Deregulation and green innovation: Does cultural reform pilot project matter

Green innovation is an important driving force for sustainable development. However China often imposes a wide variety of government regulations on green innovation One important reason behind these government regulations is the confinement of the cultural market. However, does this confinement actually affect the green innovation in China? By employing a 278 Chinese cities' dataset, we examine the effect of cultural reform pilot project on green innovation. Through the spatial difference-in-difference approach with the time trend, our results show that cultural reform pilot project (CRPP) is a significant determinist affecting the green innovation in China. Specifically, implementing CRPP promote green innovation in pilot cities which resulting from labour productivity exaltation, marketization rate increasing. The CRPP also have a spatial ripple effect which resulting from economic density promotion. Furthermore, the green innovation promotion is greater in cities which participating into World Technopolis Association, being included in the National Historical and Cultural Cities List and having high political hierarchy. Our conclusions still robustness after adopting a series of tests and alternative analyses. This paper not only provide evidence for the further implementation of cultural reform pilot project nationwide, but also provide policy implications on sustainable development in the post Covid-19 era. © 2023 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland

Marketization in Crisis: The Political Economy of COVID-19 and the Unmaking of Public Transport in Stockholm.

While measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 disturbed both global and local markets, some commentators also argued that the pandemic could be seen as the beginning of the end of neoliberalism. Although neoliberal reforms have come under pressure, little is known about the implications of COVID-19 in or across specific sectors. Scaling down the rich theoretical-historical debates about neoliberalism to the regional level, we study the impact of COVID-19 on the marketized public transport system in Stockholm, Sweden. During COVID-19, ridership dropped as did ticket revenues, which put the market under operational and financial distress. Drawing on a discussion of the norms and techniques of marketization, we probe how the contracted bus operators responded to the pandemic, how they tried to save the market from collapsing, and whether the measures taken suggest an organized move away from neoliberal policies. Adding to recent debates of COVID-19 and neoliberalism's longevity, we conclude that although the norms underpinning marketization remained unquestioned, the techniques were partly re-evaluated in the midst of the global crisis as a way to protect the established neoliberal policies from falling apart.

Interview with Samantha King Medicinal Capitalism: Beyond Cancer, Health, Pain and Meat

The interview with professor Samantha King, the author of the famous Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), reveals her current studies within the field, of cultural politics of health, sport and the body. Samantha introduces her research group in Queen's University that critically looks at the healthification of market and political processes when social control, inequality and power asymmetry are pursued under the super value of health. She describes how her team uses the genealogical method by M. Foucault to reconstruct the dynamics of historical, ideological, economic, social agendas that shape local judgments about fruitful cultural frames for corporate charity, medicalized performance in professional sport, and painkiller use by people from different social classes. King's Group studies criticize discourses about individual responsibility and good citizenship as those that may welcome getting pills into bodies instead of transforming the economic and social contexts out of which the disease arises. In the interview, Samantha traces the changes in anti-cancer philanthropy in recent years, comments on the political struggles behind the COVID-19 pandemic and points to the the hidden layers of the protein supplements market challenged by the post-humanistic ban on eating animals, emerging laboratory-meat supply, and ecological concern. The interview with Samantha King as well as her scientific articles will be useful for those who reflect on the incorporation of the human body and subjectivity into capitalistic production in different geopolitical realms. © 2022 National Research University Higher School of Economics. All rights reserved.

Fiscal Pressure and Public–Private Partnership Investment: Based on Evidence from Prefecture-Level Cities in China

Public–private partnership (PPP) policy is essential to alleviating the local government debt burden and improving resource allocation efficiency. This paper empirically examines the impact of fiscal pressure on PPP investment in Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2014 to 2019 using the ordinary least-squares (OLS) module. Moreover, we also investigate how fiscal pressure influences PPP investment and test the influenced mechanism from other perspectives. The results show the following. (1) Fiscal pressure on the government has a significant positive effect on PPP investment at the prefectural level. (2) The marketization process is the mediated effect of the relationship between fiscal pressure and PPP investment. Fiscal pressure will stimulate the regional marketization process, thus promoting PPP investment. (3) Fiscal pressure has a significant positive effect on PPP investment in the middle region, while the effect is not significant in the eastern and western regions. Meanwhile, the effect is not significant in central cities, but there is a significant positive effect in ordinary cities. (4) The effect of fiscal pressure on PPP investment is not significant in the private reward mode of government payment, but there is a significant positive effect in the mode of user payment and feasibly insufficient subsidies. Our studies could also provide practical suggestions for sustainable development of PPP policy and solving the fiscal pressure of the current economic recession under the COVID-19 pandemic.

Common-Pool Resource Depletion and Dictatorship: North Korean Coastal Fishing in the Age of Marketization

This article seeks to explain the dynamics of resource depletion in North Korea’s fishery. We utilize insights from the common-pool resource (CPR) literature and show how theories from comparative politics that explain why states sometimes do not formalize property rights but prefer their informal exercise can be fruitfully applied to North Korea’s fishery. Utilizing a process tracing methodology, we demonstrate that the North Korean state possesses the necessary capacity to limit resource depletion, but has largely failed to do so. We argue that broad access to the commons maintains relations of enmeshed dependence between the dictator and those utilizing the fishery, balancing regime social control concerns with the party-state’s need for revenue. Further, in recent times, foreign actors have been allowed into the sector, providing a lucrative source of revenue without creating issues for internal control. We consider the alternative explanation that the North Korean state lacks the capacity to prevent CPR depletion, but demonstrate its implausibility given the preponderance of available evidence, not least the response of the regime in Pyongyang to the COVID-19 pandemic, where it has demonstrated considerable capacity to control the country’s fishing fleet.

Higher Education in Europe in the Context of Global Developments

This chapter analyses how global issues and problems in higher education are reflected in the European higher education systems. The chapter starts from the premise that almost all forms of thinking and doing research about higher education are close to politics. But saying something about how global problems in higher education are reflected in the European higher education systems requires a selection or examples. After briefly defining globalisation, internationalisation and Europeanisation of higher education and clarifying how these three concepts are related to each other, the chapter focuses on six examples: migration, academic freedom, increasing marketization, competition and rankings, cooperation in higher education, and last but not least, higher education in times of the Corona pandemic. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Institutional development and the government response to COVID-19 in China.

As COVID-19 is pervasive across the globe, governments in different countries face the dilemma of restricting the transmission risk of the virus by social distancing while yet maintaining economic activity. Inadequate social distancing policies lead to more infection cases and deaths, while over stringent social distancing policies have significant economic cost implications. This study investigates the role of local government institutions in striking the balance between saving lives and economic recovery. We based our study on a sample of 28 provincial governments in China during the early outbreak of 2020 when the emergency responses of local governments were synchronous. The findings show that local governments in those provinces with lower degrees of marketization, which were accustomed to directly intervene in the social system, mandatorily quarantined many more close contacts for each confirmed case than those in the more market-oriented provinces whose social distancing policies took economic considerations into account. The 'overdone' (over stringent) social distancing policies in the more state-oriented provinces led to lower human mobility and economic growth. This study highlights the importance of taking economic considerations into account when adopting policies and strategies to combat the spread of COVID-19 and how different institution management cultures lead to different outcomes.

Medicinal Capitalism: Beyond Cancer, Health, Pain and Meat

The interview with professor Samantha King, the author of the famous Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), reveals her current studies within the field of cultural politics of health, sport and the body. Samantha introduces her research group in Queen's University that critically looks at the healthification of market and political processes when social control, inequality and power asymmetry are pursued under the super value of health. She describes how her team uses the genealogical method by M. Foucault to reconstruct the dynamics of historical, ideological, economic, social agendas that shape local judgments about fruitful cultural frames for corporate charity, medicalized performance in professional sport, and painkiller use by people from different social classes. King's Group studies criticize discourses about individual responsibility and good citizenship as those that may welcome getting pills into bodies instead of transforming the economic and social contexts out of which the disease arises. In the interview, Samantha traces the changes in anti-cancer philanthropy in recent years, comments on the political struggles behind the COVID-19 pandemic and points to the the hidden layers of the protein supplements market challenged by the post-humanistic ban on eating animals, emerging laboratory-meat supply, and ecological concern. The interview with Samantha King as well as her scientific articles will be useful for those who reflect on the incorporation of the human body and subjectivity into capitalistic production in different geopolitical realms.

Promoting urban cycling: An ecolinguistic and discursive approach

This chapter employs an ecolinguistic approach to observe recent documents promoting cycling, with the aim of retrieving discourses, frames, metaphors and in general, clusters of linguistic features that come together to convey particular worldviews. It introduces Mautner's notion of marketization in discourse (2010a), showing how the hegemonic, neoliberal, market mentality is deeply linked to the dominance of automobility and how the effective promotion of a better urban mobility-shifting away from excessive car dependence-requires the removal of marketization in language as well. Next, the chapter observes how the Covid-19 pandemic introduced-at least temporarily-an alternative to the dominant narrative and hypothesize how this could be exploited discursively when constructing new paradigms. It then analyzes the "Climate Safe Streets" report from the London Cycling Campaign from an ecolinguistic perspective in order to observe positive discourse strategies that can be employed to promote cycling effectively. This text was chosen because linguistic analysis reveals that its authors paid as much attention to discursive choices as to the accuracy of their data. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some advice from the improvement of cycling promotion discourse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Common-Pool Resource Depletion and Dictatorship

This article seeks to explain the dynamics of resource depletion in North Korea's fishery. We utilize insights from the common-pool resource (CPR) literature and show how theories from comparative politics that explain why states sometimes do not formalize property rights but prefer their informal exercise can be fruitfully applied to North Korea's fishery. Utilizing a process tracing methodology, we demonstrate that the North Korean state possesses the necessary capacity to limit resource depletion, but has largely failed to do so. We argue that broad access to the commons maintains relations of enmeshed dependence between the dictator and those utilizing the fishery, balancing regime social control concerns with the party-state's need for revenue. Further, in recent times, foreign actors have been allowed into the sector, providing a lucrative source of revenue without creating issues for internal control. We consider the alternative explanation that the North Korean state lacks the capacity to prevent CPR depletion, but demonstrate its implausibility given the preponderance of available evidence, not least the response of the regime in Pyongyang to the COVID-19 pandemic, where it has demonstrated considerable capacity to control the country's fishing fleet.

New Zealand’s ANZAC nurses: marketizing the great war for a 21st-century fit

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to demonstrate how a historical event packaged as an iconic heritage cultural brand can be marketized and modified over time to ensure brand longevity and continued emotional commitment and loyalty through the leverage of stories and associations more closely aligned with modern-day audiences. The authors do this through examining the marketization of the New Zealand World War 1 (WWI) nurse to today’s audiences. The periods of study are WWI (1914–1918) and then the modern day. The New Zealand Army Nursing Service (NZANS) during WWI has previously had little attention as a key actor in the Australia and New Zealand Army Corp (ANZAC), Today ANZAC is held as pivotal in the birth of New Zealand’s perception of nationhood and as an iconic heritage cultural brand. The history and legend of the ANZAC plays an important role in New Zealand culture and is fundamental to the “Anzac Spirit”, a signifier of what it means to be a New Zealander.Design/methodology/approachA historical case study method is used. The primary source of data is 1914–1918, and includes contemporaneous articles, and personal writings: diaries, letters and published memoirs. More contemporary works form the basis for discussion of marketization as it relates to the NZANS. The article first presents conceptual framing, then the development of the Anzac brand and the history of the NZANS and its role in WWI before turning to discussion on the marketization of this nursing service to today’s audiences and as part of the ANZAC/Anzac brand.FindingsToday the story of the WWI NZANS nurse, previously seldom heard, has been co-opted and is becoming increasingly merged as an integral part of the Anzac story. The history of the NZANS during WWI has a great deal of agency today as part of that story, serving many functions within it and providing a valuable lever for marketization.Originality/valueTo date, there is a scarcity of marketing analysis that examines the marketization of history. By focusing on New Zealand WWI nursing as a contributor to the Anzac story, the authors contribute to the understanding of how marketers package and contemporize history for appeal to audiences through both sustaining and reworking cultural branding.

The future of value in digitalised higher education: why data privacy should not be our biggest concern.

Universities around the world are increasingly digitalising all of their operations, with the current COVID-19 pandemic speeding up otherwise steady developments. This article focuses on the political economy of higher education (HE) digitalisation and suggests a new research programme. I foreground three principal arguments, which are empirically, theoretically, and politically crucial for HE scholars. First, most literature is examining the impacts of digitalisation on the HE sector and its subjects alone. I argue that current changes in digitalising HE cannot be studied in isolation from broader changes in the global economy. Specifically, HE digitalisation is embedded in the expansion of the digital economy, which is marked by new forms of value extraction and rentiership. Second, the emerging research on the intersection of marketisation and digitalisation in HE seems to follow the theories of marketisation qua production and commodification. I argue that we need theories with better explanatory power in analysing the current digitalisation dynamics. I propose to move from commodification to assetisation, and from prices to rents. Finally, universities are digitalising in the time when the practice is superseding policy, and there is no regulation beyond the question of data privacy. However, digital data property is already a reality, governed by 'terms of use', and protected by the intellectual property rights regime. The current pandemic has led to 'emergency pedagogy', which has intensified overall digitalisation in the sector and is bypassing concerns of data value redistribution. I argue that we urgently need public scrutiny and political action to address issues of value extraction and redistribution in HE.