Results by title

141 books match the query 'Developing countries' and 32 start with t

Sort by

Tax Reform in Developing Countries

Malcolm Gillis, ed.

Duke University Press, 1989

This volume presents the work of experts (in most cases the very advisers who designed and helped implement the reforms) on the tax reform efforts of a dozen developing nations—from the restructuring of the economy of postwar Japan to the 1986 reforms in Jamaica. Among the many lessons learned from these efforts are that tax reform is most successful when tax administration is a central (rather than peripheral) focus of reform efforts, and when tax reform is specifically directed toward economic rather than noneconomic objectives.
Other conclusions include the apparently mutually reinforcing nature of tax simplification and tax rate reduction, and the role of indirect tax reforms (such as the value-added tax) in successful reform undertakings.

[more]

The Democratisation of Disempowerment

The Problem of Democracy in the Third World

Jochen Hippler

Pluto Press, 1995

[more]

The Dictator Novel

Writers and Politics in the Global South

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra

Northwestern University Press, 2019

Where there are dictators, there are novels about dictators. But “dictator novels” do not simply respond to the reality of dictatorship. As this genre has developed and cohered, it has acquired a self-generating force distinct from its historical referents. The dictator novel has become a space in which writers consider the difficulties of national consolidation, explore the role of external and global forces in sustaining dictatorship, and even interrogate the political functions of writing itself. Literary representations of the dictator, therefore, provide ground for a self-conscious and self-critical theorization of the relationship between writing and politics itself.

The Dictator Novel positions novels about dictators as a vital genre in the literatures of the Global South. Primarily identified with Latin America, the dictator novel also has underacknowledged importance in the postcolonial literatures of francophone and anglophone Africa. Although scholars have noted similarities, this book is the first extensive comparative analysis of these traditions; it includes discussions of authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Mármol, Esteban Echeverría, Ousmane Sembène , Chinua Achebe, Aminata Sow Fall, Henri Lopès, Sony Labou Tansi, and Ahmadou Kourouma. This juxtaposition illuminates the internal dynamics of the dictator novel as a literary genre. In so doing, Armillas-Tiseyra puts forward a comparative model relevant to scholars working across the Global South.

[more]

The Economics of Killing

How the West Fuels War and Poverty in the Developing World

Vijay Mehta

Pluto Press, 2012

Globalisation has created an interconnected world, but has not diminished violence, militarism and inequality. The Economics of Killing describes how the power of global elites, entrenched under globalisation, has created a deadly cycle of violence.

In this groundbreaking work, Vijay Mehta shows how attempts at peaceful national development are routinely blocked by Western powers. He locates the 2008 financial crisis in US attempts to block China's model of development. He shows how Europe and the US conspire with regional dictators to prevent countries from developing advanced industries, and how this system has fed terrorism.

Mehta argues that a different world is possible, based on policies of disarmament, demilitarisation and sustainable development. This original and thought-provoking book will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the consequences of endless war fuelled by the West.

[more]

The End of the Cognitive Empire

The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Duke University Press, 2018

In The End of the Cognitive Empire Boaventura de Sousa Santos further develops his concept of the "epistemologies of the South," in which he outlines a theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical framework for challenging the dominance of Eurocentric thought. As a collection of knowledges born of and anchored in the experiences of marginalized peoples who actively resist capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, epistemologies of the South represent those forms of knowledge that are generally discredited, erased, and ignored by dominant cultures of the global North. Noting the declining efficacy of established social and political solutions to combat inequality and discrimination, Santos suggests that global justice can only come about through an epistemological shift that guarantees cognitive justice. Such a shift would create new, alternative strategies for political mobilization and activism and give oppressed social groups the means through which to represent the world as their own and in their own terms.

[more]

The Fair Trade Revolution

Edited by John Bowes

Pluto Press, 2011

Fair Trade has come a long way in the last 20 years. The Fair Trade Revolution celebrates the movement's achievement and takes up the challenge of improving more lives through fair dealing with producers.

Fair Trade is now mainstream, with large companies like Cadbury's and supermarkets such as Sainsbury's producing and stocking many Fair Trade products. The authors of this collection, many of whom were responsible for the initial success of Fair Trade, emphasise the importance of ensuring that farmers and other producers remain the main beneficiaries. Punchy chapters, illustrated with many real-world examples, cover all the important issues including the tensions between large and small operators, the impact of recession, environmental policy and the danger of large operators embracing Fair Trade more in word than in practice.

Written by the leading lights of the Fair Trade movement, including Harriet Lamb (Executive Director of the Fairtrade Foundation) and Bruce Crowther (Establisher of the world's first Fair Trade Town) this book will inspire activists and consumers to keep making the right choices.

[more]

The Fair Trade Scandal

Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich

Ndongo Sylla

Ohio University Press, 2014

This critical account of the fair trade movement explores the vast gap between the rhetoric of fair trade and its practical results for poor countries, particularly those of Africa. In the Global North, fair trade often is described as a revolutionary tool for transforming the lives of millions across the globe. The growth in sales for fair trade products has been dramatic in recent years, but most of the benefit has accrued to the already wealthy merchandisers at the top of the value chain rather than to the poor producers at the bottom.

Ndongo Sylla has worked for Fairtrade International and offers an insider’s view of how fair trade improves—or doesn’t—the lot of the world’s poorest. His methodological framework first describes the hypotheses on which the fair trade movement is grounded before going on to examine critically the claims made by its proponents. By distinguishing local impact from global impact, Sylla exposes the inequity built into the system and the resulting misallocation of the fair trade premium paid by consumers. The Fair Trade Scandal is an empirically based critique of both fair trade and traditional free trade; it is the more important for exploring the problems of both from the perspective of the peoples of the Global South, the ostensible beneficiaries of the fair trade system.

[more]

The Fernando Coronil Reader

The Struggle for Life Is the Matter

Fernando Coronil

Duke University Press, 2019

In The Fernando Coronil Reader Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil challenges us to rethink our approaches to key contemporary epistemological, political, and ethical questions. Consisting of work written between 1991 and 2011, this posthumously published collection includes Coronil's landmark essays “Beyond Occidentalism” and “The Future in Question” as well as two chapters from his unfinished book manuscript, "Crude Matters." Taken together, the essays highlight his deep concern with the Global South, Latin American state formation, theories of nature, empire, and postcolonialism, and anthrohistory as an intellectual and ethical approach. Presenting a cross section of Coronil's oeuvre, this volume cements his legacy as one of the most innovative critical social thinkers of his generation.

[more]

The Fertility Revolution

A Supply-Demand Analysis

Richard A. Easterlin and Eileen M. Crimmins

University of Chicago Press, 1985

For most of human history a "natural fertility" regime has prevailed throughout the world: there has been almost no conscious limitation of family size within marriage, and women have spent their reproductive lives tied to the "wheel of childbearing." Only recently in developed countries has fertility been brought under conscious control by individual couples and childbearing fallen to an average of two births per woman. The explanation of this "fertility revolution" is the main concern of this book.

Richard A. Easterlin and Eileen M. Crimmins present and test a fertility theory that has gained increasing attention over the last decade, a "supply-demand theory" that integrates economic and sociological approaches to fertility determination. The results of the tests, which draw on data from four developing countries—Colombia, India, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan—are highly consistent, though a number of the conclusions are likely to arouse controversy. For example, couples' motivation for fertility control appears to be the prime mover in the fertility revolution, rather than access to family planning services or unfavorable attitudes toward such services.

The interdisciplinary approach and nontechnical exposition of this study will attract a wide readership among economists, sociologists, demographers, anthropologists, statisticians, biologists, and others.

[more]

The Financial Crisis and the Global South

A Development Perspective

Yilmaz Akyuz

Pluto Press, 2013

This book is a major contribution exploring the policy options available for developing and emerging economies in response to the global economic crises.

Written by a highly respected development economist, the book gives a clear-eyed account of the issues particular to these countries and critically evaluates different policy approaches, including reforms in financial, monetary and trade policies. Informed by deep scholarship as well as practical experience, Yilmaz Akyüz draws on empirical data, historical context and theoretical expertise, with special attention paid to issues such as the role of the International Monetary Fund and China.

The Financial Crisis and the Global South is a landmark book that will be of interest to practitioners, scholars, theorists and students of economics and development studies.

[more]

The Global Hunger Crisis

Tackling Food Insecurity in Developing Countries

Majda Bne Saad

Pluto Press, 2013

Millions across the world face the daily challenge to find enough food to survive. Hunger is on the rise globally, with more than 1.2 billion people suffering from food insecurity. Rising prices are further restricting food access.

In this deeply informative study, Majda Bne Saad identifies the causes for global hunger embedded in the current global political and economic system and highlights the key challenges facing food deficit countries. She shows how Western countries share the blame for global hunger through their support for subsidies to agricultural production and biofuels, which have created new challenges to food security worldwide.

Bne Saad argues that, as world population rises from 7 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050, there needs to be a ‘second green revolution’ to grow more food. She looks at the factors constraining low-income nations from achieving food security and considers policies which could generate income and enhance individuals' entitlement to food.

[more]

The Green Revolution in the Global South

Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences

R. Douglas Hurt

University of Alabama Press, 2020

A synthesis of the agricultural history of the Green Revolution

The Green Revolution was devised to increase agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world. Agriculturalists employed anhydrous ammonia and other fertilizing agents, mechanical tilling, hybridized seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and a multitude of other techniques to increase yields and feed a mushrooming human population that would otherwise suffer starvation as the world’s food supply dwindled.

In The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences, R. Douglas Hurt demonstrates that the Green Revolution did not turn out as neatly as scientists predicted. When its methods and products were imported to places like Indonesia and Nigeria, or even replicated indigenously, the result was a tumultuous impact on a society’s functioning. A range of factors—including cultural practices, ethnic and religious barriers, cost and availability of new technologies, climate, rainfall and aridity, soil quality, the scale of landholdings, political policies and opportunism, the rise of industrial farms, civil unrest, indigenous diseases, and corruption—entered into the Green Revolution calculus, producing a series of unintended consequences that varied from place to place. As the Green Revolution played out over time, these consequences rippled throughout societies, affecting environments, economies, political structures, and countless human lives.

Analyzing change over time, almost decade by decade, Hurt shows that the Green Revolution was driven by the state as well as science. Rather than acknowledge the vast problems with the Green Revolution or explore other models, Hurt argues, scientists and political leaders doubled down and repeated the same missteps in the name of humanity and food security. In tracing the permutations of modern science’s impact on international agricultural systems, Hurt documents how, beyond increasing yields, the Green Revolution affected social orders, politics, and lifestyles in every place its methods were applied—usually far more than once.

[more]

The Ills of Aid

An Analysis of Third World Development Policies

Eberhard Reusse

University of Chicago Press, 2002

With this book, Eberhard Reusse channels thirty years of experience with international aid programs into the task of both diagnosing the problems afflicting these programs and formulating a possible cure. Supporting his analysis with detailed case studies of two rural development programs in Africa—the United Nations’ "War on Waste" and cereal banks for small-farmer communities—Reusse reveals a system riddled with flaws. Impatient assumptions, belated and often suppressed recognition of their invalidity, and the perpetuation of unsuitable programs over decades—all are characteristic of the system. Local populations "fail" to participate in programs, or their accumulated firsthand knowledge is ignored and marginalized. Development experts make misjudgments or are adversely pressured by funding concerns. Programs are unevaluated and unaccountable to donors, perpetuating themselves long after they’re proved ineffective or inefficient. And throughout the book, Reusse demonstrates the principal systemic flaw: unrealistic interventionist paradigms—that is, Western notions of Third World realities that misidentify needs for intervention—at the root of most inappropriate development policies. The problems continue to this day.

Very few critiques of foreign development aid have approached the subject from the perspectives of organizational, rural, or epistemic sociology. The Ills of Aid combines all three, and points toward fundamental solutions: more direct accountability to the primary funding base—the international taxpayer—and the privatization of aid. Learned, pragmatic, and important, The Ills of Aid is essential reading for all in the field.Organization, other international and bilateral development programs, and development financing institutions. His field experience embraces more than forty countries.

[more]

The Illusion of Cultural Identity

Jean-François Bayart

University of Chicago Press, 2005

The concept of cultural identity has become for many a convenient explanation for most of the world's political problems. In The Illusion of Cultural Identity Jean-François Bayart offers a sustained critique of this rationalization by dispelling the notion that fixed cultural identities do, in fact, exist.

In this highly sophisticated book, Bayart shows that the very idea of cultural identity prevents us from grasping the cultural dimensions of political action and economic development. Identities, he argues, are fluid, never homogeneous, and sometimes invented. Political repertoires are instead created through imagined, highly ambiguous aspects of culture—what he calls "imaginaires." For instance, the long beards worn by men in some fundamentalist groups are thought to be key to their core identities and thus assumed to be in conflict with modern values. These beards, however, do not stand in the way of the men's use of technology or their embrace of capitalism—an example Bayart uses to demonstrate the equivocality of cultural identity. The theoretical implications of Bayart's analysis emerge from a fascinating collection of historical examples that often surprise and always instruct.

[more]

The Internet of Elsewhere

The Emergent Effects of a Wired World

Farivar, Cyrus

Rutgers University Press, 2011

Through the lens of culture, The Internet of Elsewhere looks at the role of the Internet as a catalyst in transforming communications, politics, and economics. Cyrus Farivar explores the Internet's history and effects in four distinct and, to some, surprising societies—Iran, Estonia, South Korea, and Senegal. He profiles Web pioneers in these countries and, at the same time, surveys the environments in which they each work. After all, contends Farivar, despite California's great success in creating the Internet and spawning companies like Apple and Google, in some areas the United States is still years behind other nations.

Surprised? You won't be for long as Farivar proves there are reasons that:

Skype was invented in Estonia—the same country that developed a digital ID system and e-voting;
Iran was the first country in the world to arrest a blogger, in 2003;
South Korea is the most wired country on the planet, with faster and less expensive broadband than anywhere in the United States;
Senegal may be one of sub-Saharan Africa's best chances for greater Internet access.

The Internet of Elsewhere brings forth a new complex and modern understanding of how the Internet spreads globally, with both good and bad effects.

[more]

The Political Economy of Development

The World Bank, Neoliberalism and Development Research

Edited by Kate Bayliss, Ben Fine, and Elisa Van Waeyenberge

Pluto Press, 2011

Any student, academic or practitioner wanting to succeed in development studies, radical or mainstream, must understand the World Bank's role and the evolution of its thinking and activities. The Political Economy of Development provides tools for gaining this understanding and applies them across a range of topics.

The research, practice and scholarship of development are always set against the backdrop of the World Bank, whose formidable presence shapes both development practice and thinking. This book brings together academics that specialise in different subject areas of development and reviews their findings in the context of the World Bank as knowledge bank, policy-maker and financial institution. The volume offers a compelling contribution to our understanding of development studies and of development itself.

The Political Economy of Development is an invaluable critical resource for students, policy-makers and activists in development studies.

[more]

The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital

Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds.

Duke University Press, 1997

Global in scope, but refusing a familiar totalizing theoretical framework, the essays in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital demonstrate how localized and resistant social practices—including anticolonial and feminist struggles, peasant revolts, labor organizing, and various cultural movements—challenge contemporary capitalism as a highly differentiated mode of production.
Reworking Marxist critique, these essays on Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe advance a new understanding of "cultural politics" within the context of transnational neocolonial capitalism. This perspective contributes to an overall critique of traditional approaches to modernity, development, and linear liberal narratives of culture, history, and democratic institutions. It also frames a set of alternative social practices that allows for connections to be made between feminist politics among immigrant women in Britain, women of color in the United States, and Muslim women in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and Canada; the work of subaltern studies in India, the Philippines, and Mexico; and antiracist social movements in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. These connections displace modes of opposition traditionally defined in relation to the modern state and enable a rethinking of political practice in the era of global capitalism.

Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Nandi Bhatia, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chungmoo Choi, Clara Connolly, Angela Davis, Arturo Escobar, Grant Farred, Homa Hoodfar, Reynaldo C. Ileto, George Lipsitz, David Lloyd, Lisa Lowe, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Aihwa Ong, Pragna Patel, José Rabasa, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Jaqueline Urla

[more]

The Politics of the Female Body

Postcolonial Women Writers

Ketu H. Katrak

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Is it possible to simultaneously belong to and be exiled from a community? In Politics of the Female Body, Ketu H. Katrak argues that it is not only possible, but common, especially for women who have been subjects of colonial empires.

Through her careful analysis of postcolonial literary texts, Katrak uncovers the ways that the female body becomes a site of both oppression and resistance. She examines writers working in the English language, including Anita Desai from India, Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana, and Merle Hodge from Trinidad, among others. The writers share colonial histories, a sense of solidarity, and resistance strategies in the on-going struggles of decolonization that center on the body.

Bringing together a rich selection of primary texts, Katrak examines published novels, poems, stories, and essays, as well as activist materials, oral histories, and pamphlets—forms that push against the boundaries of what is considered strictly literary. In these varied materials, she reveals common political and feminist alliances across geographic boundaries.

A unique comparative look at women’s literary work and its relationship to the body in third world societies, this text will be of interest to literary scholars and to those working in the fields of postcolonial studies and women’s studies.

[more]

The Rhetoric of Empire

Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration

David Spurr

Duke University Press, 1993

The white man's burden, darkest Africa, the seduction of the primitive: such phrases were widespread in the language Western empires used to talk about their colonial enterprises. How this language itself served imperial purposes--and how it survives today in writing about the Third World--are the subject of David Spurr's book, a revealing account of the rhetorical strategies that have defined Western thinking about the non-Western world.
Despite historical differences among British, French, and American versions of colonialism, their rhetoric had much in common. The Rhetoric of Empire identifies these shared features—images, figures of speech, and characteristic lines of argument—and explores them in a wide variety of sources. A former correspondent for the United Press International, the author is equally at home with journalism or critical theory, travel writing or official documents, and his discussion is remarkably comprehensive. Ranging from T. E. Lawrence and Isak Dineson to Hemingway and Naipaul, from Time and the New Yorker to the National Geographic and Le Monde, from journalists such as Didion and Sontag to colonial administrators such as Frederick Lugard and Albert Sarraut, this analysis suggests the degree to which certain rhetorical tactics penetrate the popular as well as official colonial and postcolonial discourse.
Finally, Spurr considers the question: Can the language itself—and with it, Western forms of interpretation--be freed of the exercise of colonial power? This ambitious book is an answer of sorts. By exposing the rhetoric of empire, Spurr begins to loosen its hold over discourse about—and between—different cultures.

[more]

The Skin of the Film

Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses

Laura U. Marks

Duke University Press, 2000

Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin. How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? In The Skin of the Film Laura U. Marks offers an answer, building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others to explain how and why intercultural cinema represents embodied experience in a postcolonial, transnational world.

Much of intercultural cinema, Marks argues, has its origin in silence, in the gaps left by recorded history. Filmmakers seeking to represent their native cultures have had to develop new forms of cinematic expression. Marks offers a theory of “haptic visuality”—a visuality that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and taste—to explain the newfound ways in which intercultural cinema engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience and memory. Using close to two hundred examples of intercultural film and video, she shows how the image allows viewers to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience. Finally, this book offers a guide to many hard-to-find works of independent film and video made by Third World diasporic filmmakers now living in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.

The Skin of the Film draws on phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, and cognitive science. It will be essential reading for those interested in film theory, experimental cinema, the experience of diaspora, and the role of the sensuous in culture.

[more]