
1984: Volume 15
Volume 15 Number 4 October 1984
Edited by: John Oxenham
Research into the several dimensions of education is well established as one of the branches of social science. Cross-national research in these areas is similarly well established, as the recent Fifth World Congress of Comparative and International Education Societies bore out. With the procedure of much of such research there appears to be no issue of principle. Americans, Germans, Swedes, Russians and Japanese study each other with mutual encouragement. Until two decades ago much the same seemed to be true of all nations. Indians were at liberty to study British education, Ghanaians could doubtless look at Brazil, if they were so inclined, and Zambians and Tanzanians could examine the Chinese experiences.
Volume 15 Number 3 July 1984
Edited by: Hans Singer and Carlos Fortin
UNCTAD is celebrating this year the 20th anniversary of its foundation, but the atmosphere is not entirely congratulatory. In the anti-internationalist mood current in important sectors within the industrialised countries, notably in the United States and Britain, the fundamental ideas of the United Nations organisation as a whole are being questioned. The governments of these countries, furthermore, are strongly antiinterventionist in outlook; UNCTAD, as the UN agency mandated to negotiate and oversee changes in international economic arrangements, is, not surprisingly, a particular focus of criticism. The prolonged recession undergone by the OECD countries over the past five years has helped encourage nationalist economic tendencies and bolstered opposition to reforms of a redistributive character in the international economy.
Volume 15 Number 2 May 1984
Edited by: Gordon White and Robert Wade
The papers in this Bulletin focus on different aspects of the historical experience of state economic involvement
in three East Asian NICs, one socialist (China) and two capitalist (Taiwan and South Korea). Taking the two capitalist cases first, state economic involvement has been thorough-going in both (though with important differences): officials have imposed strict controls on flows of investment funds and have acted systematically to change the incentive structures of commodity markets in pursuit of national economic priorities. They have not only intervened to determine the evolving structure of the domestic economy, but also to capture the potential benefits offered by foreign capital and commodity markets by setting favourable terms of interaction conducive to strategic national goals.
Volume 15 Number 1 January 1984
Edited by: Kate Young
This Bulletin covers a range of themes including research on rural women's economic activities, power relationships between men and women, women's consciousness, solidarity and divisions among women, women's capacity to organise and struggle for a more just society, and the effectiveness of policy measures to promote gender equality in both employment and the family. Most of the articles here originated as papers discussed at two workshops funded by the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, and held at the IDS in Spring 1982 under the rubric 'rapid appraisal of the situation of rural women'. One workshop concentrated on a critique of the dominant concepts used in both research work and development policy-making relating to rural societies (most fundamentally, the prevailing definitions of 'work' and 'the household').
The second workshop focused on research techniques. Our aim was to ask a number of leading researchers in the field to summarise the experience of their investigations in a way that would be of use for those undertaking policy oriented research, which often has to be carried out under tight time constraints.
