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In this paper we are interested in the relationship between globalization, political institutions (notably, democracy) and international environmental commitments. This relationship has been the subject of a particularly intensive debate and the existing literature offers a wide range of partly competing claims with respect to the driving forces of international environmental cooperation. While some authors argue that democracy and globalization tend to promote international efforts to mitigate or resolve environmental problems others have challenged these propositions theoretically and empirically. We argue that existing studies suffer from three weaknesses. First, they are based on very small samples of multilateral environmental treaties in respect to which commitment is coded (usually in terms of treaty ratification) and are cross-sectional. Second, they examine the effects of globalization and political institutions on international environmental policy separately and ignore potential joint effects. Third, they ignore interdependency (diffusion) effects - i.e., they do not account for the possibility that international commitment of one country is likely to depend on what other countries and specific types or groups of other countries do (network effects). Based on a new panel dataset that includes the commitments of 180 countries with regard to international environmentaltreaties from 1902 to 2005 we study whether and how international economic and political integration, and domestic political institutions jointly affect international environmental commitments. We also study interdependency (network) effects on our dependent variable. Our preliminary results show that the net effect of democracy on environmental cooperation is rather diffuse and so is the effect of economic integration (trade openness).

International audience ; Afghanistan, Cuba, Côte-d'Ivoire, Darfour, Irak, Koweït, Kosovo, Rwanda, Tibet, Timor oriental, Somalie, etc. Egrener les parties du monde où les bruits de bottes se sont fait pressants ; où le fracas des armes a pu devenir assourdissant ; où les crimes internationaux se sont déchaînés ; où les pertes humaines ont été légion, est un exercice sans fin. Or, si les « crises » sont ni plus ni moins consubstantielles à l'ordre international elles ne sont cependant pas les guerres ; elles peuvent toutefois les précéder, leur succéder voire leur être simultanées ce qui rend souvent ténue la frontière entre les deux concepts. Le XXe siècle aura été à cet égard le théâtre de changements radicaux ; le XXIe siècle confirmera la propagation des désordres géopolitiques. L'ère de l'« hyper-puissance américaine » (Hubert Védrine) a succédé à l'ordre bipolaire de la guerre froide - que le fondateur de la V République se plaisait à nommer la « double hégémonie » . Les « conflits armés internes » ont pris l'ascendant sur les guerres classiques entre États. La politique de la terreur a envahi les moindres recoins du «village planétaire» - jusqu'aux gratte-ciel new-yorkais - au point de préfigurer un ordre multipolaire où des « valeurs » et des « civilisations» disparates s'entrechoquent, où l'Occidentvacille, où les coups de boutoirs des obscurantismes de tous bords sont à leur paroxysme.

International audience ; Afghanistan, Cuba, Côte-d'Ivoire, Darfour, Irak, Koweït, Kosovo, Rwanda, Tibet, Timor oriental, Somalie, etc. Egrener les parties du monde où les bruits de bottes se sont fait pressants ; où le fracas des armes a pu devenir assourdissant ; où les crimes internationaux se sont déchaînés ; où les pertes humaines ont été légion, est un exercice sans fin. Or, si les « crises » sont ni plus ni moins consubstantielles à l'ordre international elles ne sont cependant pas les guerres ; elles peuvent toutefois les précéder, leur succéder voire leur être simultanées ce qui rend souvent ténue la frontière entre les deux concepts. Le XXe siècle aura été à cet égard le théâtre de changements radicaux ; le XXIe siècle confirmera la propagation des désordres géopolitiques. L'ère de l'« hyper-puissance américaine » (Hubert Védrine) a succédé à l'ordre bipolaire de la guerre froide - que le fondateur de la V République se plaisait à nommer la « double hégémonie » . Les « conflits armés internes » ont pris l'ascendant sur les guerres classiques entre États. La politique de la terreur a envahi les moindres recoins du «village planétaire» - jusqu'aux gratte-ciel new-yorkais - au point de préfigurer un ordre multipolaire où des « valeurs » et des « civilisations» disparates s'entrechoquent, où l'Occidentvacille, où les coups de boutoirs des obscurantismes de tous bords sont à leur paroxysme.

A report about the U.S. providing foreign aid. A focus is placed on U.S. food assistance allocated by legislative authority for FY 2008.

In a series of summits, leading countries of the world will meet to draw up an international arrangement for financial stability. Such a rule system should prevent a financial crisis as we have seen it in 2007 and 2008. It should include appropriate principles of monetary policy, rules for financial soundness and agreements on the role of prudent regulation. The paper discusses the lessons from the subprime crisis, failures of regulation, crisis management in the US and in the EU and considers the problems that have to be solved by an international rule system.

Nicht nur Waren und Kapital überschreiten in einer arbeitsteiligen internationalen Wirtschaft regelmäßig die Landesgrenzen, sondern zunehmend auch die Arbeitskräfte. Hier stellt sich dann die Frage nach dem auf diese Arbeitsverhältnisse anwendbaren Recht. Aus der Perspektive des Völkerrechts geht es dabei um die Schaffung internationaler arbeitsrechtlicher Standards. Da es diese aber, etwa im Rahmen der ILO, nur punktuell gibt und zudem nur Staaten und nicht einzelne Vertragsparteien verpflichten, sind für das jeweils anzuwendende Recht die nationalen Kollisionsrechte (irreführenderweise als Internationales Privatrecht bezeichnet) zentral. In der folgenden Abhandlung werden die Grundstrukturen des deutschen Arbeitskollisionsrechts im EGBGB (Einführungsgesetz zum BGB) aufgezeigt. Im Mittelpunkt steht das Verhältnis zwischen dem Grundsatz der freien Rechtswahl und den vielfältigen Einschränkungsmöglichkeiten dieses Prinzips. Anhand des Beispiels eines Arbeitsvertrages mit Bezügen zum deutschen, britischen und USamerikanischen Recht wird aufgezeigt, wie die Wertungen des nationalen Kollisionsrechts die Anwendbarkeitsentscheidung beeinflussen. ; In today's global economy, international borders are crossed by not only goods and capital, but increasingly by workers as well. This raises the question of the law governing these employment relationships. From the point of view of public international law there is a need to create international labour standards. However, since only certain areas are already covered by public international law, for example in the form of the ILO Standards and, in any case, these only bind States and not individual parties, national conflict of laws rules become essential for determining the applicable law. The following paper explores the basic structures of the German conflict of laws rules in the field of labour law. These rules are contained in the Introductory Act to the Civil Code (Einführungsgesetz zum Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuch). The paper focuses on the relationship between the freedom of choice principle and the many ways of limiting its scope. Through examining an employment contract which has connections with German, British and US law, the author shows how the different approaches taken by different national conflict of laws rules can influence the decisions as to the applicable substantive law.

Using a large international firm-level data set, we estimate separate effects of host and parent country taxation on the location decisions of multinational firms. Both types of taxation are estimated to have a negative impact on the location of new foreign subsidiaries. In fact, the impact of parent country taxation is estimated to be relatively large, possibly reflecting its international discriminatory nature. For the cross-section of multinational firms, we find that parent firms tend to be located in countries with a relatively low taxation of foreign-source income. Overall, our results show that parent-country taxation – despite the general possibility of deferral of taxation until income repatriation – is instrumental in shaping the structure of multinational enterprise. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Fast Track Authority (FTA) is the institutional procedure in the Unites States whereby Congress grants to the President the power to negotiate international trade agreements. Under FTA, Congress can only approve or reject negotiated trade deals, with no possibility of amending them. In this paper, we examine the determinants of FTA voting decisions and the implications of this institutional procedure for trade negotiations. We describe a simple two-country trade model, in which industries are unevenly distributed across con- stituencies. In the foreign country, trade negotiating authority is delegated to the executive, while in the home country Congress can retain the power to amend trade agreements. We show that legislators' FTA voting behavior depends on the trade policy interests of their own constituencies as well as those of the majority of Congress. Empirical analysis of the determinants of all FTA votes between 1974 (when fast track was first introduced) and 2002 (when it was last granted) provides strong support for the predictions of our model. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin wall, legal scholars initiated a debate on the existence of a right to democratic governance in international law. Many of the adherents to the democratic entitlement school seem to assume that democratization is a simple shift in the political status, a change from one form of government to another. This contribution seeks to analyze this underlying assumption by taking a look at the current discussion on democratization theory in the political sciences. Through this lens, it will reconsider the international practice and the corresponding legal documents related to the existence of a possible democracy principle. In this respect, a special emphasis will be put on three areas of potential precedents resolutions of the UN General Assembly, the practice of regional organizations such as the Organization of American States or the African Union, and military interventions in the name of democracy. The analysis will show that the legitimacy principle of international law is, at the same time, more modest and more demanding than the claim of the democratic entitlement school. It will be argued that democracy is no strict obligation, but rather a teleological principle. States are obliged to develop towards democracy and to consolidate and to optimize democracy, once electoral institutions have been established.

Für viele Hochschulen sind internationale Kooperationen ein Instrument den gestiegenen Ansprüchen an Hochschulen gerecht zu werden und die Wahrnehmung der eigenen Einrichtung im nationalen und internationalen Bildungsmarkt zu stärken. Beim Aufbau internationaler Hochschulkooperationen sind u.a. folgende Frage zu klären: Welche Strategien tragen dazu bei, den bestmöglichen Partner für welche Zwecke zu finden? Was sind Schlüsselfaktoren für Erfolge in der Partnerwahl und der daraus folgenden Kooperationen? Und welche Einflüsse führen tendenziell zu einem Scheitern der Zusammenarbeit? Im Beitrag sollen mögliche Antworten auf diese Fragen gegeben werden. Hierfür wird zu Beginn ein theoretisches Umfeld identifiziert, das bereits in anderen Zusammenhängen Einblicke in und Vorhersagen zu akteursbasierten Entscheidungsprozessen ermöglicht hat. Anschließend werden die Hypothesen mit Hilfe quantitativer Methoden innerhalb einer relevanten Gruppe von Entscheidungsträgern internationaler Hochschulkooperation fundiert. (HoF/Text übernommen)

This paper calculates an implied cost of equity for 19 developed countries from 1991 to 2006. During this period, there has been a decline in the cost of equity of about 10-15 bps per year, which can be partially attributed to declining government yields and declining inflation. Analyst forecast inaccuracy, a proxy for firm-level earnings opacity, is positively related to the cost of equity. If this variable captures differences in disclosure across firms, then improvements in disclosure regulation may benefit firms by lowering their cost of equity. I also include countrylevel variables that measure disclosure requirements, director liability, and the ability for shareholders to sue directors. Higher levels of these measures are associated with a lower cost of equity. Previous studies [e.g., Hail and Leuz (2006a)] have found a similar relation, but my study is unique in that it uses a different measure of investor protection, which may better reflect regulatory differences across countries, and it shows this relation holds for developed countries. After controlling for the characteristics of firms that analysts choose to cover in each country, differences in the properties of analyst forecasts across countries, and differences in accounting standards across countries, Canada's cost of equity is statistically different from a handful of countries and is about 20 to 40 bps higher than that of the United States. Lowering Canadian firms' cost of equity by this amount would have large economic benefits given the size of Canada's capital markets.

Linkage of different countries' domestic permit markets for pollution rights into a single international market alters governments' incentives, and may trigger adjustments of the number of allocated permits. First, this work finds that in a non-cooperative equilibrium, international emissions trading is likely to increase the total emissions. Second, although trading will give a more efficient cross-country allocation of emissions, efficiency may nevertheless fall, because an already inefficiently low abatement level is likely to be further reduced. Third, we find that large countries are likely to experience losses from linking their permit markets to the permit markets of smaller countries.

This article takes a close look at the field of development in Sweden. Sweden has always been one of the most generous countries when it comes to allocating taxpayers' money to international development. As early as 1968, Sweden announced that it would commit 1% of its gross national product to foreign aid, and this goal was met in the mid-1970s. Together with a handful of the so-called 'like-minded countries', Sweden is often called a typical 'soft donor'. It provides aid with few political conditions or economic ties and has long insisted on respecting the needs and wishes of partner countries. Its policy is based on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) guidelines for poverty reduction. Sweden puts a strong emphasis on democracy, human rights, environment and equality between men and women.

Our goal in this project is to gain a better empirical understanding of the international financial implications of currency movements. To this end, we construct a database of international currency exposures for a large panel of countries over 1990-2004. We show that trade-weighted exchange rate indices are insufficient to understand the financial impact of currency movements. We show that our currency measure has high explanatory power for the valuation term in net foreign asset dynamics: exchange rate valuation shocks are sizable, not quickly reversed and may entail substantial wealth redistributions. Further, we demonstrate that many developing countries hold short foreign-currency positions, leaving them open to negative valuation effects when the domestic currency depreciates. However, we also show that many of these countries have substantially reduced their foreign currency exposure over the last decade.

The context and the conditions under which the media phenomenon has grown so swiftly on a worldwide basis have been analyzed throughout this thesis. On one hand by the study of international information media, on the other by the study of the financial stakes which transformed the communication industry into a powerful actor of the global economy. This major implication of the media in the international system gave rise to the emergence of a worldwide public opinion being now targeted by operations of influence destined to orient hearts and minds with specific contents. Furthermore, States' actions and reactions facing a media phenomenon, now fully part of international relations, and regardless of classical concepts of sovereignty, have been studied in this work. States themselves used media as a propaganda tool to emphasize their ideologies and policies. Besides, the growing involvement of media in military conflicts, as witnesses or now as direct and indirect actors of these wars, has been established. As a result, is the geostrategic impact due to global use of media likely to generate a growing weakness of States facing relentless flows of information especially since legal, economical and technical aspects have favored this situation? This apparent weakening of States generated reactions, some of which are particularly anti-democratic, but others more constructive and willing to contribute in the diffusion of human thought and in the progress of human societies in the globalization context. ; Dans cette thèse ont été analysées les conditions et le contexte de la progression mondiale du phénomène médiatique, d'une part par l'étude des médias d'information à vocation internationale, mais aussi par l'étude des enjeux financiers qui ont transformé l'industrie de la communication en un acteur très puissant de l'économie globale. Cette implication majeure de la chose médiatique dans le système international a donné lieu à l'émergence d'une véritable opinion publique mondiale devenue le théâtre d'entreprises ...