49 research outputs found
Historical Bookends: England and Japan
No full textVincent Benziger is a fascinating economic historian. In this piece, he continues exploring geography's bearing on economic growth. Being islands strongly affected growth in Japan and England, he argues. He supports his case well.
THE WAR AGAINST POVERTY: Out of the Loop - Causes of Africa's Poverty and Isolation
No full textWhy has development in sub-Saharan Africa remained so far behind that of the rest of the world? According to the author, geographic access to trade and good climate are critical to the development of society. Sub-Saharan Africa has had significant disadvantages in both areas.
Small fields, big money: Two successful programs in helping small farmers make the transition to high value-added crops
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The sense of a beginning : Bakhtinian dialogic criticism on 'the gospel' in Mark.
No full textContemporary literary approaches have caused paradigm shifts in Biblical Studies in the last two decades as it appears in a great deal of Markan studies using narrative, reader-response, deconstructive, feminist, and new historicist approaches. However, literary studies on the Gospel of Mark have not taken into account theoretical questions underlying those approaches. As a result biblical critics are driven by new trends without ever having a chance to examine the critical baggage of the approaches. Consequently, there is a gap of communication between the old and the new one. Therefore this thesis is an attempt to meet the need of enhancing the quality of critical endeavour in biblical studies. In the light of most recent competing critical theories of literature, the first contribution of this thesis is the methodological finding that Bakhtinian dialogic criticism contains the most profound philosophical and practical foundations for solving some crucial theoretical problems in contemporary literary theories. It is a critique to a Saussurian linguistic system of language which becomes the very foundation of modern and postmodern literary criticism. Bakhtinian literary theory shifts the foundation of literary criticism on linguistic signs into the creative activity of the socio-cultural production of human communication. The shift into socio-cultural reality of language communication makes the notion of 'genre' very important to unlock the problem of text and context in literary studies. Since the Gospel of Mark has fascinated most literary critics in Biblical Studies, the problem of 'genre' of this gospel is chosen as the focus of this study. Secondly, as no agreement is reached as to what 'genre' the Gospel of Mark belongs, this thesis makes its contribution to the discussion by locating the problem of 'genre' of Mark in the context of genre theories and argues that the Bakhtinian suggestion to find genre in the socio-cultural sphere by analysing artistic intercourse between narrative agents in Mark has freed the competing analysis from the unresolved problem between the kerygmatic (content oriented) approach and the analogical (form oriented) approach. To achieve finding 'genre' in the socio-cultural sphere, this thesis focuses on Bakhtinian analysis of the process of artistic intercourse between narrative agents. The narrative communicative interrelationships between narrative agents is constructed in this thesis as a 'stereophonic' Bakhtinian model of dialogic communication. This model is an original contribution of this thesis for revising the traditional two dimensional model of narrative communication. Based on this dialogical model of communication, a special role is given to the Bakhtinian 'author-creator' in the realization process of genre through the interaction of polyphonic voices. Through the interaction of voices of the author-artist and the hero we are led to discover a relatively stable type of portraying and controlling reality in Mark, known as the genre of Roman 'satire'. The closest literary affinity is Satyrica by Petronius. This narrative strategy of 'satire' in Mark has its root in the prophetic discourse of the Old Testament which is saturating the speech of the narrator, John the Immerser, the centurion, the people, and even Jesus. Finally, the whole search for Markan 'genre' culminates in the analysis of the realization of genre through the analysis of Bakhtinian chronotope. The reality of the genre of Mark is its social reality that is in its role as dpxrj/ 'beginning'. As the Gospel of Mark proclaims itself as 'a beginning', it defines its claim of socio-cultural 'authority' in early Christianity. It is this 'sense of beginning' which enables the narrating and the narrated world of Mark to interact dialogically
Bonifaz Wimmer, Erzabt von St. Vincent in Pennsylvanien. Ein Lebensbild unserer Zeit.
No full text"Prämie zum 55. Jahrgang des "Wahrheitsfreund".Mode of access: Internet
Targeted poverty investments and economic growth in China
No full textIn the mid-1980s, the Chinese government launched its ambitious poor area development policy, which was centered around a series of grant, credit, and Food-for-Work programs. Ironically, for the remainder of the 1980s rural poverty remained at about 90 to 100 million, or approximately 10% of the rural population. The lack of progress cannot necessarily be blamed on ineffective poor area policies, since much of the agricultural economy was mired in a deep recession between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s substantial additional poverty reduction had been achieved. Even in the late-1980s, farmers in many poor counties did better than the national average in terms of income growth. After accounting for the effects of macroeconomic elements, what factors can help explain the differences in performance among poor regions and between poor areas and rich ones? Can part of these differences be accounted for by poor area policies, in general, or by the way local and regional officials allocate their poor area investment funds, in particular? The overall objective of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of Chinese poor area policy. Specifically, the paper seeks to meet three objectives. First, we want to understand the evolution of poor area policy since the mid-1980s, trying to deduce the true goals of central and regional poor area officials, as well as how these policies have been implemented in the provinces. Next, we want to understand the magnitude and scope of investment into poor areas, and examine if changes in these policies have affected the uses of the investment funds. Finally, we want to determine the effectiveness of the investment of poor area funds, analyzing which types of investments have generated growth, and which ones have not.</p
Introduction: Some Issues of Chinese Economic Reform
No full textThis year will mark two decades of economic reform in China. Much has been written about China's transition from a plan to a market economy. According to the World Bank 1989-95 data, China scores best among the transitional economies in all the categories of GDP growth, inflation, life expectancy and infant mortality. China is the only country, besides Vietnam, that has never experienced a fall in labour productivity. Its average growth rate of 9.4 per cent in that period has placed the size of its GDP (according to purchasing power calculations) second in world rankings behind the United States and ahead of Japan and Germany. Given the fact that China and the other transitional economies commenced their reform programmes from different sets of initial conditions - for example, 90 per cent of employment in the pre-reform Russian economy was in the industrial sector compared to 19 per cent in China - the question naturally arises as to the applicability of China's reform strategy to other former centrally-planned economies.
The first article by Vincent Benziger in this special issue of JAPE addresses this question and concludes that although initial conditions differ between the transitional economies of Eastern Europe and China, the former can learn from the latter's general strategy of gradualism. He focuses attention on the importance of a gradual opening of the state industrial sector to international competition and argues that only a gradual introduction of competition can prevent a collapse of employment in the state sector before alternative new jobs are created in the private sector. According to him, far too many jobs are dependent on the state sector in Eastern Europe for it to simply collapse before sufficient new jobs are first created in the private sector.Griffith Business School, Department of International Business and Asian StudiesNo Full Tex
"Access to Markets and Farm Efficiency: A Study of Rice Farms in the Bicol Region, Philippines"
No full textThis paper presents an empirical investigation of the relationship between the spread, spatially and temporally, of market institutions and improvements in the productivity and efficiency of farmers. The data used in this study were collected over two decades in a sample of rice farms in the Bicol Region of the Philippines. Our estimates reveal a significant inverse relationship between distance from the market and farm productivity and efficiency in 1983. While there are substantial improvements in yields, unit costs, and efficiency in the two decades that followed, the gains are larger in the more remote and sparsely populated villages. This finding suggests that the relationship between remoteness and farm outcomes has weakened over time. We also find that the development of markets in the peripheral villages and the improved connectivity between the peripheral villages and market centers are facilitated by population growth, infrastructural investments (specifically, irrigation and roads), and the availability of agricultural extension programs.Farm Efficiency; Agricultural Markets; Institutional Conditions; Philippines
