In December 1998 the body of the Burkinabè novelist and newspaper editor Norbert Zongo was found in his burned-out vehicle in the village of Sapouy. He had become a victim of the impunity of the ...dictatorial regime of Burkina Faso's president, Blaise Compaoré. Sten Hagberg contends that the killing of Norbert Zongo characterized a certain political culture and was thus perceived as the starting point for an organized and widely mobilized sociopolitical struggle against impunity (31). Strikes and riots characterized the struggle to bring justice for Zongo and other victims for whose deaths the perpetrators had been neither tried nor punished. It was time that impunity came to an end, it was argued, before any rule of law could be real (Hagberg 219). While the critical focus has rested predominantly on the sociopolitical dynamics of this struggle, this article contends that the fight against impunity also found expression in Zongo's outspoken journalism and in his fictional work, as well as that of his contemporaries. This article traces the critique of impunity in Zongo's Le Parachutage (1989) and in the later Burkinabè novels of Patrick Ilboudo and Loro Mazono. I approach these Burkinabè novels as dictator-novels and argue that while a focus on the aesthetic qualities of these texts is important, they must also be read as part of the sustained fight for accountability in contemporary Burkina Faso.
Béni soit le jour ou des Africains pourront défiler, pancartes à la main, pas pour sublimer souvent le règne d'un cancre, médiocre tyran drapé de “démocratie,” mais pour désapprouver la politique d'un pouvoir dont ils auraient contribué à asseoir les fondements de sa légitimité.
(Norbert Zongo, “Avant-Propos,” Le Parachutage 8)
Blessed will be the day when the African people will be able to march freely, holding protest signs aloft not to simply protest the reign of cancerous and mediocre regimes, nor to react against tyrannies that masquerade as ‘democracies.’ Those who protest will wield a wholly different kind of power, a power that they themselves have created and made legitimate.
This paper surveys research on the size of the undocumented immigrant population in the United States, the causes and consequences of illegal migrant flows, public attitudes toward unauthorized ...migrants, and the history of attempts to control the volume of undocumented migration. It concludes that there are powerful push and pull factors that create and sustain the volume of unauthorized migration, that there is little evidence that undocumented migrants have negative labor market consequences despite what the general public thinks, that US policy has been largely powerless to make a permanent dent in undocumented immigration, and that the current level of clandestine US immigration may not be far from what society might view as socially optimal.
In this paper we document that the disparity in employment densities across US metropolitan areas has lessened substantially over the postwar period. To account for this
deconcentration of ...metropolitan employment, we develop a system-of-cities model in which an increase in aggregate metropolitan employment causes congestion costs to increase faster for the more dense metro areas. A calibrated version of the model reveals that the (roughly) two-and-a-half-fold increase in postwar aggregate metropolitan employment implies, by itself, more deconcentration than actually observed. Thus, rising aggregate metropolitan employment is a powerful force favoring deconcentration, although some benefit of greater employment density appears to have partially offset the effects of rising congestion costs for the more dense metro areas.
We apply stochastic simulation methods to a system-wide flow of funds model for India for 1951–1994. We address two issues; first, the impact of financial reforms on interest rates and loanable ...funds, and second, the robustness of policy where there is uncertainty about the true model. We find considerable variation in policy risk depending on the policy instrument and the policy regime. Interest rate risks are greater in the controlled regime; quantity risks are greater in the decontrolled regime. Outcomes also depend on controls on intermediaries: more heavily controlled banks respond differently from other less heavily controlled financial intermediaries.
This paper studies the flow of funds and portfolio behaviour of Indian banks from 1951 to 1994. In this period, financial controls such as variable reserve ratios were important constraints on bank ...behaviour, especially before liberalization took place in the early 1990s. We estimate a system of demand functions which uses as framework the Almost Ideal Demand System and which incorporates the reserve ratio regulations. Attention is paid to cointegration and to structural breaks. The estimated model provides coherent and plausible parameter estimates for prices and other variables. We find that a standard portfolio model can usefully be applied to the study of financial behaviour in a developing economy such as India, and some interesting policy implications can be drawn.
This paper reexamines the causality between the dollar and the yen in a multivariate framework with the aid of cointegration and error-correcting modeling for the 1951–94 period. The Phillips-Perron ...tests and Johansen's tests are performed. While causality from interest rates to exchange rates is found in the short run, no causality between prices and exchange rates is found in the short run. However, causality is found running from relative prices to exchange rates along with interest rates between the U.S. and Japan in the long run, which supports the long-run PPP hypothesis.
The interaction between institutional change and wage differentials in the private sector is defined and described. South Bend's industrial restructuring and the impact it had on average job payrolls ...relative to national averages are described. The job and earnings experiences of South Bend working-poor households are then described based on survey and interview data. The study is concluded with an assessment of these household and community experiences and their policy implications. South Bend experienced a series of structural changes that greatly affected area job and earnings outcomes. Nothing in the jobs the working poor have or might have (labor demand) and nothing in the labor market resources they possess or might possess (labor supply) will enable them to escape their common predicament.
The paper analyzes the economic determinants of crime rates in Italy over the period 1951 to 1994. We show that cointegrating relationships connect the long-run equilibrium levels of crime rates to ...economic factors in the presence of endogenously determined structural breaks. The long-run pattern of homicides and robberies can be better explained by consumption, whereas thefts are better explained by unemployment.
The evidence of business cycles across a sample of industrial countries indicates asymmetry in the output and price adjustments to aggregate demand shocks in the pre- and post-war periods. Upward ...price flexibility is significant in moderating output fluctuations across countries in the pre- and post-war periods. Nonetheless, the effect of upward price flexibility in accelerating trend price inflation is more evident across countries in the post-war period compared to the pre-war period. The combined evidence is consistent with a steeper supply curve in the face of expansionary demand shocks that increases the stabilizing effect of upward price flexibility. In contrast, a flatter supply curve in the face of negative demand shocks has countered the stabilizing function of downward price flexibility, which appears insignificant across countries in the pre- and post-war periods. In addition, a slower demand response to price change during recessions has further reinforced the contractionary effect on output despite a large reduction in price inflation across countries in the pre-war period. Apparent differences in the implications of upward and downward price flexibility point to the importance of policy intervention to moderate output contraction during recessions and price inflation during expansions.
Futures price contracts and options on price futures have been used for quite some time to manage price risk. However, similar market-based instruments for managing yield risk have not been ...available. On June 2, 1995, the Chicago Board of Trade launched an interesting innovation into the agricultural markets, namely the quantity-based crop yield futures and options contracts. Then, on January 19, 1996, the CBOT added a US contract plus 4 additional state corn yield contracts for Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Nebraska, thereby diluting the already thin market in the existing Iowa contract. An article addresses 2 questions: 1. What are the factors determining the hedging effectiveness of yield futures? 2. Are those factors strong enough to guarantee revenue stabilization to producers in regions outside the geographical coverage of the yield contract? The effectiveness of the dual hedging strategy with price and yield futures is examined using the example of 3 hypothetical corn producers located in the major corn producing counties in North Carolina.
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