Migration, money, markets and morality

• Date: 01 November 2015
• Published date: 01 November 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1591

■Editorial

Migration, money, markets and morality

Over the last year, the pressure of economic mi-

gration and vast numbers of people on the move

who have been destabilised by conflict, instability

and deprivation has impacted dramatically upon

Europe and particularly the European Union (EU).

Pictures of drowned children washed up on

beaches, boat swampings, human flotsam, dead

bodies of those suffocated and rotting in trucks

of those who died being smuggled into the EU

from suffocation and heat exhaustion. These are

not the pictures of a civilised society and show

the gang masters, wretches and gangsters of

society taking advantage of human desperation.

A coherent policy on economic migrants and polit-

ical asylum seekers for the multi-state union has

shown that one policy fitting all has buckled,

broke and does not work. One has to be focused

on supporting the weak and the vulnerable

and giving clear guidelines on the numbers and

quality of migrants that are needed in an economy.

This works well in Australia, Canada and New

Zealand and should be adopted more widely

across the EU.

Conflict and instability in the Middle East is fuel-

ling much of this migration and the search for

safety by asylum seekers. The instability of Africa

and the North Coast of Africa is not helping.

Long-term answers and care for immediate needs

must be the answer. Europe like America has

benefitted from economic migration and the won-

derful contributions that asylum seekers and the

persecuted have made in the past. We must make

policy for refugees and migrants a public affairs

and policy priority.

This is a general issue of the journal and shows

the breadth of thinking across the discipline.

The first article is by Adriaan Buyserd, and Bob

de Jong of the London School of Economics and

Political Science, London, UK, and is entitled

‘How online insourcing might improve EU policy

development—the view from inside the European

Commission’and explores the development of

insourcing policy development via the adoption

of technology. The suggestion is made that utilising

this new process could strengthen the development

of quality legislation and lead to more informed

debate and better delivery for citizens of the

Union.

The second article is by Sigge Winther Nielsen,

of the Department of Political Science, University

of Copenhagen, Denmark, and assesses the devel-

opment of party marketing strategy and offers

some insights into the thinking of the political

strategist. This outlines a new institutional strategy

framework based on social psychological assump-

tions. This framework links the cognition of party

operatives to their task of selecting a marketing

strategy. The results suggest that party strategists

are influenced by their own cognitive framing of

the environment, but this influence is mediated

by context-specific variables embedded in the

political realm such as historical tensions, coalition

partners or the ideology, goal and organisational

structure of the party.

The next article is by Heinz Eckart Klingelhöfer

(Department of Managerial Accounting and Fi-

nance, Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria,

Gauteng, South Africa), Lourens J. Erasmus

(Department of Public Sector Finance, Tshwane

University of Technology, Pretoria, Gauteng, South

Africa) and Solomon Kungaera Mayo (City of

Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality, Pretoria,

Gauteng, South Africa) and is entitled ‘Financial

planning in metropolitan municipalities –Lessons

for South Africa from selected countries’.

In South Africa, municipalities are central to

government’s service delivery efforts to its commu-

nities, but because of inadequate revenue collection

processes or impoverished communities that are

unable to supply necessary operational revenues,

both national and provincial government need to

transfer funds to the local government to achieve

delivery of priority services and economic develop-

ment infrastructure. This study investigates the best

financial planning practices for municipalities to

implement in order to be financially viable by

reviewing and comparing the legislative and legal

frameworks relating to financial planning and the

financial planning practices adopted in Australia

and New Zealand.

Journal of Public Affairs

Volume 15 Number 4 pp 331–333 (2015)

Published online in Wiley Online Library

(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/pa.1591

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.