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Why have the guilds, which play an influential socio-political role and are ready to cooperate economically with the government, fallen out of favor …? [T]he constitution of political forces relates to various and shifting bases of social solidarities, but crucially, these varieties and shifts often result from changes in political and economic conjuncture, including state structures and policies … . Chapter 3 outlined the change in the form of governance in the Tehran Bazaar and demonstrated that the cooperative hierarchies of the prerevolutionary era have given way to coercive hierarchies. In the process of elucidating this transformation it also pointed to the symptoms and immediate causes of this shift – political uncertainty, the increased use of cash, the acute problem of bounced checks, the rise of smuggling activities, the change in composition of bazaar members, and the demise of network producers such as brokers. These proximate causes and effects can be explained by generally accepted economic theories and straightforward political logic. When import monopolies are created and licenses are distributed, one expects rent seeking, corruption, and smuggling; when state institutions are up for grabs, especially in the case of a rentier state, it is unsurprising that competition over their design and the control of organizations that distribute power and wealth will ensue. What still remain as questions are what underlies the shifts in the Bazaar's governance and what propelled these dynamics to take place specifically in the postrevolutionary era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law and order arise out of the very processes they govern. But they are not rigid, nor due to any inertia or permanent mould. Solidarity has to be constructed out of little pieces, rather than found already waiting, in the form of an ur-langauge which all of us recognize when we hear it. I cannot remember the number of times that bazaaris complained to me that they could not trust their exchange partners, but it seemed to me to be the grandest of tropes. Their protests were articulated through a comparison between the past and the present. “The past” was a time when a man's word was as good as gold. It was a time when the maxim that a truly honest bazaari “places his mustache as collateral” (or even “places a strand of his mustache as collateral”) was a fact of daily life. No contracts or checks were signed. Instead a handshake was exchanged and honor was placed as a security deposit. Then came “the present,” when even checks and legal documents are not honored, and the threat of shaming and gossip is not a viable sanction. The refrain was “all the checks bounce.” The social scientist in me doubted this nostalgic narrative of a lost golden past and sought some form of independent, if not direct, verification. Even though non-bazaaris and the secondary literature reaffirmed these narratives, I was still skeptical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THUS far, my analysis has focused on the origins and development of localprotectionism. Based on this discussion, it would appear that by 1989–90 little progress had been made toward transforming China's internal economy from one characterized by the coexistence of markets and the plan. Resource wars had undermined the old system of commodity monopsonies left in place after reforms in the early 1980s. But movement toward effective marketization appeared stalled by the adoption of the new unified purchase system and the reduction in interregional economic conflict brought about by centrally brokered cease-fires. If anything, the new system appeared to represent retrogression because it was a system of fragmented local monopsonies rather than a centrally controlled and regulated monopsony. Illegal import barriers blocked the flow of consumer goods. Predatory taxation threatened to stifle whatever trade managed to continue in the face of export and import protectionism. Monetary embargoes and the subversion of local courts exacerbated the situation by undermining property rights and prompting the explosive growth of interregional debt chains. Despite this upsurge in local protectionism, China did not split into warring economic fiefdoms. Instead, China's internal trade system weathered the crisis of 1989–90, emerged from that crisis, and began to move in the direction of reduced local protectionism. Specifically, after the central government initiated a major antiprotectionism campaign in November 1990, provincial, prefectural, and county governments embarked on a sustained campaign to lower internal trade barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE structures that gave rise to local protectionism grew out of three changes and one nonchange in the policy environment. First, in the early 1980s, Deng's reform coalition abandoned Mao's stress on local self-sufficiency and replaced it with a strategy that stressed the expansion of interregional trade and interdependence. Second, they partially demonopolized China's internal commerce and opened up new space for interregional markets. Third, they adopted fiscal reforms that, in conjunction with administrative devolution, altered the property-rights relationship between local governments and the local economy in ways that transformed local governments from purely administrative entities into administrative-cum-economic actors. Finally, they opted not to decontrol prices. Instead, they introduced some market prices and set up a parallel price system. Rents were thus not only left in place, but could now be monetized more easily by arbitraging between the market and the plan. This combination created new space for local governments to pursue a greater share of the rents left in place by the reformers' decision not to decontrol prices. In conjunction with the decollectivization of agriculture, it also gave the real producers of those rents – China's farmers – a chance to try to grab back part of the monies that the state stripped out of their pockets by skewing prices in its favor. Reform, therefore, inadvertently triggered a battle over rents, in which trade barriers were key weapons in the struggle to localize the monetization of rents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideas in this volume are put forth at a time when the discipline of development studies is in crisis. In a recent article, Hirschman (1981: 1) suggested that (mainstream) development economics is a field in decline. Although “articles and books are still being produced…the old liveliness is no longer there…and the field is not adequately reproducing itself.” This state of affairs, according to Weisskopf (1983), is linked to theoretical dilemmas internal to the discipline of economics, as well as to a more general shift in political discourse. Development economics, Weisskopf contends, drew its primary theoretical inspiration from Keynesian principles. This orientation meant, among other things, that economists readily endorsed the premise that a neutral and activist state could, through orchestrated development policies, overcome the structural barriers that could not be resolved by a free market alone. Events in the last three decades have dashed Keynesian hopes. Stagflation afflicted the developed economies in 1970s, followed by recession in the 1980s. Some Third World nations showed impressive growth. Others did not. Nearly all failed to resolve the problems of inequality, unemployment and political tension. Such setbacks bolstered the position of conservative economists, especially their contention that an unhindered market could and would do the job. Moreover, for reasons having more to do with contemporary politics and ideology than strictly intellectual competition, the right has gained considerable ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposition that changes in fertility, mortality and migration rates can only be understood with reference to the broader social system in which demographic change occurs is by now little more than conventional wisdom. Yet despite the considerable theoretical and empirical attention given to these relationships, no central paradigm has emerged that systematically links structural change and demographic behavior in developing countries. Many accounts of population change amount to an eclectic listing of empirical generalizations. An example is Notestein's (1953) explanation of the demographic transition. In his well-known discussion of fertility, Notestein mentioned no fewer than fifteen different phenomena associated with the decline in the birth rate, ranging from changes in women's consciousness to the impact of the rise of urban-industrial production on the cost of children (see chapter 7). Each element of the argument can be supported by “hard” data. Yet the various fragments hardly add up to an understanding of structural change, nor to a coherent picture of how demographic behavior is embedded in the process of economic growth and development. Attempts in contemporary demography to model the relationship between population and development are often deficient because they are, unsurprisingly, overly demographic: population variables and the relationships that immediately affect fertility, mortality and migration upstage economic and political concerns, which are typically relegated to the category of background contingencies (Bulatao and Lee 1983; Bongaarts and Potter 1983; Stokes and Schutjer 1984:197). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first Portuguese to land in the New World in the sixteenth century settled the eastern seaboard of South America. The sparsely populated region they encountered stood in marked contrast to the densely inhabited Mexican meseta and Andean altiplano colonized by Spain. For the conquistadores in Spanish Latin America, the presence of long-established indigenous civilizations in Mexico and Peru meant the opportunity to appropriate vast quantities of gold and silver. The plunder of conquered territories provided Spain with a booty previously unknown to the world. As Spain consolidated the defense of its precious-metal-producing areas to the west, Portugal sought other ways to exploit its possessions in the Americas. The early colonists who settled the coastal regions turned to the export of brazilwood, a valuable dye product from which the country took its name. Within a few years of the initial expeditions, merchants obtained license from the crown to establish trading posts where logs were received from the local natives in exchange for tools and clothing. From these modest beginnings Brazil later grew into the largest and most economically powerful country in Latin America. Economic cycles and the moving frontier Sugar The exploitation of hardwoods in the sixteenth century was only the first of many export cycles. By the mid-1500s the European population of the colony grew to about 100,000, and the once plentiful brazilwood forests were depleted (Simonsen 1969:121). Sugar then became Brazil's principal export product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil is the largest and most populous country in Latin America. In 1980, the census bureau counted nearly 120 million people, a figure more than twice that of second-ranked Mexico. Brazil's 8.5 million square kilometers of national territory stretch from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the foothills of the Andes in the west; from the Guiana plateau in the north to the Plate River basin in the south. The country's continental proportions dominate the geopolitical map of the southern hemisphere, making it the fifth largest country in the world, surpassed in area only by the Soviet Union, the United States, China and Canada. In the nineteenth century, the change from colony to independent empire (1822), from monarchy to republic (1889–91) and from slaveholding society to a free one (1888) occurred essentially without violence. Brazil's early history thus imparted to the country a legacy of political stability and national unity rare in the New World (Burns 1970). Unlike many of its neighbors in the continent, direct military control of the state has been the exception in Brazil. From the late 1800s through the first three decades of the twentieth century, Brazil's presidents were duly elected. The democratic tradition was interrupted in the period 1930–4 and again in 1937–45 when Getulio Vargas, a civilian backed by the military, ruled by decree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]