Suchergebnisse

"This book examines the political-economic dynamics in the development of a leading global Internet giant: Alibaba. As both a prominent example of, as well as providing the basic infrastructure for, China's outward expansion, Alibaba demonstrates the complex interplay between different state agencies and units of capital in the context of the rise of global China. Hong Shen investigates the development and expansions of Alibaba and discusses how Alibaba has not only become a leader of China's increasingly globalizing internet but has also increasingly served as a basic infrastructure model for other Chinese companies to go global. Shen also addresses how this process has been constantly shaped and reshaped by complex state-capital interactions along the way. This book shows how different units of capital, both inside and outside of China, have interacted with Alibaba's developmental strategies and illustrates how different state agencies, both domestic and international, have enabled or constrained the company's development, especially its global expansion. This book will appeal to students and scholars of critical political economy of media, global media and digital industries, communication, technology and society, and internet studies. It will also be relevant to policy-makers working in the arena of global internet and trade policies"--

"In Jungian Perspectives on Indeterminate States: Betwixt and Between Borders, Elizabeth Brodersen and Pilar Amezaga bring together leading international contributors to analyze and interpret the psychological impact of contemporary border crossing - both literally and figuratively. Each chapter included assesses key themes, such as migration, culture, gender and identity formation, through a Jungian lens. All the contributors sensitively explore how creative forms can help mitigate the trauma experienced when one is forced to leave safety and enter unknown territory, and examines the specific role of indeterminacy, liminality and symbols as transformers at the border between culture, race and gender. The book asks whether we are able to hold these indeterminate states as creative liminal manifestations pointing to new forms, integrate the shadow 'other' as potential, and allow sufficient cross-border migration and fertilization as permissible. It makes clear that societal conflict represents a struggle for recognition and identity and elucidates the negative experiences of authoritarian structures attached to disrespect and misrecognitions. This interdisciplinary collection will offer key insight for Jungian analysts in practice and in training, psychotherapists, anthropologists, political and cultural theorists, and postgraduate researchers in psychosocial studies. It will also be of great interest to readers interested in migration, sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity studies"--

"This book offers a comprehensive guide to the on-going Greek debt crisis. It identifies and explains Greece's idiosyncratic weaknesses, and highlights the existing rigidities in the EU architecture that make the recovery prospects of the Greek economy challenging. Chapters from expert contributors highlight aspects of the performance of the Greek economy with focus on export performance, labour market conditions, political cycles and regional income disparities. The book then goes on to outline the banking system in Greece in the post-crisis era, and includes analysis that explains how the credit rating score affected Greece's borrowing capacity prior to the start of the insolvency crisis. The final part analyses and compares alternative scenarios of fiscal consolidation, seeking to identify whether there are alternatives to fiscal austerity and the impact of each one of them. This section also clarifies various misconceptions about the significant determinants of international competitiveness. Despite the focus of the book, the lessons drawn from the chapters are not limited to Greece. This volume will be of interest to academics, practitioners and policy makers who wish to take a closer look at the Greek debt crisis and learn more about the challenges the Greek economy is currently facing."--

In turbulent Shanghai in the years between the World Wars, the International Settlement was a mercantile powerhouse that faced unrest from Communist labor unions, criminal gangs, spies, political agitators, armed kidnappers and assassins. Adjoining the Settlement were the French Concession and the Chinese city, both hotbeds of intrigue and crime themselves. Called the most sinful in the world, the Settlement relied on its police: the Shanghai Municipal Police, one of the most advanced forces in the world. After an incident in 1926 when the police fired upon demonstrators, which resulted in unrest and strikes, W. E. Fairbairn was charged with forming a specialized unit to deal with riots and armed encounters. The resulting Reserve Unit became the prototype for future SWAT teams, as it developed tactics for using snipers in barricade and hostage incidents, techniques for use of the submachine gun during raids, hostage rescue tactics, aggressive riot-dispersal tactics and various other tactical innovations. Out of the experiences of the unit came many of the techniques later taught by W. E. Fairbairn, E. A. Sykes, Pat O'Neill and others to the Commandos, Rangers, SOE, OSS, 1st Special Service Force and other Second World War elite units. Those same techniques still resonate today with special forces and police tactical units.

German reunification was one of the most significant changes at the end of the Cold War. It not only put to an end the bipolar system that characterised the conflict between the two principal superpowers, but also to the international order that arose after the World War II. The process supposed such a considerable transformation for Europe that none of the countries which belonged to the EEC remained indifferent. This paper will approach to the attitude that Spain took towards the institutional and geostrategic changes of the German unification in the context of European integration and the end of the Cold War. ; La reunificación alemana fue uno de los cambios más significativos del final de la Guerra Fría. No solo puso fin al sistema bipolar que caracterizó al conflicto entre las dos principales superpotencias, sino también al orden internacional que surgió después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El proceso supuso una transformación tan considerable para Europa que ninguno de los países que pertenecían a la CEE quedó indiferente. Este trabajo se acercará a la actitud que tomó España ante los cambios institucionales y geoestratégicos de la unión de Alemania en el contexto de la integración europea y el final de la Guerra Fría.

What are the boundaries of humanitarianism? This question is controversially debated among humanitarian practitioners and scholars, given ever-changing spaces and temporalities of human suffering. This paper explores an understudied site of this controversy: the domestic humanitarian engagement of Médecins Sans Frontières and Médecins du Monde, two NGOs widely regarded as epitomes of liberal international humanitarianism. Their Mission France started in the 1980s to support vulnerable populations in France through medical aid, socio-legal support, and political activism. It has provoked fierce internal opposition ever since, in the name of an inherited vision of humanitarianism as impartial emergency aid. Drawing on organisational documents, archival sources and key informant interviews, we analyse how these conflicts gave rise to an unstable settlement around the diagnostic function of Mission France: Leaders aimed to make the assistance function of Mission France secondary to the advocacy function of drawing attention to health inequity, thus avoiding any long-term substitution for state services. However, the political strategizing demanded by this approach clashed with local volunteer preferences for immediate aid and claims to political neutrality. This conflict about the hierarchy of humanitarian values in the NGOs' home country sheds new light on the contentious politics of humanitarian witnessing and assistance.

There are six major measures of human capital, each of which covers at least 130 countries, all of which are described in this paper. These measures are of two distinct types: monetary and index-based. The two monetary versions are those by the World Bank (Lange et al., 2018) and by the United Nations Environmental Program and the Urban Institute of Kyushu University (Managi and Kumar et al., 2018). The four indicator versions are by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation of the University of Washington (Lim et al., 2018), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2019), the World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank, 2018), and the World Economic Forum (World Economic Forum, 2017). In addition to describing each of these six measures, this paper compares them using ranking (Spearman) and level (Pearson) correlations. This paper was written as an introduction to a forthcoming book (Fraumeni, Barbara M., ed., Measuring Human Capital, Academic Press, Cambridge, MA) on human capital in order to help statisticians, researchers, analysts, policy-makers and government officials make an informed choice about which to use as this decision can matter.

We study the role of firms in the political economy of trade agreements. Using detailed information from lobbying reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, we find that virtually all firms that lobby on free trade agreements (FTAs) support their ratification. Moreover, relative to non-lobbying firms, lobbying firms are larger, and more likely to be engaged in international trade and to operate in comparative advantage sectors. To rationalize these findings, we develop a model in which heterogeneous firms decide whether to lobby and how much to spend in favour or against a proposed FTA. We show that the distributional effects are asymmetric: the winners from the FTA have higher stakes in the agreement than the losers, which explains why only pro-FTA firms select into lobbying. The model also delivers predictions on the intensive margin of lobbying. In line with these predictions, we find that firms spend more supporting agreements that generate larger potential gains - in terms of the extent of the reduction of tariffs on their final goods and intermediate inputs, the depth of the agreement, and the export and sourcing potential of the FTA partners - and when politicians are less likely to be in favor of ratification.

The authors present (after the assessment of the experience of the Baltic States) the proposals for the improvement of both the legal regulations of the EU customs law as well as national legal regulations (in particular – in the Republic of Lithuania) to improve the areas that cause systemic irregularities of the uniform regulation of the international trade regulatory measures of the European Union. Whilst some of the similar studies were completed in the recent years (e.g. Limbach 2015), they do not provide a detailed comparative analysis of the issues that were investigated, specifically considering the situation in the Baltic States. During the investigation, the authors established that the problems of the uniform application of the EU customs law in the Baltic States arose in specific areas. Such areas were tariff classification of goods, determination of the origin and value of goods (in the case of Latvia), regulation of customs procedures (in the case of Estonia), customs duties and other import taxes preferences (in the case of Lithuania). At the same time, it was established that the national courts of the Republic of Lithuania were the least active in ensuring co-operation with the CJEU this area, which could have been caused by the improper national legal regulations