Suchergebnisse

Gross stocks of foreign assets have increased rapidly relative to national outputs since 1990, and the short-run capital gains and losses on those assets can amount to significant fractions of GDP. These fluctuations in asset values render the national income and product account measure of the current account balance increasingly inadequate as a summary of the change in a country's net foreign assets. Nonetheless, unusually large current account imbalances, especially deficits, should remain high on policymakers' list of concerns, even for the richer and less credit-constrained countries. Extreme imbalances signal the need for large and perhaps abrupt real exchange rate changes in the future, changes that might have undesired political and financial consequences given the incompleteness of domestic and international asset markets. Furthermore, of the two sources of the change in net foreign assets -- the current account and the capital gain on the net foreign asset position -- the former is better understood and more amenable to policy influence. Systematic government attempts to manipulate international asset values in order to change the net foreign asset position could have a destabilizing effect on market expectations.

Until 1970s external debts did not come as a serious problem for Polish economy. Due to political reasons, the Polish People's Republic rarely took any credits from Western countries, and when it did, all due amounts were repaid in due time. The aim of the article is to present the growth of the Polish external debt, with special consideration of its causes and methods of debt reduction. In order to achieve the aim of the article, a research method of descriptive comparative analysis has been applied. In the conclusions of the paper it is stated – among others – that external credits have been taken in order to decrease economic disproportions between Poland and highly developed countries. Considering the necessity of debt repayment, the due amounts have already become a considerable developmental barrier and a burden not only for the state budget but also for business entities. Undoubtedly, Poland is going to take more credits and to issue foreign bonds in the nearest future. Their use may turn out to be an important factor which shall determine the economic situation of the country.

Until 1970s external debts did not come as a serious problem for Polish economy. Due to political reasons, the Polish People's Republic rarely took any credits from Western countries, and when it did, all due amounts were repaid in due time. The aim of the article is to present the growth of the Polish external debt, with special consideration of its causes and methods of debt reduction. In order to achieve the aim of the article, a research method of descriptive comparative analysis has been applied. In the conclusions of the paper it is stated – among others – that external credits have been taken in order to decrease economic disproportions between Poland and highly developed countries. Considering the necessity of debt repayment, the due amounts have already become a considerable developmental barrier and a burden not only for the state budget but also for business entities. Undoubtedly, Poland is going to take more credits and to issue foreign bonds in the nearest future. Their use may turn out to be an important factor which shall determine the economic situation of the country.

The European Union has extensive competences to engage with the world beyond its borders. Therefore, the UK's own relationships with non-EU countries are deeply embedded in the EU institutional framework, and the process of Brexit will require substantial legal reform in the UK. The term 'external relations' in fact covers an extremely wide set of policies which rely on a diverse set of legal competences. For this reason, we tend not to use the term 'foreign policy' unless this refers to the 'political' as opposed to 'economic' aspects, though even these are not always easily separated. 'External relations' is taken to cover the Common Commercial Policy, the powers of the EU to make agreements with 'third' – i.e. non-EU – countries, neighbourhood policy, development policy, relations with international institutions and what is known as the 'external dimension of internal policies'. The latter refers to a long-standing legal principle set out by the Court of Justice in Case 22-70 AETR, under which the EU has implied external competence where it enjoys internal competence. In addition to the wide variety of external competences which are scattered throughout the treaties, the legal instruments and institutional arrangements which apply across these areas are not the same throughout. This makes external relations a particularly complex area which the UK will need to extract itself from. We will address two of the main focal points of EU external relations: the CCP and the CFS.

For a small country whose main relevance to the outside world has always been its strategic location and whose known history has been moulded by that fact, security has been remarkably low on the list of priorities on Malta's national agenda since independence. In recent years, security has become an issue of keen political debate, although security per se may not be the real reason why the subject has been brought out into the limelight by both government and opposition. More than just an issue in its own right, security began featuring rather more as a function of the main direction of Malta's foreign policy, which during the past decade has been focused on relations with the European Union. ; peer-reviewed

A team of experts from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security conducted an independent external assessment of Taiwan's capabilities under the International Health Regulations 2005 (IHR), using the IHR Joint External Evaluation (JEE) tool adopted by the World Health Organization and the Global Health Security Agenda. In this article we describe the methods and process of the assessment, identify lessons learned, and make recommendations for the government of Taiwan, the JEE process, and the JEE tool.

This study analyses the effect of growth rate of external debt on the growth rate of GDP and finds out whether Ghana suffers from a debt overhang problem. The results from a Johansen multivariate cointegration method employed on our data showed that (i) there exists a stable long run relationship among GDP, labour force, investment, exports and external debt; and (ii) the long run effect of external debt on GDP has been positive and that Ghana is not suffering from any debt overhang problem. This means that importation of capital or reliance on external resources will help promote economic growth in Ghana. It is therefore. ecommended that every effort should be made by authorities to make Ghana much more attractive to external resources. The results of the study also indicate that military coups (political instability) have not been significant in explaining the growth rate of GDP in Ghana.

External program and management review of IBPGR conducted in 1991 by a panel chaired by Hugh Rogers. The record also contains an extract from the proceedings of the CGIAR meeting of May 1991, transmittals from the panel chair, and jointly from the TAC Chair and the CGIAR Executive Secretary, commentary by TAC and the CGIAR Secretariat, and the response of the IBPGR.Considerable attention was given to the progress and implications of the transition of IBPGR from being a unit of the FAO to an autonomous international institute in Rome. The panel considered the negotiation of a headquarters agreement with the Italian Government, the evolution of relationships between the IBPGR and FAO, and the burdens placed on the board and staff.The panel said the board, preoccupied with the transition, had slighted research strategy and implementation. There were several recommendations for strengthening board performance. The panel suggested ways for IBPGR to use its new status to overcome past problems in areas such as financial and human resources management. The panel perceived that the center would need a major increase in contributions. Among the important new issues and opportunities were how to strengthen weak national genebanks and understanding the impact of biotechnology on the regime for intellectual property rights. TAC was concerned about enhancing the working relationships among IARCs involved in genetic conservation, and identifying cost-effective approaches for both the IARCs and national genebanks. The issue of how IBPGR should deal with forest genetic resources was left open for consideration in the context of a future strategic plan. IBPGR was encouraged to strengthen its activities in information systems. Its research should be expanded to include policy and social aspects of germplasm conservation.Agenda document at TAC 54 and the CGIAR meeting in May 1991.

The 'wider Europe' initiative opens the possibility for a far-reaching association of the EU's eastern and southern European neighbours which, by offering 'everything but institutions' (Prodi), proposes an alternative to membership. This article presents this initiative as part of an ambitious external governance agenda by the enlarged Union with the aim to manage its new interdependence in an altered geopolitical context. Focusing on the conception of interdependence and the institutional configuration of EU relations with its near abroad, external governance is defined and examined in three prominent 'soft security' issues: justice and home affairs, environmental and energy policy. It is argued that external governance seeks to expand the 'legal boundary' of the Union with only limited openings of its 'institutional boundary', thereby oscillating between an inclusionary and exclusionary approach towards its near abroad.

New federal legislation now makes it mandatory for auditors to disclose observed mis-conduct to outside agencies. This article examines this legislation and presents data from a national sample of 353 auditors to explore the level of support for these new regulations. The vast majority of auditors are found to oppose the legislation, but there are also major differences in opinion for different groups of auditors. The implications of these survey results are then discussed.

This working paper explores issues of security integration in a number of external policies of the European Union (EU), and looks at both security policies per se and the security rationale contained in other policy contexts. Following a twin-track approach of presenting both a legal and a political assessment respectively, the contributions have been clustered around three themes: energy security and the EU's relations with neighbouring states, the EU's targeted sanctions policy, and security sector reform pursued by the EU in third countries. The first contribution on energy security seeks to clarify the EU's energy dependency on Russia as a security concern and assesses the EU's response, in particular the Energy Charter Treaty, to Russia's strategic use of its new energy monopoly. The second paper focuses on the countries of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and analyses a number of critiques with respect to energy policy in the context of the ENP. Within the targeted sanctions theme, one contribution discusses the legal complexities with respect to their adoption and implementation in the EU's multilevel structure, whereas the other looks more broadly at their rationale and highlights a number of problems related to their strategic use by the EU and the UN. On the last theme, the notion of Security Sector Reform (SSR), the first contribution raises the issue in the context of the Western Balkans. While acknowledging the potential importance of EU leverage through membership conditionality, it argues that – for reasons both endogenous and exogenous to the EU's SSR approach – accession is not an automatic best case scenario for sustainable reform in these countries. The second contribution looks at the EU's SSR strategy in the light of local ownership and the quest for a holistic approach by examining the reframing of some existing policies and the adoption of new instruments and actions under the SSR agenda.

The article empirically examines the determinants of debt distress, defined as periods in which countries resort to any of three forms of exceptional finance: significant arrears on external debt, Paris Club rescheduling, and non-concessional International Monetary Fund lending. Probit regressions show that three factors explain a substantial fraction of the cross-country and time-series variation in the incidence of debt distress: the debt burden, the quality of policies and institutions, and shocks. The relative importance of these factors varies with the level of development. These results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications, and the core specifications have substantial out-of-sample predictive power. The quantitative implications of these results are examined for the lending strategies of official creditors.

There is a gap in IR and EU scholarship concerning unintended consequences in an international context, leaving this important phenomenon understudied. To fill this gap, a conceptualisation of unintended consequences is offered, and a set of common research questions are presented, highlighting the nature (what), the causes (why) and the modes of management (how) of unintended consequences of EU external action. The Special Issue contributes to the study of the EU as an international actor by broadening the notion of EU's impact abroad to include the unintended consequences of EU (in)actions and by shedding new light on the conceptual paradigms that explain EU external action.

Scholars have extensively studied how the European Court of Justice (ECJ) interacts with Member State courts. The ECJ's behaviour vis-à-vis international tribunals remains, however, underexplored despite its salience for EU global actorness. The ECJ does at times condone and at other times reject cooperation with international tribunals in that it either authorises or prohibits EU and Member State participation in relevant regimes. What drives ECJ behaviour? While intuitive, European law fails to fully account for it. This study draws on models of bounded discretion to explain ECJ behaviour in external judicial politics. It argues that two factors – namely jurisdictional overlap between the European legal order and international tribunals as well as the centrality of these tribunals in global governance – decisively influence the preferences of the ECJ, Member States, the European Commission and Parliament and thus delimit the range of politically viable rulings and shape ECJ behaviour.

This article analyzes the choice between internal promotion and external recruitment within the framework of an economic contest. Opening up the competition for a position to external candidates reduces the chance of promotion for existing workers and therefore their incentive to work. Increasing the prize for winning can maintain incentives but is limited by moral hazard and potentially disruptive office politics. Alternatively, a competitive handicap can be awarded to existing workers to boost their chances. This strategy is consistent with the general observation that an external candidate is recruited only if she is significantly superior to the internal contestants. ; published_or_final_version