IEE Newsletter No. 32

IEE Publications

Read about new publications from our IEE members

Books

uar studies 73 cover73. Jurek Seifert:
Power and Horizontality in South-South Development Cooperation. The Case of Brazil and Mozambique.

The growing importance of new actors in the global political landscape is envisaged as a phenomenon that has led to shifts in international power relations. This is reflected in development cooperation. Countries like China, Brazil, India and South Africa have enhanced their cooperation programs and present their development cooperation as South-South Development cooperation (SSDC) which takes place between countries of the 'Global South'. Both practitioners and scholars ascribe a notion of solidarity and horizontality to South-South cooperation that allegedly distinguishes it from the relationship patterns commonly associated with North-South relations. However, power constellations between the emerging powers and most of their cooperation partners are often asymmetrical. ...

Please find the full abstract and more information here


ChattorajChattoraj ThesisThe doctoral thesis of former IEE PhD student Diotima Chattoraj will soon be available in print:

Displacement among Sri Lankan Tamil Migrants
The Diasporic Search for Home in the Aftermath of War

This book focuses on the concept of ‘home’ or ‘place of origin’ (expressed in Tamil as ‘Ur’) and its various dimensions, in turn related to issues of belonging, attachment, detachment, and commonality among the war-affected population in the post-war era of Sri Lanka. Little research has been undertaken on displacement and forced migration since the end of the war, and so this book provides new insight into the intersections between externally and internally displaced people and notions of home in relation to gender, age, caste and class. It excavates the roots of the problem of not being able to return due to combinations of uncertainty, unemployment, and the loss of people and property. The author shows that notions of ‘home’ vary considerably depending on multiple variables, and this is particularly pronounced between the different generations. The book also confronts how the migration from Sri Lanka over the border to India has brought on discernible changes to the lives of women in particular, in transforming their identities in multiple re-invented cultural manifestations, and cultivating a new kind of attachment towards their new homes. Interdisciplinary in tenor, this book will be of interest to scholars in development studies with a focus on South Asia, as well as graduate students and researchers in the fields of migration, conflict studies, Sri Lanka studies, and sociology. It may also have an impact on policymakers owing to its comprehensive, empirically-based analysis of the consequences of the Sri Lankan civil war for Tamils.

Please find more information here: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789813347687

Book Chapters / Articles

TheEverydayLifeOfUrbanInequalityBeierIEE member Dr. Raffael Beier, together with Cristiana Strava, published an article in a new book:

Losing or Gaining Home? Experiences of Resettlement from Casablanca’s Slums

In 2004, Morocco’s king Mohammed VI launched the country-wide program Cities without Slums with the aim of eradicating all informal housing in the country and resettling slum dwellers into apartment blocks. In Casablanca’s working-class neighborhood Hay Mohammadi, the government evicted around 30,000 residents from Morocco’s oldest shantytown called Karyan Central and moved them to the new town Nouvelle Lahraouiyine, ten kilometers away. Treated with a uniform resettlement solution, affected shantytown dwellers have experienced very much individualized notions of displacement. By portraying different pathways to the new town, the authors argue that different life trajectories, local networks, and social status lead to varying perceptions of and expectations towards resettlement. Hence, standardized solutions in heterogeneous urban settings are likely to re-produce and re-frame urban inequalities.

Raffael Beier and Cristiana Strava (2020) Losing or Gaining Home? Experiences of Resettlement from Casablanca’s Slums. In Angela D. Storey, Megan Sheehan & Jessica Bodoh-Creed (eds.) The Everyday Life of Urban Inequality: Ethnographic Case Studies of Global Cities, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, pp. 3-22.

More information about the book here: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793610645/The-Everyday-Life-of-Urban-Inequality-Ethnographic-Case-Studies-of-Global-Cities


mein fotoBookChapter Sadik ZadaDr. Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada, together with Andrea Gatto, wrote a chapter for a new book:

Energy Security Pathways in South East Europe: Diversification of the Natural Gas Supplies, Energy Transition, and Energy Futures

This chapter explores the foreseeable repercussions of South East Europe (SEE) energy transition in terms of regional sustainability, resilience, vulnerability, and energy security. It examines enhancement of the natural gas pipelines in the framework of the Southern Gas Corridor, its broad ramifications for the SEE, as well as consequences for regional integration in energy security in the area. The chapter argues that natural gas will be relevant within the decarbonization pathway, coal-to-renewables transition, and energy security over the full transition toward a low-carbon economy. A moderate share of natural gas in the energy mix contributes to the robustness of the decarbonization strategy over the reduction of the growing electricity intermittency risk that emanates from the growing share of the renewables in the energy mix. Regardless of the undertaken landscape and energy mix, the decarbonization targets should not be subject to trade-offs with purely economic targets in the face of the short- to middle-term economic turmoils.

in: Mišík M., Oravcová V. (eds) From Economic to Energy Transition. Energy, Climate and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. pp. 491-514
(first online: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55085-1_17)

Journal Articles

mein fotoLoewensteinWDr. Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada and Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Löwenstein published a new article in the journal "Energies":

Drivers of CO2-Emissions in Fossil Fuel Abundant Settings: (Pooled) Mean Group and Nonparametric Panel Analyses

The present inquiry addresses the income-environment relationship in oil-producing countries and scrutinizes the further drivers of atmospheric pollution in the respective settings. The existing literature that tests the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis within the framework of the black-box approaches provides only a bird’s-eye perspective on the long-run income-environment relationship. The aspiration behind this study is making the first step toward the disentanglement of the sources of carbon dioxide emissions, which could be employed in the pollution mitigation policies of this group of countries. Based on the combination of two strands of literature, the environmental Kuznets curve conjecture and the resource curse, the paper at hand proposes an augmented theoretical framework of this inquiry. To approach the research questions empirically, the study employs advanced panel cointegration techniques. To avoid econometric misspecification, the study also employs for the first time a nonparametric time-varying coefficient panel data estimator with fixed effects (NPFE) for the dataset of 37 oil-producing countries in the time interval spanning between 1989 and 2019. The empirical analysis identifies the level of per capita income, the magnitude of oil rents, the share of fossil fuel-based electricity generation in the energy mix, and the share of the manufacturing sector in GDP as essential drivers of carbon dioxide emissions in the oil-rich countries. Tertiarization, on the contrary, leads to a substantial reduction of emissions. Another striking result of this study is that level of political rights and civil liberties are negatively associated with per capita carbon emissions in this group of countries. Furthermore, the study decisively rejects an inverted U-shaped income-emission relationship and validates the monotonically or exponentially increasing impact of average income on carbon dioxide emissions.

in: Energies 2020, 13, 3956. (Full text available here)


NiklasIEE member Britta Niklas, together with W. Rinke, published a new article in the "Journal of Wine Economics":

Pricing Models for German Wine: Hedonic Regression vs. Machine Learning

This article examines whether there are different hedonic price models for different German wines by grape variety, and identifies influential factors that focus on weather variables and direct and indirect quality measures for wine prices. A log linear regression model is first applied only for Riesling, and then machine learning is used to find hedonic price models for Riesling, Silvaner, Pinot Blanc, and Pinot Noir. Machine learning exhibits slightly greater explanatory power, suggests adding additional variables, and allows for a more detailed interpretation of results. Gault&Millau points are shown to have a significant positive impact on German wine prices. The log linear approach suggests a huge effect of different quality categories on the wine prices for Riesling with the highest price premiums for Auslese and “Beerenauslese/Trockenbeerenauslese/Eiswein (Batbaice),” while the machine learning model shows, that additionally the alcohol level has a positive effect on wines in the quality categories “QbA,” “Kabinett,” and “Spätlese,” and a mostly negative one in the categories “Auslese” and “Batbaice.” Weather variables exert different affects per grape variety, but all grape varieties have problems coping with rising maximum temperatures in the winter and with rising minimum and maximum temperatures in the harvest season.

In: Journal of Wine Economics, 1-28. (online first: doi:10.1017/jwe.2020.16)


PCEmein fotoDr. Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada also published an article in the journal "Post-Communist Economies":

Addressing the growth and employment effects of the extractive industries: white and black box illustrations from Kazakhstan

This survey addresses production and employment effects, which emanate from the extractive industries of Kazakhstan. To this end, the study employs static input-output models (IOMs) of Kazakhstan for the years 2007, 2010, 2012, and 2017 and dynamic nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) models for the period 1995–2018. IOMs show that extractives in Kazakhstan exhibit relatively strong links to domestic manufacturing. NARDL estimators reveal a positive relationship between commodity revenues and manufacturing value added in the commodity revenue boom phase and a high level of resilience of Kazakh manufacturing to the downward movements of the commodity revenues. Commodity revenues have a statistically significant positive impact on the aggregate employment rate. The study does not detect asymmetries concerning the job creation effects of extractives in the manufacturing sector.

First available online


SustainabilitySadik ZadaDr. Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada, together with Mattia Ferrari, published an article in the journal "Sustainability":

Environmental Policy Stringency, Technical Progress and Pollution Haven Hypothesis

The present inquiry provides a common ground for the analysis of two strands of literature, the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) and the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH). To this end, the study sets out a simple variational model, which identifies the structural composition of the economy and the level of economic development as the primary determinants of the magnitude of the domestic environmental degradation. The juxtaposition of the mentioned literature strands undermines the optimistic view that economic growth, in the long run, leads to the reduction of atmospheric pollution. To assess the empirical validity of the pollution haven conjecture, the study employs the OECD Environmental Policy Stringency Index and the refined data on carbon emissions embodied in imports for the dataset of 26 OECD countries in the time interval between 1995 and 2011. By employing pooled mean group (PMG) estimators, the study, for the first time, accounts for a number of issues mentioned in the literature as factors that confine the inferential power of existing empirical studies on the EKC. The strong and robust confirmation of the pollution haven conjecture indicates that at least in the context of global common pool resources, a purely national perspective of the EKC is not satisfactory.

More information and full text here: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/9/3880


mein fotoDr. Elkhan R. Sadik-Zada published another journal article:

Natural resources, technological progress, and economic modernization

The present inquiry focuses on the modernization perspectives of the commodity‐exporting countries through the lens of development economics. To this end, the study adopts the Kaldorian framework to address the modernization effects, epitomized in the absorption of surplus labor. To trace the process of economic modernization, the study augments Lewis’s dualistic economy model by the extractive sector. Three different scenarios for the management of resource revenues are scrutinized. An altruistic mode, which implies a pure redistribution of the revenues among the poor swaths of the population, protracts the process of economic modernization, requires a greater amount of capital stock, and harbors a greater risk of a poverty trap. This effect is less pronounced if the modern sector is more capital‐intensive. A productive mode, which elicits full reinvestment of the commodity revenues, in contrast, accelerates the pace of economic modernization. Further, predicated on the scrutiny of a more realistic scenario, a bargaining mode, the study derives the condition for a net positive (or negative) modernization effect. The study identifies technical progress alongside capital accumulation as a further important source of economic modernization.

in: Review of Development Economics, online first (https://doi.org/10.1111/rode.12716)


SocialWorkWithGroups coverTripura BAn article of IEE PhD student Biswaranjan Tripura was published in the journal "Social Work with Groups" in their series "Group Work Stories on pandemic 2020":

Forming an alumni association relief group to address the needs of Indigenous peoples in Tripura, India during the COVID-19 pandemic

In this narrative essay, he reflects on the steps taken and challenges encountered in forming and meeting the goals of an alumni group aimed at supporting vulnerable indigenous communities in Tripura, India during the COVID-19 pandemic.

in: Social Work with Groups, published online 31 Oct 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1080/01609513.2020.1840191)


OmAn article by IEE PhD student Om Ki was published in Myanmar Economic Bulletin:

Agriculture Finance in Myanmar and Myanma Agricultural Development Bank Reform

Notwithstanding enormous increases in agricultural loans to smallholder farmers by successive governments of Myanmar over the past decade, the cost of cultivating crops still significantly exceeds the subsidised loans granted by the State, and to which less than half of farm households have access. Exacerbating this State financing gap, is the lack of access to timely, affordable and dependable credit from formal financial institutions broadly, including private banks and microfinance institutions. As a consequence, Myanmar’s farmers are forced into borrowing (supplemental) loans from informal moneylenders at exorbitant rates of interest that range from 60 to 200 percent per annum, which (unsurprisingly) also chronically undermines the profitability, viability and sustainability of farm households.

This study presents a short contextual background and concise investigation into agricultural finance in Myanmar through a historical perspective, followed by a brief analysis of lessons learned from international experience in reforming agricultural banks in Asia and Latin America. ...

in: Myanmar Economic Bulletin, Vol.2, No.1, pp. 61-76 (full text online available)

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