Volume 3, Issue 1

The Post-Cold War changes in the international system and the general march of globalization have led to a renewed interest in the optimal size of states. The most powerful theoretical models for understanding state size have come from models of the political and economic geography of cities. The classic Tiebout model has been used by a number of scholars to help understand the optimal area for the provision of a single abstract public good. I argue here for the use of the revision by Ostram, Tiebout, and Warren that emphasizes the polycentric nature of urban governance. This analogy better captures the variations in optimal size that may characterize different public goods. In so doing, it can help us better understand the simultaneous pressures for fragmentation and integration that are likely to characterize the twenty-first century.

London is one of the best connected cities in the world – from a structural as well as from a functional perspective. The central finance and business districts of the metropolis feature both an extraordinarily well-developed information infrastructure and an unusually high concentration of information-dependent businesses. Outside these core districts, however, global connectivity drops massively. An informational divide rips through the global city. This paper builds on a comparatively recent understanding of 'new electronic communications technologies as part of a long history of rich and often wayward social practices' (Thrift) and seeks to provide a historical perspective on the emergence of global connectivity patterns. Due to its longstanding history as a global financial centre and its central position in the global and domestic telegraph network of the nineteenth century, London will provide a suitable case study to examine the long-term interplay of socioeconomic and structural patterns in the creation of global information networks.

Human resource policies are critical to the success of small economies that have adopted economic growth policies based on low corporate taxation and the attraction of foreign capital. This paper seeks to assess the balance of economic and political considerations that have driven human resource policies in Ireland and Singapore, two island-nations of similarly small size and high degree of integration with the global economy. I examine the political histories of reproductive policies in the two countries before and after the implementation of a trade liberalization strategy to determine the extent to which they have been subordinated to the functional requirements of that economic model. The evidence indicates that economic pressures on reproductive policies are evident in the two cases, but that these policies have not been uniformly adapted to meet the functional requirements of the economic model. I argue that reproductive policies are more decisively shaped by three political variables: dominant party consolidation, nation-building, and interest group politics. My analysis reveals a range of adaptation processes and outcomes in terms of the degree to which reproductive policies have met the requirements of an open economy with implications for fertility rates and female labor force participation.

Global citizenship represents an area of growing interest at U.S. colleges and universities. In spite of this interest, there remains a need to define global citizenship and provide a framework for integrating this concept in the undergraduate curriculum. We revisit studies on citizenship in the national context to consider whether they provide a framework when applied to the global level. We then discuss ways in which the concept of global citizenship can be integrated in undergraduate education with a focus on classroom techniques, experiential learning, service learning, study abroad, and technology. These tools help students "make the connection" between their lives and their role as global citizens. The paper ends by proposing core competencies that can be used in assessing student learning.

This article surveys the prospects and implications of the potential replacement of the U.S. dollar as the world's key currency by the IMF's Special Drawing Rights (SDR) in the context of current global imbalances.