Results by title

This study examines a crucial period in European integration, ending in the early 1990s, when significant progress was made towards the dream of a unified European market. It shows how European automakers were part of these changes and how their influence within the institutions of the European Union (EU) yielded a wide range of policy compromises governing a single European car market.

The book begins by reviewing the history of the EU and the logic of regional free trade, and goes on to develop a political explanation for the kinds of changes that actually occurred. The author argues that European automakers enjoyed a privileged place in the political arena, albeit one much transformed by the new institutions of the EU. Therefore, these firms often significantly influenced regional policy outcomes. The argument is applied to policymaking in the important areas of environmental regulation, trade, subsidies, and anti-trust regulation.

This work lies at the intersection of business, economics, and political science and is of interest to both experts and non-specialists with an interest in the tremendous economic and political changes brought about by the creation of a united Europe and, more generally, by the worldwide process of regional economic integration. Academics, professionals, businessmen, and leaders in government all have something to learn from the way in which firms and governments combined to build the largest car market in the world.

Roland Stephen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, North Carolina State University.

Chile was the first major Latin American nation to carry out a complete neoliberal transformation. Its policies—encouraging foreign investment, privatizing public sector companies and services, lowering trade barriers, reducing the size of the state, and embracing the market as a regulator of both the economy and society—produced an economic boom that some have hailed as a “miracle” to be emulated by other Latin American countries. But how have Chile’s millions of workers, whose hard labor and long hours have made the miracle possible, fared under this program? Through empirically grounded historical case studies, this volume examines the human underside of the Chilean economy over the past three decades, delineating the harsh inequities that persist in spite of growth, low inflation, and some decrease in poverty and unemployment.

Implemented in the 1970s at the point of the bayonet and in the shadow of the torture chamber, the neoliberal policies of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship reversed many of the gains in wages, benefits, and working conditions that Chile’s workers had won during decades of struggle and triggered a severe economic crisis. Later refined and softened, Pinochet’s neoliberal model began, finally, to promote economic growth in the mid-1980s, and it was maintained by the center-left governments that followed the restoration of democracy in 1990. Yet, despite significant increases in worker productivity, real wages stagnated, the expected restoration of labor rights faltered, and gaps in income distribution continued to widen. To shed light on this history and these ongoing problems, the contributors look at industries long part of the Chilean economy—including textiles and copper—and industries that have expanded more recently—including fishing, forestry, and agriculture. They not only show how neoliberalism has affected Chile’s labor force in general but also how it has damaged the environment and imposed special burdens on women. Painting a sobering picture of the two Chiles—one increasingly rich, the other still mired in poverty—these essays suggest that the Chilean miracle may not be as miraculous as it seems.

Contributors.
Paul Drake
Volker Frank
Thomas Klubock
Rachel Schurman
Joel Stillerman
Heidi Tinsman
Peter Winn

A collection of essays written on twentieth-century Vietnamese society, Viêt Nam Exposé is one of only a handful of books written by French scholars for an English-speaking audience. The volume is multidisciplinary and represents a new trend in Vietnamese studies that addresses issues beyond politics, wars, and violence, exploring the complexity of more subtle power relationships in Vietnamese society.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I, "Vietnamese Society in the Early Twentieth Century," takes a micro approach to the study of Vietnamese society on the eve of the irreversible social transformation that occurred as the colonial infrastructure took root in Indochina. Part II, "Vietnamese Intellectuals: Contesting Colonial Power," contains biographical accounts of Vietnamese intellectuals who tried to reform their society under colonial domination. Part III, "Post-Colonial Vietnam: From Welfare State to Market-Oriented Economy," traces Vietnam's search for a viable economic model while maintaining itself as a socialist state.
The book speaks to diverse themes, including the nature of village life, the development of health care during the colonial era, the status of women, the role of Vietnamese intellectuals in the anticolonial struggle, the building of a socialist state, contemporary rural migration, labor relations, and Vietnam in an age of globalization.
Gisele Bousquet is Research Associate at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Pierre Brocheux is Maître de Conference of History, Université Denis Diderot-Paris VII.

Greenport, New York, a village on the North Fork of Long Island, has become an exemplar of a little-noted national trend—immigrants spreading beyond the big coastal cities, driving much of rural population growth nationally. In Village of Immigrants, Diana R. Gordon illustrates how small-town America has been revitalized by the arrival of these immigrants in Greenport, where she lives.
 
Greenport today boasts a population that is one-third Hispanic. Gordon contends that these immigrants have effectively saved the town’s economy by taking low-skill jobs, increasing the tax base, filling local schools, and patronizing local businesses. Greenport’s seaside beauty still attracts summer tourists, but it is only with the support of the local Latino workforce that elegant restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts are able to serve these visitors. For Gordon the picture is complex, because the wave of immigrants also presents the town with challenges to its services and institutions. Gordon’s portraits of local immigrants capture the positive and the negative, with a cast of characters ranging from a Guatemalan mother of three, including one child who is profoundly disabled, to a Colombian house painter with a successful business who cannot become licensed because he remains undocumented. Village of Immigrants weaves together these people’s stories, fears, and dreams to reveal an environment plagued by threats of deportation, debts owed to coyotes, low wages, and the other bleak realities that shape the immigrant experience—even in the charming seaport town of Greenport.
 
A timely contribution to the national dialogue on immigration, Gordon’s book shows the pivotal role the American small town plays in the ongoing American immigrant story—as well as how this booming population is shaping and reviving rural communities. 

Why do American state economies grow at such vastly different rates and manifest such wide differences in living standards? Volatile States identifies the sources of rising living standards by examining the recent economic and fiscal history of the American states. With new insights about the factors that contribute to state economic success, the book departs from traditional analyses of economic performance in its emphasis on the role of volatility.

Volatile States identifies institutions and policies that are key determinants of economic success and illustrates the considerable promise of a mean-variance criterion for assessing state economic performance. The mean-variance perspective amends applications of growth models that rely on the mobility of productive factors keyed to income levels alone. Simply measuring the level of growth in state economies reveals an incomplete and perhaps distorted picture of performance. Taking the volatility of state economies explicitly into account refines the whole notion of "economic success."

This book is essential reading for economists, political scientists, and policy-makers who routinely confront questions about the consequences of alternative institutional arrangements and economic policy choices.

W. Mark Crain is Professor of Economics and Research Associate, James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy, George Mason University.