IEE Newsletter No. 30

IEE publications

Read about new publications from our IEE members.


Dr. Raffael Beier and Amina Nolte (Justus-Liebig University, Giessen) just published a new journal article in Political Geography:

Global aspirations and local (dis-)connections: A critical comparative perspective on tramway projects in Casablanca and Jerusalem

This article puts emphasis on the political representation of tramway projects in Casablanca, Morocco, and Jerusalem, Israel/the Palestinian territories. In this paper, we discuss both tramway projects as flagships of national worlding strategies that try to promote the respective city on global markets of attention, competing for international investors and tourists. As such, they are majorly driven by national political interests, fostering the hegemonic position of the central state in cooperation with private actors. The tramways are aimed at portraying modernity as well as political and economic stability, while aspiring to a supposed international urban world-class. At the same time, governments frame tramways as tools to promote socio-urban integration and to improve local transport systems. However, the paper shows that although governments are eager to stress the integrative role of tramways, they continue with violent politics of urban exclusion at the same time. Thus, the integrative wording behind tramway planning has to be understood against political (and economic) pressures to regain political legitimacy in a moment of crisis - both domestically and internationally. Consequently, the paper uses interview data and applies methods of discourse analysis to shed light on the worlding of tramways and its ambivalent practices of symbolic inclusion and exclusion.

in: Political Geography, Volume 78, April 2020, 102123 (doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102123)

More information here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629818301124
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Prof. Dr. Markus Kaltenborn, member of the IEE directory board, just co-published (together with Markus Krajewski and Heike Kuhn) the conference proceedings:

Sustainable Development Goals and Human Rights

This open access book analyses the interplay of sustainable development and human rights from different perspectives including fight against poverty, health, gender equality, working conditions, climate change and the role of private actors. Each aspect is addressed from a more human rights-focused angle and a development-policy angle. This allows comparisons between the different approaches but also seeks to close gaps which would remain if only one perspective would be at the center of the discussions.

Specifically, the book shows the strong connections between human rights and the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Already the preamble of this document explicitly states that “the 17 Sustainable Development Goals ... seek to realise the human rights of all”. Moreover, several goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda correspond to already existing individual human rights obligations. The contributions of this volume therefore also address how the implementation of human rights and SDGs can reinforce each other, but also point to critical shortcomings of the different approaches.

More information and open access available here.

You can read also read a conference report in one of our former newsletters.

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IEE members Britta Niklas and Dr. Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada worked together for the newly published journal article:

Income Inequality and Status Symbols:
The Case of Fine Wine Imports


This survey investigates the inequality-fine wine imports nexus. To this end, the study employs cointegration techniques to analyze two panel datasets, one of which will analyze data from 12 countries between 1871 and 2018, and another that analyzes data from 66 countries between 1995 and 2017. Estimations indicate that income inequality leads to more fine wine imports in the long run. Changes in income have only a short-term effect on fine wine imports. Nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) estimators reveal an asymmetric long-run relationship between income inequality and fine wine imports in the cases of Argentina and the United States.

in: Journal of Wine Economics, 365-372. doi:10.1017/jwe.2019.33 (full text downloadable as PDF)

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Britta Holzberg, PhD student of the IEE, just published an article on Emerald Insight:

Crossvergence of socially (ir)responsible employment practices in supplier firms: critical perspectives on international business

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of crossvergence from international human resource management (IHRM) as a conceptual lens for understanding and analyzing the formation of socially (ir)responsible employment practices in supplier firms in global production networks (GPNs). The crossvergence perspective can particularly contribute to understanding how the agency of suppliers is influenced by the interaction of global–local dynamics.

The paper illustrates how the formation of socially (ir)responsible employment practices can be understood as a process of crossvergence. Subsequently, it reviews and structures insights from GPN and IHRM literature to detail the process.

The paper underscores the complicated role of suppliers in ensuring decent work in GPNs. Suppliers face a multitude of global and local interacting, and partially conflicting, demands. They process these demands as active agents and need to develop suitable employment practices in response.

The paper supports the nascent discourse on supplier agency in forming socially responsible employment practices. It connects different streams of literature to illuminate the perspective of suppliers, introduces IHRM insights to the debate and offers conceptual guidance for analyzing interacting global and local pressures on suppliers.

Online first: https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-11-2017-0076 (also here: https://repub.eur.nl/pub/120762)

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Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada, Wilhelm Loewenstein and Yadulla Hasanli:

Commodity Revenues, Agricultural Sector and the Magnitude of Deindustrialization: A Novel Multisector Perspective

This study puts forward a model of a multisector economy and embeds it in a novel theoretical framework to address the relationship between commodity revenues and manufacturing output with a special focus on the role of the agricultural sector. The three-sector model lays the groundwork for analyzing policy choices in more complex sectoral settings. Based on the theoretical analysis, the study identifies the weight of the individual economic sectors in the public revenue generation as a determinant of the magnitude of rent seeking epitomized in the crowding out effect of investments in manufacturing. We find that enclave agriculture contributes to the deindustrialization pressure in the face of natural resource windfalls. The central finding of the multisector analysis is the conclusion that not diversification per se but rather a diversification with the substantial domestic factor or market orientation has the capability to limit the magnitude of deindustrialization. For the empirical validation of the theoretical findings, the study employs fixed effects, fully modified OLS, dynamic common correlated effects estimators and dynamic fixed effects estimators for the dataset of 113 developing and transition economies for 1963–2014 period. The estimations reveal that natural resource revenues correspond with a higher level of the manufacturing sector output. In the economies with a low level of economic diversification, commodity bonanza leads however to the shrinkage of the manufacturing. In the commodity revenue dependent settings, nevertheless, agricultural sector exports have a negative impact on the performance of the manufacturing sector. These findings are in line with the predictions of the theoretical model.

in: Economies 2019, 7(4), 113. Full text available as PDF file.

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IEE staff member Britta Niklas contributed to the just published AAWE Working Paper 244:

"Margins of Fair Trade Wines along the Supply Chain: Evidence from South African Wine on the U.S. Market" by Robin M. Back, Britta Niklas, Xinyang Liu, Karl Storchmann and Nick Vink.
American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) 2019, 34 pages.

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze profit margins and mark-ups of Fair Trade (FT) wines sold in the United States. We are particularly interested in whether and to what extent the FT cost impulse in production is passed on along the supply chain. We draw on a limited sample of about 470 South African wines sold in Connecticut and New Jersey in the fall of 2016; about 90 of them are certified FT. For these wines we have FOB export prices, wholesale prices, and retail prices, which allows us to compute wholesale and retail margins and analyze the FT treatment effect. We run OLS, 2SLS and Propensity Score Matching models and find evidence of asymmetrical pricing behavior. While wholesalers seem to fully pass-through the FT cost effect, retailers appear to amplify the cost effect. As a result, at the retail level, FT wines yield significantly higher margins than their non-FT counterparts.

The working paper is available online.

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IEE's research fellow Ruth Knoblich published a book review of
'Knowledge and Global Power: Making New Sciences in the South' by Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, João Maia and Robert Morrell.
Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press, 2019. First published by Monash University Publishing, Clayton, Australia, 2018, 217 pp.

in: European Journal of Risk Regulation (EJRR), Cambridge University Press, published 18 October 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1017/err.2019.57)

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Raffael Beier:
From the City to the Desert – Analysing Shantytown Resettlement in Casablanca, Morocco, from Residents' Perspectives.

In recent years, large-scale housing and resettlement projects have experienced a renaissance in many developing countries and are increasingly shaping new urban peripheries. One prominent example is Morocco's Villes Sans Bidonville (cities without shantytowns) programme that aims at eradicating all shantytowns in Morocco by resettling its population to apartment blocks at the urban peripheries. Analysing the specific resettlement project of Karyan Central, a 90-year-old shantytown in Casablanca, this book sheds light on both process and outcome of resettlement from the perspective of affected people. It draws on rich empirical data from a structure household survey (n=871), qualitative interviews with different stakeholder, document analysis, and non-participant observation gathered during four months of field research. ...

Please find the full abstract and more information here

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Dr. Annika Engelbert and Prof. Dr. Markus Kaltenborn just published a new IEE Working Paper on

Corruption and Social Rights Accountability

Transnational criminal law treaties traditionally dominate the international anti-corruption regime; yet, corruption has not considerably decreased since their coming into force. It therefore seems appropriate to broaden the legal perspective: Corruption as a threat to welfare, safety, and physical integrity of the individual can be conceptualized as a human rights violation. This paper argues that it is possible indeed to establish causal links between the misallocation of public funds, including budget distortions and underfunding of anti-corruption institutions, and a structural infringement of social human rights. We present several human rights instruments suitable to combat corruption with regard to social rights realization. In particular, we assess the capacity of public interest litigation, as well as related contextual legal and political conditions for the case of Kenya. With its new Bill of Rights, Kenya has great potential to spearhead a progressive impact litigation strategy targeting corruption-induced social rights infringements.

Download here

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Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada, Wilhelm Loewenstein, and Yadulla Hasanli:

Production linkages and dynamic fiscal employment effects of the extractive industries: input-output and nonlinear ARDL analyses of Azerbaijani economy

In this paper, we address the production linkages and employment effects of the petroleum sector on the rest of the Azerbaijani economy. The availability of the input-output tables for the years 2006, 2008, and 2009 enables the assessment of the changes with regard to the multiplier effects of the extractive industries over the first 3 years of the oil boom. We find that despite advanced infrastructure, well-developed petrochemical complex, and local content policies, the degree of integration of the international oil and gas business into the domestic economy is rather weak. In addition, both production and job creation multipliers slightly decreased after 3 years of exponential growth rates of oil production. The assessment of the production multipliers indicates that additional investments in processing, construction, and network industries have the highest production linkages. Concerning employment multipliers agriculture, education, health care, and public sector have the greatest job creation effects. To assess the fiscal employment effects of the oil revenues, which cannot be captured over the static input-output analysis, we employ the cointegrating nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model. The model reveals a sustainable job creation effect of oil revenues in the case of Azerbaijan.

In: Mineral Economics (first published online)

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IEE member Dr. Raffael Beier has just published a new article:

The world-class city comes by tramway: Reframing Casablanca’s urban peripheries through public transport

Although framed as projects targeting the improvement of public transport, the reduction of traffic congestion and the integration of urban peripheries, tramways are often inscribed to political ambitions of modernisation and urban renewal. As such, Morocco’s tramway projects constitute a distinct feature of national urban worlding ambitions promoting ‘world-class’ cities. Likewise, Casablanca’s tramway is closely entangled with political discourses on the urban integration of politically marginalised working-class neighbourhoods. However, this article sees the tramway as a symbol and driving force of a new distinction of the urban peripheries of Casablanca – separating it into ‘old’ and ‘new’, desired and undesired population groups. On the one hand, the tramway has fostered the incorporation of the traditional working-class neighbourhoods – the old peripheries – into Casablanca’s urban ‘world-class’ project. On the other hand, the tramway is the flagship of urban renaissance policies that have pushed stigmatised street vendors and shantytown dwellers from the working-class neighbourhoods to isolated new towns – the emerging ‘new’ peripheries. Here they are kept – spatially and discursively – outside the ‘world-class’ city, largely dependent on inadequate, costly and insecure urban public transport. These dynamics not only conflict with the tramway’s objectives to decrease traffic congestion and to promote socio-spatial integration, they also show the power of urban worlding projects to reframe urban marginality and to define who does (and who does not) have access to the ‘world-class’ city.

In: Urban Studies (first published online)

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Casper Boongaling Agaton:
A Real Options Approach to Renewable and Nuclear Energy Investments in the Philippines.
This book presents the application of real options approach (ROA) to analyze investment decisions for switching energy sources from fossil fuels to alternative energy. Using the Philippines as a case, the ROA models presented here explore how uncertainties including fossil fuel prices, electricity prices, discount rates, externality, renewable energy (RE) costs, and RE investment growth affect investment decisions that focus on developing countries, particularly to fossil-importing countries. ...

Please find the full abstract and more information here

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IEE member Dr. Raffael Beier just published a journal article in Middle East - Topics & Arguments (META), 12 (2019), pp. 28 - 34:

Worlding Cities in the Middle East and North Africa – Arguments for a Conceptual Turn

This article suggest analyzing megaprojects in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as worlding practices, hence, as a way to influence emerging countries’ own status of being in the world. This analytical lens differs from traditional perspectives that have tried to identify regional particularities such as the influence of Gulf countries and an authoritarian way of planning. Seeing megaprojects as worlding aspirations, instead, helps to see them embedded in a wider global context, stressing the post-colonial and developmental dimension of this significant planning trend. It further allows emphasizing interactions with other urban policies such as slum resettlement.

More information and full text download here

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Distributional Bargaining and the Speed of Structural Change in the Petroleum Exporting Labor Surplus Economies
by Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada
in: The European Journal of Development Research, pp 1-48

The paper embeds the distributional bargaining concept in the labor surplus economy setting. In the petroleum-abundant labor surplus economies, distributional bargaining comes into its own, mainly over the subsidization of the large swaths of the population working in the sectors with substantial amounts of disguised unemployment. These are primarily the subsistence agriculture and the public sector. The open-loop noncooperative differential game model yields three feasible bargaining equilibria, whereby only the antagonistic and the allocation modes are compatible with the setting of inferior institutional quality that dominates most natural-resource-dependent countries. Both modes have been scrutinized in the context of a developing dual economy model and show that political bargaining in the allocation mode unambiguously protracts the process of economic modernization. The outcome of the antagonistic mode for the process of structural change depends on the magnitude of the labor cost increase in this phase. To assess the bargaining–modernization nexus empirically, the author employs the (Pooled) Mean Group and Dynamic Fixed Effects estimators for panel datasets spanning the years 1990–2016 for 21 oil-producing countries and the System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimators for a panel with 82 countries. We find that the revenues generated from exports of natural resources have a positive long-run impact on the economic modernization. Consistent with our theoretical model, the interaction of the authoritarian regime type with the natural resource wealth has a robust negative impact on the indicators of economic modernization.

First online, full text here

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IEE member Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada and Andrea Gatto from the Department of Economic & Legal Studies (DISEG, Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope) collaborated for a working paper, published by Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) in the Economic Theory series (ed. by Matteo Manera):

Determinants of the Public Debt and the Role of the Natural Resources: A Cross-Country Analysis

This paper investigates the major drivers of the public debt growth in 184 countries. The underlying cross-country survey is conducted on the basis of the improved compilation of datasets on the central government debt for 2013. The study finds that oil abundance, economic growth rate, the share of mineral rent in the total revenue and interest rate payments for foreign borrowings have statistically significant impact on the growth of the public debt. In contrast, defence spending, unemployment rate, and inflation rate do not have a statistically significant impact on the public debt rate. Being a developing country has a statistically significant negative impact on the level of the central government debt.

FEEM Working Paper 4.2019, ET series, March 2019 (downloadable here)

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