Academic literature on the topic 'Post-WWII activism'

How does an increase in cultural diversity affect state–society interactions? Do institutional differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous communities influence economic activity? I argue that heterogeneity not only impedes informal cooperation but also increases demand for third-party enforcement provided by the state. Over time, the greater willingness of heterogeneous communities to engage with state institutions facilitates the accumulation of state capacity and, in common-interest states, promotes private economic activity. I test this argument using original data on post-WWII population transfers in Poland. I find that homogeneous migrant communities were initially more successful in providing local public goods through informal enforcement, while heterogeneous migrant communities relied on the state for the provision of public goods. Economically similar during state socialism, heterogeneous communities collected higher tax revenues and registered higher incomes and entrepreneurship rates following the transition to the market. These findings challenge the predominant view of diversity as harmful to economic development.

Editor in Chief of “The Pedagogical Quarterly” discourses with Irena Wojnar, employed at the University of Warsaw since early post-war time. Her intellectual evolution (l’âge où l’on grandit) occurs in changing dramatic periods of our history, optimism of elementary school before the World War II, painful time of clandestine education during the Nazi occupation in Warsaw, hopes and illusions of the post-war epoch. In these periods, the essential inspirations for Irena Wojnar were successive books of Bogdan Suchodolski, with symbolic titles: Love life – be valiant (2nd ed. 1930), Whence and where are we going to? (1943) and Education for the future (1947). In the Polish school before the WWII, pupils were educated in the spirit of patriotism and civic duties, sensibility to the surrounding world and the service of humans. Tragic heroism of the WWII became the proof of those values. In the conditions of constant aggressive and permanent threat, quasi “against the night”, the fight with the occupant becomes the essential moral duty. For young people, pupils and students, when secondary and tertiary schools were closed by the Nazis, this duty signified participation in clandestine education supporting hope to preserve future order in the world and preparation of the future activity in the free Poland after the WWII. The end of the WWII created a chance for the future shape of the world in line with our humanistic values. It was the period of the reconstruction of Warsaw, destroyed during the WWII, becoming a city of “sorrow and dreams”. In the final part of the conversation there appears the general opinion that every individual life–story, beyond its individual aspects, reveals a more general educational idea. Human life runs across destiny and personal consciousness. Independently of our destiny, we have a chance to choose values important for us, to realise the “poetics of the self” (poétique du soi) based on our capacity to overcome own limitations and to increase goodness in the world.

Agriculture may support the local nonagricultural economy in rural areas, though agricultural expansion may also crowd-out nonagricultural activity. On the United States Plains, areas over the Ogallala aquifer experienced windfall agricultural gains when post-WWII technologies increased farmers' access to groundwater. Comparing counties over the Ogallala with similar counties, nonagricultural sectors experienced only short-run relative benefits. Despite substantial and persistent agricultural gains, there was no long-run relative expansion of nonagricultural sectors in Ogallala counties. Agricultural development may still encourage regional or national nonagricultural development, but agriculture does not appear to generate local economic spillovers that differentially encourage local nonagricultural activity. (JEL Q12, Q15, Q18, Q25, R11)

Existing indicators of technical change are plagued by shortcomings. I present new measures based on books published in the field of technology that resolve many of these problems and use them to identify the impact of technology shocks on economic activity. They are positively linked to changes in R&D and scientific knowledge, and capture the new technologies' commercialization dates. Changes in information technology are found to be important sources of economic fluctuations in the post-WWII period, and total factor productivity, investment, and, to a lesser extent, labor are all shown to increase following a positive technology shock. (JEL E22, E23, E32, O33, O34, O47)

Abstract This article explores the experiences of the revolutionary-left opposition in the People’s Republic of Poland, a bureaucratic post-capitalist state established after WWII. It draws heavily upon Andrzej Friszke’s research concentrated on the 1960s, when post-1956 oppositional activity emerged and had an impact on the public sphere. The aim of this article is to present Marxist and revolutionary trends within oppositional circles mainly via the political trajectory of two important figures associated with revolutionary Marxism during the ‘People’s Poland’ of the 1960s, Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, and their later attitudes during the military dictatorship and the restoration of capitalism in Poland. It also focuses on Kuroń and Modzelewski’s relations with Ludwik Hass, a controversial Polish Trotskyist, and Trotskyism as a political doctrine; and the 1980s’ general tendency toward workers’ democracy in factories, before the advent of martial law implemented by General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1981.

AbstractMost theories of government growth place nearly exclusive attention on real changes in public sector activity. Yet, much nominal post–WWII government spending growth was not in the form of the public sector doing more relative to the general economy (real growth), but in the form of government activities becoming relatively more expensive (cost growth). Baumol's (1967) “cost disease” model is our best guide to understanding cost growth, but over time, Baumol has offered conflicting hypotheses about how cost growth bears on real growth. Using 1947–2012 U.S. data, we test these hypotheses, along with a more novel expectation, by modifying Berry and Lowery's (1987b) econometric models of real growth in public purchases and transfers to consider the influence of government cost growth on real public domestic spending.

Heritage preservation is a resource-intensive activity nested among other processes in the public administration, related to identity building and touristic product enhancement. Strategies and schemata associated with heritage preservation sprang in the western world after WWII and they have been adapted, in the form of ‘heritage management’, in various contexts with questionable effectiveness regarding sustainability. Our paper discusses the case of the post-earthquake cultural, social and political landscape of the World Heritage Site of Kathmandu valley in Nepal. By reviewing the bibliography and drawing upon various case studies of post-earthquake heritage restoration, we focus on the traditional ways of managing human and cultural resources in the area as related to the modern national heritage management mechanism. We also examine how traditional practices, re-interpreted into a modern context, can point towards inclusive and sustainable forms of collaboration based on the commons. We shed light on the elements of an emerging management system that could protect the vulnerable monuments through community participation, adapted to the challenging realities of the Nepalese heritage and its stakeholders.

Economic integration is widely argued to increase subnational demands for independence. Yet increasingly high degrees of integration have not been associated with a commensurate growth in separatist activity. This article argues that integration is not likely to promote separatism in general because the economic benefits of integration are not uniformly positive, and are not large enough for most regions to provide for their own defense in order to sustain themselves as independent states. This argument is empirically tested using the case of post-WWII European integration, a hard test of the argument, since the European Union is the most advanced economic integration scheme in the world. The quantitative analysis supports the argument, showing that European integration is only weakly associated with a modest increase in electoral support for separatist parties. Further qualitative analysis suggests that the effect of integration is conditional on other factors as well.

In this article the author intends to recall the figure of Zofia Dwornik, one of the most appreciated and nowadays rather forgotten female film editors of post-war communist Poland. For the twenty-five years of her creative activity, Dwornik cooperated in the production of more than thirty films with the most important directors of the Polish cinema in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. In the Polish post-war cinema, the profession of film editor was strongly feminised. In the case of Dwornik, her decision to choose this particular profession was, however, based on additional objective considerations, closely related to the context of the Stalinist period in Poland, and was not her first choice of career – she had wanted to become a film director. In this article the author takes a closer look not so much at the achievements of Dwornik in the 1960s and 70s, but at the complex circumstances that influenced her later career. Therefore, the author tries to reconstruct the most important moments in Dwornik’s student and professional life in the first years after WWII and analyse one of the film études she made at the Film School in Łódź, in order to examine the reasons for her decision to become a film editor. This allows also to formulate some hypotheses how her career might have developed, had she been given the chance to graduate and try her hand at directing.

Some years have already passed since the book Summer of dead dreams by Harry Thürk (2015) was published. Some inhabitants of Prudnik County have treated the German perception as presented in its pages and interwoven in the historicists’ motifs, as a non-fiction and as a reliable source. This is why it has become essential to take some steps to present this multithreaded post-war event more honestly. One of the museums’ functions is their multi-dimensional educational activity, achieved through exhibitions and publications. Consequently, the Prudnik County Museum in Prudnik town has undertaken the task of showing the chequered history of this region from 1945 to 1947 by: a) preparing and elaborating a permanent exhibition entitled “Seen through a net curtain. The multiculturality of Upper Silesia based on Prudnik County”; b) publishing a book of the same title which brings closer the intangible heritage of Prudnik county, seen in its traditions and folk rituals of various social and cultural groups which together form its current “ethnos”; c) publishing a collection of eyewitness accounts by people who remember the years 1945–1947. The issue of changing borders and resettlements still evokes emotions for both the Polish and German communities. Although, the Polish and German tragedy of the civilian population had different origins, the tragedy itself was the same: extermination, forcing people to abandon their homes, going into the unknown, exile, illnesses and death are the common denominators of those sad events at the end of WWII. The museum’s role is to familiarise the public with a very frequently difficult and tragic history which would be free of stereotypes and subjectivity.

The first CBs were private institutions that were given a monopoly over the issuance of currency by government in return for help in financing the budget and adherence to the rules of the gold standard. Under this standard the price of gold in terms of currency was fixed and the CB could issue or retire domestic currency only in line with gold inflows or outflows. Due to the scarcity of gold this system assured price stability as long as it functioned. Wars and depressions led to the replacement of the gold standard by the more flexible gold exchange standard. Along with restrictions on international capital flows this standard became a major pillar of the post–WWII Bretton Woods system. Under this system the U.S. dollar (USD) was pegged to gold, and other countries’ exchange rates were pegged to the USD. In many developing economies CBs functioned as governmental development banks.Following the world inflation of the 1970s and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, eradication of inflation gradually became the explicit number one priority of CBs. The hyperinflationary experiences of the first half of the 20th century, which were mainly caused by over-utilization of the printing press to finance budgetary expenditures, convinced policymakers in developed economies, following Germany’s lead, that the conduct of monetary policy should be delegated to instrument independent CBs, that governments should be prohibited from borrowing from them, and that the main goal of the CB should be price stability. During the late 1980s and the 1990s numerous CBs obtained instrument independence and started to operate on inflation targeting systems. Under this system the CB is expected to use interest rate policy to deliver a low inflation rate in the long run and to stabilize fluctuations in economic activity in the short and medium terms. In parallel the fixed exchange rates of the Bretton Woods system were replaced by flexible rates or dirty floats. The conjunction of more flexible rates and IT effectively moved the control over exchange rates from governments to CBs.The global financial crisis reminded policymakers that, of all public institutions, the CB has a comparative advantage in swiftly preventing the crisis from becoming a generalized panic that would seriously cripple the financial system. The crisis precipitated the financial stability motive into the forefront of CBs’ policy concerns and revived the explicit recognition of the lender of last resort function of the CB in the face of shocks to the financial system. Although the financial stability objective appeared in CBs’ charters, along with the price stability objective, also prior to the crisis, the crisis highlighted the critical importance of the supervisory and regulatory functions of CBs and other regulators. An important lesson from the crisis was that micro-prudential supervision and regulation should be supplemented with macro-prudential regulation and that the CB is the choice institution to perform this function. The crisis led CBs of major developed economies to reduce their policy rates to zero (and even to negative values in some cases) and to engage in large-scale asset purchases that bloat their balance sheets to this day. It also induced CBs of small open economies to supplement their interest rate policies with occasional foreign exchange interventions.

The introductory chapter reinterprets Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and its historiographical legacy. It begins with an exploration of lay and expert conceptualizations of the relationship between health and the environment in the United States in the pre-WWII period. It then situates health and environmentalism within both the broader political culture of liberal and progressive activism in the post-WWII period, and the legislative and regulatory trajectory of health and the environment. From these broader histories, the chapter argues that the widespread lionization of Carson’s work and person, by embracing an influential yet bounded reformism for which health was a matter of personal choice and individual boundaries, has impeded a more wide-ranging scholarly engagement with the centrality of health to environmental politics.