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RRPE Best Paper Award

Sage Publications introduced a new initiative in 2008 for a Best Paper award. The RRPE editorial board selects the best paper from the among those published in the Review in the previous year. The winner receives a plaque and a small check from Sage. Free access to the full version of the award-winning paper is available for a limited time on the Sage website.

Current Recipient

2011: “Water, Health, and the Commodification Debate” by Patrick Bond, 42(4): 445-464.
Conflicts in the water sector are now well-known, and also increasingly researched by economists, particularly in relation to major ideological differences over state-run versus privatized municipal systems. A major dividing line is over how to access and sustain the financing required to expand and maintain municipal grids. In the context especially of third world urban processes, a crucial determinant is whether market-based pricing of water can generate health benefits to justify new capital investments. Such benefits have typically required strong public systems that offer adequate water supply (with sufficient proximity to source) at an affordable price. A variety of financial and fiscal pressures emerged since the 1980s, leaving full cost recovery as the core practice required by international aid agencies, multilateral financiers, and multinational corporations. Those firms were attracted by high potential profits which, ultimately, could not be realized (in part because of currency deterioration and profit repatriation problems), and hence systems were not maintained or expanded, and health benefits not realized. As commodification of water spread during the era of globalization, so too did an international civil society network demanding—and often winning— decommodification of water and deglobalization of water-capital, returning service delivery to local public institutions, often on grounds of improved public health.

Previous Recipients

2010: “Financialization and Changes in the Social Relations along Commodity Chains: The Case of Coffee” by Susan A. Newman, 41(4): 539-59.
Abstract: This article examines distributional implications of the restructuring of international coffee markets that has occurred since the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989 and market liberalization in coffee producing countries under structural adjustment programs. It is argued that increased financial investment on international commodity exchanges, together with market liberalization, have given rise to opportunities and challenges for actors in the coffee industry. Given the heterogeneity of market actors, these tend to exacerbate inequalities already present in the structure of production and marketing of coffee.

2009: “Globalization? No Question! Foreign Direct Investment and Labor Commanded” by Massimo De Angelis (University of East London, Dockland Campus) and David Harvie (University of Leicester), 40(4): 429-44.
Abstract: Skeptics of the globalization thesis argue that most Third World countries are “virtually written off the map” (Hirst and Thompson 1999) in terms of foreign direct investment and trade. The authors reexamine the empirical evidence on international investment, drawing on the concept of labor commanded. Recalculating foreign direct investment flows in terms of labor-commanded hours instead of U.S. dollars, the authors find developing countries to be highly integrated into the global economy.

2008: “Saving, Spending, and Self-Control: Cognition versus Consumer Culture” by Martha Starr (American University), 39(2): 214-229.
Abstract: Recent economic literature puts forth “behavioral” perspectives on self-control as a means of understanding oddities of consumer behavior: spending too much, saving too little, borrowing too much on costly credit cards. This article argues that the behavioral emphasis on cognition overlooks the extent to which issues of self-control are framed, elaborated, and sustained as problematics of contemporary consumer culture. As such, they are rooted as much in the social, cultural, and economic dynamics of capitalism as they are in the human mind.

 

Please visit the RRPE archive for additional information.