我国土地财政现状及其原因分析

近年来,我国房价持续上涨、地王频现、住房保障投入不足,而各地方政府的土地出让收入却节节攀升,土地财政已成为社会各界热议的话题。随着我国城市化步伐日益加快,经济持续快速发展,政府公共支出规模也逐渐加大,土地作为地方政府的主要资产,与土地相关的收入成为预算外收入的重要来源。     

我国农村土地产权制度改革的几点思考

城市化是我国低成本实现现代化的必由之路。城市化提高社会要素整体配置效率,没有城市化依托的工业化将支付极高的分散化成本;一个社会从事农业的劳动力越多,物质财富的代际积累能力越弱,一个大多数人生活在农村的大国要实现现代化是不可想象的,解决“三农”问题的主导权在城市而不是在农村;     

Routine of seasons: Labour regimes and social ritual in an antebellum plantation community

Using the narrative of Ellen and William Craft's escape from slavery, together with a database of 2260 runaway slave advertisements published in antebellum South Carolina newspapers, this article examines the ways in which runaways exploited whites' notions of race and freedom to pass as free. Acculturated women and men engaged in intricate performances in which they exploited colour, dress, language, and employment skills to transcend lines of race and class, in order to assume free identities. Recognising that freedom could be performed, if not legally attained, the majority of runaways did not strike out for free territory. Instead, many remained in the South where they created free identities that enabled them to secure employment, enjoy mobility, and maintain kinship ties, if only temporarily.     

In bondage when cold was king: the frigid terrain of slavery in antebellum Maryland

Cold weather remains one of the least explored environmental phenomena in the historiography of American slavery. By detailing the heightened vulnerabilities of the enslaved during the colder portions of the year and then describing the means by which enslaved people leveraged frigid weather against slaveholders, this paper highlights how slave and slaveholder differently mobilized the cold against one another in contests over power. It argues that in the lives of enslaved women and men in antebellum Maryland, cold weather was both an afflicting as well as empowering force.     

Hospice of the Red River Valley: A nonprofit's response to for‐profit competition

Research of nonprofit versus for‐profit competition points to potential quality and access advantages of the nonprofit, tied to shared community values leading to enhanced social capital and legitimacy, whereas the for‐profit is known for cost and scale advantages. However, the prevailing mode of thinking in mixed‐form competitive contexts urges nonprofits to become “more businesslike” and imitate for‐profit attributes. This qualitative study of a nonprofit organization facing new for‐profit competition illustrates that while it is possible and advisable to learn from for‐profit competitors, it is not necessary or even desirable for the nonprofit to abandon its own unique advantages. Although nonprofits should be increasingly sensitive to cost and scale advantages, they do not have to imitate for‐profit attributes and play the low‐cost game. A competitive response to for‐profit challenges that is carefully crafted and executed based on the unique advantages of the nonprofit organization can truly win the day.     

岷江上游生态环境的现状与综合治理

编者按 该文是成都理工大学教授吴香尧在德国艾伯特基金会资助的研讨会上所作发言,对综合治理岷江上游生态环境具有参考价值.现刊载如下,以飨读者.     

西部开发与长江上游生态屏障建设

一、长江上游生态环境的现状与问题长江是我国最大的河流,干流全长6300公里,流域集水面积180万平方公里,占我国国土总面积19%.其中,长江从源头到湖北省宜昌市为上游,全长4511公里,占长江全长的70%,其干流流经青海、西藏、四川、重庆、云南、湖北六省(区、市),支流布及甘肃、陕西、贵州三省,共涉及9个省(区、市).流域面积105.9万平方公里,分别占全流域面积和全国陆地面积的58.9%、11.1%,流域人口1.55亿,分别占流域人口和全国人口的35%、14%,是汉、藏、彝、羌、回、傣、白、傈僳、纳西、布依等多民族聚居的地区.由于我们过去在经济建设中忽视了生态环境的保护和建设,长期的森林过度砍伐、坡地垦殖,使得长江上游甚至整个长江流域的生态环境迅速恶化.     

Lifestyle Options and Economic Strategies: Subsistence Activities in the Mississippi Delta1

Abstract "Subsistence" and "informal economy" are contrasted in their utility as sociological concepts and their ability to explain a variety of activities in two rural Mississippi Delta communities. Literature on subsistence stresses that the desired outcome of participation is not an increase in income but the social rewards of participation itself. Two underlying dimensions of participation in these activities are documented through the literature and through a confirmatory factor analysis of empirical data: life-style choice and economic strategy. These were constructed into indexes and examined individually and in combination as dependent variables using regressors at the community, household, and individual levels. Community ties were weakly associated with participation in such activities. Whites and those with higher incomes participated more in lifestyle choice oriented activities. Participation in general was statistically related to households needing less weekly income and being of larger size. Potential connections with persistent rural poverty are discussed.     

The disparity in land grant funding from state sources between traditionally white institutions and traditionally black institutions in Louisiana and Mississippi: The role of agricultural development legislation

Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont as a young Congressman in 1862 obtained legislation for the establishment of colleges in the respective States for education in agriculture and the mechanic arts and including other fields of study. After 12 unsuccessful attempts. Senator Morrill obtained similar legislation in 1890 which permitted the establishment of such colleges for Blacks. In the meantime, agriculturalists of the period obtained legislation in agricultural research and extension in 1887 and 1913 respectively which was officially designated by Congress as progeny of the original 1862 legislation. These four acts and other such minor acts are referred to as land grant legislation. The Black land grant colleges and their Black clients have never significantly benefited on the State level from the 1887 and 1913 acts and only in the early 1970s did they begin benefiting from the federal funding in the 1913 Act. This article details and discusses the disparities and consequences of the lack of a rural development policy for Blacks and Black land colleges.     

Effects of urbanization and land use on fish communities in Valley Creek watershed, Chester County, Pennsylvania

Valley Creek watershed, located in southeastern Pennsylvania, is a small, fourth-order stream that empties into the Schuylkill River at Valley Forge National Historic Park, thirty-five kilometers northwest of Philadelphia. The 64 km² watershed has been under extreme urbanization pressure over the past 30 years, resulting in rapidly increasing impervious surface cover and decreasing open space. The purpose of this study was to document some of the effects of urbanization on fish assemblages by quantifying the fish communities at fifteen sites throughout the watershed. Long-term effects of continued urbanization were identified, as data from the present study were compared to similar work completed nearly ten years earlier. There has been a shift in species composition from intolerant, coldwater species to more tolerant, eurythermal species. Currently, Valley Creek is supporting a naturally reproducing population of brown trout, but there has been a marked decline in relative abundance and range since 1993. Increased stream temperature from urban run-off is one of the primary issues in Valley Creek. Species composition was unique at each of the 15 stations owing to the effect of local land use in each station’;s drainage area. Fish assemblages revealed a patchy, non-continuous pattern of fish distribution.     

Neoliberal disorientations: changing landscapes of disability and governance in India

This article delves into questions of neoliberal disorientations experienced by disabled people in the context of a participatory development self-help group project from the World Bank in south India. I explore ways in which neoliberal development regimes produce exclusionary forms of inclusion by producing subjects who are ‘able-disabled’. I ethnographically examine ‘who gets counted’ and ‘what gets counted’ within the neoliberal governance framework, and what remains outside. Deconstructing participatory development approaches from a critical disability perspective, the article sheds light on processes of inclusion through exclusion in the neoliberal framework of governance. It highlights what is at stake for disability futures in the context of austerity in the Global South.     

Suburban road-closures and the ruinous landscapes of privilege in Johannesburg

In this article we trace the emergence of road-closures – i.e. the barricading by local residents of public roads ostensibly in response to crime – in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg in the decade after apartheid. We argue that road-closures manifest an attempt at material “fixing” an urban order of privilege, even as privilege and inequality is increasingly “deterritorialised” in the city of the global South. While conventionally theorised as part of a broader global trend towards the privatisation and securitisation of urban space, we demonstrate that road-closures contain qualitatively different expectations of the urban order to e.g. private gated communities. Whereas gated communities are premised on and driven by a political economy of self-exclusion from urban life, road-closures simultaneously resist and prefigure this “deterritorialised” reordering of privilege in the post-apartheid city. Based on archival research in local community newspapers over a 10-year period between and 2004 (the high-water mark of the so-called road-closure “debates”), we trace shifting discourses about road closures and the city: from anxieties about crime and loss of privilege, to fantasies of abandonment, to the assertion (and rupture) of a mythical suburban utopia. Drawing on a literature on ruins as the material effects of a past order manifest in the urban order of the present, we assert that despite anxieties about the loss of privilege, these enclosed neighbourhoods remain spaces of extreme privilege, now implicated into an emergent geography in which old and new spaces of privilege overlap to reinforce spatial inequalities in post-apartheid Johannesburg.     

The repeal of the land acts: the challenge of land reform policies in South Africa

This paper analyses South Africa’s land reform policies post-1994 against the backdrop of the apartheid government’s manoeuvres through the repeal of the notorious Land Acts in 1991. The paper concludes that the democratic government could have avoided the challenges of ineffective land reform by taking into consideration land dispossession prior to 1913.