Search

This article presents information about the book "The Politics of Migration," edited by Robin Cohen and Zig Layton-Henry. This book contains sixteen previously published papers examine the politics of migration. Papers discuss transnational migration as a small window on the diminished autonomy of the modern democratic state; migration and the political economy of the welfare state; the Western European experience with immigrant workers and class struggles; the function of labor immigration in Western European capitalism; racism, migration, and the state in Western Europe; the black experience in Great Britain; class, race, ethnicity, and political action; nonwhite minority access to the political agenda in Great Britain; immigration and refugee policy in the United States; the effectiveness of party strategies on immigration and devolution in Great Britain; migration and citizenship; citizenship and the right to leave; the dynamics of racial exclusion and expulsion in Western Europe.

This paper presents the results of a survey on price-setting behavior conducted on a large random sample of Swedish firms. The median firm adjusts the price once a year. State- and time-dependent price setting are about equally important. The four highest-ranked explanations for price rigidity in this study (implicit contracts, sluggish costs, explicit contracts, and the kinked demand curve) have close correspondents among the top five places in two similar large-scale surveys carried out in the UK and the U.S. The results point to the importance of the long-term relations with customers for the rigidity of prices (the estimated share of sales that go to regular customers is more than 80%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We ask whether the US government should replace its current discounting practices with a declining discount rate schedule, as the United Kingdom and France have done, or continue to discount the future at a constant exponential rate. We present the theoretical basis for a declining discount rate (DDR) schedule, but focus on how, in practice, a DDR could be estimated for use by policy analysts. We discuss the empirical approaches in the literature and review how the United Kingdom and France estimated their DDR schedules. We conclude with advice on how the United States might proceed to consider modifying its current discounting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though almost no postwar union contracts indexed wage rates to prices of the employer's products, union agreements linking wage rates to product prices, known as sliding scales, were common in some industries in the United States and Britain from the 1860s through the 1930s. This paper explains why sliding scales disappeared after the 1930s, and examines what practical experience with sliding scales revealed about fundamental constraints on wage indexation. Paradoxically, the history of sliding scales confirms that workers' information about product prices and materials costs is generally imperfect, in ways that would substantially constrain wage indexation in long-term contracts. Sliding scales were not indexed long-term contracts, but rather devices to forestall costly strikes in the absence of contracts by revealing employers' private information about product demand. In the postwar US, unions and employers failed to link wage rates to product prices because they had gained the ability to enter binding contracts, which could achieve the benefits of preventing strikes without incurring the extra negotiation costs and information problems associated with product-price indexation. I present a model to show how sliding scales could forestall strikes by revealing information, and how the introduction of binding union contracts reduced incentives to link wages to product prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a summary picture of the worldwide wage explosion. During the decade prior to 1968, most of the industrial countries of the West experienced a period of tranquility in which prices were relatively stable and wage inflation moderate. Then quite suddenly--and, to judge from professional and political reaction, unexpectedly--wages and prices began to rise very sharply. Monetarists have argued that the recent inflation is but another incident in a long historic series induced by excessive growth of the money supply. A cosmic interpretation provided by Mundell is that the growing deficits in the U.S. balance of payments in the late 1960s provided the reserves for excessive growth in the world's money supply that in turn led to the inflation. A second simple explanation is that tight labor markets, measured by low unemployment rates, gave rise to unusually high wage inflation in the late sixties. Perhaps the most popular explanation, especially in the U.S. and Britain, is that provided by the expectations Phillips curve. This theory holds that anticipated inflation as well as tight labor markets produced the wage explosion.

This article analyzes the incidence of social spending and taxation by income quintile for seven Latin American countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Absolute levels of social spending in Latin America are fairly flat across income quintiles, a pattern similar to that in the United States and differing from the more progressive pattern of spending in the United Kingdom. The structure of taxation in Latin America is also similar to that of the United States. Because of high income inequality in Latin America and the US, the rich bear of most the burden, whereas the United Kingdom taxes the middle class to a greater extent. The analysis suggests that many Latin American countries are trapped in a vicious cycle in which the rich resist the expansion of the welfare state (because they bear most of its tax burden without receiving commensurate benefits), and their opposition to its expansion in turn maintains long-term inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the features of the sub-prime crisis, that began in August 2007, was its unexpected nature. It came as a surprise not only to most financial market participants but also in some degree to the policy community. In this context, we seek to assess whether early warning systems based on the logit and binomial tree approaches on the UK and US economies could have helped to warn about the crisis. We also consider a 'check list approach' of indicators based on history. Although not all of the complementary approaches are successful, we contend that our work suggests that a broadening of approaches to macroprudential analysis is appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of the debate over free trade and tariffs in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have not taken adequate account of the impact of the protectionist United States. The article first examines how American protectionism influenced the cause of imperial preference. It then looks at how both rides in the fiscal debate used the American economic experience to bolster their cases. Finally, it is demonstrated that the economic success and liberal democratic character of America compelled free traders to attack the American example on a moral and political basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine empirically whether asset prices and exchange rates may be admitted into a standard interest rate rule, using data for the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan since 1979. Asset prices and exchange rates can be employed as information variables for a standard "Taylor-type" rule or as arguments in an augmented interest rate rule. Our empirical evidence, based on measures of the output gap proxied by marginal cost calculations, suggests that monetary policy- makers may use asset prices and exchange rates not only as part of their information set for setting interest rates, but also to set interest rates to offset deviations of asset prices or exchange rates from their equilibrium levels. These results are open to several alternative interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between movements in nominal incomes and in the money supply, and the influence of unidirectional causality in Great Britain. Unlike in the U.S., Great Britain is a relatively small, open economy which during the observation period maintained a regime of fixed exchange rates. Under such circumstances, the private sector can more easily adjust their money holdings to their incomes by transfers of funds over the exchanges, than in a virtually closed economy such as the U.S. Furthermore, the conduct of monetary policy during the 196Os was influenced by the precepts of the Radcliffe Committee Report that the authorities thus have to regard the structure of interest rates rather than the supply of money as the centrepiece of the monetary mechanism. In so far as the authorities primarily aim to regulate the structure of interest rates, movements in the money stock can be expected to respond to movements in nominal incomes. A study by Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace investigates the direction of causality between money and prices during periods of hyperinflation for certain European countries. They show that there is evidence to suggest that the causality is from prices to money. Hence, the implication is that the form and direction of these relationships do depend on the institutional context. In particular, it may be hazardous to extrapolate findings obtained in a virtually closed economy such as the U.S., also to smaller, open economies.

This article cites some observation from a study of rationing and price control of food and other consumer goods in Great Britain. In all of its important dimensions the structure of the organization for price control and rationing in Great Britain differs from that in the United States. In Great Britain the Ministry of Food handles the rationing and price control of food and the Board of Trade handles the pricing and rationing of most other consumer goods. Both the Ministry of Food and the Board of Trade have unified programs of production as well as distribution to meet the wartime requirements of consumers' goods to which they minister. Thus, the Ministry of Food not only works out the plans, which govern the provision of the basic supplies of food, but also carries out elaborate arrangements to see that these supplies reach the places they are most needed to meet the requirements of wartime nutrition. Extensive wartime collaboration between government and business in Great Britain is facilitated by the fact that for some years prior to the war there had been a government which would have found such collaboration natural and congenial.

The article focuses on the U.S. foreign exchange policy during 1933-34. The U.S. administration was successful in depressing the dollar in 1933. In October 1933 the gold buying policy was introduced as a means of depressing the dollar further. Disturbing exchange policies tended to unsettle business, however, with the result that sentiment in favor of some sort of stabilization became more powerful after October. The supporters of the gold buying policy had been impressed with the difficulty of controlling the value of gold in goods and the ease of controlling its price in dollars. The American Government buys gold at its official price and, in doing so, dumps dollars on the foreign exchange markets directly or through the intermediary of private purchasers. Prices rose in the U.S. for the year 1933 while they declined elsewhere; and production increased more rapidly in Great Britain than elsewhere. On the whole the developments in 1933 were favorable in the two countries operating with depreciated exchanges. It is to be recalled that conditions in Great Britain had improved relatively in the preceding year, and in 1933 continued improvement at the American rate was not to be expected.

The article focuses on the strategy of economic policy for less-than-total war in the Unites States. According to the author goals for readiness for economic mobilization program are to get set so that if war breaks out Americans can mobilize fully in months rather than years, and secondly to develop enough ready strength in Great Britain to guarantee the United States the necessary months in case of war. The control problems of readiness differ in kind as well as in degree from those of full mobilization. The lack of wartime patriotic fervor implies more compulsion behind economic policy. Inflation impairs efficiency by bending the measuring rod of cost accounting and by making the hoarding of scarce materials a protective to profit. Qualitative controls on installment and real estate credit will be at their most powerful when their effect is compounded with that of drastic shortages of new durable goods to buy. Building up to a plateau of readiness obviously creates an inflation problem. Inflationary pressure arising from the demand-suction process may be less intense than in full mobilization.

This article focuses on railroad transportation in several nations. In the United States, these national ventures in the field of transportation still are of isolated, limited, or specialized character. The only transportation field so far quite generally invaded by government operations is that of urban transportation. the private operators. Part or all of the capital costs and sometimes part of the costs of operation of these urban enterprises are borne by local taxation. The assumption of part of the capital costs and some of the operating expenses out of taxes shifts the burden of supporting these enterprises in part to the public treasury. The wartime control of British railways entailed dose co-operation between the railways and the government, particularly with the armed forces and defense agencies. Special flat rates or charges regardless of the normal ratings of the goods were made with government agencies and special fares were made for troop movements. Normal competitive routings and interrailway relationships were disrupted in order to adapt the services to the requirements of wartime traffic which did not conform to usual geographical or commercial patterns.

The article presents an overview of the national monetary policies of countries around the globe. It maintains its forecast of a 50 percent chance of recession in Great Britain and a 30 percent probability of recession in the euro area. It predicts a 1.9 percent economic growth in the U.S. and Canada and 1.8 percent growth in Japan. It discusses the possible resolution to the euro area crisis.