Suchergebnisse

AbstractMost private international laws do not address cultural property specifically but, instead, apply the general lex rei sitae rule also to artifacts. Legal scholarship has revealed the flaws of the rigid application of the lex rei sitae principle to cultural goods and has proposed alternative connecting factors, such as the lex originis principle, to prevent forum and law shopping in this field. Reacting to the criticisms, some of the more recent private international law codifications have decided on the adoption of specific rules on stolen and illegally exported cultural goods that combine the lex rei sitae and the lex originis rules and provide room for the parties' autonomy. This article draws the conclusion that these more recent legislative solutions do not necessarily promote legal certainty and predictability with regard to the governing law and are far from being a Holy Grail for the conflict of laws of cultural property, whether on a national level or within the European Union.

Abstract Thanks to lessons learned and reforms implemented after the financial crises of the late 1990s, most emerging market economies proved relatively resilient to the 2008 global crisis. Yet to cope with the turbulence that ensued, several interventions by monetary authorities in foreign exchange and capital markets were carried out. The literature on Latin American financial systems and central bank reform tends to emphasize international actors and pressures as key determinants of policy change. In contrast, this paper raises the hypothesis that domestic concerns were the main drivers of financial policymaking after the 2008 crisis even in countries with different institutional arrangements and macroeconomic trajectories such as Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Through a comparative case study analysis, it is concluded that indeed the three countries' approaches to exchange markets and capital controls contradicted international perceptions and even the IMF's stance on foreign exchange policies and the management of capital flows. By pursuing more autonomy and responding to domestic priorities, each of the three countries adopted different policy measures.

SummaryIn recent decades, public management has been restructured worldwide for greater efficiency and innovation based on entrepreneurship‐driven models such as Reinventing Governance, New Public Management, and post‐NPM frameworks. The primary intent of these business‐like models is instilling entrepreneurship, which would encourage risk‐taking innovation, managerial autonomy, performance orientation, and customer choice. Such entrepreneurial orientation is embedded in organizational‐managerial reforms related to human resource management, budgeting framework, performance benchmarking, and so on. These entrepreneurship‐driven reforms have significant impacts on administrative structure, procedures, and norms affecting the process of public sector accountability. In line with such global trends, most countries in Southeast Asia have embraced some of these pro‐market business‐type reforms in public management to enhance its entrepreneurship, innovation, and competition, which have implications for managerial control, neutrality, regulation, and integrity required for public accountability. This article explores these entrepreneurship‐driven reforms in the region and evaluates their critical implications for the long‐established institutions, structures, and procedures of public accountability.

Under mandated choice policies, people are free to choose whichever option they prefer, but "choosing not to choose" is penalized. In Australia, voting is mandatory, and abstaining is penalized with a fine. In New Zealand and several American states, it is mandatory for those who want to obtain a driver's license that they decide whether to register as organ donors. If they fail to do so, they will not receive a driver's license. Proponents of such policies stress that they may be the least autonomy-infringing ways of achieving some good and provide society with knowledge about people's preferences and are, partly for these reasons, preferable to employing defaults. This article compares mandated choice in voting and donor registration with respect to the ends served, how a mandated choice policy will serve these ends, the distribution of burdens, and the nature of the possible options. It is argued that mandated choice is more attractive in the context of donor registration.

This discussion of Peter James Hudson's Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean focuses on the way transnational banks are revealed to be players of multiple roles in the development of past and present Caribbean economies. The banks were hardly mere stalking horses for imperialism, and their considerable autonomy and self-interest were sometimes at odds with the objectives of both host governments and metropoles. They acquired a cosmopolitan character that allowed them to bypass particular national identities when convenient. Caribbean markets lay at the epicenter of their financial projects, which employed racism as a technology to banking interests, and racial capitalism grafted itself onto existing hierarchical systems. Hudson has shown the banks to be heirs to a long history of Caribbean commerce that tracks the shadowy line between the legal and the illicit and the piracy and smuggling of the past to the money laundering, tax evasion, and drug smuggling of the present.

Using the Zimbabwean case, this article explores the assertion that autocracies are better placed than democracies in land redistribution because of lower institutional constraints and concentration of power which makes policy implementation easier. This is rightly so, because such political systems have the notoriety of neutralizing or eliminating the veto gauntlet which is normally strengthened by institutional autonomy. Extant literature on land reform continues to grapple with overarching questions as to why countries redistribute land, relating to the type of conditions that incubate the need for reform and the political purpose that redistribution serve in this world. Equally important, is the need to interrogate the real beneficiaries of land reform. The study notes that in the post-Cold War globalized era of 'fractured sovereignty', redistribution from above remains attractive despite its protracted nature. However, against a post-colonial settler land discourse that memorializes race, privilege, dispossession, and restitution, the article evinces that land redistribution is tainted by elitism, clientelism, and partisanship which eventually distort its structural transformative power.

Discussions of "justice" in planning are commonplace; discussions of "kindness," strangely enough, are rare. Perhaps not by accident. Taking "compassion" as an empathetic, intentional orientation toward suffering, we analyze "kindness" as the situated action of compassion that requires—following and extending analysis of Martha Nussbaum—four contingent, contextually sensitive practical judgments: (1) empathetic recognition of another's vulnerability or suffering; (2) causal/moral gauging of the sources of that vulnerability or suffering; (3) crafting of acts to mitigate that vulnerability/suffering, and (4) forming the motivation to respond practically to that Other's situation. Diverse planning cases from Cleveland, the Canadian Yukon, and Australia illuminate these practical judgments. We show how these contingent judgments can go wrong and thereby produce not kindness but humiliation, shame and victim blaming, pity and condescension, or dependency not autonomy. In doing so, the article makes a fresh contribution toward analyzing the moral requirements of, and the risks faced in, any planning seeking to respond to others' vulnerabilities and suffering.

The potential influence of fiscal decentralization on economic growth in China has been extensively studied. This paper examines whether fiscal decentralization has influenced marketization and regional disparity (intra-provincial expenditure inequality) and the tradeoff between them (quality of government, QoG). When local governments have sufficient fiscal autonomy, decentralizing fiscal power to sub-provincial governments is found to have a greater impact on increasing marketization, highlighting the important role of fiscal self-sufficiency in the effect of fiscal decentralization on market efficiency. Measuring the QoG from the marketization versus disparity perspective, we find a reversed U-shape relationship between revenue decentralization and QoG. Comparing the effect of fiscal decentralization on the QoG in different regions, intra-provincial revenue decentralization in the eastern area is above the optimal level, while the fiscal decentralization in the middle and western areas is near the optimal level. This paper combines the perspectives of fiscal decentralization and governance and conducts an empirical test of market-preserving federalism to explain differences among provinces.

Fiscal stress among local governments in the US has become a key concern since the 2008 Recession. Fiscal stress is fueled by structural pressures from demography, economy, and state policy. How do these pressures shape perceptions of fiscal stress? We conducted a national survey in 2017 of 2,064 US local governments. Our regression models measure the factors that differentiate perceptions of fiscal stress among local government leaders. We find governments with professional managers perceive higher stress. These perceptual measures reflect not only higher objective financial measures, such as debt per capita, but also structural factors like aging infrastructure, unemployment, education levels, and state policy. Professional managers take a broader view of fiscal stress – not just short-term financial concerns, but longer-term structural shifts in demography, economy, and state policy. Greater autonomy allows US local governments to have a more balanced view on fiscal stress and, by practicing pragmatic municipalism, to hold back the tides of austerity.

This article analyses governmental decision-making processes during presidencies of the European Union (EU) from the outset of the planning to the end of the evaluation of the concluded presidency. The Polish, Danish and Cypriot presidencies in the Trio of 2011-2012 are compared by applying a Most Different Systems Design. The three presidencies represent member states that differ in political, administrative and geographical terms. In spite of these differences, considerable similarities can also be traced between the countries in terms of how they handled the presidency, especially how civil servants adapted to the different phases. However, there are also variations concerning the degree of centralization versus decentralization of the whole process, the degree of autonomy of individual civil servants, the degree of political involvement in the presidency process, and the type of evaluation carried out after the EU presidency had taken place. The article is based on interviews with more than 80 civil servants involved in the presidency process from the three countries over a period of nearly four years.

The article clarifies the prerequisites and circumstances ofFrancemovement in the direction of selfidentification as a Western economy. Based on an analysis of the foreign policy's views and practical efforts of theFifthRepublic's Presidents, the authors note the country's transition from opposing the expansion of partnership withGreat Britainand military cooperation with theUnited Stateswithin the North Atlantic Treaty's framework to overcoming deep disagreements with NATO to restore membership in its military organization. The "Westernization" ofFrance's security and defense policies is also explained by its move from national autonomy to understanding the importance of ensuring the country's sovereignty through active participation in European integration. Describing the "proWestern" course ofFranceat the present stage, the authors pay attention to President E. Macron's skepticism concerning Euro-Atlantic solidarity and the deterioration of the conditions for transatlantic cooperation with theUnited States. According to the authors' opinion, the current foreign policy strategy ofFranceis distinguished by Eurocentrism, as well as its desire for a strategic partnership with theRussian Federation.

Social theory and photographic aesthetics both engage with issues of representation, realism and validity, having crossed paths in theoretical and methodological controversies. This discussion begins with reflections on the realism debate in photography, arguing that beyond the polar positions of realism and constructivism the photographic image is essentially ambivalent, reflecting the ways in which it is situated within cultural modernity. The discussion draws critically on Simmel's sociology of the visual to elucidate these issues and compares his concept of social forms and their development with the emergence of the photograph. Several dimensions of ambivalence are elaborated with reference to the politics and aesthetics socially engaged photography in the first half of the 20th century. It presents a case for the autonomy of the photographic as a social form that nonetheless has the potential to point beyond reality to immanent possibilities. The discussion exemplifies the processes of aesthetic formation with reference to the 'New Vision' artwork of László Moholy-Nagy and the social realism of Edith Tudor Hart.

The Bologna Process indicates that preparation for living as active citizens in a democratic society is one of the main purposes of higher education. Moreover, other relevant European strategies postulate that social competences development in HE graduates as well as the European Qualifications Framework should comprise the pillar of 'competences: autonomy and responsibility'. The United Nations and OECD emphasise the role of education and developing social competences, too.Higher Education Institutions' (HEIs) educational mission involves the transfer of knowledge and skills, as well as shaping the social competences of students. This article aims to show good practices in the development of students' social competences by different HEIs. Based on the cases the findings were formulated that the development and assessment of social competences in HEIs is possible, however, one standardised solution cannot be developed. Diversity is crucial in the presented programmes. Our main recommendation is to create room for debates about social competences in the researched countries and in the whole EHEA.

We describe partial results from a study on the construction of the international image of the political process in Catalonia in recent years in the main European and the US newspapers. In particular, using several analytical techniques we determine the presence of civil society organisations for and against independence in press articles between July 2010 (the first mass demonstration, in this case against a Spanish Constitutional Court ruling on the Catalan Statute of Autonomy) and October 2017 (the self-determination referendum). To detect the dominant frame, a framing analysis was undertaken from a communicative and deductive perspective, applying the widely tested and used Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) classification. The international press has generally depicted the Catalan sovereignty process as a conflict involving institutions and politicians, despite the fact that the Catalan process has always been claimed as an initiative with social and cultural roots. The research concludes that, although social movements and civil society played a significant role in the emergence of the sovereignty movement, these have been rendered largely invisible by the international press.

Based on the Self Determination Theory (SDT), the main purpose of this study is to determine the effect of psychological needs on task performance with the mediating role of work engagement. The participants of this research are from public companies operating in post and telecommunication area in Kosovo. With the convenience sampling method, the data were collected from 394 employees working in different positions. The results showed that amongst others merely competence need has significant positive relationship with the task performance. For the engagement sub-dimensions, relatedness need has significant positive relationship with vigor, dedication and absorption, and autonomy need has significant positive relationship with vigor and dedication. It's also found that engagement has not a mediating role in between psychological needs and task performance. However, the results presented that competence need has a significant explaining power together with all three engagement sub-dimensions of vigor, dedication absorption on the task performance. The contributions, limitations and suggestions are discussed.