As months passed at the bazaar my claims of conducting research without seeming to do much were for many of the jhupri labourers really a distraction from a more obvious reality: I was unemployed. The group were then impressed by my swift change in status in subsequent years evidenced by a business card, jumping from a hanger on who drank too much tea to a ‘professor’, as they generously framed various post-doctoral positions. This admiration was accompanied by requests to detail my income and expenditure in minutia, starting of course with salary, tax and housing costs and later, at my own insistence, the much-dreaded nursery fees. Jobs are hard to come by in Dhaka and anything vaguely formal a distant dream for the jhupri labourers. Government positions in particular are rare and much coveted, often requiring extortionate bribes to acquire, similar to how jobbers once mediated work in industry. Many municipal sweepers in Dhaka, for example, are known to have paid up to 10 lakh taka to gain a job, bringing debts but conferring stability of income and other opportunities. A younger labourer in the jhupri group, clearly exaggerating, once claimed to me while looking at the road being cleaned that ‘even the sweepers on this lane are government people, but only us labourers don't have papers.’

The jhupri group have few avenues for getting salaried jobs. Being the sons of labourers, fishermen, small-scale farmers or faded one-time santrashis and having spent years apart from them, means family is rarely a source of strength. Few here can rely on family capital, security, contacts or opportunities. Whatever the jhupri labourers have, they have it despite this background. As children they learned to fend for themselves. The friendships formed here were not only their fictive bhais and schoolmates to play and joke with, but something even closer, brothers to survive with. Viewed from the side of the jhupri lane, their world then is much smaller, framed by the corners of the bazaar. It is here that they can earn, and here that they seek opportunities.

• Information travels through the brain as electrical signals along a complex network of interconnecting nerve cells called neurons.

• Neurons connect to each other at synapses, small gaps where chemicals called neurotransmitters amplify or muffle the electrical signals.

• The reward pathway determines our experience of pleasure and many psychoactive drugs work by over-stimulating this pathway.

• After using psychoactive drugs, the brain needs time to recover. This is often experienced as a psychological ‘crash’ or ‘come down’.

• If a drug is used regularly, the desired effects become harder to achieve – a process called tolerance.

• People who use drugs often increase the amount of drug they take over time in an attempt to overcome tolerance. This increases the risk of drug-related harm.

• Regular psychoactive drug user ends up altering brain functioning, making it much harder to enjoy non-drug experiences. The world can become joyless.

In this chapter, I address some further phenomena of German syntax that would seem to lend themselves to an analysis in terms of structure removal. However, the analyses are carried out in much less detail, as the overall goal is not so much to develop full-fledged accounts but to make a case for structure removal at work in each of the constructions. For concreteness, the chapter addresses bridge verbs (where a DP shell on top of a CP is removed), applicatives (where a full DP is removed), null objects (where, again, a DP is removed), pseudo-noun incorporation (where a DP dominating an NP is removed), nominal concord (where the well-known case/cyclicity dilemma with concord is approached by postulating temporary removal of case assigners), and ellipsis (where structure removal may give rise to constructions like gapping, sluicing, and determiner sharing).

The book adopts a two-pronged empirical strategy to test the theory. First, a deep dive into a country’s political institutions is required, to ascertain whether electoral districts meeting the conditions for group-based clientelism exist. Second, after these electoral districts have been identified, the researcher must gather data on voting behavior, resource allocations, and other confounding variables at the level of the administrative entity within (tournament-possible) electoral districts and devise stringent empirical tests capable of pitting the theory’s expectations against those of rival theories. This chapter implements the first prong of this empirical strategy, using information about Japan. It presents a detailed overview of how electoral district boundaries are drawn, how votes are counted, what the relevant lower-tier entities are (in Japan’s case, they are municipalities) and how these entities are funded. It explains that Japanese municipalities depend for large shares of their revenue on national treasury disbursements (NTD), which are allocated by bureaucrats but vulnerable to influence by politicians. It classifies the universe of electoral districts that have been used in Japan’s Lower House elections, 1980–2014, as tournament-possible (or not), and it presents evidence that election outcomes are qualitatively different across both sets of districts, in the direction expected by the theory.

Chapter 16 concludes. Section 16.1 discusses the concentration effect of decentralised finance, Section 16.2 the supervisory challenges, Section 16.3 the impact of digital finance regulation on centralised finance, while Section 16.4 summarises four key challenges, and Section 16.5 concludes by formulating five key policy options.

Introduction

In the context of postwar Europe, Germany was long an exception (Decker and Hartleb 2006). Unlike in neighbouring France, Austria, Denmark, or Poland, for example, in Germany, until fairly recently, populist parties and movements did not play a major role. Only with the emergence of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) did populism become a significant political force in German politics. Founded on 6 February 2013, the party only narrowly missed the 5 per cent threshold needed to enter parliament in the September 2013 federal elections. Within the next 12 months, it successfully contested the elections for the European parliament and in the East German states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia.

The AfD's first leader, Bernd Lucke, was a professor of economics who pursued a neoliberal political agenda and advocated for Germany to leave the Eurozone. While the economic policies of Lucke and other AfD founders attracted many followers in the wake of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, the AfD's meteoric rise between 2013 and 2019 was largely due to its ability to gain the support of voters dissatisfied with official attempts to value cultural diversity and with Germany's asylum and immigration policies, particularly the Merkel government's decision in 2015 to not close Germany's borders and to admit more than a million asylum seekers over a two-year period. In the 2017 federal elections, the AfD won 12.6 per cent of the votes and became the third-largest party in the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament. Although immigration did not feature prominently in the next federal election campaign, in September 2021 the AfD was largely able to consolidate its position; in Saxony and Thuringia, it finished ahead of all other parties.

In terms of its elected representatives, its members, and its voters, the AfD has included and appealed to a wide range of people, from social conservatives at one end of the spectrum to sympathizers of the New Right at the other. The AfD's heterogeneity has been a strength because it has broadened the party's appeal, but it has also been a weakness because the AfD has always been riven by factional conflicts.

This case study uses Alibaba/Ant Group as an example to show how the meteoric growth of e-commerce and the platform economy in China has transformed the way that business is done and has made Chinese consumers into some of the world’s most active online sellers and purchasers. It focuses especially on the constantly evolving interactions between Alibaba/Ant Group, the Chinese government, and international investors. The case study demonstrates that the expansion of large Chinese corporations within China and overseas, as well as their occasional setbacks, cannot be understood without a broader knowledge of the legal structures underpinning cross-border investment and awareness of multiple competing political interests in China.

The case also gives insights into the multinational links of Chinese e-commerce firms, such as international buyers purchasing Chinese goods online through Taobao and AliExpress, investors buying Alibaba’s shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and Alibaba acquiring e-commerce firms overseas, especially in Southeast Asia and developing countries elsewhere.

Finally, the case explains how e-commerce platforms like Alibaba/Ant Group evolved into online banking and financial services. Their huge size and financial complexity have led to systemic risks, and this has caused the Chinese government to regulate these firms more tightly.

Two younger sons of two fathers, one in the Prodigal Son parable and the other, Jacob, son of Isaac, each acquires his inheritance before the father’s death and is resented by an older brother. In both instances, heaven so directs events as to mitigate fraternal discord.

In the Good Samaritan parable, the victim suffering from an assault and the passing Samaritan who cares for him are inspired by two different facets of Joseph’s life. Joseph was a victim, beaten up by his brothers and thrown into a pit. Later, as the ancestor of the Samaritans, he was the rescuer of the Egyptians and his family from famine.

Disapproval of acting and the theatre was a distinguishing Roman characteristic, in the eyes of many ancient authors. The significance Romans attached to the different ways actors were viewed in Greece and in Rome is indicated by Cornelius Nepos, in the preface to his Lives, where he sets out some of the principal contrasts between Greek and Roman culture ... While Greeks admired actors, according to Nepos, to display oneself on stage, to make a spectacle of oneself, was considered by Romans to be shameful. Other writers, too, saw differing attitudes to the theatre as a significant indicator of the contrast between Greek and Roman culture.