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1

Aryani, Putri Retno, and Kurnia Krisna Hari. "Pengaruh Pertumbuhan Ekonomi, PAD, DAU Terhadap Pengalokasian Anggaran Belanja Modal Pada Kabupaten/Kota Sumatera Selatan." Jurnal Akuntansi dan Keuangan 24, no. 2 (June 30, 2019): 84–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.23960/jak.v24i2.3.

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This research is aimed at determining the influence ofeconomic growth, local revenue and general fund allocation toward appropriation of capital budget In Districts/City in South Sumatera Province. The samples used in this study were 11 districts/cities in South Sumatera Province in line with the source of Realization Report Budget (APBD) which was accessed from www.djpk.depkeu.go.id and Economic Growth which was obtained from the Central Statistics Agency of South Sumatera Province. The data used in this research was secondary data. The technique of analyzing the data was using multiple regression test. Simulataneously, the results showed that Economic Growth, Local Revenue and General Fund Allocation had positive significant influence toward capital expenditures. While, partially, the results showed that Economic Growth had no positive significant influence toward toward Capital Expenditure, regional revenue had no positive significant influence toward Capital Expenditure, General Fund Allocation had positive significant toward Capital Expenditure.
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2

Mayer-Sommer, Alan P. "So many controls; so little control: The case of Isaac Henderson, Navy Agent at New York, 1861-4." Accounting History 15, no. 2 (May 2010): 173–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1032373209359324.

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The experience of one man, Isaac Henderson, provides the lens through which this study examines the operation during the Civil War of the federal expenditure control system of the USA. This system’s requisitioning, disbursing and auditing activities cannot be disentangled from the patronage system and profiteering that inevitably accompany war. Surging activity levels brought on by the war only aggravated the existing weaknesses. Rigidities, redundancies and formalities within the Treasury Department delayed disbursement processing and the subsequent auditing of those disbursements. Clerks who approved disbursements also audited the same disbursements. The focus on appropriation accounting — rather than on information for planning and control purposes — reflected the view that controls existed primarily to assure Congress and the public that money was spent in conformity with laws and regulations. Improper charges were sometimes intentionally placed against appropriations with available balances. Thus the most significant contribution of the federal expenditure control system may well have been to help legitimize wartime spending to Congress and the American people.
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3

Nguyen, Quynh, and Van Thinh Pham. "Of financial autonomy at Lao Cai General Hospital, period 2015 – 2019." Journal of Health and Development Studies 05, no. 03 (May 30, 2021): 67–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.38148/jhds.0503skpt20-124.

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Objective: The study was conducted to understand the financial autonomy situation at the Lao Cai General Hospital for the period 2015-2019. Methods: Cross-sectional descriptive study design using retrospective quantitative research methodology of secondary data from financial statements of Lao Cai General Hospital in the 5 years 2015-2019. Results: The hospital's total revenue tended to increase (in 2019, it increased by 97,445 million VND compared to 2015), of which, non-business revenues accounted for more than 80% of the total revenue each year. Revenue from hospital fees and health insurance accounts for a high proportion in the total non-business revenues of the hospital, accounting for about 66-79%. Total hospital spending tends to decrease from 2015 to 2018 (down 3%) and increase in 2019. Professional spending is at the top of the recurrent expenditure structure, accounting for about 38-40%. The personal payment group accounts for 25-29% of the total recurrent expenditure in the hospital and tends to increase each year. The hospital's revenue and expenditure difference tends to increase with the total difference of VND 15,322 million, VND 18,875 million, VND 10,578 million, VND 16,950 million and VND 16,950 million respectively for the years 2015-2019. In general, the total revenue and expenditure realized were in excess of the estimate. Conclusion: In the period 2015 - 2019, total hospital revenues tend to increase, total hospital expenditures tend to decrease, leading to an increasing trend in hospital revenues and expenditures over the years. The appropriation of funds is in accordance with the current regulations, so the salary reform fund accounts for a large proportion and tends to increase sharply, making the bonus fund, the welfare fund, the salary fund increase and decrease. gradually. Keywords: Financial revenue and expenditure activities, Lao Cai Province General Hospital
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4

GORDON, SANFORD C., and HANNAH K. SIMPSON. "The Birth of Pork: Local Appropriations in America’s First Century." American Political Science Review 112, no. 3 (March 28, 2018): 564–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s000305541800014x.

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After describing a newly assembled dataset consisting of almost 9,000 local appropriations made by the U.S. Congress between 1789 and 1882, we test competing accounts of the politics surrounding them before offering a more nuanced, historically contingent view of the emergence of the pork barrel. We demonstrate that for most of this historical period—despite contemporary accusations of crass electoral motives—the pattern of appropriations is largely inconsistent with accounts of distributive politics grounded in a logic of legislative credit-claiming. Instead, support for appropriations in the House mapped cleanly onto the partisan/ideological structure of Congress for most of this period, and only in the 1870s produced the universalistic coalitions commonly associated with pork-barrel spending. We trace this shift to two historical factors: the emergence of a solid Democratic South, and growth in the fraction of appropriations funding recurrent expenditures on extant projects rather than new starts.
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Ezeilo, Joy Ngozi, Uchechukwu Nwoke, and Sylvester Ndubuisi Anya. "The (Un)Constitutional Appropriation and Expenditure of Public Funds in Nigeria: Analysing the “Security Vote” Paradigm through the Law." Journal of African Law 62, no. 2 (May 29, 2018): 225–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021855318000141.

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AbstractSecurity challenges have continued to trouble governments internationally. From the Islamic State terrorists in the Gulf region, to the murderous activities of Boko Haram and “herdsmen” in Nigeria in recent times, it has become imperative for those entrusted with maintaining security to redefine the conditions of national security. In this context, it is now conventional for various governments in Nigeria to appropriate enormous amounts of money in their budgets for “national security” (“tagged security vote”). This article explores the emergence, configuration, constitutionality and abuses of security votes in Nigeria. It also explores the appropriation and expenditure of security funds in the USA and attempts to draw lessons from this jurisdiction. It argues that there is a robust connection between security votes and corruption and, thus, attempts to identify legal structures for preventing the misspending and embezzlement of public funds (security votes) in the country's monetary appropriation and expenditure.
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6

Han, Kyuhong, Vikas Mittal, and Yan Zhang. "Relative Strategic Emphasis and Firm-Idiosyncratic Risk: The Moderating Role of Relative Performance and Demand Instability." Journal of Marketing 81, no. 4 (July 2017): 25–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1509/jm.15.0509.

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Firms may allocate scarce resources to two fundamental strategic processes: value creation and value appropriation. The relative investment in these processes (i.e., a firm's relative strategic emphasis) may be associated with firm-idiosyncratic risk. Empirically, a firm's relative strategic emphasis is represented by the difference between its advertising expenditure and its research-and-development expenditure. Using data from 2,403 firms over the period of 2000–2014, the authors find that firms’ relative strategic emphasis on value appropriation versus value creation reduces firm risk, though in a contingent manner. This association is weaker when firms have larger positive or negative relative performance. Furthermore, these contingent associations are stronger when demand instability in an industry is higher. Overall, the results demonstrate that a firm's strategic emphasis should be examined in light of its relative performance, as well as in the context of current market conditions, when making judicious resource allocation decisions.
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7

Stančík, Juraj. "Targeting the Digital Agenda for Europe: a new approach for estimating ICT R&D expenditures." info 16, no. 1 (January 7, 2014): 45–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/info-09-2013-0048.

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Purpose – The main goal of this paper is to create a methodology for estimating public research and development (R&D) expenditures on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the European Union (EU). The study further applies this methodology on business expenditures on R&D (BERD) data across all sectors and estimate ICT BERD within each of them. Then the study assesses the evolution of these expenditures in the context of the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) and its specific target to double them by 2020. Design/methodology/approach – The study assumes that the share of public ICT R&D expenditures in total public R&D expenditures is similar to the share of ICT R&D labour costs. The study bases its estimation on government budget appropriations or outlays on R&D (GBAORD). Findings – EU public ICT R&D expenditures grew steadily over the period 2004-2010 and in 2010 reached 5.9 billion. The study also estimates that the total EU ICT BERD in 2010 amounted to 15.8 billion. Regarding the DAE target about ICT R&D expenditures, the study shows that, in both public and private, the EU drops behind. Research limitations/implications – The study estimates that substantial ICT BERD can be found also in non-ICT sectors. Practical implications – The methodology allows for monitoring one of the DAE targets. Originality/value – The methodology currently represents the only way for measuring public ICT R&D expenditures in the EU.
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Juan Kornblihtt. "Oil Rent Appropriation, Capital Accumulation, and Social Expenditure in Venezuela during Chavism." World Review of Political Economy 6, no. 1 (2015): 58. http://dx.doi.org/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.6.1.0058.

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9

Skačkauskienė, Ilona. "RESEARCH ON THE DYNAMICS OF LITHUANIAN STATE REVENUE AND PREFERENCES FOR EXPENDITURE ALLOCATION." Journal of Business Economics and Management 14, no. 4 (August 28, 2013): 806–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.3846/16111699.2013.789451.

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The article analyses revenue and expenditure on the national budget of Lithuania and looks at their dynamics and structure. First, the paper is aimed at naming the main sources of revenue as well as the preferential areas of financing. Second, it is also sought to disclose the objective principles of allocating budget appropriation. To achieve the goal, the correlation between preferences in government activity and expenditure allocation was investigated. The conducted research employs ranging and correlational analysis. Since the formation of a bigger budget leads to an increased appropriation of all functional areas, structural data were analysed thus enabling to more soundly determine whether the distinction of a functional area, as the preferential one, has an influence on its greater significance in the overall system of the national budget. After making the study, no possibility of asserting that a distinction of the preferential functional area is related to its preferential financing exists. In order to summarize the obtained results, it could be claimed that the allocation of resources accumulated by the state would be more substantiated if we related it more with activity priorities of the Government. This would lead to higher objectivity when taking decisions on public administration.
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10

Middlekauff, Wm Bradford. "Twisting the President's Arm: The Impoundment Control Act as a Tool for Enforcing the Principle of Appropriation Expenditure." Yale Law Journal 100, no. 1 (October 1990): 209. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/796769.

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11

Jianu, Marian. "Fundamental Elements Regarding the Organization of Internal Financial Control in Public Entities in Romania." International conference KNOWLEDGE-BASED ORGANIZATION 27, no. 2 (June 1, 2021): 31–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/kbo-2021-0044.

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Abstract Financial control, as part of internal managerial control and economic control, is an activity of overwhelming importance for the efficient, effective and economical use of resources economic and financial institutions in public institutions and beyond.The profile literature in this field has outlined the conceptual aspects, the necessary classifications and other defining dimensions of financial control as a highly responsible activity, meant to prevent facts contrary to the good management of wealth elements in public institutions and private entities.Preventive financial control, with its two components (own and delegated), is designed and carried out in public institutions according to a very rigorous methodology, meant to grant a visa only to those public money expenditures that meet all the requirements entered in the checklist. inserts requirements regarding the existence of supporting documents, visas, certifications and approvals regarding the legality of operations, the inclusion of amounts in the allocations of budgetary appropriations and the existence of supporting documents specific tooperations.
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12

Tazanu, Primus M. "Communication technologies and legitimate consumption: making sense of healthcare remittances in Cameroonian transnational relationships." Africa 88, no. 2 (May 2018): 385–403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0001972017000961.

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AbstractResearch on the significance of the mobile phone and internet in transnational family relationships shows that these media provide direct platforms for negotiating remittances. My interest in this article is not so much in how they are used to coordinate and channel money home as in their appropriation to meet expectations of reciprocity. The article draws from field narratives collected among Cameroonians in Germany and in Cameroon to reveal contestations over what can be described as legitimate consumption within the Cameroonian transnational social sphere. Underlying the arguments in this article is my observation that direct communication within the Cameroonian transnational sphere is beset by so much mistrust, discontent and uncertainty that remitters must specify what they are remitting money for. Healthcare in Cameroon is considered an expenditure that is worthy of migrants' financial support.
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13

Sinha, Michael S., Nina Jain, Thomas Hwang, and Aaron S. Kesselheim. "Expansion of the Priority Review Voucher Program Under the 21st Century Cures Act: Implications for Innovation and Public Health." American Journal of Law & Medicine 44, no. 2-3 (May 2018): 329–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0098858818789430.

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The U.S. federal government awards a priority review voucher (“PRV”) to a pharmaceutical manufacturer after the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) approves a product for one of a list of voucher-eligible indications. The voucher, which can be transferred or sold, allows the company to accelerate the review timeline of another product for any indication. The PRV program was proposed in 2006 as an incentive for research and development for neglected diseases, such as dengue and leishmaniasis.Neglected tropical diseases (“NTDs”) predominantly affect the world’s poorest populations and are associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Despite their global public health importance, neglected diseases were estimated to account for less than 1% of pharmaceutical research and development expenditures. The voucher program was intended to address this gap between investment and disease burden: “[t]he major obstacle to stimulating the R&D of new medicines for neglected diseases is lowincome nations' inability to pay for such medicines.” The voucher would provide an additional financial incentive to fund clinical development of these products without requiring additional appropriations from Congress.
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Sunansyah, Didi Wahyudi, and Aryani Witasari. "Effectiveness Of Allotment Penalty Imposed By Judge In The Case Of Children For A Child Protection As Victims (Case Study at State Court of Sumber)." Jurnal Daulat Hukum 3, no. 1 (April 13, 2020): 87. http://dx.doi.org/10.30659/jdh.v3i1.8483.

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The formulation in this study were 1) How allotment setting penalty in child protection legislation in order to protect the child as a victim? 2) How is the effectiveness of the penalty in the Child Protection Act?Method sociological approach juridical law and specification in this study were included descriptive analysis. Even sources and types of data in this study are primary data obtained from interviews with field studies Supervising Officers Society Child (PK Child) of the Penal Hall Cirebon and Head of Correctional Cirebon, And secondary data obtained from the study of literature. Data were analyzed qualitatively. The problems studied by the theory of progressive legal protection and law.Based on the results of this study concluded under Appropriation settings Criminal Penalty In Child Protection Act is not describe protect children as victims, because the penalty to be paid by the convict is intended for countries not intended for children who are victims of crime. Appropriation effectiveness Criminal Judge Penalty That Dropped In Case of Children in the Context of the Protection of Children As Victims are Criminal penalties in the Law on Child Protection was not effective in reality, as more convicts chose imprisonment in lieu of penalty are not paid, compared to paying the penalty, it has implications for the expenditure of state finances are more likely to pay for convicts in prisons and to make prisons more crowded or over capacity.Keywords: Effectiveness; Penalty; Justice; Protection; Child.
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Ahn, Yong-Jun, Joon-Shik Shin, Jinho Lee, Yoon Jae Lee, Me-Riong Kim, Ki Byung Park, Jun-Hwan Lee, Kyung-Min Shin, and In-Hyuk Ha. "Evaluation of use and cost of medical care of common lumbar disorders in Korea: cross-sectional study of Korean Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service National Patient Sample data." BMJ Open 6, no. 9 (September 2016): e012432. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2016-012432.

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ObjectivesTo assess medical care and costs of the 3 highest prevalence lumbar disorders—non-specific low back pain (nLBP), intervertebral disc disorder (IDD) and spinal stenosis (SS)—from national billing data to provide basic information for standards of appropriate management.DesignRetrospective analysis of National Health Insurance National Patient Sample data provided by the Korean Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA).Setting2011 claims data from all medical institutions which filed billing statements to HIRA.ParticipantsA total of 135 561 patients with lumbar disorder who received medical services during 2011.Outcome measuresPatient characteristics, medical procedures, medication, cost, injection and surgery.ResultsIn the nLBP and IDD groups, the 50–59 age range had the highest prevalence, whereas prevalence increased with age in SS. All 3 groups showed a higher percentage in women. The average treatment cost was 196 552 KRW in the nLBP and 362 050 KRW in the IDD group, and highest in the SS group at 439 025 KRW. While in the nLBP group women spent more on medical expenses, in the other 2 groups men showed higher expenditure. Expenditure grew with age in the nLBP and SS groups, whereas that of the IDD group peaked in their 40s. Analgesics were used in 73.43% of patients with nLBP, 82.64% of patients with IDD and 86.46% of patients with SS, and opioids in 4.12% of patients with IDD and 5.36% of patients with SS. Surgery rates were highest in the SS group at 4.85%, with 0.9% for nLBP and 4.59% for IDD. The most frequent injection code was lumbar/caudal epidural nerve block. Expenditure and surgery rates were higher in the injection than in the non-injection subgroup in all 3 groups.ConclusionsPatterns of medical care of most frequent lumbar disorders from HIRA data showed significant difference between groups and provide a basic standard for future usual care guidelines linked with health policy and budget appropriation.
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Obeng, George. "Incidence of Value Added Tax, Effects and Implications." International Journal of Economics and Finance 10, no. 10 (September 15, 2018): 52. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ijef.v10n10p52.

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The current debate in the field of taxation and public finance is the concern of Value Added Tax (VAT) being inflationary and who the incidence or burden of payment falls. The implication from available literature and studies points to the fact that VAT can impact negatively on production and consumption, stifling free flow of economic activities. Literature is reviewed to find out the incidence of VAT and its implications on the firm and the consumer. It is established that VAT is not a cost to the business firm to make it inflationary but a charge independent of its pricing mechanism. It is also not extra cost to the consumer but part appropriation of the economic resource flow accruing to the consumer to settle the legitimate obligation of financing public expenditure. The paper concludes that the incidence of the tax is on the consumer and VAT is not inflationary but a means of tax optimality to stabilize the system in the event of market failure.
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Junqueira, Virgínia, and Áquilas N. Mendes. "The Brazilian Public Health in Contemporary Capitalism." International Journal of Health Services 48, no. 4 (March 31, 2018): 760–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0020731418767556.

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This article examines some political and economic facts that led to an intensification of austerity measures by the Brazilian government, including ones against the Unified Health System (SUS) and its progressive dismantling. In a country where fundamental human rights were never fully respected, nowadays social and labor rights are under severe attacks. The deepening of the capital crisis and the rise of interest-bearing capital dominance have been causing unemployment, social insecurity growth, and resulting public fund appropriation by the private capital. The Brazilian governments in the 1990s and 2000s have implemented deeper cuts in social policy expenditure, freezing security benefits, privatizing services, and prioritizing the payment of public debt interests. The right wing’s project involves the demoralization of not only the Workers’ Party but also the left as a whole, so that the adoption of austerity measures could be achieved without popular resistance. It is the duty of the Brazilian left wing to denounce such a project and to provoke firm initiatives to rebuild its bonds with the working class.
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18

Ajibolade, Solabomi Omobola, and Collins Sankay Oboh. "A critical examination of government budgeting and public funds management in Nigeria." International Journal of Public Leadership 13, no. 4 (November 13, 2017): 218–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijpl-11-2016-0045.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to attempt an empirical examination of government budgeting and expenditure processes in Nigeria, a developing country. It examines the current state of budgeting and public funds management (PFM) in Nigeria. It also examines the extent to which the government has used the budgetary mechanism to effectively manage the nation’s economy. Design/methodology/approach The paper employed simple regression estimation technique for data analysis. Time series data set of budgetary information was constructed from different archival sources over a 16-years period (2000-2015), majorly the national Appropriation Acts, press releases, regulatory and governmental reports, reports of Transparency International, World Bank and Central Intelligence Agency. Findings The findings confirm that the nation’s annual budgeting approach is defective and lags in achieving its fiscal objectives. The budget indicates a state of poor accountability and transparency in PFM. Findings also suggest that the level of economic development in Nigeria is not commensurate with the size of government expenditure. Practical implications The paper draws the attention of the government to the need to restructure its approach to budgeting and adopt a more resilient approach that suits its environment and economic peculiarities in effort to ensure efficient management and accountability of public funds. The paper also offers value to other developing countries. It provides empirical evidence that explains an aspect why the African continent remains underdeveloped hitherto. Originality/value This paper lends a voice to the call for a restructuring of the Nigerian budgetary system and its implementation strategy. It advocates for the adoption of an alternative budgeting approach that matches Nigeria economic realities. The paper demonstrated that the traditional budgetary approach being used by many developing countries is limited in certain ways and could hinder sustainable development.
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19

Munavalli, Sahana, and Sanjeevakumar M. Hatture. "Fraud Detection in Healthcare System using Symbolic Data Analysis." International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering 10, no. 9 (July 30, 2021): 1–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.35940/ijitee.h9269.0710921.

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In the era of digitization the frauds are found in all categories of health insurance. It is finished next to deliberate trickiness or distortion for acquiring some pitiful advantage in the form of health expenditures. Bigdata analysis can be utilized to recognize fraud in large sets of insurance claim data. In light of a couple of cases that are known or suspected to be false, the anomaly detection technique computes the closeness of each record to be fake by investigating the previous insurance claims. The investigators would then be able to have a nearer examination for the cases that have been set apart by data mining programming. One of the issues is the abuse of the medical insurance systems. Manual detection of frauds in the healthcare industry is strenuous work. Fraud and Abuse in the Health care system have become a significant concern and that too inside health insurance organizations, from the most recent couple of years because of the expanding misfortunes in incomes, handling medical claims have become a debilitating manual assignment, which is done by a couple of clinical specialists who have the duty of endorsing, adjusting, or dismissing the appropriations mentioned inside a restricted period from their gathering. Standard data mining techniques at this point do not sufficiently address the intricacy of the world. In this way, utilizing Symbolic Data Analysis is another sort of data analysis that permits us to address the intricacy of the real world and to recognize misrepresentation in the dataset.
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20

Goldstein, Evan V. "Sophistry in American medicine? Platonic reflections on expertise, influence and the public’s health in the democratic context." Medical Humanities 45, no. 1 (July 14, 2018): 45–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2018-011469.

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Without question, the American medical craft—the physicians, clinicians and healthcare organisations that comprise the American healthcare sector—provides immense value to patients and contributes expertise on matters relevant to the public’s health. However, several conspicuous realities about healthcare in America should give the reader pause. Most problematic are the comparative measures of access to care, quality of care, life expectancy, racial health disparity and cost, all of which demonstrate how many Americans experience relatively lower value public health than other Western liberal democratic states. Since the early 1900s, American medical craft behaviour contributed to suboptimal social investment in public health, successfully influencing greater medical investment and higher healthcare expenditure relative to social welfare investments. Today, American policymakers seek the ‘holy grail’, a mythical panacea that purports to restrict spending and improve care quality and value, leading the USA to chase ‘technocratic solutions to political problems’. This paper explores the claim that the USA is hampered by suboptimal public health decision making. Public health decision making has been historically impacted by the overextended reach of medical craft expertise—technê in Platonic terms of art—as permitted by the American democratic political system. American policymakers must not forget that the debate over technê, epistêmê, sophistry and who should have authority in public affairs is not new. Rather, it is an ancient debate, and now as then, the ancient arguments remain relevant in a democratic context. For particularly helpful insight, one ought to look no further than the lessons of Plato’s dialogues. Platonic lessons on expertise and decision making can enlighten our understanding of modern public health decision making, specifically regarding the appropriation, allocation and distribution of health-related resources in the state.
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Samkov, K. N. "Financing the Implementation of National and Regional Projects: Problems and sustainable Development Directions." Finance: Theory and Practice 25, no. 4 (August 24, 2021): 24–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.26794/2587-5671-2021-25-4-24-36.

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Regional projects and programs are intended to become the main mechanism for achieving national development goals in territorial entities. The aim of the article is to analyze the problems of project implementation and program approaches at the level of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, as well as to develop proposals for their development. The methodological basis of the study is the regulatory legal acts of the federal and regional levels, scientific (foreign and domestic) literature in the field of economics and public finance, official statistical information, empirical data regarding the results and progress of the implementation of regional projects and state programs of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. The author uses the method of system analysis. The article analyzes the conceptual foundations of project management in the public sector, foreign and domestic research on this issue, examples of program implementation abroad, establishes the role of regional projects and state programs in the budget system of the Russian Federation, their relationship, identifies the main problems of their financing, considers examples of direct implementation of projects and programs, and suggests directions for their development. In the course of the study, the distortion of the initially inherent meanings of the implementation of the project approach is proved, first of all, in determining the goal setting, providing sufficient mechanisms for its achievement and financing. It is established that the state programs at present actually represent documents of planning of budget appropriations in implicit interrelation with the main directions of activity of authorities. It is concluded that it is necessary to clarify the current project and program methodology, which will allow the regions not only to engage in the implementation of federal projects but also to initiate them according to the priorities of socio-economic policy and the characteristics of the region. The author also proposes to develop regional projects as financial institutions. For this, it is necessary to clarify the budget legislation to ensure the possibility of actual planning of expenditure obligations within the framework of the design of projects. The prospects for further research are to develop a model for evaluating the effectiveness of the design and implementation of regional projects and state programs, and its further testing on specific programs of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation.
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22

Allers, Eugene, Christer Allgulander, Sean Exner Baumann, Charles L. Bowden, P. Buckley, David J. Castle, Beatrix J. Coetzee, et al. "13th National Congress of the South African Society of Psychiatrists, 20-23 September 2004." South African Journal of Psychiatry 10, no. 3 (October 1, 2004): 17. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/sajpsychiatry.v10i3.150.

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List of abstacts and authors:1. Integrating the art and science of psychiatryEugene Allers2. Chronic pain as a predictor of outcome in an inpatient Psychiatric populationEugene Allers and Gerhard Grundling3. Recent advances in social phobiaChrister Allgulander4. Clinical management of patients with anxiety disordersChrister Allgulander5. Do elephants suffer from Schizophrenia? (Or do the Schizophrenias represent a disorder of self consciousness?) A Southern African perspectiveSean Exner Baumann6. Long term maintenance treatment of Bipolar Disorder: Preventing relapseCharles L. Bowden7. Predictors of response to treatments for Bipolar DisorderCharles L. Bowden8. Aids/HIV knowledge and high risk behaviour: A Geo-graphical comparison in a schizophrenia populationP Buckley, S van Vuuren, L Koen, J E Muller, C Seller, H Lategan, D J H Niehaus9. Does Marijuana make you go mad?David J Castle10. Understanding and management of Treatment Resistant SchizophreniaDavid J Castle11. Workshop on research and publishingDavid J Castle12. From victim to victor: Without a self-help bookBeatrix Jacqueline Coetzee13. The evaluation of the Gender Dysphoric patientFranco Colin14. Dissociation: A South African modelA M Dikobe, C K Mataboge, L M Motlana, B F Sokudela, C Kruger15. Designated smoking rooms...and other "Secret sins" of psychiatry: Tobacco cessation approaches in the severely mentally illCharl Els16. Dual diagnosis: Implications for treatment and prognosisCharl Els17. Body weight, glucose metabolism and the new generation antipsychoticsRobin Emsley18. Neurological abnormalities in first episode Schizophrenia: Temporal stability and clinical and outcome correlatesRobin Emsley, H Jadri Turner, Piet P Oosthuizen, Jonathan Carr19. Mythology of depressive illnesses among AfricansSenathi Fisha20. Substance use and High school dropoutAlan J. Flisher, Lorraine Townsend, Perpetual Chikobvu, Carl Lombard, Gary King21. Psychosis and Psychotic disordersA E Gangat 22. Vulnerability of individuals in a family system to develop a psychiatric disorderGerhard Grundling and Eugene Allers23. What does it Uberhaupt mean to "Integrate"?Jürgen Harms24. Research issues in South African child and adolescent psychiatryS M Hawkridge25. New religious movements and psychiatry: The Good NewsV H Hitzeroth26. The pregnant heroin addict: Integrating theory and practice in the development and provision of a service for this client groupV H Hitzeroth, L Kramer27. Autism spectrum disorderErick Hollander28. Recent advances and management in treatment resistanceEric Hollander29. Bipolar mixed statesM. Leigh Janet30. Profile of acute psychiatric inpatients tested for HIV - Helen Jospeh Hospital, JohannesburgA B R Janse van Rensburg31. ADHD - Using the art of film-making as an education mediumShabeer Ahmed Jeeva32. Treatment of adult ADHD co-morbiditiesShabeer Ahmed Jeeva33. Needs and services at ward one, Valkenberg HospitalDr J. A. Joska, Prof. A.J. Flisher34. Unanswered questions in the adequate treatment of depressionModerator: Dr Andre F JoubertExpert: Prof. Tony Hale35. Unanswered questions in treatment resistant depressionModerator: Dr Andre F JoubertExpert: Prof. Sidney Kennedy36. Are mentally ill people dangerous?Sen Z Kaliski37. The child custody circusSean Z. Kaliski38. The appropriatenes of certification of patients to psychiatric hospitalsV. N. Khanyile39. HIV/Aids Psychosocial responses and ethical dilemmasFred Kigozi40. Sex and PsychiatryB Levinson41. Violence and abuse in psychiatric in-patient institutions: A South African perspectiveMarilyn Lucas, John Weinkoove, Dean Stevenson42. Public health sector expenditure for mental health - A baseline study for South AfricaE N Madela-Mntla43. HIV in South Africa: Depression and CD4 countM Y H Moosa, F Y Jeenah44. Clinical strategies in dealing with treatment resistant schizophreniaPiet Oosthuizen, Dana Niehaus, Liezl Koen45. Buprenorphine/Naloxone maintenance in office practice: 18 months and 170 patients after the American releaseTed Parran Jr, Chris Adelman46. Integration of Pharmacotherapy for Opioid dependence into general psychiatric practice: Naltrexone, Methadone and Buprenorphine/ NaloxoneTed Parran47. Our African understanding of individulalism and communitarianismWillie Pienaar48. Healthy ageing and the prevention of DementiaFelix Potocnik, Susan van Rensburg, Christianne Bouwens49. Indigenous plants and methods used by traditional African healers for treatinf psychiatric patients in the Soutpansberg Area (Research was done in 1998)Ramovha Muvhango Rachel50. Symptom pattern & associated psychiatric disorders in subjects with possible & confirmed 22Q11 deletional syndromeJ.L. Roos, H.W. Pretorius, M. Karayiorgou51. Duration of antidepressant treatment: How long is long enough? How long is too longSteven P Roose52. A comparison study of early non-psychotic deviant behaviour in the first ten years of life, in Afrikaner patients with Schizophrenia, Schizo-affective disorder and Bipolar disorderMartin Scholtz, Melissa Janse van Rensburg, J. Louw Roos53. Treatment, treatment issues, and prevention of PTSD in women: An updateSoraya Seedat54. Fron neural networks to clinical practiceM Spitzer55. Opening keynote presentation: The art and science of PsychiatryM Spitzer56. The future of Pharmacotherapy for anxiety disordersDan J. Stein57. Neuropsychological deficits pre and post Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) thrice a week: A report of four casesUgash Subramaney, Yusuf Moosa58. Prevalence of and risk factors for Tradive Dyskinesia in a Xhosa population in the Eastern CapeDave Singler, Betty D. Patterson, Sandi Willows59. Eating disorders: Addictive disorders?Christopher Paul Szabo60. Ethical challenges and dilemmas of research in third world countriesGodfrey B. Tangwa61. The interface between Neurology and Psychiatry with specific focus on Somatoform dissociative disordersMichael Trimble62. Prevalence and correlates of depression and anxiety in doctors and teachersH Van der Bijl, P Oosthuizen63. Ingrid Jonker: A psychological analysisL. M. van der Merwe64. The strange world we live in, and the nature of the human subjectVasi van Deventer65. Art in psychiatry: Appendix or brain stem?C W van Staden66. Medical students on what "Soft skills" are about before and after curriculum reformC W van Staden, P M Joubert, A-M Bergh, G E Pickworth, W J Schurink, R R du Preez, J L Roos, C Kruger, S V Grey, B G Lindeque67. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) - Medical management. Methylphenidate (Ritalin) or Atomoxetine (Strattera)Andre Venter68. A comprehensive guide to the treatment of adults with ADHDW J C Verbeeck69. Treatment of Insomnia: Stasis of the Art?G C Verster70. Are prisoners vulnerable research participants?Merryll Vorster71. Psychiatric disorders in the gymMerryl Vorster72. Ciprales: Effects on anxiety symptoms in Major Depressive DisorderBruce Lydiard
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23

"FY2016 - Output Cost Estimates and Budget Outturn Paper." Policy Papers 2016, no. 42 (July 21, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5089/9781498345422.007.

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Operating within a flat real budget envelope, the Fund delivered on the priorities and initiatives laid out in the Global Policy Agenda and Management’s Key Goals (MKGs). Resource pressures were addressed via implementation of streamlining initiatives, strategic reallocation of resources towards higher priority areas, and careful budget management. In terms of outputs, spending in FY 16 continued the shift from crisis management to crisis prevention, in line with the MKGs. Output shifted moderately from multilateral surveillance and oversight of the global system to bilateral surveillance and capacity development. Lending activity expenditure remained broadly unchanged. Average country spending was broadly aligned with assessment of risk. The net administrative budget outturn in FY 16 was $1,038 million against an approved budget of $1,052 million. The modest underspend reflects the preservation of the contingency reserve and lower-than-planned travel expenditure. Relative to FY 15, higher budget execution led to a small real (0.8 percent) year-on-year increase in net expenditures. Total capital expenditures of $131 million were recorded in FY 16 out of the $435 million in available appropriations. HQ1 Renewal expenses made up 70 percent of the spending.
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24

Silveira, Cleo Schmitt, Marta Olivia Rovedder de Oliveira, Rodrigo Heldt, and Fernando Bins Luce. "Trade-off between value creation and value appropriation?" Marketing Intelligence & Planning ahead-of-print, ahead-of-print (June 17, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/mip-11-2019-0592.

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PurposeManagers face the challenge of balancing resources needed to support value creation and value appropriation. In this study the authors analyze the impacts of innovation investments (i.e. value creation: VC) on advertising expenditures (i.e. value appropriation: VA), and vice versa, and verify the effects of these options on short- and long-term performance.Design/methodology/approachThe effects of these two activities on short- and long-term performance were analyzed observing a panel of 4,090 companies of Standard and Poor's Compustat database from a 40-year period. The authors adopted the panel vector autoregressive (VAR) approach, using the generalized method of moments (GMM).FindingsAlthough there is a trade-off between the strategic emphases on creating and appropriating value, there is also a synergy between them. The results from the impulse response functions support the argument for a virtuous business circle: companies that choose to intensify their investments in R&D tend to increase advertising expenditures, and vice versa.Practical implicationsManagers, rather than having to deal with a trade-off between allocating resources either on VC or VA activities, can capitalize on synergetic benefits resulting from the interaction among them.Originality/valueThe relationship between the VC and VA activities transcends the trade-off imposed by resource restrictions, since the interaction between them creates additional benefits afforded by the synergy of these activities.
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25

Ismoilova Sanobarkhon Yakubovna. "ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEMS OF EFFECTIVE USE OF LOCAL BUDGET FUNDS AND THEIR CAUSES. (in the case of Fergana region)." EPRA International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (IJMR), February 26, 2021, 211–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.36713/epra0327.

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The article analyzes the problems of effective use of local budget funds and their causes on the example of the Ferghana region. KEYWORDS: local budget, revenues and expenditures, financing, deficit, appropriations, illegal expenditures.
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26

Oluwadare, Christopher, and Toyin Abe. "Effects of Corruption on Health Care Processes and Outcomes in Nigeria." Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology 11, no. 1 (June 1, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.36108/njsa/3102/11(0130).

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Corruption remains the most pervasive social problem in Nigeria. In this paper corruption is viewed as the root cause of non-improvement in the health status of Nigerians produced by comparative failures of huge public health expenditures to achieve the objective of reducing epidemic diseases with the attendant high mortalities. The gap between public health investment and public health outcome is largely accounted for by wasteful public health expenditure which is corruption. Merton’s Structural Functionalist Theory of Anomie is used to analyze health policy and legislation, health procurement, availability and access of health care, budgetary appropriation and release in relations to overall health dysfunctions. The paper concludes that the prevailing high level of corruption in health care processes of Nigeria is a function of decades of moral laxity and weak social structures, and it is only a strong political leadership backed by adequate legal and political structures that will halt the impunity of public corrupt practices and catalyze significant improvement in health outcomes.
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27

Zatsepin, Vasily. "Russian military expenditure: What's behind the curtain?" Economics of Peace and Security Journal 2, no. 1 (January 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.15355/2.1.51.

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The article views the Russian defense budget as a representation of national strategic interests, priorities, and policies. Although Russia conforms to the United Nations' statistical standard for reporting military expenditure, several budget categories are hidden in other parts of the federal budget. Transparency in defense spending has been decreasing steadily. The budgeting process itself is cumbersome and opaque. Parliamentary control over the budget process and control over the execution of defense appropriations are limited. Importantly, frequent changes in the system of national accounting impede historical comparisons. The study finds that the low quality of defense management, dominated by members of the military-industrial complex, is a major problem locking Russian defense policy in an institutional trap.
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28

Delfin, Nilo D. "Fiscal Administration Variables and Productivity of State Universities and Colleges in Western Visayas, Philippines." JPAIR Multidisciplinary Research 22, no. 1 (October 22, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.7719/jpair.v22i1.334.

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Funds, whether from government or generated by institutions from other sources are the lifeblood of institutional development. Since there is never an end to development and improvement, fund sourcing and allocation are continuing concerns of every educational institution. The study determined the financial variables and productivity of SUCs in Region VI for CY 2002-2003. The study aimed to determine the a) institutional profile of the 11 SUCs in Region VI, b) profile of financial managers of SUCs in Region VI, c) budgetary allocation based on the General Appropriations Act (GAA) and income from the Special Trust Fund (STF), and d) how these financial resources are utilized for the operation. Descriptive method of research was employed and data were analyzed through frequency count and percentage mean. Study revealed that 11 SUCs in Region VI shared a common vision of becoming the center excellence, research, extension, and production with a mission of producing globally competitive graduates. The West Visayas State University (WVSU) had the biggest budgetary allocation from GAA, and got the highest earnings in school fees. A similar pattern of expenditures had been adopted by the 11 SUCs in Region VI. The SUCs in the region foresee their respective institutions as Center of Excellence. Fiscal managers had upgraded their educational qualifications. Faculty members have conducted extension, income generating projects and published researches. Fiscal managers of SUCs in Region VI should think and implement strategic plans to increase budgetary allocations to meet the demands of necessary expenditures vital to the attainment of quality education.Keywords – Fiscal Administration, SUCs productivity, descriptive research, Western Visayas, Philippines
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29

Chishimba, Hanson, Eustarckio Kazonga, and Evaristo Nsenduluka. "An analysis of the effects of equalisation funds on service delivery in selected local authorities in Zambia." Journal of Local Government Research and Innovation 1 (October 30, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/jolgri.v1i0.14.

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Background: The government of the Republic of Zambia established the Local Government Equalisation Fund, to which each year parliament appropriates not less than 5% of the total amount of projected income taxes collected for the republic for that financial year. The purpose of the fund is to provide a source of financing for service delivery.Aim: The goal of this study was to analyse the effects of equalisation funds on service delivery in selected local authorities in Zambia.Setting: The study focused on Lusaka City Council, Luanshya Municipal Council and Chisamba and Luangwa town councils in Zambia.Methods: A concurrent mixed-methods approach was used. The population comprised registered property owners and council officials in the selected districts. The sample was drawn using stratified sampling. Data were collected using questionnaires and analysed by using descriptive statistics and regression analysis using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25. Qualitative data were analysed using a narrative approach.Results: The expenditure composition of the equalisation funds shows that expenditure on personal emoluments accounts for a greater proportion than capital and service expenditure. There were similarities and differences in the methods of service delivery among local authorities: the use of local government enterprise, contracting out, franchises, volunteers, self-help groups and in-house provision.Conclusion: There is lack of satisfactory adherence to the guidelines on utilisation of equalisation funds for service delivery as espoused by the central government. The local authorities studied do not adhere to the prescribed guidelines on the utilisation of equalisation funds.
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30

Chebotarev, Vladislav, and Andrey Timchenko. "Analysis of cost efficiency of budgetary funds of national projects: problems and ways of their overcoming in the context of implementation of the May Decree of the President of the Russian Federation." Economy under Guard, July 3, 2020, 93–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.36511/2588-0071-2020-2-93-97.

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The present article is devoted to the review of problems at implementation of national projects. This aspect, including, is important also for ensuring economic security of the Russian Federation as besides the direction of expenditure of public funds for realization of social and economic functions, the essential share of budgetary appropriations is allocated for the spheres providing increase in level and economic, and national security. It and digitalization of economy (including information security), both comprehensive plan of modernization of infrastructure, and «safe and qualitative highways» project, and development of small and average business, and other projects. However, the rates and quality of application of funds allocated for implementation of the specified federal projects already since the beginning of their introduction causes serious concerns and complaints from the President and expert community. This work is devoted to the analysis of problems of efficiency of use of public funds of national projects and search of possible ways of their decision.
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31

Jezek, Tomas, and Oluwaseun Adebayo Bamodu. "A cross-country comparison of malaria policy as a premise for contextualized appropriation of foreign aid in global health." Health Research Policy and Systems 19, no. 1 (June 14, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12961-021-00700-6.

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Abstract Background Foreign aid continues to play an essential role in health sector development in low-resource countries, particularly in terms of providing a vital portion of their health expenditures. However, the relationship between foreign aid allocation and malaria policy formulation and/or implementation among state aid recipients remains unknown. Methods Publicly available data were collected with the country as observational unit to set up the conceptual framework. The quality and strength of relationships between socioeconomic, environmental and institutional parameters were estimated by Pearson and polychoric correlations. A correlation matrix was explored by factor analysis. Results The first policy index captured policy variation related to malaria burden and development assistance. Funding per capita from all international agencies was correlated with malaria burden, whereas governmental funding for national malaria programmes per capita was not. The second policy index captured variation beyond malaria endemicity and country size. Variation was found to be related to international country risk instruments and funding from the United States Agency for International Development President’s Malaria Initiative. Conclusions Not all agencies involved in malaria policy allocate assistance in alignment with the gross domestic product and malaria burden. While the country size does not negatively impact malaria burden, it does account for greater development assistance per capita from selected international agencies. Novel policy indexes describe complex relationships between malaria policy, international foreign aid and socioeconomic parameters. Small countries have distinct environmental and sociopolitical properties.
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32

Gomersall, Kathryn. "Governance of resettlement compensation and the cultural fix in rural China." Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, May 31, 2020, 0308518X2092652. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0308518x20926523.

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Financial management of resettlement funding has always been problematic for governments and development agencies trying to mitigate the negative effects of moving people from one location to another. In China, Poverty Alleviation Resettlement attempts to rectify the shortcomings in policies designed for distributing compensation and ensuring funds reach their intended use with apparatuses of security. Governance technologies take the form of reimbursement subsidies, which mitigate the risk that funds will be corrupted or households misuse money, by reimbursing expenditures already made on village construction. These technologies convey the contradictory nature of Chinese rural development, as they employ neoliberal discourse to direct fiscal transfers from the central government to enterprising individuals, but also attempt poverty alleviation of rural societies’ most marginalized households. Resettlement technologies are therefore leading to uneven development while simultaneously claiming to adhere to transnational poverty alleviation norms. In this article, the Party-state applies a cultural fix to resolve contradictions in the development apparatus. The Party-state draws on historical governance norms to change the meaning of the corrupt official that receives disproportionate government assistance into the “ideal” all villages should emulate. In this way, the Chinese bureaucracy appropriates the power of local elites to guide conduct and achieve broader political economic goals.
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Mules, Warwick. "A Remarkable Disappearing Act." M/C Journal 4, no. 4 (August 1, 2001). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1920.

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Creators and Creation Creation is a troubling word today, because it suggests an impossible act, indeed a miracle: the formation of something out of nothing. Today we no longer believe in miracles, yet we see all around us myriad acts which we routinely define as creative. Here, I am not referring to the artistic performances and works of gifted individuals, which have their own genealogy of creativity in the lineages of Western art. Rather, I am referring to the small, personal events that we see within the mediated spaces of the everyday (on the television screen, in magazines and newspapers) where lives are suddenly changed for the better through the consumption of products designed to fulfil our personal desires. In this paper, I want to explore the implications of thinking about everyday creativity as a modern cultural form. I want to suggest that not only is such an impossible possibility possible, but that its meaning has been at the centre of the desire to name, to gain status from, and to market the products of modern industrialisation. Furthermore I want to suggest that beyond any question of marketing rhetoric, we need to attend to this desire as the ghost of a certain kind of immanence which has haunted modernity and its projects from the very beginning, linking the great thoughts of modern philosophy with the lowliest products of modern life. Immanence, Purity and the Cogito In Descartes' famous Discourse on Method, the author-narrator (let's call him Descartes) recounts how he came about the idea of the thinking self or cogito, as the foundation of worldly knowledge: And so because sometimes our senses deceive us, I made up my mind to suppose that they always did. . . . I resolved to pretend that everything that had ever entered my mind was as false as the figments of my dreams. But then as I strove to think of everything false, I realized that, in the very act of thinking everything false, I was aware of myself as something real. (60-61) These well known lines are, of course, the beginnings of a remarkable philosophical enterprise, reaching forward to Husserl and beyond, in which the external world is bracketed, all the better to know it in the name of reason. Through an act of pretence ("I resolved to pretend"), Descartes disavows the external world as the source of certain knowledge, and, turning to the only thing left: the thought of himself—"I was aware of myself as something real"—makes his famous declaration, "I think therefore I am". But what precisely characterises this thinking being, destined to become the cogito of all modernity? Is it purely this act of self-reflection?: Then, from reflecting on the fact that I had doubts, and that consequently my existence was not wholly perfect, it occurred to me to enquire how I learned to think of something more perfect than myself, and it became evident to me that it must be through some nature which was in fact more perfect. (62) Descartes has another thought that "occurred to me" almost at the same moment that he becomes aware of his own thinking self. This second thought makes him aware that the cogito is not complete, requiring yet a further thought, that of a perfection drawn from something "more perfect than myself". The creation of the cogito does not occur, as we might have first surmised, within its own space of self-reflection, but becomes lodged within what might be called, following Deleuze and Guattari, a "plane of immanence" coming from the outside: "The plane of immanence is . . . an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world: it is immanence" (59). Here we are left with a puzzling question: what of this immanence that made him aware of his own imperfection at the very moment of the cogito's inception? Can this immanence be explained away by Descartes' appeal to God as a state of perfection? Or is it the very material upon which the cogito is brought into existence, shaping it towards perfection? We are forced to admit that, irrespective of the source of this perfection, the cogito requires something from the outside which, paradoxically, is already on the inside, in order to create itself as a pure form. Following the contours of Descartes' own writing, we cannot account for modernity purely in terms of self-reflection, if, in the very act of its self-creation, the modern subject is shot through with immanence that comes from the outside. Rather what we must do is describe the various forms this immanence takes. Although there is no necessary link between immanence and perfection (that is, one does not logically depend on the other as its necessary cause) their articulation nevertheless produces something (the cogito for instance). Furthermore, this something is always characterised as a creation. In its modern form, creation is a form of immanence within materiality—a virtualisation of material actuality, that produces idealised states, such as God, freedom, reason, uniqueness, originality, love and perfection. As Bruno Latour has argued, the "modern critical stance" creates unique, pure objects, by purging the material "networks" from which they are formed, of their impurities (11-12). Immanence is characterised by a process of sifting and purification which brings modern objects into existence: "the plane of immanence . . . acts like a sieve" (Deleuze and Guattari 42). The nation, the state, the family, the autonomous subject, and the work of art—all of these are modern when their 'material' is purged of impurities by an immanence that 'comes from the outside' yet is somehow intrinsic to the material itself. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, the modern nation exists by virtue of a capacity to convert strangers into citizens; by purging itself of impurities inhabiting it from within but coming from the outside (63). The modern work of art is created by purging itself of the vulgarities and impurities of everyday life (Berman 30); by reducing its contingent and coincidental elements to a geometrical, punctual or serialised form. The modern nuclear family is created by converting the community-based connections between relatives and friends into a single, internally consistent self-reproducing organism. All of these examples require us to think of creativity as an act which brings something new into existence from within a material base that must be purged and disavowed, but which, simultaneously, must also be retained as its point of departure that it never really leaves. Immanence should not be equated with essence, if by essence we mean a substratum of materiality inherent in things; a quality or quiddity to which all things can be reduced. Rather, immanence is the process whereby things appear as they are to others, thereby forming themselves into 'objects' with certain identifiable characteristics. Immanence draws the 'I' and the 'we' into relations of subjectivity to the objects thus produced. Immanence is not in things; it is the thing's condition of objectivity in a material, spatial and temporal sense; its 'becoming object' before it can be 'perceived' by a subject. As Merleau-Ponty has beautifully argued, seeing as a bodily effect necessarily comes before perception as an inner ownership (Merleau-Ponty 3-14). Since immanence always comes from elsewhere, no intensive scrutiny of the object in itself will bring it to light. But since immanence is already inside the object from the moment of its inception, no amount of examination of its contextual conditions—the social, cultural, economic, institutional and authorial conditions under which the object was created—will bring us any closer to it. Rather, immanence can only be 'seen' (if this is the right word) in terms of the objects it creates. We should stop seeking immanence as a characteristic of objects considered in themselves, and rather see it in terms of a virtual field or plane, in which objects appear, positioned in a transversally related way. This field does not exist transcendentally to the objects, like some overarching principle of order, but as a radically exteriorised stratum of 'immaterial materiality' with a specific image-content, capable of linking objects together as a series of creations, all with the stamp of their own originality, individuality and uniqueness, yet all bound together by a common set of image relations (Deleuze 34-35). If, as Foucault argues, modern objects emerge in a "field of exteriority"—a complex web of discursive interrelations, with contingent rather than necessary connections to one another (Foucault 45)—then it should be possible to map the connections between these objects in terms of the "schema of correspondence" (74) detected in the multiplicities thrown up by the regularities of modern production and consumption. Commodities and Created Objects We can extend the idea of creation to include not only aesthetic acts and their objects, but also the commodity-products of modern industrialisation. Let's begin by plunging straight into the archive, where we might find traces of these small modern miracles. An illustrated advertisement for 'Hudson's Extract of Soap' appeared in the Illustrated Sydney News, on Saturday February 22nd, 1888. The illustration shows a young woman with a washing basket under her arm, standing beside a sign posted to a wall, which reads 'Remarkable Disappearance of all Dirt from Everything by using Hudson's Extract of Soap' (see Figure 1). The woman has her head turned towards the poster, as if reading it. Beneath these words, is another set of words offering a reward: 'Reward !!! Purity, Health, Perfection, Satisfaction. By its regular daily use'. Here we are confronted with a remarkable proposition: soap does not make things clean, rather it makes dirt disappear. Soap purifies things by making their impurities disappear. The claim made applies to 'everything', drawing attention to a desire for a certain state of perfection, exemplified by the pure body, cleansed of dirt and filth. The pure exists in potentia as a perfect state of being, realised by the purgation of impurities. Fig 1: Hudson's Soap. Illustrated Sydney News, on Saturday February 22nd, 1888 Here we might be tempted to trace the motivation of this advertisement to a concern in the nineteenth century for a morally purged, purified body, regulated according to bourgeois values of health, respectability and decorum. As Catherine Gallagher has pointed out, the body in the nineteenth century was at the centre of a sick society requiring "constant flushing, draining, and excising of various deleterious elements" (Gallagher 90). But this is only half the story. The advertisement offers a certain image of purity; an image which exceeds the immediate rhetorical force associated with selling a product, one which cannot be simply reduced to its contexts of use. The image of perfection in the Hudson's soap advertisement belongs to a network of images spread across a far-flung field; a network in which we can 'see' perfection as a material immanence embodied in things. In modernity, commodities are created objects par excellence, which, in their very ordinariness, bear with them an immanence, binding consumers together into consumer formations. Each act of consumption is not simply driven by necessity and need, but by a desire for self-transformation, embodied in the commodity itself. Indeed, self-transformation becomes one of the main creative processes in what Marshal Berman has identified as the "third" phase of modernity, where, paraphrasing Nietzsche, "modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence and emptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance of possibilities" (Berman 21). Commodification shifts human desire away from the thought of the other as a transcendental reality remote from the senses, and onto a future oriented material plane, in which the self is capable of becoming an other in a tangible, specific way (Massumi 35 ff.). By the end of the nineteenth century, commodities had become associated with scenarios of self-transformation embedded in human desire, which then began to shape the needs of society itself. Consumer formations are not autonomous realms; they are transversally located within and across social strata. This is because commodities bear with them an immanence which always exceeds their context of production and consumption, spreading across vast cultural terrains. An individual consumer is thus subject to two forces: the force of production that positions her within the social strata as a member of a class or social grouping, and the force of consumption that draws her away from, or indeed, further into a social positioning. While the consumption of commodities remained bound to ideologies relating to the formation of class in terms of a bourgeois moral order, as it was in Britain, America and Europe throughout the nineteenth century, then the discontinuity between social strata and cultural formation was felt in terms of the possibility of self-transformation by moving up a class. In the nineteenth century, working class families flocked to the new photographic studios to have their portraits taken, emulating the frozen moral rectitude of the ideal bourgeois type, or scrimped and saved to purchase parlour pianos and other such cultural paraphernalia, thereby signalling a certain kind of leisured freedom from the grind of work (Sekula 8). But when the desire for self-transformation starts to outstrip the ideological closure of class; that is, when the 'reality' of commodities starts to overwhelm the social reality of those who make them, then desire itself takes on an autonomy, which can then be attached to multiple images of the other, expressed in imaginary scenarios of escape, freedom, success and hyper-experience. This kind of free-floating desire has now become a major trigger for transformations in consumer formations, linked to visual technologies where images behave like quasi-autonomous beings. The emergence of these images can be traced back at least to the mid-nineteenth century where products of industrialisation were transformed into commodities freely available as spectacles within the public spaces of exhibitions and in mass advertising in the press, for instance in the Great Exhibition of 1851 held at London's Crystal Palace (Richards 28 ff.) Here we see the beginnings of a new kind of object-image dislocated from the utility of the product, with its own exchange value and logic of dispersal. Bataille's notion of symbolic exchange can help explain the logic of dispersal inherent in commodities. For Bataille, capitalism involves both production utility and sumptuary expenditure, where the latter is not simply a calculated version of the former (Bataille 120 ff.) Sumptuary expenditure is a discharge of an excess, and not a drawing in of demand to match the needs of supply. Consumption thus has a certain 'uncontrolled' element embedded in it, which always moves beyond the machinations of market logic. Under these conditions, the commodity image always exceeds production and use, taking on a life of its own, charged with desire. In the late nineteenth century, the convergence of photography and cartes-de-visites released a certain scopophilic desire in the form of postcard pornography, which eventually migrated to the modern forms of advertising and public visual imagery that we see today. According to Suren Lalvani, the "onset of scopophilia" in modern society is directly attributable to the convergence of photographic technology and erotic display in the nineteenth century (Lalvani). In modern consumer cultures, desire does not lag behind need, but enters into the cycle of production and consumption from the outside, where it becomes its driving force. In this way, modern consumer cultures transform themselves by ecstasis (literally, by standing outside oneself) when the body becomes virtualised into its other. Here, the desire for self-transformation embodied in the act of consumption intertwines with, and eventually redefines, the social positioning of the subject. Indeed the 'laws' of capital and labour where each person or family group is assigned a place and regime of duties, are constantly undone and redefined by the superfluity of consumption, gradually gathering pace throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These tremendous changes operating throughout all capitalist consumer cultures for some time, do not occur in a calculated way, as if controlled by the forces of production alone. Rather, they occur through myriad acts of self-transformation, operating transversally, linking consumer to consumer within what I have defined earlier as a field of immanence. Here, the laws of supply and demand are inadequate to predict the logic of this operation; they only describe the effects of consumption after desire has been spent. Or, to put this another way, they misread desire as need, thereby transcribing the primary force of consumption into a secondary component of the production/labour cycle. This error is made by Humphrey McQueen in his recent book The Essence of Capitalism: the origins of our future (2001). In chapter 8, McQueen examines the logic of the consumer market through a critique of the marketeer's own notion of desire, embodied in the "sovereign consumer", making rational choices. Here desire is reduced back to a question of calculated demand, situated within the production/consumption cycle. McQueen leaves himself no room to manoeuvre outside this cycle; there is no way to see beyond the capitalist cycle of supply/demand which accelerates across ever-increasing horizons. To avoid this error, desire needs to be seen as immanent to the production/consumption cycle; as produced by it, yet superfluous to its operations. We need therefore to situate ourselves not on the side of production, but in the superfluity of consumption in order to recognise the transformational triggers that characterise modern consumer cultures, and their effects on the social order. In order to understand the creative impulse in modernity today, we need to come to grips with the mystery of consumption, where the thing consumed operates on the consumer in both a material and an immaterial way. This mystification of the commodity was, of course, well noted by Marx: A commodity is . . . a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. (Marx 43, my emphasis) When commodities take on such a powerful force that their very presence starts to drive and shape the social relations that have given rise to them; that is, when desire replaces need as the shaping force of societies, then we are obliged to redefine the commodity and its relation to the subject. Under these conditions, the mystery of the commodity is no longer something to be dispelled in order to retrieve the real relation between labour and capital, but becomes the means whereby "men's labour" is actually shaped and formed as a specific mode of production. Eric Alliez and Michel Feher (1987) point out that in capitalism "the subjection framework which defines the wage relation has penetrated society to such an extent that we can now speak not only of the formal subsumption of labor by capital but of the actual or 'real' subsumption by capital of society as a whole" (345). In post-Fordist economic contexts, individuals' relation to capital is no longer based on subjection but incorporation: "space is subsumed under a time entirely permeated by capital. In so doing, they [neo-Fordist strategies] also instigate a regime in which individuals are less subject to than incorporated by capital" (346). In societies dominated by the subjection of workers to capital, the commodity's exchange value is linked strongly to the classed position of the worker, consolidating his interests within the shadow of a bourgeois moral order. But where the worker is incorporated into capital, his 'real' social relations go with him, making it difficult to see how they can be separated from the commodities he produces and which he also consumes at leisure: "If the capitalist relation has colonized all of the geographical and social space, it has no inside into which to integrate things. It has become an unbounded space—in other words, a space coextensive with its own inside and outside. It has become a field of immanence" (Massumi 18). It therefore makes little sense to initiate critiques of the capital relation by overthrowing the means of subjection. Instead, what is required is a way through the 'incorporation' of the individual into the capitalist system, an appropriation of the means of consumption in order to invent new kinds of selfhood. Or at the very least, to expose the process of self-formation to its own means of consumption. What we need to do, then, is to undertake a description of the various ways in which desire is produced within consumer cultures as a form of self-creation. As we have seen, in modernity, self-creation occurs when human materiality is rendered immaterial through a process purification. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, I have characterised this process in terms of immanence: a force coming from the outside, but which is already inside the material itself. In the necessary absence of any prime mover or deity, pure immanence becomes the primary field in which material is rendered into its various and specific modern forms. Immanence is not a transcendental power operating over things, but that which is the very motor of modernity; its specific way of appearing to itself, and of relating to itself in its various guises and manifestations. Through a careful mapping of the network of commodity images spread through far-flung fields, cutting through specific contexts of production and consumption, we can see creation at work in one of its specific modern forms. Immanence, and the power of creation it makes possible, can be found in all modern things, even soap powder! References Alliez, Eric and Michel Feher. "The Luster of Capital." Zone 1(2) 1987: 314-359. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Penguin, 1982. Bataille, George. "The Notion of Expenditure." George Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Trans. Alan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp.116-129. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method. Trans. Arthur Wollaston, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock, 1972. Gallagher, Catherine. "The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew." The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987: 83-106. Lalvani, Suren. "Photography, Epistemology and the Body." Cultural Studies, 7(3), 1993: 442-465. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Karl. Capital, A New Abridgement. David McLellan (Ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Massumi, Brian. "Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear" in Brian Massumi (Ed.). The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 3-37. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1968. McQueen, Humphrey. The Essence of Capitalism: the Origins of Our Future. Sydney: Sceptre, 2001. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive." October, 39, 1986: 3-65.
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34

Pardy, Maree. "A Waste of Space: Bodies, Time and Urban Renewal." M/C Journal 13, no. 4 (August 18, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.275.

Full text
Abstract:
“This table breeds idleness!” read the text of a handwritten message placed prominently on the table I shared with 5 of my friends many years ago in secondary school. Ours was one of several tables positioned to the side of the main teaching area of the classroom where we would gather on arrival, decant our bags to tables, gossip with our ‘group’ and then begin our school day. It was also a space where we could sit or study quietly between classes and during free periods. The note about our idleness was left only on ‘our’ table. Recognising the handwriting of our classroom teacher, Sister Celestine, we greeted her note with restrained laughter and a sense of teenage pride. Her reprimand was stern, but she had also acknowledged our specialness. We were seen as we might have wanted to be seen, recalcitrant, not too hardworking, slightly roguish, and a bit improper.That note, and its words, stayed with me for a long time. There was something wonderfully urgent about this call to reflexivity; and something pleasantly disturbing about the panicky tone of its message. It seemed a peculiar expression of both crisis and care. ‘Idleness’ was a word we rarely encountered. In fact, it seemed such an old fashioned utterance, belonging more to a past era of our nun and the vernacular of her time. What was it that moved this nun to construe our mischief and our youthful conviviality as idleness? We considered ourselves spirited and boisterous, certainly not inert, as the word seemed to imply. This was curious, but it was the word ‘breeds’ that captured me more. What precisely is the generative or reproductive power of the conjunction of our bodies and this table? The concern was clearly not just about our idleness, but also about the breeding power of this table.Idleness here speaks to us of what happens when proper things are not happening. When the table and our bodies converge in this space of idleness we are in the terrain of waste: wasting time (that could be spent on studying), wasting potential (that could advance our life prospects), wasting space (that could be used productively). The breeding of idleness is a judgement about how we are occupying this time and space. The table is a wasted space, and in turn it produces us as a waste of space. It is regulated by a circular logic. We are wasting time, which is wasting space; this in turn produces us as the wasters of that space. The space of the table might be used more purposefully, but not while it is breeding us. The nun’s note to us might have read, “You are a waste of space because you are wasting time.” Time is thus spatialised. The ‘table of idleness’ has returned to me in recent times as a partial metaphor for the paradigm of urban renewal. Contemporary urban renewal and regeneration programs in places like the UK, Europe, North America and Australia are inspired to use space more productively, and to design and develop urban space in ways that enable the production of vibrant, clean, safer places where cultural diversity might be experienced as cosmopolitan chic. Tethering modern urban design to property development and the trend to ‘lifestyle’ based local economies, urban renewal is a strategy sweeping most postindustrial economies. Suburbs ripe for these renewal, regeneration or revitalisation projects are identified in part through the presence of dormant, derelict spaces, in other words, wasted spaces from bygone eras. Typically these suburbs show the signs of neglect associated with economic change. They have become dormant as large-scale deindustrialisation and the development of large shopping malls away from urban centres sees people exiting the suburbs to work and shop. Street life diminishes and local businesses struggle or close, leaving landscapes of decaying infrastructure and urban decline. Urban renewal apprehends such idle spaces as wasted opportunities that can be designed and developed into a usefulness that provides lifestyles of comfort, vitality and urban safety. But these wasted spaces also produce shadow wastes. Much like our table of indolence and time wasting, these spaces are considered breeding grounds, not just for a sense of urban dullness and decay but, more worryingly, for generating urban sloth and danger. They become the breeding grounds for what is now commonly referred to as ‘antisocial behaviour’ or ‘urban incivility’. That is, those who ‘unproductively’ and ‘dangerously’ occupy particular urban public spaces. In the inner western Melbourne suburb of Footscray, which is currently undergoing renewal, these bodies are identified as the unruly public drinkers and drug users, black African men who have created a street café culture, and people with mental health difficulties who occupy the streets and who at times display anomalous bodily comportment and atypical civil demeanours. Many of these people are poor and sometimes engage in unconventional modalities of conviviality. A contemporary urban version of the idle schoolgirls in many ways, they sit at tables, on footpaths, in stairwells, on seats, in parks and often linger around railways stations. They are the unproductive, idle, culturally defunct bodies of the present day. It is useful to hold these bodies in mind when considering the waste products, and waste producers, of present time In the discourse of urban renewal, Footscray is depicted as a once thriving regional hub that has been ‘in decline’ since the 1980s. Decline here is code for the loss of industry and retail business alongside rising levels of poverty, cultural diversity, and public crime (predominantly drug related and property crime). A suburb in the grip of uneven gentrifying change, its dominant image of danger and diversity still sabotages its ‘lifestyle potential’. It remains a wasted space.The nexus of urban renewal and wasted space reveals a double obligation of renewal programs. The need to remove the waste, to ‘clean up’ the debris and decay of a bygone industrial and suburban era and to ‘clean out’ its progeny, the bodies borne of, and now further wasting, this wasted space. In this sense idle space as waste entails a bio-politics that produces particular bodies as a ‘waste of space’. Urban Dictionary defines waste of space thus: 1. A person devoid of any redeeming characteristics; 2. Someone who consumes valuable resources without contributing anything to society. A bum. A drain on the economy. 3. A person or occasionally an object which nobody is fond of. In fact, most people hate this person/thing and find it completely useless. 4. Completely useless people. 5. Waste of room, usually on computer hard drives, that could be used for better things. It is therefore worth considering the conceptual and historical trajectory of the link between waste and idleness as a prelude to considering in more detail some of the anxieties associated with the disorderly urban effects of idle bodies in wasted spaces. Waste as Improper UseAt its most elemental, waste is a judgment. Waste as profligate or excess consumption, or as leftover material, or as something that has deteriorated through neglect or lack of effort, is a moral reckoning. Judgments about waste signal a moral economy far more than they do a fiscal one. In his book On Garbage, John Scanlan notes that ‘waste’ in its old and middle English modes referred to a land or an environment that was unsuitable to human habitation. This reference was gradually replaced by the corresponding terms ‘wilderness’ or ‘desert’, thus marking the beginning of waste as reprimand. Bringing together modern and pre-modern language usage, Scanlan suggests that waste at its most general refers to an imbalance (22). Whether it is rubbish, junk, clutter or other extravagance excess, and squander, waste is too much, but also too little in the sense of ‘not making the best use of something’ (time, resources, opportunities). Pared right down waste refers to the proper use of something. Scanlan again: “‘waste’ carries force because of the way in which it symbolises an idea of improper use, and therefore operates within a more or less moral economy of the right, the good, the proper, their opposites and all values in between” (22 my emphasis). In the contemporary urban domain this might refer to the overuse of vast tracts of land exhausted or wrecked by industry, the abandonment or underutilisation of shops and commons, or the improper and uncivil use of the space that lingers. Scanlan traces this idea of waste as improper use back to the relation between self and natural space that inheres in seventeenth century English political philosophy. Referring to the work of John Locke in particular, waste is conceived as the original condition of the chaos of nature. For Locke selfhood became linked to freedom from this chaos and entailed the virtue, indeed the necessity, of human labour and intervention to ward off the potential ruin that nature may inflict. Locke outlines a philosophical and ethical basis for claims to property over land and natural resources such that “claims to property ownership rest on an idea of the proper use of land which entails the appropriation (through the use of one’s labour) of its previously unused potential” (Scanlan 24). Hence, “Land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste; and we shall see the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing.” (Locke quoted in Scanlan 24). This Lockean understanding of waste has come to be associated with his theories of property rights, but, as Scanlan points out, it was also driven by the idea that any benefits derived from property were “dependent on a duty to a higher power” (26).Nature is construed as useless and chaotic (waste) in the absence of human intervention. Property and ‘land use’ were not just about use by humans, but use for humans in order to defend them against the unruliness of nature and the disorder and ruin it might issue. The danger of going to rack and ruin through the disorder of untamed waste is crucial to this understanding. To neglect nature through idleness or lack of intervention is to invite ruin. Idleness thus breeds waste. There is a link here between land and character, for doing nothing or not doing things properly corresponds with improper character. Scanlan advances that waste can best be understood here as an indeterminacy signaling the need for form and discipline. He notes that Montaigne in his essay On Idleness compares wasted land with the idle mind, which when undisciplined allows wildness of character and purpose. Reminiscent of schoolgirls at their table of idleness, the defunct bodies of urban life are seen to be without purpose or goal and to be wasteful of life itself. As a consequence they are deemed to be inviting havoc and all its destructive tendencies. This fear of the indeterminacy of waste, says Scanlan, portends the social and cultural links between “waste, imperfection, disorder and ruin” (25). While concepts of properness and proper use have multiple histories, it is not difficult to see how these seventeenth century Enlightenment associations of proper use and rights to property underpinned the period of new imperialism of the nineteenth century. We might say then that waste features prominently in the imperialist imaginary. Codes of properness, as in the proper use of things, are time and place specific, hence interrogating the meanings of ‘proper use’ entails a prior enquiry into the framing of time. It is linear time, that is, time as progress which frames imperial and colonial history. Progress is movement away from scarcity, disorder and deficiency towards enlightened reason, discipline and mastery. However, this notion of progress, which is central to ideologies of both Enlightenment and imperialism, is always dependent on a shadow other: backwardness. Anne McClintock emphasises a corresponding need to always travel backwards in time in order to apprehend the colonised spaces and people as existing in an eternally prior time, as obsolete historical subjects. According to McClintock, imperialist discourse relies on two principal tropes: panoptical time and anachronistic space. She explains that the eighteenth century historians and empiricists required “a visual paradigm […] to display evolutionary progress as a measurable spectacle.” Progress is fundamentally a visually driven process and narrative. Panoptical time is depicted as “the image of global history consumed—at a glance—in a single spectacle from the point of privileged invisibility” (37). Marginal groups are placed outside of history in the sense that they can be seen by the bourgeoisie, who itself remains unseen. In this spectacle of progress, history appears static and fixed, but this is countered through the invention of the trope of anachronistic space. This space denies the agency of the archaic subjects that exist outside and therefore threaten history as progress. McClintock explains: “the agency of women, the colonised and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity” (40). If imperial panoptical time produces inferior subjects who are “hemmed in” (Fanon 29) by anterior time and anachronistic space, contemporary urban renewal projects prompt questions about their time, the time of now. How might we conceptualise the time/space of now, and are these regulatory technologies of panoptical time and anachronistic space at work in the time/space of now? In what way is urban renewal a contemporary “measurable spectacle of progress” in an age of postindustrial neoliberalism?Urban Space, Proper Use and Idle BodiesIn a recent article on sexual politics and torture, Judith Butler argues that the ways in which debates of this nature are framed “are already imbued with the problem of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time” (1). Butler reminds us that hegemonic conceptions of progress endure, and continue to define themselves over and against a pre-modern temporality produced for self-legitimation. This narrative of progressive modernity continues to spatialise time. For her it is the framing of modernity as sexual freedom that apprehends others as outmoded and stuck in anachronistic space. The time of now in the urban setting is the time of neoliberal modernity, a time that is also driven by spectacle. The vision of freedom through lifestyle consumption similarly identifies others who are outside this time and who threaten it. Neoliberalism as the ideology of a radically free market that institutes economic deregulation, tariff reduction, public financial support for business and its shareholders, and the reduced role of government in areas of welfare and social expenditure, the effects of which are discernable at the urban scale. For Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “actually existing neoliberalism” is witnessed in what they call the “creative destruction” that inheres in the urbanisation of neoliberalism. In this materialisation of neoliberal time, modernity and progress continue to be driven visually. Thus this neoliberal/urban nexus depends on further sub-units of time, nominated by Brenner and Theodore as moments of (visual) “destruction and creation.” A series of examples of such creative destruction are offered by Brenner and Theodore and include the destruction of rights through the creation policing and social exclusion agendas. They argue that the mechanism of “re-regulating urban civility” entails moments of destroying notions of the liberal city in which all inhabitants are entitled to social services and political rights, and moments of creating zero tolerance policing, new forms of social surveillance and new policies to prevent social exclusion. The destructive moment of “re-representing the city” recasts the postwar image of the working class through visions of urban disorder, dangerous classes of people and of economic decline, involves the creative moment of entrepreneurial discourses about the need for revitalisation, renewal and reinvestment in urban areas (372). The ‘proper use’ of neoliberal urban space depends on the dynamic of destruction/creation through a new consumer-driven urban entrepreneurialism. Urban renewal as proper neoliberal usage is a re-ordering of space to make it fit for purpose. Proper use here follows the Lockean impulse of human intervention through planning, design and redevelopment, is now apprehended not as service to God, but capitulation to the dictates of the neoliberal agendas implemented by the combined forces of the state and capital. The moral economy of waste is at work in the moral economy of urban renewal, As Sharon Zukin elaborates: “the look and feel of cities reflect decisions about what and who should be visible and what should not, concepts of order and disorder, and on uses of aesthetic power” (7). At the crux of waste, and of urban renewal, is an anxiety about visibility, therefore the persistently visible presence of waste as idleness, has become an acute focus of contemporary urban governance and police ‘law and order’ campaigns. Modernity and progress must materialise as an urban aesthetic that is purposeful and vibrant, not idle and wasteful.The indeterminacy of waste thus becomes determined by its attribution as ‘garbage’ to be disposed of, banished, evicted, cast out. Waste converted to garbage is made into an object disconnected from the process of its production. Garbage is a noun rather than a verb, and as such, it conceals process. Creative destruction is again at play; waste is destroyed (as process) and garbage (as object) is produced. In the suburbs this conversion from process to object is narrated through the objectifying language of anti social behavior and incivility. I recently attended Maribyrnong council meeting (Maribyrnong being the local government authority for Footscray), where a discussion about cleaning up the central activity district quickly became a discussion about “those antisocial people.” This was not the terminology of council officers, but of a number of ratepayers. This anxiety about the image of the area is reflected also in the minutes of a further council meeting where differences between the stigmatised image of Footscray was compared with the changing images of other inner municipalities: “The visibility of these antisocial behaviours and the associated negative impact has significantly diminished in these [other] areas due to the gentrification of the inner-city, and the associated revitalisation of street activities. [Our municipality] is on the cusp of a similar transformation. In the meantime the social issues … continue to remain more visible” (71). These bodies are the garbage to be removed from the urban landscape so it might be made anew.The bodies at the imaginative centre of this cleansing impulse are those bodies that one might see as the waste products of neoliberalism. Loic Wacquant suggests that today’s urban policies focus on “making the dangerous and dirty classes invisible.” This, he argues is “leading to a cleansing of the urban environment and the streets from the physical and human detritus wrought by economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment” (198). Consequently, waste in urban renewal both conceals and reveals the shadow side of contemporary cultural politics. Public policy is increasingly concerned with the detritus, yet the failed and wasted bodies that litter the streets and stations, these bodies and their predicaments, as with other garbage objects, are steadfastly disconnected from the policies and processes that produced and continue to ‘breed’ them. The moral economy of urban renewal targets a cluster of wastes—idle bodies, wasted time, and improper uses of space—all fused in an endless reproduction of uselessness. This coalescence of wastes and wasters forms the spectacle of contemporary urban decay and failure. Neoliberal urban renewal begins to mimic Locke’s taming of nature, making it useful as a defense against ruin and disorder. The uncultivated bodies of urban waste are contemporary versions of Lockean wildness. Being of such poor character they have no right to occupy the property in which they idle. Through the panoptical time of neoliberalism they are cast as remarkable spectacles of failure, out of place in this time and space. They are wasting time, and are themselves a waste of space. References Brenner, Neil and Nik Theodore. “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’.” Antipode 34.3 (July 2002): 349-79.Butler, Judith. “Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time.” The British Journal of Sociology 59.1 (2008): 1-23.Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin, 1963.Maribyrnong City Council. Ordinary Meeting Minutes, File no: HEA-60-014, 29 April. 2010.McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge, 1995.Scanlan, John. On Garbage. London: Reaktion, 2005.Wacquant, Loic. “Relocating Gentrification: The Working Class, Science and the State in Recent Urban Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32.1 (2008): 198-205.Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995.
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