计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

This book opens a fresh chapter in the debate on local enterprise clusters and their strategies for upgrading in the global economy. The authors employ a novel conceptual framework in their research on industrial clusters in Europe, Latin America and Asia and provide new perspectives and insights for researchers and policymakers alike.

Governance in global value chains

Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. In India, in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of Dholera, the first Indian smart city, I examine how global models of smart cities are provincialized in the regional state of Gujarat through local histories, politics and laws. First, I argue that Dholera smart city is part of a longer genealogy of utopian urban planning that emerged as a response to the challenges of development and modernity in post-independent India. Second, that Dholera highlights a shift towards an ‘entrepreneurial urbanization’ in a regional state interested in scaling up a ‘Gujarat model of development’ for emulation at the scale of the nation. Finally, that in Dholera ‘speed’ is a ...

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New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat

According to the India: Urban Poverty Report, the urban population in India is growing at a rate faster than the total population, and by 2030, 41% of the country’s people will live in cities and towns (GOI 2009). This will create immense pressure on India’s urban economies with their already massive deficits in infrastructure and civic amenities. Moreover, the big cities in India are growing faster than small and medium towns. The government has responded to this coming crisis by promoting new townships close to Indian metropolises in an attempt to decongest them (Wang, Kundu and Chen 2010). However, the development of new towns functions less as a means to decongest the older metropolitan centres than as a means to bypass them. This is the new face of urbanisation in India; it relies on the “bypass” approach to urbanisation instead of the urban regeneration approach one finds in western cities. In the urban regeneration approach, comprehensive action is taken to overhaul the physical, social, economic and environmental character of an urban space that has degenerated over time. More often than not, the idea is to reclaim a position in the global economy as a reinvigorated centre for business, professional assemblage and tourism. To this end, cities are transformed into “entertainment machines”, where high value-producing workers “make ‘quality of life’ demands, and in their consumption practices can experience their own urban location as if tourists, emphasising aesthetic concerns” (Lloyd and Clark 2001: 357). The new face of western cities is largely explained by the decline of the industrial economy in the cities and the rise, in its place, of a new economy that revolves around finance, producer services, entertainment, information technology, media, and so on, which is referred to as the “informational economy” (Castells 1989), postindustrial economy (Sassen 2001) or even postmodern economy (Hardt 1999). In contrast to an industrial proletariat, the workers in this new economy, who assert their quality of life demands on the city, are producers of symbols, simulations and information. Their quality of life demands have triumphed over the logic of social reproduction that constituted the urban space in the Fordist era, leading to the gentrification of cities and the exclusion of disadvantaged urban populations and the traditional working

Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labour and Exclusion in Post-colonial Urbanisation

In the dominant policy discourses, the informal sector is often treated as composed of millions of entrepreneurs who are stuck at small scales of business with low levels of productivity and incomes because of market imperfections, institutional rigidities, or regulatory bias. Technological inclusion is often considered a solution to the problem of institutional exclusion that the informal business owners face. Such policies are often based on the assumption that informal business owners behave like entrepreneurs. However, there is also an alternative view that informal business owners are forced to run businesses on their own account because they cannot find decent jobs in the formal or organized modern sector. Their skills and attitudes towards risk are very different from what we associate with entrepreneurs. Technology solutions in general—and information and communication technology (ICT) solutions in particular—are more likely to be effective in their developmental objectives, if a more nuanced and disaggregated view of the informal economy is adopted.

ICT solutions for the informal sector in developing economies: What can one expect?

There are two divergent perspectives on the impact of subcontracting on firms in the informal sector. According to the benign view, formal sector firms prefer linkages with relatively modern firms in the informal sector, and subcontracting enables capital accumulation and technological improvement in the latter. According to the exploitation view, formal sector firms extract surplus from stagnant, asset-poor informal sector firms that use cheap family labour in home-based production. However, direct, firm-level evidence on the determinants and impact of subcontracting is thus far lacking in the literature. We apply a modified Heckman selection model to Indian National Sample Survey data on informal manufacturing enterprises (2005–2006). We find that home-based, relatively asset-poor, and female-owned firms are more likely to be in a subcontracting relationship. Further, we perform selectivity-corrected Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition and calculate treatment effects to show that subcontracting benefits smalle...

Determinants and impacts of subcontracting: evidence from India’s unorganized manufacturing sector

Dualism in the Informal Economy: Exploring the Indian Informal Manufacturing Sector

.................................................................................................................... viii LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................... xiv CHAPTER

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Rajesh Bhattacharya

Papers

Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labour and Exclusion in Post-colonial Urbanisation

ICT solutions for the informal sector in developing economies: What can one expect?

Determinants and impacts of subcontracting: evidence from India’s unorganized manufacturing sector

Dualism in the Informal Economy: Exploring the Indian Informal Manufacturing Sector

Capitalism in post-colonial India: Primitive accumulation under dirigiste and laissez faire regimes