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Modelling and forecasting tourist demand is a contemporary issue in tourism and with it connected international economics. Its importance stems from prediction of exchange rate changes, volatilities in terms on national currency, but also a demand for domestic goods and services, and consequently gross domestic product. As tourist arrivals increase on an annual basis, forecasts of inbound tourist arrivals are a prerequisite for forecasting labour market trends, demand for domestic goods and services, exchange rate volatilities, investment and gross domestic product. Both parametric and nonparametric approaches were used in previous studies, whereby non-linear forecasts and multivariate parametric approaches, methods such as spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity, or fuzzy time series approach, which predicted tourist arrivals with higher degree of accuracy compared to traditional methods. Contemporary methods include machine learning and internet search approaches. This paper takes on a nonparametric approach and univariate specification previously tested in finances and demographic studies, and not evaluated in cases of tourist arrivals series. This paper aims to evaluate forecasting performance of functional time series approaches to forecast tourist arrivals, i.e., inbound tourism. Monthly data sample of tourist arrivals in Croatia from January 2005 up to December 2017 was considered as a training sample while the data from January 2018 up to December 2019 were considered as a testing sample. Tourist arrivals time series in Croatia exhibits unit root and seasonal unit root, which is confirmed with standard unit root tests and seasonal unit root tests. Mean squared error and root mean squared error was used to evaluate forecast accuracy of the considered specifications. Based on empirical evaluation from this research, functional time series approach outperforms seasonal ARIMA as a benchmark. Considering dynamic updates, which were evaluated for different methods, forecast from penalized least squares were more accurate comparing to block moving method and ridge regression. Empirical results from this paper suggested functional time series approach as a promising alternative to forecast tourist arrivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The comparative world-systems theoretical research program employs anthropological and biological frameworks of comparison to comprehend the evolution of geopolitics and economic institutions. This paper outlines a revised formulation of the iteration model proposed by Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997: Chapter 6) to explain the emergence and continued increase in sociocultural complexity in historical world-systems. We reformulate the iteration model as an explicitly multilevel model that shows the causal connections among processes operating within polities and those that operate between polities. For the within-polity part of the model we begin with the structural demographic theory proposed by Jack Goldstone, Peter Turchin and their colleagues. We include the role of social movements in the "secular cycle" of rise and fall within polities. For the world-system level of analysis part of our multilevel model we include the variables from the original iteration model and we add non-core development, trade relations and world revolutions in which social movements in different parts of the interpolity system cluster together in time to produce consequences for the both the polities and for the whole system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates Immanuel Wallerstein's 1974 article, Dependence in an Interdependent World: Limited Possibilities of Transformation within Capitalist World Economy, with the goal of understanding the recent dramatic changes in global economic stratification wrought on by the rise of China. We use Giovanni Arrighi and Jessica Drangel's approach to global economic stratification developed in their 1986 paper, The Stratification of the World-Economy: An exploration of the Semi-Peripheral Zone, to determine economic stratification for the period 1990 to 2010. The initial findings support a trimodal distribution typical with Wallerstein's World-Systems theory. However, during the course of the study, the shape of the distribution veers away from trimodality with China being a major driver of this change as it begins to experience significant economic growth. Given the results of our study, the central concern of this paper then is to attempt to reconcile Wallerstein's statements regarding the legitimizing role of the semi-periphery and the impossibility of a world-system without a semi-periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines changes in the lives of Indo-Trinidadian women across two generations. The focus of the paper will be on their "work lives," broadly defined. The paper begins in the standpoint of women (Smith 1987; 2005) and explores the extended social relations shaping those experiences. It is based in intensive ethnographic field work among two generations of Indians in Trinidad. The analysis suggests that their lives have to be understood in the context of modernization and globalization processes in conjunction with Indians' attempts to find their place within the society in the post-colonial period. I argue that these women's lives reveal the often ambiguous and contradictory outcomes of such processes, and that women are not simply passive recipients of extended forms of ruling but active agents in carving out a niche for themselves as material and social conditions shift. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deploying conceptual and methodological insights from historical and environmental sociology, this paper contends that the emergence of the modern world-economy in the 16th century was at once cause and consequence of an epochal reorganization of world ecology. This argument is developed through an consideration of one of the early modern era’s most dramatic episodes of environmental transformation: Latin American silver mining. While flows of American silver loom large in the ongoing debate over the world history of European hegemony and its relation to East Asia, the socio-ecological contradictions of silver production are rarely mentioned. If the conventional view, even among environmental sociologists, holds that industrialization is the prime mover of ecological crisis, this study reveals a striking modernity to the ecological moment of the early (and pre-industrial) European colonial project. Many of the patterns that took shape in this era survive in altered form to this day. In a concluding section, the paper speaks to the implications of this analysis for environmental and historical sociology and efforts to come to grips with global ecological crisis today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The struggle to define the political and economic terms for globalization is one of the key political issues of our time. A major venue for this struggle is the discourse of globalization, a narrative of power and knowledge through which the political terms for globalization are defined. In this paper, I build upon a theory of globalization as a complex process involving economic, political and discursive dimensions developed in earlier work. I explore a new chapter in Brazilian-U.S. conflicts over the politics of globalization, focusing on the 2003 meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Free Trade Association of the Americas (FTAA). The data for this paper are policy statements, political speeches, and Brazilian media sources. At the WTO and FTAA meetings, Brazilian President Lula employed the neoliberal globalization discourse as a strategy to promote economic sovereignty, supporting the interests of Brazilian companies and resisting those of foreign capital. The Brazilian government pursued this strategy implicitly; in contrast to its explicit strategy during the 1970s and 1980s when it protected the growth of a local computer industry by using the informatics policy to restrict foreign investment. In 2003, the Brazilian government thus pursued those goals in a new form, using the neoliberal discourse to advocate open markets and the eradication of ?barriers to trade.? In this paper, I analyze the political and economic conditions shaping these changes in the Brazilian discourse, highlighting their implications for the Brazilian project of national sovereignty and the politics of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores and describes diaspora relations as a function of global public relations. To do so, a qualitative case study of how the State of El Salvador builds relationships with its three million migrants in the United States is presented. The analyses of documents, audiovisual materials, and in-depth interviews with eight El Salvador's government officials show that diaspora relations have become a key function of El Salvador's State global public relations. This paper offers a typology of State-diaspora relationship-building strategies and tactics occurring in the case of El Salvador, from the efforts developed to attract remittances and promote investments in the home country to the strategies developed to maintain the migrant identity and to ?construct? the image of the Salvadoran diaspora community in the United States as an active group of ?far-away brothers? and ?agents of development? in El Salvador's life. Implications for public relations theory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is motivated by the recent resurgence of interest in the economic development of raw material rich countries. The rapid increase in raw material demand from China and India has revived the debate about the costs and benefits of raw material extraction in resource rich countries, but with an emphasis on the new dynamic of South-South trade and investment. While the debate has been prominent in the popular press, it has not been grounded in empirical studies or linked to theories on resource wealth and development. This paper thus has two objectives. The first is to provide a critical assessment of the idea that there is a 'resource curse' such that countries with economies that rely heavily on raw material production are economically disadvantaged relative to other countries in the world economy. The second is to employ the world systems perspective to develop a cohesive analytical framework for understanding how raw material wealth is linked to economic outcomes. The intention of this analysis is to support subsequent informed predictions about how changes in the structure of trade relations between southern countries might change the future economic prospects of raw material rich countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACTBeginning in the 1500s and continuing to this day, North American fur trappers have constituted the front-line production workers in the global luxury trade in non-human animal pelts. Throughout this period the fur industry and fur trappers have marked the economies, politics, geographies, and cultures of the U.S. and Canada in significant ways. Although the fur trade industry as a whole has been the focus of a good deal of research, very much less attention has been paid to fur trappers themselves, upon whom the entire enterprise has depended. This paper focuses on White male fur trappers in North America and how race, class and gender have long been entangled with the work they perform. It explores the sometimes contradictory and problematic, but nonetheless revealing conceptions and realities of fur trapping as both a brotherhood and a test of manhood in a war against nature. The paper concludes by extending its race, class, and gender analysis from fur producers to fur consumers. This work is a portion of an empirical chapter of a book manuscript on the global production and consumption of luxury products, of which North American furs are one of two case studies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past thirty years, the global economic landscape has changed dramatically. Organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, and national governments, have through their interactions changed the international economy. Beginning in the late-1970s, structure adjustment programs (SAPs) have been implemented to encourage the governments of so-called developing countries to pay back debts to the World Bank and in the process become part of the global economy. SAPs are implemented as part of the conditions for loans given by monetary lenders including the World Bank. Lenders require that governments take steps that are intended to increase their gross domestic products. Governments must focus on increasing exports, decreasing spending on social programs, and privatizing public services such as water and electricity. Much has been written, particularly in the literature on inequality, about the negative effects of SAPs on developing countries and particularly on the neediest of the people of those countries (Seligson and Passe-Smith 2003; Cagatay and Ozler 1995; Afshar and Dennis 1992). Less has been written about the theoretical explanations for the implementations for SAPs by the World Bank and the IMF. Organizational theory would be useful for examining how the organizations of the World Bank, IMF, and national governments act within a particular organizational environment. In this paper, I apply resource dependency theory to the issue of SAPs to better understand this process. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of the varieties of capitalism literature maintain that capitalist countries whose institutions best fit either the liberal market economy or coordinated market economy types will perform better than countries whose institutions are more mixed. This is because hybrids are less likely to yield functionally beneficial institutional complementarities. This paper challenges that assertion by focusing on Denmark-a country that has performed at least as well as many other advanced capitalist countries during the 1990s, including those that fit much more closely either the pure CME or LME types. Denmark has recently developed a more hybrid form than is generally recognized by (1) increasing the exposure of actors to market forces and (2) decentralizing collective learning and decision making institutions. The institutional complementarities associated with such hybridization have contributed to its success, but these complementarities are based on institutional heterogeneity rather than homogeneity. This is demonstrated by analyses of three cases: Danish labor markets, vocational training, and industrial policy. The implication of our argument is that the varieties of capitalism theory is logically flawed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports results from a network analysis of international trade over the period 1965 to 2000. This study addresses whether or not changes associated with globalization and the "new international division of labor" suggest that structural inequality no longer characterizes the world economy? To answer this general question, I bring a world-systems perspective to bear on a network analysis and address the following three specific questions. 1) Does the structure of international trade continually exhibit a hierarchical structure in which some countries occupy dominant positions and play dominant roles vis-à-vis others? 2) Are dominant positions associated with higher levels of industrial sophistication than subordinate positions? 3) Do patterns of mobility suggest that historically underdeveloped countries have been able to improve their position in the world economy, or has the relative position of countries remained stable throughout these global shifts? The findings support the view that the "new international division of labor" and globalization have not reversed historical relationships between center and periphery, but have reproduced structural inequality. Consequently, few countries have improved their status throughout these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Wallerstein (1974), world-systems sociologists have recognized a three-tier structure in the world-economy, which comprises peripheral, semiperipheral, and core groups of countries. This paper introduces a new database tool for analyzing this structure of the world-economy in terms of national income, the Structure of the World-Economy (SWE) analytical tool. It is an excel spreadsheet based on World Bank (2004) data that charts the national income structure of the world-economy for any year 1960-2000 based on parameters input by the user. Users can choose any of six data series, whether to include all countries or to use one of several pre-selected panels, and the standard deviation of the kernel used to smooth the results. Initial results confirm the existence of a three-tier structure of the world-economy that is relatively stable over the period for which data are available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to examine the effect of macro-level economic factors on international news coverage. It particularly investigates how US-China economic ties influence the coverage about China in the New York Times. International news coverage is measured by quantity of stories, prominence and valence. A method of content analysis is used. Non-content statistical data are also used to indicate US-China economic relations. The study proposes and tests three hypotheses. It confirms that systemic economic determinants are important factors predicting international news coverage and proposes an international level of analysis of media content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports results from a quantitative network analysis of international commodity trade flows designed to pilot measures of structural change and continuity over the period 1965 to 2000. This period is important because of the theoretical claims of global restructuring associated with the "new international division of labor" and the end of the north-south divide. The dimensions on which this study measures both continuity and change are 1) the form of the world trade structure, 2) upward and downward mobility on a continuous, hierarchical measure of trade structure, and 3) the global division of labor characterized by exchanges of commodities along a continuum of capital intensive to labor intensive/raw materials. The findings support the view that the "new international division of labor" has not reversed historical relationships between center and periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological studies of globalization treat law little, if at all. Yet for the past fifteen years, an enormous enterprise of global norm-making and related national law-making has been underway in most every area of global commerce. In this paper we show that leading global institutions are building an international financial architecture with law as its foundation. Corporate bankruptcy law is a critical element in the global legal framework for national and global markets and is therefore a central project for global institution-builders and norm-makers. Within a theoretical framework that integrates theory from globalization and the sociology of law, we draw on empirical data from (a) extensive fieldwork and interviews within global institutions that drive legal change, and from (b) fieldwork in China, Korea, and Indonesia. First, we argue that globalization of insolvency regimes follows a recursive process. Second, we analyze the cyclical dynamics of global norm-making that have been undertaken in the last ten years by international financial institutions (World Bank, IMF, regional banks), international governance organizations (OECD, United Nations), professions, and leading financial powers. Third, we observe how the dynamic of recursivity operates in the law-making of China, Korea, and Indonesia, nations subject to differing amounts of leverage by international institutions. We show that three cycles of global norm-making, national law-making, and global/national law-making intersect and express a dynamic within the global system that reflects many of the tensions that accompany globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I combine national income distribution data from 117 countries to produce a synthetic composite income distribution of all the households in the world. Most conventional thinking about the emergence of a "global" economy would predict a single, unimodal, lognormal distribution of income, with most of the population of the world falling into a band surrounding the median global income. The empirical result, however, is strikingly different: a clearly bimodal distribution of global income, with both the lower and the upper nodes surrounded by a clearly lognormal spread. These patterns tend to confirm the Arrighi-Drangel (1986) model of global commodity chains that are divided into core and peripheral nodes. Going further, they suggest the existence of two interacting global economies, with one subject to Marxist and Malthusian pressures while the other is able to extract a comfortable surplus. As world-systems theorists have argued for three decades, a global world-economy does not seem to imply any trend toward a uniform world-economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The globalization of law parallels and indeed undergirds economic globalization. This paper presents an initial sociological analysis of a key institution in the global diffusion of commercial law?the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). We describe UNCITRAL?s work and its significance for the world?s most powerful financial interests. We generate alternative hypotheses for capture of UNCITRAL?s product by competing interests and then examine those hypotheses with simple indices of participation via speech-turns over several weeks of UNCITRAL?s formal proceedings between 1999 and 2002. These unobtrusive measures, while elementary in themselves, nevertheless accurately signal the deeper patterns of influence on UNCITRAL that we have observed through intensive participant observation of UNCITRAL proceedings and interviews over several years. We find that advanced economies and international professional associations based in those economies dominate deliberations. More specifically, two nations (U.S. and France) and three professional associations of lawyers and accountants exert disproportionate influence over the law-making efforts. While these patterns of influence do not amount to capture of the UN agency, they do demonstrate that this instance of law-creation for global dissemination rests overwhelmingly on the efforts of a small number of actors at the center of the world economic order, despite the large number of nations who convene in a democratically organized forum. The North dominates the South. The suppliers of capital dominate its prospective recipients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic ascent of China in the past two decades is the most dramatic change in the capitalist world-economy of this period. Analyses have focused on changes in government control of the economy, the availability of low cost workers for export production, and the historical characteristics of Chinese economy and society. All highlight key parts of China's economic ascent, but none addresses what we argue is the central driving force underlying sustained economic ascent: the role of raw materials and transport industries as generative sectors. These generative sectors in the most successful historical cases articulate domestic economic development with the creation of new systems of international economic and political relations, ultimately restructuring the capitalist world-economy in support of a nation's ascent to core status and its ability to challenge the existing hegemon and other ascendant economies for hegemony. We focus analytically on a different set of industries and on the often highly conflictual process of developing a system of state-sector-firm relations that supports these generative sectors and, via a range of material, economic and sociopolitical mechanisms, the broader process of economic ascent. China is following the Japanese model of coastal greenfield heavy industrialization. However, following the models of earlier ascendant economies is no guarantor of success. In this paper, we analyze the efforts underway in China to use steel, coal and other linked industries as the driving forces for sustained economic ascent, and the potential consequences of these efforts for China and for the world economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of international institutions in fomenting austerity protest in the developing world has been substantiated through both quantitative and qualitative analyses. How can we understand variation in this almost three-decade global wave of protest? This paper seeks to understand the differential role played by international institutions, hardships imposed by national governments in fulfilling international agreements, domestic political participation, and national budgetary choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades, thanks to the process of globalization, there is the diversification of forms and kinds of the economic relations. Therefore the trust instrument is used more and more in the countries where before it was practically unknown legal instrument. The author has defended dissertation paper "The Essence of Trusts, its Recognition and Legal Regulation in the Roman - German Law System Countries and Possible Introduction in Latvia" on September 12, 2008. In this dissertation paper it was advised to introduce trust instrument in the Republic of Latvia I order to improve the existing regulation in Latvia; draft law on trusts was prepared. The Czech Republic had introduced trust instrument from January 1 2014. This article will be devoted to the comparative analysis of the Czech regulation on trusts; therefore it is a very important both from academic and practical point of view. Till now there are a few researches on this theme. The survey and comparative analysis are the main methods used in the present article. Based on the comparative analysis it is recommended to use regulation of the Czech Republic and Province of Quebec in order to draft similar legislation in the Republic of Latvia. The present research is a very topical for the academics, Members of the Saeima (Latvian Parliament), practitioners in the financial and legal field. This is unique research on comparative basis, using Civil Code of the Czech Republic and Province of Quebec, the Principles of European Trust Law, the Hague Convention on the Law Applicable to Trusts and on their Recognition and existing regulation and prepared draft legislation on trusts of the Republic of Latvia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the relationship between China and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in terms of global economic stratification. Utilizing gross national income per capita (GNI) data spanning 1990 to 2010, we attempt to place China and SSA in the context of peripheral and semiperipheral development. Our results show that despite an initial conformity to trimodal distribution, as China begins to experience significant economic growth there are dramatic changes in the shape of the distribution of population as a function of GNI per capita. We then try to determine whether there is a 'China effect' on SSA given their increasing involvement through trade, foreign direct investment and foreign aid. We find that, for the most part, individual resource-rich countries that are heavily involved with China have successfully advanced in the trimodal hierarchy of the world-system. However, as a group SSA continues to remain in the tail end of the distribution; that is, while there has been absolute economic improvement for some countries, on a whole SSA has not seen any major changes with majority of the world's poorest remaining in that region. Finally, we look at the cases of Zimbabwe, Botswana, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea whose movements and/or non-movements raise questions about the role of the semi-periphery in the world-economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]