Thatcherites, early on, liked to think their race-to-the-bottom policies on wages and unions might rejuvenate British industry, but Canary Wharf is the place where that was shown up for the myth it always was.
It might start with rethinking NAFTA and other race-to-the-bottom policies that have dislocated farmers and up-ended livelihoods for people in the Global South.
These are still hanging around from the 2014 budget, not spoken of much, but still factored in to the budget bottom line – policies including the aforementioned family benefits cuts, cuts to other "supplements" and forcing young people to wait one month to get the dole.
And all the other parties are failing to take seriously employers using migrant workers to pursue a race to the bottom – their policies mean those on the lowest incomes and most worried about immigration are at risk of being left further behind.
Though this rather overdraws the distinction between top-down and bottom-up policies in urban planning and design, the following case studies will help to rethink these positions in their complexity.
We were now in a world of "pledge and review," of bottom-up policies in every country, at best loosely aggregated into a global reporting system.
First, corporate taxes have been reduced in most countries, reflecting the race to the bottom that policy-makers are engaged in.
All three parts of this argument are unconvincing — and the bottom-line policy implication, "do little, be happy," is downright dangerous.
"Thus the renowned (some would say notorious) Harvard admission practice known as the 'happy-bottom-quarter' policy was born," Karabel writes.
Conclusions for the design of future bottom-up policy development processes are drawn.
Besides the top-down approaches, several researchers have proposed bottom-up policy mining techniques [18 20].
