Suchergebnisse

Sanctions are among the most frequently used foreign policy tools to address human rights violations, but they can be highly politicized. Since the early 2000s, human rights sanctions have been increasingly triggered by standardized rankings of states' performances. While research on economic statecraft suggests that coercive measures based on cross-national assessments may be less influenced by strategic considerations, scholarship on rankings highlights how standardized performance indicators can also be political. This paper investigates whether sanctions based on standardized human rights assessments are also influenced by senders' strategic political and economic interests. Empirically, we examine the case of United States human trafficking sanctions that combines universal rankings in the first stage and country-specific sanctions waivers in the second. The analysis leverages novel data on all Trafficking in Persons (TIP) rankings by the US State Department and presidential sanctions waivers from 2003 to 2018. Despite the TIP report's reputation as a reliable indicator, we find that both stages in the process of imposing human trafficking sanctions are driven by strategic attempts to minimize the economic and political costs of sanctions for the US. These findings have broader implications for the reputation and effectiveness of other human rights rankings by the US.

Despite intense public and policy debates about the termination (and re-instatement) of sanctions in cases such as Iran, Cuba and Russia, research has hitherto focused on sanctions imposition and effectiveness, directing little attention towards their removal. Existing work has been constrained by a lack of adequate data. In response, we introduce a novel dataset that contains information on the termination of all EU, UN, US and regional sanctions between 1990 and 2018. In contrast to previous datasets, which rely on media reports, the International Sanctions Termination (IST) dataset systematically codes official governmental and intergovernmental documents. It contains information on the design of sanctions – including expiry dates, review provisions and termination requirements – and captures the gradual process of adapting and ending sanctions. The article describes the data collection process, considers IST's complementarity to and compatibility with existing datasets, and discusses the newly captured variables, exploring how they affect the termination of sanctions. The results indicate that changes in the sender's goals and investments in monitoring devices lead to significantly longer sanctions spells. By contrast, clearly stipulated termination requirements decrease the expected duration of sanctions.

Sanctions senders respond to the abrupt escalation of crises, such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. To react quickly, they often decide on coercive measures without a long-term exit strategy in mind. Similarly, research has long prioritized questions of sanctions onset and effectiveness, while studies on their termination remain scarce. In response, we reconstruct previously neglected debates about ending sanctions for the "watershed case" of the UN embargo against Iraq. Based on a conceptual framework that emphasizes a more process-oriented and signaling perspective on sanctions termination, we analyze archival data as well as governmental and UN documents. We find that the United States depicted the lifting of sanctions as an all-or-nothing question, which impeded a more gradual approach toward ending the measures. We show that senders significantly disagreed over the requirements for ending sanctions and over whether possibly signaling the end of Iraq's isolation was politically desirable. In the second step, we then draw implications from the case of Iraq to study contemporary sanctions termination. We use novel data on the termination of all EU, UN, and US sanctions from 1990 to 2018 to explore whether the Iraq case inspired changes in senders' approaches. We find that the use of review provisions and sunset clauses significantly increased post-Iraq. Finally, we discuss whether disagreements over termination requirements in the case of Russia risk the repetition of past pitfalls when it comes to the process of ending sanctions.

Despite intense public and policy debates about the termination (and re-instatement) of sanctions in cases such as Iran, Cuba and Russia, research has hitherto focused on sanctions imposition and effectiveness, directing little attention towards their removal. Existing work has been constrained by a lack of adequate data. In response, we introduce a novel dataset that contains information on the termination of all EU, UN, US and regional sanctions between 1990 and 2018. In contrast to previous datasets, which rely on media reports, the International Sanctions Termination (IST) dataset systematically codes official governmental and intergovernmental documents. It contains information on the design of sanctions – including expiry dates, review provisions and termination requirements – and captures the gradual process of adapting and ending sanctions. The article describes the data collection process, considers IST's complementarity to and compatibility with existing datasets, and discusses the newly captured variables, exploring how they affect the termination of sanctions. The results indicate that changes in the sender's goals and investments in monitoring devices lead to significantly longer sanctions spells. By contrast, clearly stipulated termination requirements decrease the expected duration of sanctions.

The article analyses the effectiveness and challenges of the use of the white cane and makes suggestions for its effective use. We explain that the white cane is one of the widely used and famous orientation and mobility (O&M) tools designed for pupils with visual impairment to move independently in their environment. By employing the descriptive qualitative design, we draw our findings from 12 participants who were pupils of the Akropong School for the Blind in Ghana. We make implications and conclude on the findings for policy formulation on the white cane, and make suggestions for future research work.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine borrowing capacity (BC) of government-owned firms and whether real earnings management (REM) activities moderate the sensitivity of firm BC to government ownership.


Design/methodology/approach
A simultaneous equation analysis is applied to study 210 Tunisian non-financial firms over the 2001–2014 period.


Findings
The empirical results provide substantial evidence indicating that government-owned firms have higher BC and significant REM than other firms; the relationship between government ownership and firm BC is partially moderated by REM activities.


Practical implications
The findings imply that the implicit credit guarantee of government is not necessarily the unique determinant of firm BC and highlight the role of lenders in monitoring discretionary real transactions in government-owned and protected firms. These implications should be taken in to account by public sector policy makers. In particular, the findings predict that the current government accounting reform in Tunisia on the basis of IPSAS will, probably, improve information quality, but it is still insufficient to control real activities in public institutions.


Originality/value
This study extends a growing research stream on the relationship between BC and government ownership by focusing on the moderating effect of REM on this relationship and by considering the endogeneity issue. The findings provide evidence that government-owned firms use REM practices to improve their BC. Examining these practices in developing countries provides an opportunity to evaluate the efficiency of their public sector reforms and their effect on a firm's performance and financing decisions.