Suchergebnisse

AbstractWhat is the connection between mass surveillance and institutions of individual agency, freedom, and self-governance? Recent literature on "surveillance capitalism" argues that, over the past two decades, the capitalist Big Tech companies have commodified personal data for profit. This commodification goes beyond gathering information to improve the products provided by the collecting organization directly and entails using data to predict what people will do, the sale of that data, and its use to modify the behaviors of unknowing consumers. According to critics, this erodes individual dignity and freedom while also threatening democracy. This paper offers an alternative framing of surveillance and data collection based on comparative institutional analysis. While data collection and attempts at persuasion are present in private and government settings, the welfare effects vary due to institutional differences. We leverage the comparative institutional framework to analyze the differences between private data collection ("surveillance capitalism") and government data collection (the "surveillance state"). Our analysis sheds light on how data collection in the private, for-profit sector has different welfare consequences from those in the surveillance state.

AbstractThe clean development mechanism (CDM) is a project‐based instrument that allows developed countries to receive credits toward meeting their obligatory targets under the Kyoto Protocol by investing in emission reduction projects in developing countries. This article provides a comparative institutional analysis of the CDM in China and India. It focuses on each country's 'designated national authority' (DNA), which is the national agency to approve CDM projects. Three dimensions of the DNAs are considered: their structures, their policies and the CDM project market. Although the DNAs in both China and India have their strengths and weaknesses, China's approach in particular has some positive lessons for other DNAs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SUMMARYIn the paper several reasons will be investigated why there is only partial deregulation in Germany and extensive deregulation in the U. S. Purely economic reasons such as economies of scale are shown to be of little help for understanding telecommunications policy in Germany as compared to the U. S. As an alternative, a politico‐economic approach is presented. It is shown that institutional differences can help to understand the differences in deregulatory policy. In Germany, decisions on telecommunications deregulation are centralized on the federal level, whereas they are distributed on the federal and state level in the U. S. As consequence, a different interest group representation is prevailing in each country promoting deregulation in the U. S. and impeding deregulation in Germany. It is shown that the obstacles to deregulation in Germany might be overcome through an explicit compensation scheme embodying an entry tax on the one hand a price subsidy on the other.

'The Chinese Triangle of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong: Comparative Institutional Analysis' edited by Alvin Y. So, Nan Lin and Dudley Poston is reviewed.