New Zealand children in the 1990s: beneficiaries of New Right economic policy?

This paper questions the extent to which New Zealand children have benefited from New Right economic policies and argues that the invisibility of children, the role of public concern about children and the social construction of childhood are factors which have facilitated implementation of these changes. Attention is drawn to the ways in which the personal and the political spheres intersect in children's lives. Rather than focusing on either the micro level of intervention in the lives of individual children or the macro level of societal change it is argued that the dualism itself must be transcended in order to move forward from the current position. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Political Economy of International Agricultural Research: Innovation for Whom in the 1990s?

Book reviewed in this article: Rice Science and Development Politics: IRRI's Strategies and Asian Diversity 1950–1980. By Robert S. Anderson, Edwin Levy and Barrie Morrison. First the Seed: the Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology 1492–2000. By Jack Ralph Kloppenburg Jr.     

The restructuring of the U.K. financial services industry in the 1990s: a reversal of fortune?

Whereas for much of the 1980s the financial services industry was characterised by growth and expansion, the late 1980s and early 1990s was a period of redundancies and financial losses. This paper seeks to explain this reversal of fortune and the responses of the financial services industry. The restructuring of the financial System at a global level, through a process of disintermediation, and at a national level, in response to financial re-regulation, led to an intensification of competition between financial institutions and helped produce a developed countries debt crisis, founded in personal and corporate indebtedness. In the wake of this crisis, the financial services industry has been in transition. Bureaucratic labour market models have been overturned in favour of more flexible variants, while at the same time many financial services firms have engaged in the wholesale spatial reorganisation of their activities. One important consequence has been a process of ‘financial infrastructure withdrawal’, by which services and operations are withdrawn from certain social groups and certain localities. This process, which revolves around a rubric of risk reduction and a ‘flight to quality’, has introduced an element of exclusion and closure to the operation of financial Systems within developed countries. In this sense, the reaction of the financial services industry to the developed countries debt crisis mirrors that which followed the less developed countries debt crisis of the early 1980s; that is, abandonment and retreat to a more affluent client base. As was the case during the less developed countries debt crisis, the current process of financial infrastructure withdrawal has serious social and economic implications for those social groups and localities abandoned by the financial community.