At the Gleneagles summit in July 2005, the heads of state from the G-8 countries - the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom - called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the African Development Bank to cancel 100 percent of their debt claims on the world's poorest countries. The world's richest countries have agreed in principle to forgive roughly $55 billion dollars owed by the world's poorest nations. This article considers the wisdom of the proposal for debt forgiveness, from the standpoint of stimulating economic growth in highly indebted countries. In the 1980s, debt relief under the "Brady Plan" helped to restore investment and growth in a number of middle-income developing countries. However, the debt relief plan for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) launched by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1996 has had little impact on either investment or growth in the recipient countries. We will explore the key differences between the countries targeted by these two debt relief schemes and argue that the Gleneagles proposal for debt relief is, at best, likely to have little effect at all. Debt relief is unlikely to help the world's poorest countries because, unlike the middle-income Brady countries, their main economic difficulty is not debt overhang, but an absence of functional economic institutions that provide the foundation for profitable investment and growth. We will show that debt relief may be more valuable for Brady-like middle-income countries than for low-income ones because of how it leverages the private sector.

In the wake of Yeltsin's unexpected resignation on 31 December 1999 and the apparent inevitability of Putin's electoral victory in the March 2000 presidential election, the 1999 December parliamentary elections already seem like ancient history. For the analyst of Russian politics, however, Russia's Duma vote offers a new wealth of data that will help reveal important trends in electoral behavior, party development, and institutional consolidation. In this article, written just days after the vote, I cannot pretend to offer definitive conclusions about the election's consequences for any of these important issues. My aim is rather to suggest some tentative hypotheses that may help to guide future discussion and research.

This book illuminates the central role played by international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) in the emergence and development of a comprehensive world polity. The contributors argue that the enormous proliferation of INGOs since 1875including international environmental organizations, human rights groups, bodies formed to regulate technical standards, and economic development organizations, among othersboth reflects and contributes to the spread of global institutions and cultural principles based on models of rationality, individualism, progress, and universalism. The contributors contrast this world-polity perspective to other approaches to understanding globalization, including realist and neo-realist analyses in the field of international relations, and world-system theory and interstate competition theory in sociology.

The volume considers transnational organizing as a historical process of the creation of global rules and norms, changing over time, that have identifiable effects on social organization at the national and local levels. The chapters provide empirical support for this approach, identifying specific mechanisms that translate global cultural assumptions and prescriptions into local social activity, such as the creation of state agencies, the formulation of government policies, and the emergence of social movements. The first part of the book deals with social movement INGOs, including environmental groups, womens rights organizations, the Esperanto movement, and the International Red Cross. The second part treats technical and economic bodies, including the International Organization for Standardization, population policy groups, development organizations, and international professional science associations.

This book provides provocative material for training to foster dialogue about development strategies and policies in education. It is intended as a departure point for the building of a solid research foundation and the development of research capacity for the creation of a sound knowledge base for an education system.

What impact does culture have on state-formation and public policy? How do states affect national and local cultures? How is the ongoing cultural turn in theory reshaping our understanding of the Western and modernizing states, long viewed as the radiant core of a universal, context-free rationality? This eagerly awaited volume brings together pioneering scholars who reexamine the sociology of the state and historical processes of state-formation in light of developments in cultural analysis.

The volume first examines some of the unsatisfying ways in which cultural processes have been discussed in social science literature on the state. It demonstrates new and sophisticated approaches to understanding both the role culture plays in the formation of states and the state's influence on broad cultural developments. The book includes theoretical essays and empirical studies; the latter group of essays are concerned with early modern European nations, non-European countries undergoing political modernization, and twentieth-century Western nation-states. A wide range of perspectives are presented in order to delineate this emergent area of research. Together the essays constitute an agenda-setting work for the social sciences.

Globalization and the role of the state are issues at the forefront of contemporary debates. With editors and contributors of outstanding academic repututation this exciting new book presents an unconventional and radical perspective. Revealing that states do still matter despite the vigour of international capital flows and the omnipresence of the global market, the chapters in this collection controversially highlight that how states matter depends upon their differing roles in the global economy and geopolitical system.

The acceptance of human rights and minority rights, the increasing role of international financial institutions, and globalization have led many observers to question the continued viability of the sovereign state. Here a leading expert challenges this conclusion. Stephen Krasner contends that states have never been as sovereign as some have supposed. Throughout history, rulers have been motivated by a desire to stay in power, not by some abstract adherence to international principles. Organized hypocrisy--the presence of longstanding norms that are frequently violated--has been an enduring attribute of international relations

Political leaders have usually but not always honored international legal sovereignty, the principle that international recognition should be accorded only to juridically independent sovereign states, while treating Westphalian sovereignty, the principle that states have the right to exclude external authority from their own territory, in a much more provisional way. In some instances violations of the principles of sovereignty have been coercive, as in the imposition of minority rights on newly created states after the First World War or the successor states of Yugoslavia after 1990; at other times cooperative, as in the European Human Rights regime or conditionality agreements with the International Monetary Fund.

The author looks at various issues areas to make his argument: minority rights, human rights, sovereign lending, and state creation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Differences in national power and interests, he concludes, not international norms, continue to be the most powerful explanation for the behavior of states.

Extensively revised since the first edition was published in 1989, this analytically balanced and empirically rich volume thoroughly examines the historical, cultural, social, economic, political, and international factors that affect both the prospects for and the nature of political democracy in Latin America.

The book reflects improvements in democratic trends in some countries, but also the erosion of democratic advances in others, with substantial malaise regarding key political actors and institutions and continuing concerns about the impact on democratic consolidation of economic constraints, weak states, judicial inefficacy, and high degrees of inequality. A comprehensive introduction precedes the nine country chapters, which follow a similar format to facilitate comparisons.

Democratization in Africa examines the state of progress of democracy in Africa at the end of the 1990s. The past decade's "third wave" of democratization, the contributors argue, has been characterized by retreats as well as advances. In some cases, newly established democratic orders have devolved into pseudo-democracies while, in other cases, superficial changes have been used as a cosmetic screen for continuation of often brutal regimes. The volume makes clear, however, that political liberalization is making significant headway.

The first section of the book ("Assessing Africa's Third Wave") offers several broad analytical surveys of democratic change and electoral processes in the 48 sub-Saharan African states. Frequent abuses are noted, but several contributors find room for guarded optimism. The second section ("South Africa: An African Success?") focuses on the dramatic developments in South Africa, the most advanced democracy on the continent but one faced with enormous challenges in the aftermath of apartheid. Essays in this section examine such issues as the role of nongovernmental organizations in the new political order, the ongoing and linked problems of racial and economic division, the demographics of public opinion on democracy, and the viability of the country's new constitution. The third section of the book ("African Ambiguities") considers more closely several other African states-Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, the Gambia, and Nigeria-all at different crossroads in their progress toward democracy.

From the Introduction:

"For the past three decades, there has been no lack of reasons to be pessimistic about Africa's future. But a more balanced reading is called for . . . There is significantly greater political freedom and more space for civil society in Africa today than a decade ago. Even as some states have disintegrated, others are moving forward to reconstruction. There is also a new ideological and intellectual climate. Unlike during the false start of the first liberation that came with decolonization, Africa today evinces a new political sobriety that is hardened (and even jaundiced) by experience, but not without hope."

Trading relations in Vietnam's emerging private sector are shaped by two market frictions: the difficulty of locating trading partners and the absence of legal enforcement of contracts. Examining relational contracting, we find that a firm trusts its customer enough to offer credit when the customer finds it hard to locate an alternative supplier. A longer duration of trading relationship is associated with larger credit, as is prior information gathering. Customers identified through business networks receive more credit. These network effects are enduring, suggesting that networks are used to sanction defaulting customers.