Agriculture in Liberalizing Economies

Agriculture in Liberalizing Economies
Author: DINA L. UMALI
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1995
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780821333549

Discusses ways in which the role of the state in promoting agricultural growth and development may be redefined. This report presents the proceedings of the 14th World Bank Agricultural Symposium held in January 1994. The papers explore ways in which the role of the state in promoting agricultural growth and development may be redefined. They also capitalize on important lessons emerging from experiences around the world. The report suggests that changing the role of government from market domination towards the provision of a regulatory framework that facilitates private sector activity is an ongoing process rather than a one-time occurrence. The papers also illustrate the wide variety of issues and the different approaches in the various countries that are redefining the role of government in agricultural development.

Property Without Rights

Property Without Rights
Author: Michael Albertus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2021-01-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108835236

A new understanding of the causes and consequences of incomplete property rights in countries across the world.

An Endogenous Theory of Property Rights

An Endogenous Theory of Property Rights
Author: Peter Ho
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351623486

From a neo-liberal, neo-classical paradigm, secure, formal and private property rights are crucial to fostering sustained development. Institutions that fail to respond to shifting socio-economic opportunities are thus forced to make new arrangements. The enigma is posed by developments on the ground. Why would the removal of authoritarian institutions during the Arab Spring or Iraq War not increase market efficiency but rather cause the reverse, while China and India, despite persisting insecure, informal and common institutions, featured sustained growth? This collection posits that understanding these paradoxes requires a refocusing from form to function, detached from normative assumptions about institutional appearance. In so doing, three things are accomplished. First, starting from case studies on land, it is ascertained that the argument can be meaningfully extended to labour, capital and beyond. Second, the argument validates the ‘Credibility Thesis’ – that is, once institutions persist, they fulfil a function. Third, the collection studies ‘development, broadly construed’, by including the modes of production and beyond, the rural and urban, the developed and developing. This is why it reviews property rights from China and India, to Turkey, Mexico and Malaysia, covering issues such as customary rights and privatization, mining and pastoralism, dam-building and irrigation, but also state-owned banks, trade unions and notaries. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

The Politics of Property Rights

The Politics of Property Rights
Author: Stephen Haber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2003-05-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521820677

This book addresses a puzzle in political economy: why is it that political instability does not necessarily translate into economic stagnation or collapse? In order to address this puzzle, it advances a theory about property rights systems in many less developed countries. In this theory, governments do not have to enforce property rights as a public good. Instead, they may enforce property rights selectively (as a private good), and share the resulting rents with the group of asset holders who are integrated into the government. Focusing on Mexico, this book explains how the property rights system was constructed during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1876-1911) and then explores how this property rights system either survived, or was reconstructed. The result is an analytic economic history of Mexico under both stability and instability, and a generalizable framework about the interaction of political and economic institutions.

Property without Rights

Property without Rights
Author: Michael Albertus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2021-01-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108858465

Major land reform programs have reallocated property in more than one-third of the world's countries in the last century and impacted over one billion people. But only rarely have these programs granted beneficiaries complete property rights. Why is this the case, and what are the consequences? This book draws on wide-ranging original data and charts new conceptual terrain to reveal the political origins of the property rights gap. It shows that land reform programs are most often implemented by authoritarian governments who deliberately withhold property rights from beneficiaries. In so doing, governments generate coercive leverage over rural populations and exert social control. This is politically advantageous to ruling governments but it has negative development consequences: it slows economic growth, productivity, and urbanization and it exacerbates inequality. The book also examines the conditions under which subsequent governments close property rights gaps, usually as a result of democratization or foreign pressure.

The Poetics of Fire

The Poetics of Fire
Author: Victor M. Valle
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2023-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 082636554X

In The Poetics of Fire, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Chicano author Victor M. Valle posits the chile as a metaphor for understanding the shared cultural histories of ChicanX and LatinX peoples from preconquest Mesoamerica to twentieth-century New Mexico. Valle uses the chile as a decolonizing lens through which to analyze preconquest Mesoamerican cosmology, early European exploration, and the forced conversion of Native peoples to Catholicism as well as European and Mesoamerican perspectives on food and place. Assembling a rich collection of source material, Valle highlights the fiery fruit's overarching importance as evidenced by the ubiquity of references to the plant over several centuries in literature, art, official documents, and more to offer a new eco-aesthetic reading--a reframing of culinary history from a pluralistic, non-Western perspective.

Revolution and State in Modern Mexico

Revolution and State in Modern Mexico
Author: Adam David Morton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2013-10-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1442229454

Now in an updated edition, this groundbreaking study develops a new approach to understanding the formation of the postrevolutionary state in Mexico. In a shift away from dominant interpretations, Adam David Morton considers the construction of the revolution and the modern Mexican state through a fresh analysis of the Mexican Revolution, the era of import substitution industrialization, and neoliberalism. Throughout, the author makes interdisciplinary links among geography, political economy, postcolonialism, and Latin American studies in order to provide a new framework for analyzing the development of state power in Mexico. He also explores key processes in the contestation of the modern state, specifically through studies of the role of intellectuals, democratization and democratic transition, and spaces of resistance. As Morton argues, all these themes can only be fully understood through the lens of uneven development in Latin America. Centrally, the book shows how the history of modern state formation and uneven development in Mexico is best understood as a form of passive revolution, referring to the ongoing class strategies that have shaped relations between state and civil society. As such, Morton makes an important interdisciplinary contribution to debates on state formation relevant to Mexican studies, postcolonial and development studies, historical sociology, and international political economy by revitalizing the debate on the uneven and combined character of development in Mexico and throughout Latin America. In so doing, he convincingly contends that uneven development can once again become a tool for radical political economy analysis in and beyond the region. A substantive new epilogue engages the main theoretical debates that have emerged since the book was first published, while also exploring the dominant geographies of power and resistance that are shaping state space in Mexico in the twenty-first century. And now a Spanish edition, Revolución y Estado en México moderno (México, D.F.: Siglo XXI, 2017), is available as well. Click here to see the book trailer.

Empire's Twin

Empire's Twin
Author: Ian Tyrrell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2015-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801455693

Across the course of American history, imperialism and anti-imperialism have been awkwardly paired as influences on the politics, culture, and diplomacy of the United States. The Declaration of Independence, after all, is an anti-imperial document, cataloguing the sins of the metropolitan government against the colonies. With the Revolution, and again in 1812, the nation stood against the most powerful empire in the world and declared itself independent. As noted by Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton, however, American "anti-imperialism was clearly selective, geographically, racially, and constitutionally." Empire’s Twin broadens our conception of anti-imperialist actors, ideas, and actions; it charts this story across the range of American history, from the Revolution to our own era; and it opens up the transnational and global dimensions of American anti-imperialism. By tracking the diverse manifestations of American anti-imperialism, this book highlights the different ways in which historians can approach it in their research and teaching. The contributors cover a wide range of subjects, including the discourse of anti-imperialism in the Early Republic and Civil War, anti-imperialist actions in the U.S. during the Mexican Revolution, the anti-imperial dimensions of early U.S. encounters in the Middle East, and the transnational nature of anti-imperialist public sentiment during the Cold War and beyond.