Arno Tausch


Arno Tausch is an Austrian political scientist. His research program is focused on world systems theory, development studies and dependency theory, European studies in the framework of core-periphery relationships, and quantitative Peace and conflict studies.

Academic career

Tausch received his Ph.D. in political science from Salzburg University in 1976. His habilitation at the Department of Political Science at Innsbruck University was concluded in 1988; the Chairperson of his habilitation commission was Professor Anton Pelinka. Since then he has been adjunct professor at that department. He was also an associate visiting professor of Economics at Corvinus University Budapest.
Tausch currently is a regular contributor to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in Israel.
Tausch is a member of the editorial boards of several scientific journals, among them Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, Society and Economy,, and the Journal of Globalization Studies. He also edites the History & Mathematics Almanac.

Publications

, Tausch had authored or co-authored according to his CV on Academia.edu, 22 books in English, 2 in French, and 8 in German, and a number of articles in English, Spanish, French, Russian, Polish and German in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and articles on current affairs.
Worldcat lists four of his works which achieved a global library presence of more than 300 global libraries..
He also has written articles for Tiempo Argentino, a newspaper based in Buenos Aires,, Die Presse, Der Standard, Die Furche and Wiener Zeitung in Vienna

Scholarly work

Generally, social science literature mentions Tausch’s work mainly in the context of debates on Global Keynesianism; the Socio-liberal Theory of World Development; Kondratieff waves; the measurement of child poverty; Dependency theory and world system approaches to international relations; the World Values Survey; Antisemitism; Islamic studies and European Union studies and European Social Policy.
In the international press, Tausch's work is seen mostly in the framework of the efficiency and effectiveness of social spending.
Tausch published critical studies of the political economy of the European Union, globalization and providing a link between dependency theory and world system theory with the empirical analysis of social development in Europe, especially Eastern Europe and in the Muslim world.
His research started with a rethinking of dependency theory in the framework of quantitative data and statistical analysis and work on poverty in the leading industrialized countries.
His doctoral thesis at Salzburg University on "The limits to growth theory" was dedicated to the empirical analysis of dependency, income inequality, and social development in up to 40 countries of the world, with country studies for Brazil and Yugoslavia. Following the logic of trying to identify the structures, which block Third-World development in the industrialized countries, he then researched on Austrian arms exports to Third World countries, based on United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency figures.
His habilitation thesis focused on multiple regression models of global development, based on data from the World Bank and Volker Bornschier as well as the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators III, and tests the relevance of socio-liberal approaches to world development, already inherent in the writings of classical social democratic development theories in Europe in the 1930s with multiple regression and canonical correlation models. This approach was continued and expanded in Socio-Liberal Theory of World Development.
Later work dealt with Russia and the global Kondratieff cycle; the effects of the arms trade on social development, especially for the countries of Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Militarism will grow in these countries because of the distribution coalition prone environment of "periphery socialism". In the 1990s, Tausch analyzed migration processes and the transformation of post-communist countries.
Later work also included studies of the effects of multinational corporations and their investments in developing countries; work on social indicators of development; Anti-Americanism, child poverty,Islamism, Kondratieff cycles, liberation theology, pension reform, contradictions of European Union development, global Keynesianism and comparative price levels, Islamophobia, social expenditure and Public Health research.
In recent years, Tausch’s studies were debated in the fields of Bibliometry and Scientometry; China studies; environmental studies and studies on unequal exchange; European Union studies; research on globalization and the international political economy; Kondratieff cycles; the measurement of poverty and well-being; Middle East studies and studies about Muslims in Western countries globalization studies; in studies on Terrorism; and in World Values Survey oriented research

Presentation of Tausch’s work in the 70th Anniversary Issue of the International Social Science Quarterly

The John Wiley International Social Science Journal in its Special Issue: 70 years of International Social Science Journal, reprinted Tausch’s 2010 contribution to the journal “Globalisation and development: the relevance of classical “dependency” theory for the world today” with a comment by Christopher Chase-Dunn, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World‐Systems at the University of California, Riverside.

Critique

Although the concept of "unequal exchange", as developed by Kohler and Tausch has become one of the standard definitions in "world system theory" and in critical studies on globalization and sustainable development, the Turkish economist Turan Subasat criticized this concept by saying that international prices are formed in a complex manner and lower international prices for low income countries cannot simply be considered as evidence for unequal exchange.

Selected books

English