Suchergebnisse

Decisions that affect the life chances and wellbeing of citizens are increasingly being made in international settings that are only indirectly connected to the democratic institutions where those citizens have a voice. Global and regional governance organizations not only lack the democratic legitimacy of states but also there are few mechanisms that make them accountable to the citizens that their decision making most affects. Civil society groups have exposed this gap between the jurisdiction and the impact of supra-state organizations and have proposed various ways of addressing it. Feminist analysis has highlighted the masculine preserve of traditionally closed-door multilateral trade and security discussions and negotiations. It has also highlighted the unequal and deeply structural gender impact of this style of policy making. Women's movements have found international organizations to be especially challenging institutional settings within which to achieve policy influence. Yet transnational feminist networks have the political and ethical resources to make global governance organizations more accountable to a broader constituency. This article explores this phenomenon through an examination of the Women Leaders' Network (WLN) and its efforts to make Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation more accountable to women as political and economic actors. The WLN is the only women's transnational advocacy network to have directly and routinely engaged with an economic intergovernmental organization. An analysis of the limits and potentials of the WLN model highlights accountability issues for APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) and other regional or global governance organizations, as well as for the WLN and transnational civil society networks more generally. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

APEC has been established since 1989 with 21 member countries. The crucial questions are what are major works of APEC from 1994 to present time? What are APEC's current challenges? And, how APEC manages its hopes and responds to the challenges in order to reach its goals? This article argues that APEC is on the right track to attain the Bogor goals by pursuing trade liberalization in its member countries. There are several works which have been achieved by APEC, for example: its achievements for trade liberalization in goods and its support for facilitating foreign investment in the Asia-Pacific region. However, there are several challenges for APEC, such as the complexity of regional cooperation in South-East and East Asia and the social implications for vulnerable groups in developing countries within APEC as negative impacts of trade liberalization. Consequently, APEC should manage its hopes and responds challenges in order to meet its goals. APEC must adjust its hopes to be matched with the latest political and economic developments in the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time, South-East and East Asia become more integrated economic regions and apply an open regionalism for other countries from outside of these regions to engage with the developments in these regions. Overall, APEC must respond to crucial challenges (e.g. geo-politics and geo-economics) in the Asia-Pacific region which have changed overtime.

Investment strategies related to the use of high-dividend shares have been known for more than 30 years. Despite this, they remain relevant today. A large number of studies on this topic are devoted to studying the effectiveness of high-dividend strategies within one market, and cross-country studies evaluate a small number of markets. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of high-dividend strategies in the markets of all APEC economies, with the exception of Brunei and Papua New Guinea. The time horizon of the study is from 2002 to the present. We applied well-known modifications of the classic high-dividend strategy and modifications developed by the authors. We test hypotheses regarding the influence of various factors, such as the number of shares in a portfolio, the month of portfolio formation,classifying the economy as developed or developing, and the return on high-dividend portfolios. We also test the hypothesis that the significance of the high-dividend anomaly exists in various markets, but decreases over time. The results show different levels of effectiveness of high-dividend strategies and the different impact of the factors on the markets of developed and developing APEC economies. We found that high-dividend strategies are generally more effective in emerging markets, but in case of market growth, high-dividend strategies increase their abnormal returns only in developed markets. At the same time, the authors conclude that the number of shares in a high-dividend portfolio directly affects the result of its work. The results have theoretical and practical value, and can be applied in compiling a real investment portfolio.