Suchergebnisse

With the use of a liberal/rational framework as a baseline, this article examines whether economic asymmetric interdependence can yield political influence. More specifically, it examines exogenous gas supply to the EU and develops a theory that provides testable hypotheses aiming to answer whether the export of gas provides political advantages for the sender state. The outlined hypotheses, and more, are tested in a cross sectional time series dataset, where votes in the United Nations (UN) Assembly are used as the dependent variable, as a measurement for the policy preferences of states. The empirical findings support the prediction made in the theory section. Gas dependence has a conditional effect on policy behaviour. The sender government has to be a sizeable international power, whilst the recipient government should have low military capabilities and be dependent on foreign support.

This study investigates the perception of factors that are likely to influence the Internet information relevance of financial institutions. The media richness theory and stakeholder theory point out that the extent of information and stakeholder communication will influence the utilization of online information, while not many of these discussions are associated with financial institutions. This study integrates seven information categories into three constructs: sufficiency, stakeholder communication and external supervision, using a structural equation model to examine whether the three constructs relate to information utilization. The results show that stakeholder communication and external oversight are significantly related to the user's intention to utilize online information of financial institutions, while information sufficiency is not. These findings correspond to stakeholder theory as well as international guidelines that emphasize external oversight of financial institutions.

This essay deals with some key Italian contributions to econometrics in the twentieth century. It opens with some notes on the need to define and measure each dimension of the manifold notion of well-being. While considering the convinced supporters of the methodological adoption of tools devised by economics and statistics, the central part of the essay focuses on Corrado Gini (1884–1965). He was Italy's leading econometrician and the main reference of the international network of econometricians until the 1940s. Other Italian members of the newly formed Econometric Society are also cited, specifically Luigi Amoroso and Umberto Ricci, because of the relevance of their contribution. The essay concludes by referring to Gini's rejection of econometrics, which coincided with the appearance of a new generation of social scientists whose aim was to combine economics, statistics, and mathematics.

The EU has taken influence on the administrative laws of the Member States by introducing elements of public information, participation of stakeholders and private enforcement, and environmental law was the frontrunner of this development. The same tendency can be observed at the international level, culminating in the adoption of the Århus Convention in 1998. This has created tensions with traditional administrative law systems that have strongly relied on public authorities to produce the correct outcome whilst severely restricting private participation and private access to justice. The Trianel case, dealing with the protection of habitats against a coal power plant, demonstrates the need for fundamental adjustment of German administrative law, and it may lead to subsequent changes of the modalities of administrative procedural law in order to really allow the private enforcement of the public interest (authors' headnote).

AbstractA major programme of health reform was announced in 2009. China is growing fast, and is beginning to engage with the international social policy community to discuss and review the consequences of rapid industrialization. As a specific part of social policy, health policy shares some of the characteristics of a policy area driven by the consequences of industrialization, but it also has its own particular features. This article reviews the general relationship between state and citizens in the health field by way of an introduction before focussing more specifically on Chinese patterns of health inequalities, and the pressures for reform. The 2009 reform of health policy and its dynamics are then presented, and the article concludes that there has been a deterioration in Chinese health policy, which threatens to undermine the benefits of economic growth for Chinese people.

Résumé Le droit de la participation du public est étudié ici essentiellement dans les domaines du droit de l'environnement et de l'urbanisme, où la démocratie participative a entraîné l'adoption de plusieurs procédures. L'analyse prend en compte les apports du droit international, du droit de l'Union européenne et du droit français, en mettant en relief la dynamique des différentes sources juridiques et l'opposition des systèmes de civil law et common law . Deux moments sont distingués, celui de la participation du public au stade de l'élaboration de la décision, et celui de la participation du public en vue de l'effectivité du droit existant. Une distinction est faite entre procédures entraînant un effet juridique sur le processus décisionnel et procédures sans effet juridique, une autre isole les procédures permettant une controverse sur l'opportunité d'un projet et celles qui concernent davantage sa faisabilité.

Abstract:
Since it began, the Arab spring has been subject to a proliferation of comparisons with 1989, and rightly so. Two decades after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, we have learned a great deal about regime transitions—lessons that can improve our understanding of events in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) today. Unfortunately, the comparison does not make one optimistic about democracy's near-term prospects there. Those regimes rooted in recent revolutionary struggle often survive even the most severe economic crises or opposition challenges, as did China's rulers in 1989 and Cuba's and North Korea's in the early 1990s. Given the continued dominance of old-regime actors, the weakness of democratic forces, and the current international environment, some form of authoritarianism is likely to dominate the Middle East and North Africa for a long time to come.

AbstractOver the last decade the 80-million strong Anglican Communion has been increasingly divided, seemingly over the issue of sexuality. This article explores this conflict by focusing on the particular problems of resolving conflict when the divisions are a product of a growing ethical pluralism within the Church and the wider society. In particular, we locate the discussion within an emerging debate about the utility of "rules" in resolving conflict in an international community where cultural particularity challenges claims made for universal values. In the Anglican case, hope has been vested in a Covenant that is discussed in the second part of this article. The hope of Church leaders was that this particular set of rules would acquire not just formal consent but normative legitimacy, although by early 2010 it was far from clear that this had resolved the crisis.

The main purpose of this paper is to extend the empirical research on the behavior of credit spreads on the USD denominated Malaysian bonds. We find that international political events have more influence on the changes of bond yield spreads from Malaysian USD issues than domestic events. Significant results are consistent across different issues. However, the resignation by the former Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, created a mixed response from the market. Using an error correction model, this study also found that the monetary policy by the US Federal Reserve has a long-term and significant impact on the behavior of the Malaysian USD issues. This study also provides further evidence that the current theoretical framework is sufficient to explain changes in the credit spread of bonds issued by the emerging market.

The authors study the evolution of the wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers in Italy from 1977 to 2004. In this period, the differentials do not show a clear trend (apart for a feeble increasing trend in the very last years) and they fluctuate around a fairly stable mean. Four factors may influence the evolution of those differentials: relative supply of skilled and unskilled workers, technological change (which may be biased toward a certain category), international commerce, and, finally, institutions in the labour market. After discussing some of these aspects from a theoretical point of view, the authors perform an econometrical analysis for the Italian case with the SUR estimation technique, and test which of these factors are important in explaining the evolution of the differentials and how they affect different categories of workers.

Abstract This paper provides empirical evidence on the effects of cross‐border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on the acquiring firms' domestic performance in the U.K. and France. We build a new firm‐level data set that combines a global M&A database with balance sheet data for the years 2000 to 2007. Combining matching techniques with a difference‐in‐differences estimator, we find that cross‐border M&As boost on average acquirers' domestic sales and investment, and they are not accompanied by a downsizing of the domestic labour force in either country. Further, cross‐border M&As in knowledge‐intensive industries lead to improvements in domestic productivity. Our results display some heterogeneity across industries and types of acquisitions, suggesting a connection between the motives for international M&As and their resulting effects.

Three approaches to human rights in US foreign policy serve as benchmarks for a general understanding of the subject from a historical perspective. The first is Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, or classical liberalism, featuring a consistent commitment to the international law of human rights and humanitarian affairs. The second is Providential nationalism, or belief in a Divinely blessed Manifest Destiny. The third is structural realism as represented in modern times by Henry Kissinger. This article examines a fourth approach that will be termed muddling through, or inconsistency regarding human rights in foreign policy, practiced by not only the Obama administration from the start, but at the end of the day by all administrations. There remain particular differences among administrations, and while the Obama record has shown a certain continuity with Bush's foreign policy, some differences are evident.

The article characterizes the efforts of national and international statistical services to better adopt contents and forms of statistics dissemination to changing requirements of primary user groups. A statistical information importance for socio-economic decision makers is discussed in the study. There are some demands for statistics concerning improvement of the citizen life condition and quality measurement taking into consideration rational aspects of the nature and culture resource management. Special attention was paid to assess today statistical information systems as well as change proposals presented in the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report on Economic Performance and Social Progress Measurement. The authors discuss activities concerning the welfare and social progress measurement conducted under the aegis of the OECD, i.e. World Project on Social Progress Measurement as well as studies conducted within the European Statistical System.

Cette étude examine les raisons de l'intervention maussienne dans le débat conceptuel qui secoue, au début des années 1920, la discipline anthropologique française et internationale concernant le remplacement du terme de « civilisation » par celui de « culture », tel que défini par l'école américaine d'anthropologie. Les différentes prises de position de Mauss en faveur du terme de civilisation, à la fois dans ses textes mais aussi dans ses enseignements à l'Institut d'ethnologie à partir de 1925, dessinent une direction de recherche pour ses « héritiers » directs, dont A. G. Haudricourt qui, après la mort de Mauss, continuera de s'intéresser aux différences entre mentalités mais aussi à l'observation des techniques, à la description des processus technologiques ou encore à l'analyse des processus d'évolution des « forces productives » en ouvrant l'ethnologie à d'autres disciplines dont l'histoire, la biologie, la botanique et, surtout, la linguistique.

How does the European Court of Justice (ECJ) firmly maintain a now 45-year-old consistent integrationist jurisprudence when exerting virtually no control over the recruitment of its members (a selection left to national governments)? Rather than considering such judicial consistency over time as a 'given', the paper questions the social fabric of judicial preferences. On the basis of a variety of commemorative materials produced within the Court (Festschriften, tributes, eulogies, and jubilees) and never studied so far, the paper stresses the manner in which these rituals are home to social processes of aggregation (into one unique judicial family), demarcation (from the political realm), and self-identification (to roles of so-called 'founding father', 'current spokesmen', or 'would-be judges'), thereby enabling transnational role transmission within international courts such as the ECJ.