世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Scholars routinely make claims that presuppose the validity of the observations and measurements that operationalize their concepts. Yet, despite recent advances in political science methods, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to measurement validity. We address this gap by exploring four themes. First, we seek to establish a shared framework that allows quantitative and qualitative scholars to assess more effectively, and communicate about, issues of valid measurement. Second, we underscore the need to draw a clear distinction between measurement issues and disputes about concepts. Third, we discuss the contextual specificity of measurement claims, exploring a variety of measurement strategies that seek to combine generality and validity by devoting greater attention to context. Fourth, we address the proliferation of terms for alternative measurement validation procedures and offer an account of the three main types of validation most relevant to political scientists.

Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research

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The regnant scholarly consensus linking good governance—the quality of public administration—to economic development has undergone surprisingly little empirical scrutiny. We examine the relationship by asking two questions: How confident are we in our cross-national measures of good governance? How solid are the empirical foundations of the growth-governance causal linkage? Our results suggest that the dominant measures of governance are problematic, suffering from perceptual biases, adverse selection in sampling, and conceptual conflation with economic policy choices. Within the limits of somewhat problematic measures, the evidence suggests that there is far more reason to believe that growth and development spur improvements in governance than vice versa. The policy implications are profound, for international organizations and governments are beginning to condition developmental aid on problematic measures of administrative performance.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00549.x

Growth and Governance: Models, Measures, and Mechanisms

Scholars have usually understood the problem of democratic consolidation in terms of the creation of mechanisms that make possible the avoidance of populist excesses, polarized conflicts, or authoritarian corporatist inclusion that undermined free politics in much of postwar Latin America. This article makes the case that, under contemporary liberal economic conditions, the nature of the challenge for democratization has changed in important ways. Earlier problems of polarization had their roots in the long-present statist patterns of economic organization. By contrast, under free-market conditions, democratic consolidation faces a largely distinct set of challenges: the underarticulation of societal interests, pervasive social atomization, and socially uneven political quiescence founded in collective action problems. These can combine to undermine the efficacy of democratic representation and, consequently, regime legitimacy. The article utilizes data from the Latin American region since the 1970s on development, economic reform, and individual and collective political participation to show the effects of a changing state-economy relationship on the consolidation of democratic politics.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0043887100004299

The Dilemmas of Democracy in the Open Economy: Lessons from Latin America

The solar wind interacts very strongly with the extensive cometary coma, and the various interaction processes are initiated by the ionization of cometary neutrals. The main ionization mechanism far outside the cometary bow shock is photoionization by solar extreme ultraviolet radiation.Electron distributions measured in the vicinity of comets Halley and Giacobini-Zinner by instruments on the VEGA and ICE spacecraft, respectively, are used to calculate electron impact ionization frequencies. Ionization by electrons is of comparable importance to photoionization in the magnetosheaths of Comets Halley and Giacobini-Zinner. The ionization frequency in the inner part of the cometary plasma region of comet Halley is several times greater than the photoionization value. Tables of ionization frequencies as functions of electron temperature are presented for H2O, CO2, CO, O, N2, and H.

/pdf/electron-impact-ionization-in-the-vicinity-of-comets-3gsw3r2shy.pdf

Electron impact ionization in the vicinity of comets

The end of the twentieth century was marked by a sea change in global governance in the realm of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Whereas countries historically retained substantial autonomy with regard to what they defined as intellectual “property” and the rights granted to the owners of intellectual property, the 1990s witnessed the establishment of new global obligations regarding national practices. This paper focuses on the case of software “piracy” to assess the mechanisms by which the new global obligations for the treatment of IPRs are transmitted from the international to the national levels. We first consider a set of national-level factors that many scholars have shown to be important determinants of IPR policy. We then supplement the standard emphasis on domestic factors with an analysis of new transnational factors: countries' multilateral obligations under the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and bilateral pressures from the United States to increase the protection of IPRs. Population-averaged panel data models are used to assess the effects of these national and transnational determinants on levels of software piracy in 80 countries from 1994 to 2002. Our results indicate that membership in the WTO and bilateral pressures from the United States—particularly pressures that offer reciprocal concessions—lead to substantial increases in levels of protection in rich and poor countries. There is, in short, a new international political economy of intellectual property.

The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Protection: The Case of Software

Since the 1990s it has become conventional wisdom that an abundance of natural resources, most notably oil, is very likely to become a developmental “curse.” Recent scholarship, however, has begun ...

Marcus J. Kurtz

Papers

Growth and Governance: Models, Measures, and Mechanisms

The Dilemmas of Democracy in the Open Economy: Lessons from Latin America

Electron impact ionization in the vicinity of comets

The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Protection: The Case of Software

Conditioning the "Resource Curse": Globalization, Human Capital, and Growth in Oil-Rich Nations