Suchergebnisse

This note aims to build understanding of the existing disaster risk financing and insurance (DRFI) tools in use in Fiji and to identify gaps where potential engagement could further develop financial resilience. In addition the note aims to encourage peer exchange of regional knowledge, specifically by encouraging dialogue on past experiences, lessons learned, optimal use of these financial tools, and the effect they may have on the execution of post-disaster funds. In 2012 alone Fiji experienced three major events with estimated total damage of F$146 million (US$78 million). Fiji is expected to incur, on average over the long term, annual losses of F$158 million (US$85 million) due to earthquakes and tropical cyclones. In the next 50 years Fiji has a 50 percent chance of experiencing a loss exceeding F$1,500 million (US$806 million). The country has a taken a proactive approach to DRFI and developed a finance manual for post-disaster budget execution. The government now has F$3 million (US$1.6 million) available in DRFI instruments to facilitate disaster response and also implemented tax concessions to encourage donations in the wake of tropical cyclone Evan. A number of options to support ongoing DRFI improvements in Fiji are presented for consideration: (a) the finance manual developed by the Ministry of Finance for post-disaster procedures should be finalized, and cabinet approval should be sought; (b) an overarching disaster risk financing and insurance strategy should be developed that includes options for risk transfer; and (c) assets should be identified in order to develop an insurance program for critical public assets.

This semiannual report, a product of the Office of the Chief Economist for the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region of the World Bank, examines the nature of the very good overall performance of the LAC region in the aftermath of the 2008-09 global financial crisis and presents a comparative analysis of the post-crisis recovery patterns in the region vis-a-vis other regions. The first part of this report provides an overview of recent economic developments, an in depth look at the drivers of the post-crisis performance in the region, analyzes the external and domestic risks that could drag down growth performance in LAC, and discusses policy response options. The second part of the report documents the adverse impact of the crisis on the Caribbean region as well as its slow recovery. It distinguishes the poorer performance of English speaking Caribbean nations vis-a-vis non-English speaking ones, and highlights the dependence of the region on countries in the epicenter of the crisis, especially the United States, and the limited fiscal space that disabled a counter-cyclical policy response. The report concludes by emphasizing that skillful cycle management is necessary although far from sufficient to be able to turn what has to date been a cyclical recovery into a higher rate of trend growth. Moreover, countries experiencing a formidable windfall from the high commodity prices are in a unique position to seize the opportunity by judiciously saving and investing out of the windfall, they could relax the structural speed limits that have so far kept economic activity from rising to a higher long-run growth path.

South Africa's growth experience provides an example of how contrasting growth trends long-term decline followed by improved growth pivot around political change, in this case a transition to democracy. In the decade prior to 1994, South Africa experienced the worst period of economic growth since the end of the Second World War, with growth variable and declining. The proximate causes of slowing growth were trade and financial sanctions in opposition to the Apartheid government, political instability and macroeconomic policy decisions that resulted in higher inflation, increased uncertainty, and declining investment. Democracy has proved critical for, among other factors, creating the possibility of a peaceful and more stable future and reversing investor sentiment at a basic level. Political and economic leadership have been essential for improving the country's growth performance because of the effect on policy formulation, institutional development, regulatory design, and economic vision. Prudent fiscal policy and sound macroeconomic management have been critical factors in creating an environment conducive to growth by stabilizing economic conditions, lowering the user cost of capital, and putting downward pressure on the real exchange rate. This case study provides some insight into a more general perspective on political and economic transition and some of the key macro- and microeconomic policy shifts that need to occur to realize a more rapid and sustained growth path.

Peripheralisation is a process to which a person, a group or an area might be subjected to. Stigmatisation, selective migration, disconnection, dependence and social exclusion are dimensions of peripheralisation that are interconnected and that accelerate each other's effects. Structurally disadvantaged rural areas, especially remote small villages in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are particularly affected by the processes of peripheralisation. While economic decline and ethnic exclusion produced contagious "ghettoes" (Virág 2010) or "internal colonies" (Kóczé 2011) in the last two decades in structurally disadvantaged small villages of Hungary, in the German context the phenomenon of a "rural ghetto" seems to be non-existent. In Germany, mainly East German old industrial towns and rural areas are affected by peripheralisation, selective out-migration, demographic shrinking and demographisation are emphasised here. Ethnographic research in the case study villages of Eastern Germany and Hungary confirmed that peripheralisation is relational and amongst others national and regional social policies influence how it manifests on the local level. While areas undergoing moderate peripheralisation were able to attract counter-cultural migrants ("back-to-the-landers", Calvário and Otero 2015), who further counteracted peripheralisation processes, socially excluded people (Roma and long-term unemployed) accumulated in areas undergoing advanced peripheralisation. While counter-cultural migrants (case study G1 and H3), who follow a critique of materialist mainstream culture, modern farming practices, and the globalization of the agri-food systems, were free to decide where to live, the inhabitants of areas undergoing advanced peripheralisation (H2) got locked into spaces which are abandoned by the state, investors and the majority society (non-Roma people). As class, gender, ethnicity and place of residence influences autonomy, the individual and collective autonomy of the counter-cultural migrants is on a higher level than the autonomy of the inhabitants of areas undergoing advanced peripheralisation. As local initiatives (social and solidarity economy initiatives or rural social enterprises) are created to counteract processes of peripheralisation, the central question of this research is: In the context of peripheralisation how can social and solidarity economy initiatives contribute to local development? To explore in what ways rural social enterprises may (or may not) counteract processes of peripheralisation this study relies on a critical realist ethnography (with participant observation, in-depth interviews and documentary analysis) and on a normative approach of local development, integrating economic, social, and environmental aspects too. ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS In line with the relational approach to individual autonomy (Mackenzie 2014), a normative assumption of social enterprise scholars is that even if social enterprises receive state funding or money from private foundations or churches, they should be able to preserve their organisational autonomy. However, it should be pointed out that existing institutional contexts influence the political and organisational independence of social and solidarity economy (SSE) initiatives. Even if the reunification of Germany resulted in the assimilation of many East German institutions into West German ones, compared to Hungary, East Germany got integrated into a country with a thick institutional system for welfare provision and in which state-civil society relationships are rather characterised by partnership than state control. The current Hungarian government shows authoritarian tendencies, when it limits funding sources for civilian-based initiatives. Such a context, leads to municipality-based and faith-based social enterprises to blossom over civilian-based ones. These organisations are embedded in centralised structures and they often envision development through patronising means and thus reproduce the marginality of the socially excluded (particularly Roma) within the local society. Beyond monetary resources, non-monetary resources, such as volunteers or strong communities with reciprocal behaviour are considered to be potential resources for social enterprises. However, this research showed that with intensifying peripheralisation (eg. the selective out-migration of better-off social strata) SSE initiatives can decreasingly rely on non-monetary resources locally. Even if capitalist integration of CEE influenced negatively village communities, the reciprocal structures still existed in a village undergoing a higher (but not advanced) level of peripheralisation (H3) when the Ministers moved there and started their faith-based social enterprise together with the locals. In contrast, when the colleagues of the Equality Foundation started their civilian-based social enterprise in a village undergoing advanced peripheralisation, structures of reciprocal relations no longer existed there (H2). People in this village had time, but had been experiencing socio-spatial marginalisation (educational and territorial segregation, lack of jobs locally, limited access to public transport and car) for such a long time that they did not have the actual capacity to initiate local development without assistance coming from outside the village. SOCIAL CONSIDERATIONS The potential of participative decision-making is recognised by social enterprise researchers as a vehicle to empower marginalised people. From the four case studies only two initiatives (H2, G1) aim explicitly to achieve participative decision-making. Within the two other projects decisions are made through representatives of the community. In the case of the municipality-based social enterprise (H1), dominantly one representative, the Mayor has the power to make decisions, while in the case of the faith-based social enterprise (H3) the community representative, the 8 Presbyters and the Minister (who are all male) have the institutionalised right to make decisions for the community. The two civilian-based social enterprises (G1 and H2) are embedded in differently peripheralised contexts. In the case of advanced peripheralisation (H2) help comes outside of the village, from a development organisation. Building up the capacities of the local stakeholders for participative decision-making is a long-term strategy for the Foundation, which explicitly focuses on the empowerment of Roma and women. In case of moderate peripheralisation (G1) local agents, amongst whom counter-cultural migrants are overrepresented, have a capacity to start their SSE initiatives without help coming from a development organisation. Even if inhabitants of areas undergoing advanced peripheralisation have an agency, they need professional assistance from outside. It is, however, of particular importance that the development organisation follows the philosophy of democratic solidarity and has a capability-based approach. Without such assistance it would be naïve to expect agents of severely peripheralised areas to set up and run SSE initiatives themselves. At the same time it would be also wrong to think that without local knowledge (for example the knowledge of surviving in conditions of deep poverty and lived experiences of institutional racism) "developers" could reach long lasting results. Among the four case studies, the empowerment capacity was the highest in the civilian-based social enterprise (belonging to the Equality Foundation). This was the only initiative that acknowledged the ethnicised (and gendered) structural oppression of Roma (women). In addition to aiming to increase the individual autonomy of their stakeholders (through supporting adult education or providing advices on how to deal with domestic abuse), the organisation also aims to develop the collective autonomy of the inhabitants of the village through their community development project. Without identifying themselves as a Roma feminist organisation, the Equality Foundation has consciously focused on women as partners of local development. The reasoning behind their decision is connected to the role women play in the social reproduction of their households. ENVIRONMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS There are life situations, when social needs get prioritised over environmental considerations. Deep poverty is one of those life situations. For example, the daily survival under conditions of housing poverty and extreme cold weather overwrites long-term strategies, such as environmentalism. Due to a lower purchasing power, poorer households have lower levels of consumption too. This, however, does not mean that underprivileged people would not aim to consume more. On the contrary, as our society is dominated by the ideology of capitalist consumerism, to counteract social exclusion consumerism is seen as a strategy towards social integration for people living in deep poverty. The comparison between a Hungarian village undergoing advanced peripheralisation (H2) and a German village undergoing moderate peripheralisation (G1) shows that only people with a higher level of individual autonomy are capable of "decolonizing their imaginary" (Latouche 2011), namely of questioning capitalist consumerism and develop ethical consumption practices.:Contents List of Abbreviations 11 Figures / Maps / Images 13 Tables 15 1 Introduction 17 1.1 AIMS AND MOTIVATION 17 1.2 THE RELEVANCE OF THE RESEARCH 20 1.3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 21 2 Theorising peripheralisation and local development 23 2.1 PERIPHERALISATION, A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL, SELF-REINFORCING PROCESS 23 2.1.1 Dimensions of peripheralisation 23 2.1.2 Advanced peripheralisation 28 2.2 SOCIAL AND SOLIDARITY ECONOMY AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT 29 2.2.1 Economic dimension 30 2.2.2 Social dimension: autonomy and empowerment 31 2.2.3 Environmental dimension 36 2.3 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS 38 3 Contexts: social and solidarity economy in the context of peripheralisation 41 3.1 PERIPHERALISATION 41 3.1.1 Post-socialist transformation, a historical overview of periheralisation 41 3.1.2 Multi-dimensional peripheralisation in East Germany and Hungary 44 3.1.3 The relational aspect of peripheralisation 48 3.1.4 Advanced peripheralisation, a Hungarian (semi-peripheral) reality 50 3.2 SOCIAL AND SOLIDARITY ECONOMY IN CEE 51 3.2.1 Informal social and solidarity economy 52 3.2.2 Institutionalised social and solidarity economy 54 4 Methodology 59 4.1 TOWARDS A CRITICAL REALIST ETHNOGRAPHY 59 4.1.1 The scope of postmodern reflexive ethnography 60 4.1.2 Critical realism 61 4.1.3 Critical realist ethnography 62 4.2 CASE SELECTION AND COMPARATIVE PROCEEDING 63 Stage 1: Selecting areas undergoing peripheralisation 63 Stage 2: Identifying rural social enterprises 66 4.3 DATA COLLECTION 68 4.3.1 Interviews 69 4.3.2 Participant observation 72 4.3.3 Documents 76 4.4 POTENTIAL AND LIMITATIONS OF THE METHODOLOGY 77 4.4.1 Positivist critiques of the ethnographic approach 77 4.4.2 Anti-realist and postmodern critiques of ethnography 78 4.4.3 Critical realism and political engagement 79 4.4.4 Data analysis and reflections on the field experiences 81 5 Peripheralisation and the local scale 83 5.1 PERIPHERALISATION: THE LOCALITY AND THE CASE STUDY PROFILES 83 5.2 PERCEPTIONS AND RESPONSES TO PERIPHERIALITY IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS 91 5.2.1 Surviving advanced peripheralisation 91 5.2.2 Uneven access to education 92 5.2.3 Counter-cultural migration 93 5.3 THE MAIN CHALLENGES AND MISSION OF THE CASE STUDY SOCIAL ENTERPRISES 95 6 The interplay between autonomy and local resource-mix strategies 99 6.1 ORGANISATIONAL AUTONOMY AND ACCESS TO FUNDING 99 6.2 MARKET-BASED RESOURCES: EARNED INCOME 102 6.3 NON-MARKET RESOURCES: GRANTS AND SUBSIDIES 106 6.3.1 International governmental funding 106 6.3.2 National governmental funding 114 6.3.3 Non-governmental funding 119 6.4 NON-MONETARY RESOURCES: THE CAPACITIES OF THE LOCAL COMMUNITY 120 7 Empowerment capacity of the case study initiatives 123 7.1 DECISION-MAKING STRUCTURES 123 7.1.1 Representative decision-making structures 124 7.1.2 Participative decision-making structures 127 7.2 EMPOWERMENT OF ROMA (WOMEN) 131 7.2.1 The empowerment capacity of rural social enterprises: a perspective of the Roma 132 7.2.2 A gendered aspect: the empowerment of Roma women 137 8 Environmental considerations 143 8.1 ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS ON THE LOCAL LEVEL 143 8.2 ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS ON THE ORGANISATIONAL LEVEL 145 9 Summary and conclusions 149 9.1 LIMITATIONS AND POTENTIALS OF THE METHODOLOGY 149 9.2 THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS: THE CAPACITY OF SOCIAL AND SOLIDARITY ECONOMY IN COUNTERACTING PERIPHERALISATION 150 9.2.1 Economic considerations: autonomy and local resource-mix strategies 150 9.2.2 Social considerations: Autonomy and Empowerment 153 9.2.3 Environmental considerations: environmental consciousness and environmental impact 156 9.3 POLICY IMPLICATIONS FOR LOCAL DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL ECONOMY POLICIES 156 10 References 159 10.1 GENERAL WORKS 159 10.2 DATABASES, RELATED MATERIALS 172 10.3 MEDIA SOURCES 172 10.4 WEBPAGES 173 10.5 LEGAL REFERENCES 174 Annex 1 Expert sampling sheet (hu) 175 Annex 2 Information sheet (hu) 177 Annex 3 Information sheet (de) 179 Annex 4 Consent form (hu) 181 Annex 5 Consent form (de) 183 Annex 6 Expert interviews 185 Annex 7 Case study interviews 187 Annex 8 Participant observation 189 Annex 9 Anonymised data sources 193

Robert Wade on Zombie Ideas, Being inside the World
Bank, and the Death of Ethics in Economics after the Marginal Revolution







The global
economy is at the core of some of the main issues in contemporary International
Relations. But how do we understand the global economy and what impact does
that have on how we deal with the power politics around it? A fault line seems
to have emerged between those who take economic theory seriously and those who
denounce it for being part of the problem. Informed by his training as an
anthropologist, Robert H. Wade—professor at the LSE—takes a different tack: he
bases his engagement with the way in which Adam Smith has been appropriated to
advocate for a dominant view of 'free markets' on real-world economics and in-depth
accounts of insiders. In this Talk,
Wade—among others—discusses experimentation in international economic
regimes, why the International Financial Institutions don't fight economic
crises, and the powers and perils of being inside the World Bank.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is,
according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current
International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in
this debate?



If we'd reframe
your question as being more broadly about global studies, I think that one of
the really fundamental questions is how and why it is that the precepts of neoliberalism
have penetrated into every nook and cranny of Western societies, and have
penetrated to a very large extent many non-Western countries.



This has
happened especially, but not only, through the agency of the IMF and the World
bank, which have imbued these neoliberal principles; through the mechanism of
graduate education: children of the elites in developing countries go out to
American, British, other Western universities, and they learn that this is
'true' economics, or 'true' IPE, or 'true' Political Science, and then they
come back and implement these same principles and make them a reality back
home. But across the globe, this even holds for the Nordic countries. In
Iceland and other Nordic countries, from the 1980s, networks of people sharing
a belief in neo-liberal precepts, began to form and sort of place each other in
key positions within the state, and in politics, and built a momentum in this
direction. These precepts have become understood as just natural, as in
Margaret Thatcher's 'there is no alternative'.



I live in the
UK, and the great bulk of the British public really does believe that the
government is just like a household writ large, and the same rules of budgeting
that apply to the household should apply to the state. That when times are
tough the household has to tighten its belt, cut back on spending, and it is
only fair that the government does the same, and if the government does not, if
the government runs a deficit in hard times, then the government is being
irresponsible. And this is a completely mistaken and pre-Keynesian idea, but it
is a 'zombie idea'—that is, however much arguments and evidence may be mounted
against it, it just keeps coming up and up and up, and governments come to
power riding on this zombie idea and a flotilla of related ideas.



The persistence
of this zombie idea is all the more amazing as we just had a global financial
crisis in 2007/8, which would prompt a rethinking of these ideas. But these
neoliberal precepts have been, if anything, more strongly reinforced. In
previous hard times—and obviously the 1930s depression is the exemplary
case—there has been a stronger move towards, what you could call, social
democratic precepts. But not this time! Indeed, even after the crisis, the
whole of the European Union with 500 million people is even more thoroughly structured
on the basis of these ideas. I am thinking of what is popularly known as the Fiscal Compact signed by the EU Member States in 2012, which commits all governments
to balance budgets all the time—that is, first, the structural deficit may not
rise above 0.5 percent of GDP. Second, the public debt may not rise above 60
percent of GDP. Third, automatic financial sanctions are levied on governments
that exceed these two thresholds. Fourth, the whole procedure is supervised by
the European Commission, and this is presented as in the name of sound
budgeting. This package is presented as justified by the proposition that
government is a household writ large. The most elementary principles of
Keynesian macroeconomics show why this is not simply mistaken, but a disaster,
and will keep generating recessionary pressures. It is sold as a kind of excuse
for avoiding to put in place the essential conditions for the monetary union,
namely, a common budget and a sizable transfer mechanism to the regions just as
exists in the United States. But they do not want to do that, but still they
call this agreement 'cooperation', which is all about not cooperation, but
about writing these dictates around this zombie idea written into the very
basic architecture of the EU. Beyond EU politics, it materializes all the way
down to, I don't know, the function of the privatization of the Post Office, it
goes all the way down to the sort of capillaries of how universities are run,
and the incentive systems that have placed upon academics, and there is very
little pushback. The one reason, why I am almost completely delighted about
Jeremy Corbyn's election as the leader of the Labour party, is that this is one
small case of where there seems to be some concerted pushback against these
zombie ideas. The point being that the established Labour party basically
bought into this whole set of neo-liberal ideas. It combined maintaining the
overall structure of inequality in society with more emphasis on providing some
help to the poor, but they had to be hardworking poor.



Yet, one knows
that there can be dramatic changes in the prevailing zeitgeist of norms. One
knows that there can be big changes in the space of a few decades and the
question is can one imagine a scenario in which they might be a big change in
norms back to a more kind of social-democratic direction. So where will this
take place? Because of technological change in the labor market, there is a
real big crisis of employment with many middle-class jobs cut out and
polarization in the labor market. This might then induce a political movement
to have a much bigger change in income distribution than anybody with power is
now talking about. Talk of re-distribution these days is really almost entirely
around redistribution through the state, but the point I would make is that if
there is to be any significant reduction of inequality, especially inequality
at the top, there has to be more attention to changes in market-income
distribution.



Let me explain. The
share of profits in national income has been going up and the share of labor
income has been going down. So we should harness the shareholder structure of
the market to affect a more equal income distribution by enabling a much wider
section of the population to buy into the profit share. At the moment the
profit share goes to senior executives and equity holders, but equity holders
are highly concentrating at the top of the income and wealth distribution. If
equity earners could be spread much more equally, then a much wider section of the
population would get income, while they sleep so to speak. We could institute
something like trusts, whose members could be the employees of a company, the
customers, the neighbors of the company, and the trust would borrow on capital
markets and take out insurance against the repayment of the lending of loan and
then it would buy shares, it would use that borrowed money to buy shares in the
company, and the company would pay out dividends on the shares and then that
dividend income coming out of profits would be distributed to the members of
the trust. That would be a way of getting the rising share of profits in
national income distributed out to the population at large. I particularly like
this metaphor of "earning income while you sleep", since at the moment it is
only the rich people, who are earning income while they sleep. Somehow that facility
of earning income while you sleep has to be made much more widely and available—by
using the market against itself, so to speak.





How did you arrive at where
you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?



I suppose the starting point was really this; my
father was a New Zealand diplomat, so we moved quite often. By that time I was
twelve my parents were posted to Colombo, Ceylon as it was called then. After
having lived just in Western countries, I suddenly encountered at this very
formative age Colombo and Sri Lanka. I was just amazed by that experience; by
the color, the taste, the exoticness, but I was also very struck by how the
many boys at the same age as me, were walking around with no shoes. I particular
remember this boy carrying a baby on his shoulder, the baby looked half-dead
and covered in scabs, and I think it was then I got the idea of just how
unequal the world was. Then at university I studied economics, but I also
visited my parents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and I got another sense of that
great disparity in wealth and living standards. At this time I had come across
Adam Smith and the wealth of nations question and that helped to encapsulate or
to crystalize my interests. So I wanted to go the Institute of Development
Studies in Sussex and  got enrolled for a
PhD in economics, but en route I spent several weeks in India and during that
time I began to dwell upon just how boring and how useless everything I studied
under the name of microeconomics. I kept thinking of these dreadfully dry
textbooks of marginal cost curves and marginal revenue curves and utility function
and difference curves etc., which I had forced myself to sit exams in. By this
time I had done a little bit of fieldwork, living on Pitcairn Island in the
middle of the Pacific.



When I got back to Sussex after fieldwork I announced
that I wished to not do a PhD in economics, but to do one in anthropology
thinking all the time, that this would actually be more use for understanding
why for example India, where I had been, was so very poor. So that's what I did:
a PhD in anthropology… In some ways I regard that as having been a mistake,
because the sort of mainstream of anthropology is very far away from the Adam
Smith questions. Having done the degree in anthropology, pretty soon I began to
change direction and pay much more attention to the state, to the state
bureaucracy. I went to India and I studied the Irrigation Department and other
related departments. I went to South Korea and I studied state irrigation
agencies and I went to Taiwan and I studied the state more broadly. So I was
kind of moving up from my Italian village, moving kind of up the scale in terms
of state agencies and then the state as a whole.



Then I went to work for the World Bank in the 1980s and
my main reason for doing that was not to do the research the World Bank wanted
me to do, but rather to study the World Bank from the inside as fieldwork. If
in some ways switching to anthropology was a mistake, in other ways it was not,
because I approached those kind of Wealth-of-Nations-questions in a way very
different from how economists approached them. For example when I went to
Taiwan and studied the trade regime, the first thing I did was to go and talk
to people who operated through the trade regime, whereas I noticed that the
published works by economists celebrating Taiwan's free trade regime was based
on what the rules said and what certain government officials told them was the
case. They had never actually talked to
people who traded through the trade regime. If they would have, they would
have learned about all the covert controls that went on such that there was
quite a distinction between the liberal face of the trade regime and the
reality of the trade regime. The reality was that the government was managing
trade in line with industrial policy, but the government absolutely did not
want the world to know that. So all this was kept hidden and I was really
regarded as rather unwelcome visitor—and in fact to this day my book Governing the Market (1990, read the
introduction here) is not well
received in Taiwan. It says the government of Taiwan did a good job of managing
the market, but they want the world to believe that Taiwan is a free trade
country. So that is the kind of intellectual trajectory that I have been on.



So I think that the value of the anthropology PhD was
that it really taught me, in practical terms, the meaning of the
anthropological maxim, which is 'soaking and poking'. To put it another way—I
love this—anthropologists are social scientists, who believe that the plural of
anecdote is evidence. And indeed I place a lot of weight on anecdotes, on
gossip, on the stories people tell, whereas economists would be much happier
reducing, let us say, South Korea's trade regime to one data point in a matrix,
and then compare that data point with, let us say, Malaysia's data point to see
how the trade regimes are correlated with growth, or something like that, and
that is really not my interest.





What would a student need to
become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?



Despite what I've just said, I do think that a graduate
training in economics is very useful, provided one does not believe it. And that is really
difficult, because the socialization pressures are intense: if you do not say
the right things—which are neoliberal type things on the whole—then you will
likely not get a high grade. But I have noticed that economists tend to know
how to think, how to make arguments,
they tend to understand the idea of causality, and that may seem an astonishing
thing to say on my part, because it implies that students coming from other
disciplines are often weak in understanding the very basic ideas of causality,
but that is my experience. I had many students coming from, who knows, IR or
Political Science or Sociology or Anthropology, who clearly do not have much
idea of causality; they can describe things, but they find thinking in terms of
cause and effect, in terms of independent and dependent variables, in terms of
left and right side, they just find it difficult. So I do think that there is a
lot to be said for studying economics, and mastering the maths, provided that
the critical facility is not lost. That is point number one.



Point number two is that I think that there is a huge
premium on doing fieldwork, and the field work maybe in developing countries,
but when I say field work, I don't just mean going out to villages, going out
to see poor people 'over there'. I am talking of fieldwork inside bureaucracies:
to try and understand the culture, the incentive systems that people are
working under—fieldwork at home so to speak, in the countries one comes from. From
the students' point of view, it is clearly much easier to sit in the LSE
library to do the research. So in my marking I give quite a premium to a
student actually doing fieldwork, going out and interviewing, and having the
experience of writing up and interpreting the interviews and somehow fitting it
back into a larger argument—but really few students actually do that, and I
think that that is a real, real big mistake. Mind you, the same risk holds for fieldwork in economics as it does for
studying economics: I encourage students to work for (do fieldwork in,
experience) the World Bank; and several have—but to the best of my knowledge
almost none of them has kept their critical perspective. They really come to
buy into it.





The relations between states are settled
either through diplomacy or warfare. Why would we have to focus on economics to
understand IR?



Because economics—such as
for example balances of payment, surpluses and deficits—set the constraints and
incentives on countries in terms of their relationships with each other. A great
deal of diplomacy is driven by economic pressures: diplomacy to get other
countries to for example open their markets, or to cut deals with countries—'if
you do this, we will do that'—deals that may relate to areas that are rather
different, for instance if you buy more of these of our exports, we will help
you fight such and such country, because the manufactures are in my
constituency.



So, in a way, the way you
framed the question is part of the reason why I react against the discipline of
IR: because it tends to treat diplomacy, war, and so on, as somehow rather
separate from economic pressures, and I see these economic pressures as very
powerful drivers of both of the other two things. As another example, one of
the drivers of the Syrian conflict was that there was an acute drought (like
Weizman observed in Theory Talk #69, red), which meant that many people
were rendered destitute; rural areas flooded into the cities, and the Assad
regime just was—understandably—unable to cope; and large numbers of young men,
concentrated in cities, rootless and with no jobs, just were recruiting fodder for
the Wahhabi sect. I have always thought of economics—not so much as in the
making choices in conditions of scarcity, that is sort of Lionel Robin's definition—in the sense of Alfred Marshal, about how people make a
living, as a very fundamental driver of a lot of what happens in International
Relations.





Pikkety recently published Capital in the
21st Century, causing quite the stir. But why would inequality
between people matter for IR?



Let me comment by invoking
a very contemporary exhibit—the migration crisis in Europe now. Maybe a decade
ago I looked at the figures and if you took the
average income of the EU-15 prior to latest extensions and then expressed the
average income of countries outside of the EU—including sub-Sahara Africa—as a
percentage, then there was a really dramatic falling away of income levels
relative to the EU, in countries all around the EU and whether you took market
exchange rates or purchasing power parity. If you went round to sub-Sahara
Africa and took the average, it was more like two percent in market exchange rates
and seven percent in purchasing power parity; and the 'problem' is that there
is certainly here a rather thin slither of sea between Africa and the promised
land of Europe and to the east there are these great open planes, where armies
can go up and down to the speed of light, so to speak, but people can also move
pretty quickly across these planes.



So all one has to do—and this
might just be only a bit of an exaggeration—if one is on the poor end of this
poverty pyramid is hop across the border and you have a chance at least of
getting a very appreciable increase in living conditions and income, with which
you can then get savings to remit back to home. So the migrations pressures are
just huge. So that is one reason for linking inequality to issues in International
Relations—really fundamental issues, and very very difficult to dissolve.





You've done anthropological fieldwork inside
the World Bank—an institution drawing a lot of criticism from its detractors in
IR. Can you shed some kind of light about what kind of 'animal' the World Bank
is?



First of all, let me say
that at the micro-level—the level of the people you know and the people I know
inside the World Bank—I agree that there are people doing a lot of good work.
But if you look at the organization more generally—the World Bank and also the
IMF—they are clearly instruments mainly of US foreign policy—and any number of
US senators, members of the House, have basically said that. When they are
defending the International Financial Institutions (they often criticize them),
they do so by saying they are important for US foreign policy. And you have to
look at the governance structures to see how it is that the US in particular—but
Western states more generally—have from the beginning, through the very Articles
of Agreement, created a structure which locks in their power, and has made it
very difficult for other countries (including Japan) to significantly increase their
shareholdings. The US has kept the presidency of the Bank and the much less
recognized Number Two position of the IMF, and has used these positions to have
a very strong influence.



Just to illustrate what the
Bank and the Fund do: at the time of the East-Asian crisis—specifically the
Korean crisis in 1997-1998—the IMF mission was in Seoul. The negotiations were
in a hotel there. David Lipton from the US Treasury (and a former student of
Larry Summers who was by then Deputy Secretary) was just down the corridor of
where the negotiations took place, and every so often the IMF people would walk
out of the negotiations and consult with David Lipton, then come back in and—as
Paul Blustein reports in his book called The Chastening—often said
something rather different from what they had been saying before they consulted
with David Lipton.



Just to take another
example, the US being able to appoint the president of the Bank—to appoint a
person known personally to the Treasury Secretary or to the Secretary of the
State, or both—is really of great value: when there is a 'trustful relationship'—or
a relationship of dependency, the president being dependent on those who
appointed him in the Administration—it is possible for those people in the Administration,
or people close to them, to just ring up the president of the Bank, and talk in
a very informal, confidential, trustful way about what is happening in Latin
America, or what is happening in the Middle East, and what the US thinks the
Bank should or should not be doing in those places. Larry Summers appointed a
protégé of his to one of the regional development banks, and this person—who is
very senior in the bank—told me that Larry would frequently ring him, while he
is being driven home in the evening from the Treasury, just to have a chat
about how things were going in her region, and to pass on suggestions about
what the Bank should be doing there, and to get intelligence from her about
what was happening in the region, and so on. The point is that, making these
personal connections is of immense value, but at the same time, the US
Congress, in particular, is very much against having a big Bank against allowing
a capital increase for the World Bank—so that the bank could, as it should be
doing, increase its lending for infrastructure investment ten times. It is just
a complete scandal how little the Bank has been lending for the past 20 years
or more for infrastructure, for roads and power stations and so on. The US does
not want the Bank providing socialistic competition with the private sector: it
says these things are for the private sector to do, and the Bank has to take
care of poverty, because the private sector is not interested in poverty.



So the US wants to keep the
presidency of the Bank, it wants to keep, secondly, its unique veto right on
the big decisions, such as decisions on whether to increase the capital base—but
provided those two things are met it does not care that much about the Bank. In
the case of the Fund, the US is also very powerful, but of course the Europeans
have a bit more relative power. Right now I think the world is in an even more dangerous
sort if financial condition than might appear, because the IMF is acutely short
of secure or guaranteed lending resources, so if there is to be another round
of crisis—as I think is entirely likely within the next five years—the Fund
depends upon borrowing short-term from member countries, like on six months
terms, but member countries can say 'no', and that means that the Fund's
ability to fight crises is quite constrained. The Fund should implement what
was agreed in 2010 by all the member countries represented on the board of the
IMF: to roughly double the quote of the guaranteed lending resources, that is,
resources the countries actually hand over to the Fund, over which they
actually give up country control. All the relevant capitals ratified it with
one exception—the US—because Congress refused because the individual barons,
who are not under that much party discipline, each said to the Treasury: 'look,
the question of the IMF is of zero significance to my electorate, so if you
want my vote on the IMF, you have to give me things that I want like projects
in my constituency and so on'. The Treasury added up the demands of the people,
whose vote had to be won, and it considered those demands were just way, way,
way over the top. As long as a Democrat is in the presidency, while the House
is controlled by Republicans the world is sort of held hostage to this. Beyond
this example, this actually entails a structural problem: the US blocking or
producing a gridlock in international organizations, because the Congress is
hostile to international organizations, because Congress sees it to imply a
loss of US sovereignty. The only way to end this gridlock is to end the US veto
in the Fund and the Bank, but the problem is that the US can veto any measures.



One response of the big
developing countries is to create bypass organizations—such as the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Banks, such as the new Development Bank, such as the
Contingent Reserve arrangement the BRICs have established, and then a growing
number of sort of regional development banks. And I think that that is a good
thing, but it does raise questions about coordination, about who is looking
after, if you will, the global interests, global issues such as climate change.
In short, we need a genuine World Bank, rather than the American-Bank-in-the-World
we have today.



You engage thoroughly with economics and
economic theory. Now there seem to be two kinds of critical approaches to
economics in IPE: one criticizes its rationality as flawed, and another buys
into its rationality but attempts to point out where actual policy gets it
wrong. Where do you stand in this?



If you take the example of
how the EU attempted to impose fiscal rules on Greece, you see a notion of
rationality which draws upon these very primitive notions that I referred to
right at the beginning, where the government is just a household writ large,
and the same set of rules that apply to the budgeting of the household must
apply to the government as well. Here, the assumption is that any macroeconomic
proposition must have microeconomic foundations, that it must be derivable from
propositions about microeconomic agents acting in this sort of self-maximizing
way, and if you cannot derive macroeconomic propositions from those micro
foundations, then there is something unreliable, un-rigorous about your macroeconomics.
So what are then the sources of these micro-economic assumptions?



This leads us to one
fundamental and almost completely unaddressed weaknesses of economics can be
traced back to the Marginal Revolution in the late 19th
century. From that moment onwards, there has been an attempt to model economics
on physics, and that was very explicit on the part of people like Pareto and
Walras, and Jevons, early Marginalist thinkers. They even drew up tables with
terms of physics, like velocity, on one side, and then corresponding terms in
economics on the other. That had a huge benefit in terms of the 'science' of
economics, because it cut economics loose from Adam Smith's and other classical
economists' preoccupations with issues of morality and ethics. Adam Smith
thought his most important book was not the Wealth of Nations but his Theory of Moral Sentiments, on which he was working,
revising yet again, when he died. For Smith, economics and morals were never
separate worlds, but intimately related. So for him, the Theory of Moral
Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations were just twins. The point
about the marginalist revolution, and the embrace of physics as the model, was
that it cut economics free of all that sort of subjective stuff about values. So
economics after the marginalist revolution set off with the assumption that not
production, but the movement of individuals in markets engaged in trading with
each other became the center of gravity of economics. Making the study of exchange
rather than the study of production central was analogous to, say, Boyle's Law
in physics. Boyle's Law in physics explained the
movement of molecules in gasses, as a function of the pressure applied to the
gas. So why did they make that analogy?



The point of likening of
individuals in microeconomic actions with molecules in gasses was the
following. Everybody knows that we do not apply any consideration of
ethics or moral sentiments to the movement of the molecules in gas, so neither should
we apply any notions of ethics or moral sentiments to the movements of
individuals in market exchanges. And that was the way that all considerations
of ethics, of morality were just removed from economics. I for instance asked the
question to well-known American growth theorist, as we were walking down the
street in Providence at Brown University: 'is it moral for people to freeride?'
And he said, 'yes of course, provided they do not break the law'. So ethics and
questions of morality have been almost completely expunged from economics in a
way that would horrify classical economists including Smith; and a particular idea
of rationality has been an important part of cleansing economics from those
moral considerations. George DeMartino, editor of the Oxford Handbook of
Professional Economics Ethics which just appeared has a wonderful phrase to
capture this—'econogenic harm': the harm built into the way that economics,
professional economists work.





Haven't specific fields, like development
economics—a field you engage with yourself—advanced to overcome these
weaknesses in economic theory?



Let me root my answer again
in observations about the linkages between theory and practice, for it is in
practice that economic theory really does its work and its politics becomes
visible. It always amazes me we have had a development industry in place for
roughly the past 70 years with vast numbers of people, organizations, money all
orchestrated underneath this umbrella of development; yet if you go back and
read what the early writers about development and economic growth said—I am
thinking of people like Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Myrdal, Hirschman, Prebisch, but also Moses Abramovitz. If you go back and look
at what they were saying, it seems to me that we have not advanced all that
much. Sure, we have advanced a lot in terms of econometric techniques, but in
terms of substance we have not. One conclusion I draw from that is that it is
really important that international regimes—for example, World Bank and IMF
loan conditions, but also WTO regimes—give room for experimentation, because it
is really not the case that 'there is no alternative'. This Washington
Consensus agenda has clearly not been effective in accelerating production,
upgrading it, and production diversification, or export upgrading, or export
diversification. So, there should be written into the regimes a lot of room for
experimentation. But this isn't there because of the political origin of these
regimes; because of what western countries want for the rest world, namely, to
open the rest of the world to their markets.



In the 80s there were a lot
of experts in industrial development in the World Bank and they did good work,
promoting industrial growth and investment in productive infrastructure. But
then Anne Krueger came in as chief economist, and brought in a whole lot of
people with her—who, like here, were arch-neoliberals. The industrial growth
people were invited to find employment elsewhere, or to rebrand themselves as
experts in who knows what, environmental assessment, primary education, or good
governance. There was no room for them. This also fitted well with some bad
experiences the Bank had had with investing in infrastructure. It had gotten
into a lot of trouble with large-scale infrastructural interventions such as
roads and dams and the like from, especially, US NGOs mobilizing Congress—which
then put pressure on the Treasury and so on. My lament throughout this whole
conversation has been that we seem to have become just locked into this
direction that was set in the 1980s, and it is very difficult to see what kind
of economic catastrophe would be necessary to give a sufficient shock to
reroute the global system of economic governance.



So after the 1980s, the
Bank sort of backed off and began saying that development, economic
development, was about poverty reduction—the slogan of the Bank became, 'our
dream is a world free of poverty'. You can understand that shift partly in
terms of pulling out of the concern with production to get into safe territory,
but also because poverty reduction seemed to sort of take care of inequality,
because you reduced inequality to poverty—to the poor 'over there', and we can
feel good about helping them; but we do not want talk about inequality, which
involves us, because then there is the question of justice of our income.



But then the most recent
turn is that we're seeing a renewed push for infrastructure in the World Bank
and western development agencies. I think that you can link this recent
infrastructure push to uncertainty about the sources of economic growth. In the
West there is a real question about sustaining economic growth without housing
bubbles and stock market bubbles—in other words, without endogenously building
financial instability. There may well be a similar sort of issue in terms of
the growth of developing countries.





Last question. Adam Smith seems to be
constantly present in your work as a critical interlocutor. How come?



I kind of engage in a
critical debate with Adam Smith, but especially with people today, who believe
his ideas. I often start to frame arguments in terms of his famous 40 word
summary of the causes of the relative wealth of nations, which he actually
wrote in 1755, which is to say long before the first edition of the Wealth
of Nations. I will just tell you what these 40 words say, and then I will
tell you the significance of them. He said:



'Little else is
requisite to carry a state to the highest degree
of opulence from the lowest
barbarism than peace, easy taxes, and tolerable
administration of justice; all the rest being
brought about by the natural course of things.'



So I am struck by how today
many economists say or imply that this is essentially right; you need some
qualifications of course, but essentially that is the nub of it. You might have
to translate peace, easy taxes, tolerable administration of justice into more
modern terms, but that is the essence of it. For example, Gregory
Mankiw—Professor of economics at Harvard, former chair of the National Council
of Economic Advisers during the Bush administration, and author of a very
popular textbook in economics—said in the Wall Street Journal in 2006: Adam Smith was right to
say that – and then he gave the 40 word quote. The renowned economists Timothy
Besley and Torsten Persson wrote Pillars of Prosperity, which also
begins with Smith's 40 words, and they even see the book as a kind of
elaboration, but in that same kind of spirit, of Smith's basic idea. So my
point is that these ideas are still current; they are still the sort of front
of a lot of neoliberal thinking. I am just astonished these ideas all these
centuries later remain so powerful. I have had at the back of my mind the idea
of organizing an international competition to provide a contemporary 40 word
statement, which is sort of equivalent to Smith's, which would obviously have
to be of a more global character, encompassing the globalized world economy.







Robert Hunter Wade worked at the Institute of
Development Studies, Sussex, 1972-95, World Bank, 1984-88, Princeton Woodrow
Wilson School 1989/90, MIT Sloan School 1992, Brown University 1996-2000.
Fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 1992/93, Russell Sage
Foundation 1997/98, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin 2000/01. Fieldwork in
Pitcairn Is., Italy, India, Korea, Taiwan. Research on World Bank
1995-continuing. Author of Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village
Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988,
1994), Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government
in East Asia's Industrialization (1990, 2003). Latter won American
Political Science Association's award of Best Book in Political Economy, 1992.



Related links





Faculty profile at LSE
Read Wade's The Piketty
phenomenon and the future of inequality (2014, real-world economics review)
here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Capitalism
and Democracy at Cross-Purposes (2013, Challenge) here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Rethinking
Industrial Policy for Low Income Countries (2007 ADB Conference paper) here
(pdf) 
Read Wade's Bringing the
State Back In (2005, IPG) here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Is
Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? (2004, World Development)
here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Creating
Capitalisms (Introduction to 2003 book 'Governing the Market') here (pdf) 


Print version of this Talk (pdf)

[ES] Se ha buscado un diálogo de tres ramas del Derecho: Internacional, Constitucional y Procesal con la Economía, en especial con el Neo-Institucionalismo. Además, en algunos aspectos también dialoga con la sociología y con la filosofía. Es, por tanto, un trabajo INTERDICIPLINÁRIO. Contiene 4 Capitulos: i aspectos conceptuales de los derechos humanos de tercera generación; ii el derecho al desarrollo como derecho humano de tercera generación; iii consideraciones generales con respecto al proceso en la modernidad para la comprensión de su misión protectora de los derechos humanos de tercera generación; referencia especial a la protección del derecho al desarrollo; iv la protección judicial de los derechos humanos de tercera generación, en especial referencia al derecho al desarrollo (El Poder Judicial y el Derecho al Desarrollo). Descreve la responsabilidad de Naciones Unidas con el fin de que la humanidad disponga de unas mínimas condiciones de vida que garanticen el respeto de los hombres y ciudadanos en cada país, acciones, a fin de cuentas, dirigidas a la implantación de políticas públicas que favorezcan la dignidad del hombre. No es suficiente el mero reconocimiento positivo de los derechos humanos, sino que es necesario contar con instrumentos normativos procesales que, de forma efectiva, protejan y garanticen los derechos humanos, para así posibilitar al hombre el acceso a los tribunales, la reivindicación de sus derechos y el pleno conocimiento y entendimiento de éstos, por lo que el Poder Judicial juega un papel preponderante en la protección de los derechos humanos. Además, el desarrollo debe estar fundamentalmente al servicio de la satisfacción de las necesidades básicas de la población. En este tiempo una actuación judicial más humana, relacionada, evidentemente, con la implantación de un proceso más humano. Se subraya esta nueva misión del juez en la pos-modernidad, cuando se reflexiona sobre la visión de la economía neo-institucionalista, que destaca la importancia para el desarrollo socio-económico de las instituciones, de entre las cuales, se destaca, la Justicia. Por consecuente, estas afirmaciones económicas pueden se constituir en un antecedente racional para que se pueda llegar hasta la concepción de una finalidad económica que se reviste el proceso civil, esto es, un escupo económico para el proceso civil. Hay que observar, en la concepción de la Economía Neo-Institucionalista, el nuevo vigor que asume la Economía del Desarrollo. Dada la importancia que para el mercado representan los consumidores e incluso los efectos para la economía y para el desarrollo de un país - y no sólo para el propio mercado, ya que su equilibrio se refleja significativamente en la economía - es fundamental propiciar las condiciones favorables para que el mercado esté estable y en crecimiento. Esto dependerá sin duda, entre otras cuestiones, de la protección legal y judicial que se dé a los consumidores, especialmente la protección a través de las tutelas procesales (tanto individuales como colectivas). El Poder Judicial, con esas tutelas de protección a los consumidores y usuarios ofrecería, indirectamente, su contribución para el desarrollo socio-económico de una sociedad beneficiada con esas tutelas de protección.El proceso civil, en cuanto instrumento que el Estado dispone para hacer Justicia a los ciudadanos, más allá de su función redistributiva y de reintegración social al aplicar normas jurídicas a situaciones factuales, ha asumido, modernamente, una función de cooperador de la economía, ante justamente, el papel adyuvante del desarrollo socio-económico, que la seguridad jurídica puede proporcionar en el contexto social. Al Derecho Procesal Civil deben ser incorporados los más nuevos estudios de la Economía Neoinstitucionalista, en un esfuerzo científico interdisciplinario, para mejor reflexión y búsqueda de soluciones que tornen el sistema de justicia, ágil y eficiente. La justiciabilidad puede ser una vía para favorecer la efectividad de los derechos humanos. Asumimos posición de entre aquellos que defienden que el Derecho al Desarrollo, comprendidos en los derechos sociales, por ejemplo, de educación fundamental, salud básica, asistencia a los desamparados y el derecho de acceso a la Justicia, son integrantes indispensables y con posibilidades de constituirse en un derecho subjetivo individual definitivo. Defendemos, por consiguiente, que así como es perfectamente posible la justiciabilidad de los derechos económicos, sociales y culturales es igualmente posible la justiciabilidad del derecho al desarrollo en el estadio actual de los derechos humanos. Los tribunales y juzgados ya han protegido de forma bastante enfática y en numerosas ocasiones algunos de estos derechos de tercera generación, como son los de los consumidores y del usuario y los de cariz ambientalista, algo no muy diferente al derecho al desarrollo aunque es muy difícil verificar una jurisprudencia correspondiente. Hay que considerar que la defensa de la protección y justiciabilidad de los DESCs ha sido gradualmente admitida en muchos países democráticos, no sólo con sede doctrinaria pero también jurisprudencial. Y de la misma manera, se puede antever que el derecho al desarrollo, poco a poco, va siguiendo el mismo camino de aquellos otros derechos ya plenamente justiciables y protegidos por el Poder Judicial. Seguramente que en actualidad hay una nueva Justicia en Brasil, por los poderes constituidos, han firmado dos pactos republicanos de Estado por un Sistema de Justicia más accesible, ágil y efectivo, es decir, por una Justicia mejor, más democrática y más eficiente, que ha exigido la edición de 18 (dieciocho) nuevas leyes, de nuevas medidas tomadas por el Presidente de la República Brasileña y por el Presidente de la Corte de Justicia mayor, el Supremo Tribunal Federal STF. El Banco Mundial ha querido aprovechar el modelo de desarrollo del STJ para ayudar en la modernización de las cortes de América Latina, Caribe y África, dentro del eje de cooperación conocido como Sud-Sud. Estas cooperaciones con instituciones de países en desarrollo han sido valoradas por este importante organismo internacional de políticas de desarrollo. La creación del CNJ ha comportado en el seno nacional importantes cambios éticos y la modernización de carácter administrativo. Basta citar, como ejemplos éticos, los siguientes: 1º) el término del nepotismo en el Poder Judicial brasileño; 2º) establecimiento de límites en los salarios de jueces, desembargadores y ministros de tribunales superiores y la eliminación de salarios adicionales que aumentaban considerablemente los valores que el Estado pagava a los magistrados. Es perfectamente posible defender la concepción de que, siempre que el Estado interfiere de manera práctica para proteger y garantizar derechos humanos o derechos fundamentales, a través de la realización práctica de estos derechos, estará por consiguiente, contribuyendo al desarrollo humano e indirectamente al desarrollo socio-económico. Insertado en esta perspectiva, proponemos que al conceder una medida cautelar de protección a la integridad física de una mujer, y algunas veces de protección al mayor derecho de un ser humano, que es la propia vida, el Estado Jurisdiccional estará adoptando, in concreto, medidas que promueven el desarrollo humano; y considerando estas actuaciones estatales al ámbito colectivo, también el desarrollo socio-económico ; [EN] It has sought a dialogue of three branches of the law: International, Constitutional and Procedural with economics, especially the Neo-Institutionalism. In addition, in some respects also talks with sociology and philosophy. Is therefore interdisciplinary work. Contains 4 chapters: i. conceptual aspects of the human rights of third generation, ii. the right to development as a human right of third generation, iii. general considerations regarding the process in modernity for understanding its protective of human rights of third generation; special reference to the protection of the right to development; iv. judicial protection of human rights of third generation, with special reference to the right to development (The Judiciary and the Right to Development). Descreve UN responsibility in order that humanity available to minimal living conditions to ensure respect for the men and citizens in each country, actions, ultimately, led to the implementation of public policies that favor the dignity of man. It is not enough to merely positive recognition of human rights, it is necessary to have procedural policy instruments, effectively, protect and fulfill human rights, so as to allow man access to court, claiming their rights and full knowledge and understanding of them, so that the judiciary plays an important role in protecting human rights. In addition, development must be primarily serve the satisfaction of the basic needs of the population. At this time a more human judicial act, connected, obviously, with the introduction of a more humane process. It underscores the new role of the judge in the post-modernity, when reflecting on the vision of the neo-institutionalist economics, which stresses the importance for socio-economic development of the institutions, among which stands out, Justice. By consequent, these economic statements may constitute a precedent is rational so you can get to the conception of an economic purpose that is coated on civil process, that is, an economic spit civil process. It should be noted, in the conception of Neo-institutionalist economics, the new force that assumed Development Economics. Given the importance to the consumer market and even represent the effects for the economy and for the development of a country - and not just for the market itself, as your balance is reflected significantly in the economy - is essential to foster favorable conditions so that the market is stable and growing. This will certainly depend, among other things, the legal and judicial protection given to consumers, especially protection through the guardianship process (both individual and collective). the Judiciary, with those guardianships to protect consumers and users provide, indirectly, its contribution to socio-economic development of a society benefited from these civil process protection.The guardianships, as a tool that the State has to Justice citizens, regardless of their redistributive and social reintegration in applying legal rules to factual situations, has assumed, modern, built-in helper of the economy, with precisely the adjuvant role of socio-economic, that security entity may provide in the social context. The Civil Procedure Law should be incorporated the newest studies institutionalist economics in an interdisciplinary scientific effort to better reflect and search for solutions that make the justice system, agile and efficient. The justiciability can be an effective way to promote human rights. We assume position between those who argue that the right to development, including social rights, for example, basic education, basic health, homeless assistance and the right to access to justice are indispensable members and likely to become in final individual subjective right. We advocate, therefore, that it is perfectly possible and the justiciability of economic, social and cultural rights is also possible the justiciability of the right to development at the present stage of human rights. The lower courts have protected quite emphatic and in many cases some of these third generation rights, such as consumer and user of appearance and environmental, not unlike the right to development although it is very difficult check a corresponding law. Consider that the protection and defense of the justiciability of downl has gradually been accepted in many democratic countries based not only doctrinal but also jurisprudence. And in the same way, we can foresee that the right to development, little by little, is following the same path from those already fully justiciable rights and protected by the judiciary. Surely that today there is a new Justice in Brazil, by the powers that be, have signed two agreements for state Republicans justice system more accessible, responsive and effective, ie a Justice better, more democratic, more efficient, which has demanded the release of 18 (eighteen) new laws, new measures taken by the Brazilian President and the President of the Court of Justice major, the Supreme Federal Tribunal STF. The World Bank has sought to exploit the STJ development model to assist in the modernization of the courts of Latin America, Caribbean and Africa, in the area of cooperation known as Sud-Sud. These partnerships with institutions in developing countries have been evaluated for this important international body development policies. The creation of the CNJ has performed in important national changes within ethical and administrative modernization. Suffice it to mention, as examples ethical, the following: 1) the term nepotism in the Brazilian Judiciary, 2 º) setting limits on salaries of judges, desembargadores and ministers of courts and the elimination of additional wages that significantly increased values that the State Pagava the judges. It is perfectly possible to defend the idea that, if the State interferes practice to protect and guarantee human rights or fundamental rights, through the implementation of these rights, is therefore contributing to human development and indirectly to the socio -economic. Inserted in this perspective, we propose that in granting an injunction to protect the physical integrity of a woman, and sometimes greater protection of human rights, which is life itself, the State Jurisdictional be adopting, in particular, measures that promote human development and considering these state actions to collective boundaries also socio-economic development

Lebanon faces serious challenges from a volatile security environment and spillovers from the ongoing Syrian conflict which pose serious risks to an already fragile internal political situation. Security incidents have become increasingly more common and the volatile security environment is weakening consumer and investor sentiments and adversely affecting tourism, a central contributor to economic growth and employment in Lebanon. The influx of Syrian refugees to Lebanon persists, with officially registered refugees reaching close to 1 million (i.e., 21.6 percent of Lebanon's pre-conflict population), which poses significant fiscal, health and educational challenges.

Swiss Confederation ; Ukraine has extensive public infrastructure inherited from the Soviet times but much of it has fallen into disrepair over the past decades and needs major rehabilitation or replacement so that growth may continue. Creating fiscal space for investing more is one of the critical tasks that facing the country, but a constrained fiscal space together with the use of investments as a stimulus for growth call for more efficiency in public investment management practices. There are a number of fundamental issues that need to be addressed if Ukraine is to make progress in its reform ambitions for public investment management (PIM). The most significant are: (1) most projects avoid scrutiny due to loopholes in classification (lack of definition of a public investment project); (2) there is no effective economic appraisal and appraisal review procedures in place due to limited human resource (HR) capacity, and no common technical standards; (3) the PIM system does not seem to block new projects from entering the budget but allows ministries to delay ongoing ones and squeeze in new ones; and (4) lack of strategic guidance with which to prioritize complicates project selection. One of the fundamental building blocks of a sound PIM system is a clear, legal definition of what counts as a public investment project and what does not. It should be pointed out that this already high discrepancy is only a comparative measure of input values. Developing projects that are output and performance driven should yield even greater efficiencies. Between 2000 and 2008, Ukraine was an average growth performer in a fast growing region, with gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaging 7 percent. As the global financial crisis hit the Ukrainian economy it contracted by 15 percent in 2009, exposing its underlying macroeconomic and structural vulnerabilities. As a result of the insufficient structural transformation and impact of the economic crisis, Ukraine now faces substantial fiscal pressures that threaten economic stability and growth. The Government of Ukraine recognized the need for a modern public financial management (PFM) system and put considerable emphasis on several aspects of PFM reforms. Training for the development of capacity in the PIM system is tricky in Ukraine. It is becoming clear that due to the dynamic nature of the Ukrainian civil service, officials are rapidly moving from one area of the Administration to another.

This report reviews the status of Maghreb countries' economic integration with the world, with the Arab world, and within the Maghreb itself. It focuses on trade in goods and services, labor and capital flows, financial integration and cross-border infrastructure integration. It discusses the potential benefits of and key constraints to greater integration. The focus on trade liberalization with the European Union (EU) provides an opportunity for individual Maghreb countries to lock in policies that would eventually help them harmonize policies within their own region. The same argument can be made regarding accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Maghreb countries would reap significant additional benefits if, in parallel to reforms undertaken to improve trade liberalization with Europe, they improved conditions for streamlined trade among themselves. There is significant potential for trade in services in the financial sector, transportation and logistics, and communications and information, among other sectors. According to some studies, comprehensive services reforms that involve increased competition and regulatory streamlining would yield benefits that are at least twice the magnitude of those achieved through tariff removal alone.

This paper analyzes the relations between leadership, the policy making process, policies and institutions, and development results in Chile. It starts with a stylized model for the dynamics of development that derives a Kuznets type relation between growth and distribution of income, determined by the quality of leadership, the policy making process, institutions, and policies. This framework is applied to Chile, identifying the features of the policy making process and leadership that allowed for continuation of growth enhancing reform, with a stronger focus on equity goals, since the transition to democracy. As a result of three decades of reforms, Chile has recorded a quantum leap in economic growth, which is traced down to specific reforms. Yet Chile's equity experience is much more mixed: poverty has declined massively but income remains highly concentrated, a likely result of shortcomings in the quality of education and in labor markets. The paper reviews the major risks to the country's future development pace and points out the main reform challenges faced by policy makers.

This paper analyzes the economic effects of agricultural price and merchandise trade policies around the world as of 2004 on global markets, net farm incomes, and national and regional economic welfare and poverty, using the global economy wide Linkage model, new estimates of agricultural price distortions for developing countries, and poverty elasticity's approach. It addresses two questions: to what extent are policies as of 2004 still reducing rewards from farming in developing countries and thereby adding to inequality across countries in farm household incomes? Are they depressing value added more in primary agriculture than in the rest of the economy of developing countries, and earnings of unskilled workers more than of owners of other factors of production, thereby potentially contributing to inequality and poverty within developing countries (given that farm incomes are well below non-farm incomes in most developing countries and that agriculture there is intensive in the use of unskilled labor)? Results are presented for the key countries and regions of the world and for the world as a whole. They reveal that, by moving to free markets, income inequality between countries will be reduced at least slightly, all but one-sixth of the gains to developing countries will come from agricultural policy reform, unskilled workers in developing countries the majority of whom work on farms will benefit most from reform, net farm incomes in developing countries will rise by 6 percent compared with 2 percent for non-agricultural value added, and the number of people surviving on less than US$1 a day will drop 3 percent globally.

Many analysts consider that lack of security is a major obstacle to growth in Colombia. This paper identifies a structural downturn in economic growth-of nearly two percentage points per year-as a result of the increase in illicit crops and crime rates after 1980. A decline in total factor productivity has been the key channel linking crime and economic growth. Political upheavals and high levels of inequality and poverty motivated the adoption of a new constitution in 1991. The constitution mandated additional fiscal expenditures to curb social tensions. Major progress has been made in terms of public safety and, to a lesser extent, in the provision of health and education. However, long?run growth will continue to be constrained by inadequate transport infrastructure and low international trade volumes.

Real Gross Domestic product (GDP) in Thailand is projected to grow at 5.0 percent in 2008, driven by recovery in domestic demand. The key reason for the strengthened growth this year is the higher confidence of both consumers and investors with the return of democracy and the election of a new government late in 2007. Last year's better than-expected growth of 4.8 percent was due to buoyant export performance throughout the year even as domestic consumption and investment declined amidst the uncertain political environment and sudden shifts in policy. But this year, the opposite is likely. The external current account may weaken slightly in 2008, as the global downturn slows exports and robust domestic demand stimulates imports. Private investment should recover after its slump last year. Recovery in private consumption and investment could be fragile as there remain large down side risks to their growth, but could be mitigated by additional fiscal stimulus. In addition to the short-term measures have been introduced by the government to mitigate risks this year and next, longer term measures are needed to sustain Thailand's growth and poverty alleviation.

In its military campaign in Gaza, Israel faces a seemingly endless list of alleged human rights violations. International monitors argue the Israel Defense Forces have starved Gazans, targeted journalists attempting to cover the carnage, tortured detainees, and attacked hospitals full of wounded civilians.
The U.S. — a passionate backer of civilian protections in Ukraine — has struggled to find the right way to address these claims while still standing by its long-time partner. The bombing has been "indiscriminate," says President Joe Biden, but perhaps it will improve tomorrow. Killing more than 10,000 women and children in two months is not "genocide," argues White House spokesperson John Kirby, but Hamas' brutal Oct. 7 attacks were.
If human rights are fundamentally a matter of world consensus, then what does it tell us that the United States threatens to cast a second veto against a United Nations Security Council resolution begging for a humanitarian suspension of fighting? What does it mean when a supposed champion of human rights seems to jettison them when it becomes inconvenient? For that matter, why should Israel care about human rights when it perceives its fight as existential?
Kenneth Roth has a unique perspective on these questions. Roth, considered by many to be a dean of the human rights movement, spent nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch before stepping down last year to become a visiting professor at Princeton University. Under his leadership, HRW drew flak for, among other things, declaring Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories to be apartheid, all while documenting in meticulous detail abuses committed by Palestinian groups, including Hamas.
RS spoke with Roth to get his thoughts on human rights at a time of crisis. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
RS: How would you rate the Biden administration's handling of the Gaza crisis from a human rights perspective?
Roth: The Biden administration has been far too deferential to the Israeli Government, despite the pretty clear commission of war crimes in Gaza. And while the administration has pushed to ameliorate some of those war crimes — by pressing for humanitarian access, by urging greater attention to avoiding civilian casualties — that rhetorical push has not been backed by the use of the leverage that the administration has that might have really put pressure on the Israeli government to stop, whether that would be withholding or conditioning ongoing arm sales or military assistance, or even allowing a Security Council resolution to go forward.RS: What would a better approach look like?Roth: The initial problem was that Biden pretty unconditionally wrapped himself in the Israeli government's response to the horrible October 7 attacks by Hamas. If you look at his initial comments, while there were caveats written in about the need to respect humanitarian law, there was no emotional punch behind them. It was pretty clear that Biden simply stood with Israel and was giving it a green light to proceed with its military response to Hamas without much effort, at least during the first few weeks, to ensure that that response really did comply with humanitarian law. So I think the Israeli government got the message that the references to humanitarian law were necessary for certain audiences, but that the administration's heart was not in them.
RS: Would a more forceful form of messaging at the start have led to different results?
Roth: Obviously, it's hard to know the counterfactual. But the U.S. government, which has the greatest leverage of any external actor, didn't really use that leverage to ensure that its periodic rhetorical commitment to the need to respect humanitarian law was matched by its much more forceful embrace of the Israeli military response to Hamas.
RS: I've seen some reporting that the State Department has done internal inquiries as to whether U.S. officials could be legally complicit if Israel is found to have committed war crimes in Gaza. Do you have any thoughts on that question?
Roth: Well, they could be. Biden's references to the Israeli military conducting indiscriminate bombing were clearly not just a verbal slip. It probably reflected the internal conversations that the administration has. The second one even seems to have been somewhat deliberate. And the significance of that is that indiscriminate bombardment is a war crime. As any administration lawyer would know, continuing to provide weapons to a force that is engaged in war crimes can make the sender guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes.
That is not some crazy, wacko theory. That was the basis on which former Liberian President Charles Taylor was convicted by an internationally backed tribunal, the so-called Special Court for Sierra Leone, for providing weapons to the Sierra Leonean rebel group known as the Revolutionary United Front, a group that was notorious for chopping off the limbs of its victims. Because Taylor kept providing arms in return for the RUF's diamonds while he knew the RUF was committing these war crimes, this internationally-backed tribunal found him guilty of aiding and abetting, convicted him, and sentenced him to 50 years in prison, which he is currently serving in a British prison.
RS: My next question is a little tricky, but I'm curious how you approach it. Israel claims that this war is a fight for its very survival. Why should a country that views itself as being in that position care about respecting human rights?Roth: Well, I think the question is why should it care about adhering to international humanitarian law and protocols. It's worth noting that humanitarian law was not drafted by a bunch of human rights activists and peaceniks. This was drafted by the world's leading militaries. It was designed for war, for situations where governments often feel that they are existentially at risk, and these were the limits that the world's leading militaries imposed on themselves. Israel has signed on to these standards, and it claims to abide by them. It has many capable lawyers who could be applying them. It just isn't applying them.
It probably requires a certain psychological analysis to figure out why, but some of the signals being sent from the top indicate a willingness to disregard the requirements of humanitarian law. When you have Defense Minister [Yoav] Galant referring to the residents of Gaza as "human animals," when you have [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu invoking the biblical story of Amalek in which there's a divine injunction to not spare the men, women, children, or animals, these are not-so-subtle signals that the top political and military leadership in Israel doesn't care that much about civilian casualties. This has seemed to have manifested itself in the indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks that the Israeli military has carried out in Gaza.
RS: It seems to me that focusing on war crimes or potential war crimes can sometimes lead to really bad policy outcomes. In this case, Israel is really spotlighting Hamas' alleged war crimes. You think back to the war in Iraq, where there was a lot of highlighting of Saddam's alleged war crimes. How can advocacy for human rights avoid supporting unfettered militarism?
Roth: First, I think it's important to note that war crimes by one side do not justify war crimes by the other. If a warring party could cite the other side's war crimes, you would quickly have no more Geneva Conventions because allegations of war crimes are often made in the passions of conflict. The fact that some people have committed war crimes — in this case, both sides — doesn't justify that others resort to criminal conduct. Now, in terms of military action, few people contest that Israel had every right to respond to Hamas' military attack. It was an extraordinarily lethal military attack. It was ruthless, with widespread murder, rape, abduction, and indiscriminate bombardment. So with an attack of that sort, no one should be surprised that the Israeli government responds. The only real question was, will it respond consistent with humanitarian law? Or would it flout that law?RS: What does all this mean — especially the fact of the U.S. seemingly taking a step back in advocacy for the protection of human rights — what does all this mean for the state of human rights today?
Roth: It is harmful because the U.S. government is such a powerful voice, and when it does seem to make an exception in its human rights advocacy for a close ally like Israel, it discredits the U.S. as a voice for human rights around the world. Now, I should say this is not the only instance of inconsistency on the part of Washington. We're seeing it as well as the Biden administration tries to build alliances to oppose Russia's invasion of Ukraine or to contain China. So while the administration has spoken numerous times about its fundamental commitment to human rights, it's been a very inconsistent commitment. And that inconsistency is probably most visible in the Middle East, which has been essentially a black hole in the administration's human rights policy. It's very difficult to be so permissive of human rights violations in one region of the world and have a whole lot of credibility on human rights in other parts of the world.
This means that one of those powerful voices we have has weakened itself. It's not the first time that has happened. Under [former President Donald] Trump, the U.S. essentially abandoned any pretense of enforcing human rights. Prior administrations have had comparable inconsistencies. The U.S. still has been able to be a useful voice for human rights, despite these inconsistencies, in some cases, but it is a much weaker voice than if it had really been principled and consistent.
RS: How do you see the future of the push to get states to protect human rights? Are we in a moment of crisis that galvanizes change?
Roth: If you look at the various efforts to uphold human rights, they've been quite vigorous in certain cases. There has been a very strong response to Russian war crimes in Ukraine, complete with multiple General Assembly resolutions, the Human Rights Council standing up a commission of inquiry, the International Criminal Court launching an immediate investigation and actually charging Putin and one of his aides with war crimes.
A place where it's been weaker has been, say, China's crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, where we came within two votes of putting on the agenda a discussion of then-UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet's very strong report on what she called possible crimes against humanity. But we didn't even get that agenda item, so that's a place where the world has been much weaker.
But there's been greater mobilization, greater willingness to speak out on a range of other situations, whether that be Myanmar or Iran, Saudi abuses in Yemen for a time, Sudan, Ethiopia for a time, Venezuela, Nicaragua. So the idea that because there's this black hole in U.S. human rights policy, therefore nothing can get done, that's just not true. A lot gets done, but the defense of human rights is weaker because the U.S. has been an inconsistent supporter of the effort.

The Limpopo Province is one of the nine Provinces in South Africa, located in the far north of the country, bordered by Gauteng (south), Mpumalanga (south-east) and North West (south-west) Provinces along its southern border. It links the country to the southern African Democratic Countries, via Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, along its northern borders both economically and hydrological. The Province is characterised by insufficient and highly variable rainfall patterns upon which the agricultural sector depends on, prone to extreme climate events (such as drought and flood), high concentration of rural poor and socioeconomic inequalities. Water scarcity and inefficient available water use are some principle constraints evident from low agricultural productivity. Limpopo smallholder farmers (LSF) are faced with numerous challenges, ranging from resource access to agriculturally marginal farmlands located in the former demarcated homelands in agro-ecologies characterized by erratic rainfall, poor soil fertility, low crop productivity, degraded landscapes, and lack of irrigation and limited land for expansion. Climate change is projected to be an additional stressor, threatening small-scale agricultural farmers' productivity and livelihoods. A primary concern addressed by this thesis is to generate scientifically based information that can help to enhance the farmers' ability to respond effectively to current and future climate regimes. The overall aim of this study was to develop and evaluate climate smart agriculture (CSA) strategies for attaining resilience and adaptation pathways in smallholder farming system to climate variability and change. CSA is an approach that transforms and changes the direction of agricultural development under human-induced climate change. This aim was addressed through the following specific objectives:  to carry out field survey- and desktop-analysis to investigate whether the LSF perceived past and future climates are in agreement with scientific evidence, and how farmers' inclination to adopt climate smart adaptation practices is influenced by past climate experiences, as well as their constraints and future climate concerns.  to conduct field experimental trails to evaluate effects of climate smart practices on soil moisture and maize yields, then used to parameterise, calibrate and validate the daily time-step APSIM model, and lastly upscale them to sub-catchment level to test their effects across different soils, climates and locations by coupling the APSIM model with geographical information system. This was done to test if increasing surface residue application leads to higher soil-water retention, and thus maize yield; and if insitu rainwater harvesting (IRWH) in combination with conservation agriculture leads to higher yields than conventional practice.  to assess the likely impacts and opportunities of LSF's crop management practices under changing environmental conditions, and  to determine when incremental adaptation is not an option and transformational adaptation might be suitable or needed to address risk and vulnerability of Limpopo Small-scale agriculture under climate future projections. CSA practices aimed at reducing small-scale farmers' exposure to climate-related risks and increasing their productivity, while improving their resilience and adaptive capacity to climate variability and change were identified. The practices were selected on bases of incorporating an integrated soil, water and crop management strategies approach, to increase and sustain crop productivity by increasing water availability, crop access to soil-water and soil-water holding capacity. A structured survey questionnaire was used to collate data on across 6 villages (n = 201) to better understand the LSFs practices, experiences and perceptions, with emphasis on climate variability and change. The data was initially used to determine if the LSFs understood impact of climate variability and change, thereafter, utilized the collected information to determine what influences the LSFs willingness to adopt climate-smart adaptation practices. This was archived through a multiple-mediation analysis of farmers past climate experiences, adoption of climate-smart adaptation practices, their future concerns regarding extreme climate, and physical and socio-economic adaptation constraints, presented in Chapter 2. The LSF indicated that they have noticed changes in climate (citing hotter conditions and shifts in rainfall onsets) and perceived that temperature are more likely to continue to increase in far distant future while the rainfall will decline. Their observations and perceptions were found to be consistent with historical climate records, and climate model projections, particularly temperature regimes. The multiple-mediation analysis suggests that past climate experiences of LSF directly influenced willingness to adopt climate-smart practices, and indirectly by concerns about future extreme conditions, economic and physical adaptation constraints. Summary 104 In the third chapter, field experiments data were conducted over two seasons (i.e. 2013/14 and 2014/15) at University of Limpopo Syferkuil Research Farm in Limpopo Province, on effects of tillage practices on maize crop production are presented. The practices considered were (i) tillage practices (i.e. IRWH, no-till (NT) and conservation tillage (CT) practices), (ii) surface organic mulch cover, (iii) planting dates and (iv) maize cultivars. IRWH is documented in literature as mitigating dry spells by increasing soil-water storage and improving crop production. Application of mulch cover is linked with reducing unproductive water loss via evaporation. Integration of both tillage practices and surface mulch cover improves infiltration and hence increases soil-water storage required particularly during critical maize crop growing periods, such as vegetative and reproductive growth stages. The two seasons offered an opportunity for the comparison of field experimental treatments, with the start of El Nino during the second growing season and the above normal rainfall in the first season. In the first season yields there were no treatment differences, with average maize grain and biomass yields of 5 and 10 ton per ha, respectively, while in second season the yields were half that of the first and treatment effects were found with high yields from NT tillage practice, followed by IRWH and then CT. Further, maize productivity increased with increments in surface mulch levels. The soil-water and plant available water in the first season were high for NT followed by CT and then IRWH, whereas, for the second season were high for CT followed by IRWH and then NT. In the field experiment, during below normal rainfall, NT performed slightly better than IRWH. This observation suggests that these practices are likely to be more of benefit during dry spells and/or below average rainfall years. The data from the field experiment and secondary data were used to parameterize, calibrate and validate a daily process-based farming systems model, APSIM - Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator. The model calibration indicated a positive strong relationship between predicted and observed maize grain yields and biomass. The validation analysis suggests that the model is capable of simulating soil-water, biomass (r = 0.82 and RMSE of 572 kg.ha-1) and grain yields (r =0.76 and RMSE = 2 577 kg.ha-1). In order to simulate the effects of IRWH on hydrological processes and crop productivity APSIM was configured with a runoff generation area and a basin collection along a soil profile. This concept was adopted from the PARCHED-Thirst model and yielded a strong correlation with observed data. The strong correlation between model simulations and observed were also found in validation analysis of effects of CT and NT tillage practices. The calibrated model was used for climate impact and adaptation strategies analysis. To perform the analysis over the Limpopo Province, in unmeasured or tested locations and environmental conditions - an APSIM-GIS coupling approach commonly used in hydrological modelling, was adopted in this research for scaling up the validated model's farming systems to sub-catchment scale, for simulating the tillage practices effects on agro-hydrological responses across varying climate and soils over different locations and time period. Findings from the simulations based on APSIM-GIS coupling over maize producing areas in the Province on effects of tillage practices with different surface mulch levels on agrohydrological responses, suggested the available soil-water content increased with increments in surface residue, but these positive effects were negated in some sub-catchments with high rainfall and/or through drainage losses. A similar trend as soil-water content was observed for maize grain yield, but with even more sub-catchments experiencing higher yields, and some decrease with increments in residue application levels mostly in high rainfall areas. The combination of both tillage and surface residue yielded higher maize grain yields in IRWH combination and less so in NT. In order to select an ensemble of representative General Circulation Model (GCM) suitable for assessing future climate scenarios, GCM's similar to those presented in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment report were used, and only those available at daily time-step and empirically downscaled (to climate station level) were selected for inclusion in the fourth chapter. Further, the GCMs scenarios values used were from the A2 emission (low mitigation) storylines forcing over the Limpopo Province. Then, a set of these GCMs scenario values representing four random locations assumed to representative of the Province were selected. The selection process was based the GCMs performance in predicting past climate conditions, followed by their representation of a range of future climate projections, with precipitation as dominant determinant factor owing to all GCM projections suggesting a similar direction in temperature regimes. Crop management scenarios, developed from LSF survey data, were surface mulch application only for poor-resourced farmers, whereas, for better-resourced farmers both nitrogen fertiliser and surface mulch application, both farmer groups with early and late sowing dates. The practices identified were different sowing dates, N fertilizer and surface mulch application, and interaction effects of the Summary 105 practices. These were used for climate change impacts assessment of LSF system across maize growing sub-catchments over the Province, using the calibrated coupled APSIM-GIS modelling system. Two climate projections periods, i.e. 1971-1990 and 2046-2065, were used and findings from the assessment indicated that an increased fertiliser use leading to higher soil fertility would increase yields for present and future projections. The incorporation of surface mulch effect lead to significant declines in simulated grain yields (over 90 %) mainly in high rainfall areas. Early sowing dates had significant effect on potential maize yields with 48 % increase, over 58 % of the Province. The interaction effects of the management scenarios are likely to result in up to 17 % higher yields. Therefore, N fertilization should be part of the practices that allow higher productivity even under less favourable climate. Poor-resourced farmers' potential maize yields under projected future climate will be negatively impacted, with some gains arising from those who plant early and do not apply surface mulch. Better-resourced farmers were shown to have an opportunity to capitalise on climate change impacts, compared to their counterparts mainly due to application of N fertilizer. The current poor farmer management practices are not resilient to prevailing climates and are postulated in climate futures leading to significant low crop productivity. Soil fertility, planting dates and soil-water availability, in particular, were identified as factors influencing productivity in the Province. Projected increase in temperature was found to be the main contributors to low or reduce productivity, even with wetter future projections from the GCMs. The incremental, systemic and transformational adaptation modes, identified from literature as likely climate adaptation pathways, represented by adopt of short duration cultivars, mainstreaming supplementary irrigation and shifting from cereal crop to livestock ranching as adaptation measures (respectively). These adaptation modes were used to assessing plausible optimal adaptation phase for LSF by mid-century, using median GCM and coupled APSIM-GIS modelling approach. The findings indicate that transformational adaptation might be required much earlier than suggested from literature to be towards end of the century, as some areas are already experiencing extreme climate risks and vulnerabilities that might not be alleviated by incremental adaptation measures, as a result of increase temperatures exceeding the historical variability thresholds. Further, the results suggest that for the beneficial effects of climate-smart practices to optimize agricultural productivity, they would need to be targeted and adapted to a specific biophysical condition. The traditional cropping systems assessed in this study indicated spatially varied potential gains and losses in yields, however, farmers can capitalise on change climate by adopting better cropping practices and using seasonal forecast linked sowing dates. Incremental adaptation measures, such as farm management, are suggested not to be sufficient for addressing projected climate impacts at mid-century. This is expected to occur in certain areas and/or systems, particularly specialised cropping systems, when the climate-related risks and vulnerabilities far outweighs the adaptive response, and thus requiring transformational adaptation. Such transformational adaptation, in terms of landuse change has already observed in the region with traditional crop farmers opting for ranching and game farming, and large scale adoptions of irrigation.