The Anglosphere: new enthusiasm for an old dream
Having cut Britain adrift of Europe, Brexiters are indulging in an old fantasy about a new national role in the world—as the hub of a far-flung Anglosphere

by Duncan Bell / January 19, 2017 / Leave a comment
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Published in February 2017 issue of Prospect Magazine

Written post Asia crisis but eternally applicable - he was focusing on capital flows when it still was heterodoxy -- Once upon a time, economists saw capital account liberalization--the free and unrestricted flow of capital in and out of countries--as unambiguously good. Good for debtor states, good for the world economy. No longer. Spectacular banking and currency crises in recent decades have shattered the consensus. In this remarkably clear and pithy volume, one of Europe's leading economists examines these crises, the reforms being undertaken to prevent them, and how global financial institutions might be restructured to this end. Jean Tirole first analyzes the current views on the crises and on the reform of the international financial architecture. Reform proposals often treat the symptoms rather than the fundamentals, he argues, and sometimes fail to reconcile the objectives of setting effective financing conditions while ensuring that a country "owns" its reform program. A proper identification of market failures is essential to reformulating the mission of an institution such as the IMF, he emphasizes. Next he adapts the basic principles of corporate governance, liquidity provision, and risk management of corporations to the particulars of country borrowing. Building on a "dual- and common-agency perspective," he revisits commonly advocated policies and considers how multilateral organizations can help debtor countries reap enhanced benefits while liberalizing their capital accounts.

Based on the Paolo Baffi Lecture the author delivered at the Bank of Italy, this refreshingly accessible book is teeming with rich insights that researchers, policymakers, and students at all levels will find indispensable. -- downloaded excerpt to Tab S2

The financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States swept the world, producing substantial bank failures and forcing unprecedented state aid for the crippled global financial system. Bringing together three leading financial economists to provide an international perspective, Balancing the Banks draws critical lessons from the causes of the crisis and proposes important regulatory reforms, including sound guidelines for the ways in which distressed banks might be dealt with in the future.

While some recent policy moves go in the right direction, others, the book argues, are not sufficient to prevent another crisis. The authors show the necessity of an adaptive prudential regulatory system that can better address financial innovation. Stressing the numerous and complex challenges faced by politicians, finance professionals, and regulators, and calling for reinforced international coordination (for example, in the treatment of distressed banks), the authors put forth a number of principles to deal with issues regarding the economic incentives of financial institutions, the impact of economic shocks, and the role of political constraints.

Offering a global perspective, Balancing the Banks should be read by anyone concerned with solving the current crisis and preventing another such calamity in the future.
Downloaded Chapters 1 & 2 to Tab S2

FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT, June 2016, Vol. 53, No. 2 - Prakash Loungani profiles Dani Rodrik, the Harvard professor whose warnings about the downsides of globalization proved prescient. -- downloaded pdf to Note

WZB Berlin Social Science Center Discussion Papers, SP IV 2015-808, 2015 - Developing a sociological informed social theory perspective, this article asks the question why social praxis’ of justification has moved to the centre-stage within the debate on transnational ordering. In contrast to perspectives which see the relationship between national and transnational forms or ordering as characterised by a zero-sum game, the coevolutionary and mutually reinforcing relationship between national and transnational forms of ordering is emphasised. It is, moreover, argued that this complementarity can be traced back to the fundamentally different function and position of national and transnational forms of ordering in world society. The widespread attempt to analyse transnational developments on the basis of concepts of law and the political which emerged in national contexts are therefore seen as problematic. Instead context adequate concepts of transnational law and politics are needed. It is on this background, that a discourse on justification has emerged in relation to transnational settings. Transnational justificatory praxis’ can be understood as functional equivalents to democracy in transnational settings in so far as both can be understood as reflexivity increasing instruments. The central difference is, however, that democratic frameworks implies an ex ante form of the political in contrast to the ex post emphasis of justificatory praxis’. In addition, law gains a central role as the framework through which justificatory praxis’ are structured in transnational settings. - downloaded pdf to Note

Les usages de la peur dans la mondialisation: Entretien avec Zygmunt Bauman -- Zygmunt Bauman, Cécile Desaunay, Michaël Fœssel and Marc-Olivier Padis, Esprit, No. 316 (7) (Juillet 2005), pp. 71-98 -- Loin d'uniformiser la planète, la mondialisation provoque un morcellement des espaces et une montée de la peur. Comment, dans ces conditions, penser une mondialisation positive qui ne signifierait pas l'abandon de la politique sociale, pensée jusqu'ici dans le cadre de l'État-nation? -- downloaded pdf to Note

Seeing Is Believing -- We don’t know yet what’s in the TPP. But knowing some things that aren’t in it—currency manipulation rules, notably—should make us nervous. A response to Michael Froman. -- Jared Bernstein

Jan Wouters, Professor of International Law, Director of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, University of Leuven -- We are living in interesting times for investment treaties, whether bilateral treaties or investment chapters in free trade agreements. Never before have they aroused such an interest from parliaments. People and politicians alike are concerned about their impact on international and domestic affairs. Their scope is expanding dramatically: just think of mega deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the rise of intra-regional investment agreements. Debates on investment agreements have intensified recently within the EU because of the European Commission’s newly-acquired exclusive powers in this arena.

Here on planet Earth, things could be going better. The rise in atmospheric temperatures from greenhouse gases poses the most dire threat to humanity, measured…

Austan D. Goolsbee and Alan B. Krueger - A Retrospective Look at Rescuing and Restructuring General Motors and Chrysler (pp. 3-24) **--** W. Scott Frame, Andreas Fuster, Joseph Tracy and James Vickery - The Rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (pp. 25-52) **--** Charles W. Calomiris and Urooj Khan - An Assessment of TARP Assistance to Financial Institutions (pp. 53-80) **--** Robert McDonald and Anna Paulson - AIG in Hindsight (pp. 81-106) **--** Phillip Swagel - Legal, Political, and Institutional Constraints on the Financial Crisis Policy Response (pp. 107-22) -- available online, didn't download

Reviewed : C. Colliot-Thélène, La Démocratie sans « Demos » [Democracy Without ‘Demos‘], PUF, 2011, 256 pages, 27 euros -- French version January 2012 -- translated by Michael C. Behrent -- Democracy is not the government of the people, by the people. Rather, it is a permanent process of conquering new rights. This is the argument of Catherine Colliot-Thélène’s book, which examines the tension, found throughout democracy’s history, between individual emancipation and political affiliation. -- downloaded pdf to Note

2015 marks the deadline for the MDGs... And while it might come as a surprise to those in Japan, Europe, or North America, the past 15 years may have been the period of greatest progress in humanity’s quality of life. Not least, the available data suggest that we have seen the fastest declines in global child mortality and absolute poverty in recorded history. As a result, we have far surpassed the first MDG—to halve the number of people worldwide living on less than $1.25 a day. 2015 is also the starting date for the SDGs to be agreed at the UN this fall. These goals outline a vision of progress to 2030 covering poverty, health, education, security, the environment, governance, gender equality, and much more. ..at Addis Ababa in July this year will try to finance that new agenda. ... at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in December, countries will pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions, with the hope of setting us on a path away from catastrophic global warming. A strong agreement in Addis Ababa and progress toward the SDGs depend on advanced economies’ understanding that the issue is not altruism but naked self-interest. In 2002, when rich countries ... discussed global cooperation to meet the MDGs, these countries may have asked, “What can we do for them?” This time around the process can only be seen as “What can we do for each other?” Even though developing countries need global ties to make progress, at issue now is not persuading cash-strapped OECD finance ministers to be a little less skinflint but tackling a set of global problems that can be resolved only with the support of the developing world. -- in F&D issue downloaded as pdf to Note

1st of a back-and-forth with Streeck and others -- Freedom and Democracy: Democracy or Capitalism? On the Abject Spectacle of a Capitalistic World Society fragmented along National Lines -- In his book on the deferred crisis of democratic capitalism Wolfgang Streeck develops an unsparing analysis of the origins of the present banking and debt crisis that is spilling over into the real economy. This bold, empirically based study developed out of Adorno Lectures at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt. At its best—that is, whenever it combines political passion with the eye-opening force of critical factual analysis and telling arguments—it is reminiscent of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. It takes as its starting point a justified critique of the crisis theory developed by Claus Offe and me in the early 1970s. The Keynesian optimism concerning governance prevalent at the time had inspired our assumption that the economic crisis potential mastered at the political level would be diverted into conflicting demands on an overstrained governmental apparatus and into “cultural contradictions of capitalism” (as Daniel Bell put it a couple of years later) and would find expression in a legitimation crisis. Today we are not (yet?) experiencing a legitimation crisis but we are witnessing a palpable economic crisis.

ENCYCLICAL LETTER "LAUDATO SI’" OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME -- downloaded pdf to Note

In making yet further revisions to our paper on Hawtrey and Cassel, Ron Batchelder and I keep finding interesting new material that sheds new light on the…

Sustainable development: UN expert group calls for accountability of public and private sectors -- GENEVA (16 June 2015) – The United Nations Working Group on business and human rights today urged the UN system and all its member states to make globalization inclusive and aligned with human rights, and called for full accountability of public and private sectors’ activities in that regard. The expert’s call comes as a number of key international negotiations are taking place on sustainable development goals for the world, development financing and the climate change, as well as a number of policy talks on trade, finance and investment. -- downloaded pdf to Note

On July 2, the IMF released its analysis of whether Greek debt was sustainable or not. The report said that Greek debt was not sustainable and deep debt relief…

East Asia has avoided major military conflicts since the 1970s. After the United States fought three wars in the preceding four decades originating in East Asia, with a quarter of a million lost American lives, this is no small achievement. It is owing to the maturity and good sense of most of the states of the region, their emphasis on economic growth over settling scores, and the American alliances and security presence that have deterred military action and provided comfort to most peoples and states. But above all else, it is due to the reconciliation of the Asia-Pacific’s major powers, the United States, and China, initiated by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and nurtured by every American administration and Chinese leadership since. In the inaugural Brookings China Strategy Paper, Jeff Bader evaluates the recent rhetoric towards China, and argues that the United States and China should work out their differences in a way that promotes continued economic dynamism and lowers tensions in the region. Jeffrey Bader is the John C. Whitehead Senior Fellow in International Diplomacy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. From 2009 until 2011, Bader was special assistant to the president of the United States for national security affairs at the National Security Council. In that capacity, he was the principal advisor to President Obama on Asia. Bader served from 2005 to 2009 as the director of the China Initiative and subsequently as the first director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. His latest book, "Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy," was published by Brookings Institution Press in March 2012. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Edited by Kerstin Martens, Alessandra Rusconi, Kathrin Leuze -- How and to what extent is education becoming a field of international and market governance? Traditionally, education policy making has been viewed as the responsibility of the nation state, falling within the realm of domestic politics. But recent years have witnessed the transformation of the state. Globalization has introduced new actors and led to the internationalization and marketization of education. This volume provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of these new arenas of education governance, examining the impact of international organizations and the role of the market in policymaking. It demonstrates how education policy is formulated at international levels and what the consequences for national policy making will be. -- excerpt = TOC, Introduction and index -- downloaded pdf to Note

[This post was written jointly with Ben Spielberg] In this PostEverything piece, Bernstein and Baker quote estimates of jobs lost in the U.S. due to higher…

Reviews a number of stress indexes developed since the financial crisis -- most show a good way of indicating where we are at any one time, and several may be useful in crisis management for identifying institutions with liquidity vs insolvency problems, but none tell us where we're going **--** Where does this leave us? Our answer is that we have yet another reason to be skeptical of time-varying, discretionary regulatory policy. In an earlier post, we noted that the combination of high information requirements, long transmission lags and significant political resistance made it unlikely time-varying capital requirements will be effective in reducing financial vulnerabilities. Our conclusion then, which we reiterate now, is that the solution is to build a financial system that is safe and resilient all of the time, since we really never know what is coming. That means a regulatory system based on economic function, not legal form, with sufficient capital buffers to guard against all but the very worst possibilities. In the end, a financial system that relies on an early warning indicator of imminent financial collapse seems destined to fail. -- copied to Pocket

Harvard University - Harvard Business School *--* A long-standing ideology in business education has been that a corporation is run for the sole interest of its shareholders. I present an alternative view where increasing concentration of economic activity and power in the world’s largest corporations, the Global 1000, has opened the way for managers to consider the interests of a broader set of stakeholders rather than only shareholders. Having documented that this alternative view better fits actual corporate conduct, I discuss opportunities for future research. Specifically, I call for research on the materiality of environmental and social issues for the future financial performance of corporations, the design of incentive and control systems to guide strategy execution, corporate reporting, and the role of investors in this new paradigm. -- Pages in PDF File: 27 -- Keywords: corporate performance, corporate size, sustainability, corporate social responsibility, accounting -- downloaded pdf to Note

Reviewed: Tim Bütheand Walter Mattli, The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2011; and Vibert, Frank, Democracy and Dissent: The Challenge of International Rule Making, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2011. -- Tags : democracy | globalisation | European Union | governance | United States of America -- Thirty years of misguided deregulation have brought us the 2008 collapse. Two books look at how we should create new rules democratically. While adopting widely different perspectives, both beg the same question: can rulemaking alone ensure the wellbeing of people in a global society? -- saved to Instapaper

Background papers, events, reports etc on carbon pricing methods, markets, integration of markets, internal pricing by businesses etc

To close the gap between existing country pledges and the necessary ambition level to limit anthropogenic climate change to not more than 2°C average global temperature increase above pre-industrial levels, decision makers from both the public and private domain have started to explore a number of complementary approaches to the top-down targets-and-timetables approach of international climate change policy. Referred to as International Cooperative Initiatives (ICI), these governance arrangements are now also officially acknowledged under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Durban Platform for Enhanced Action. While proponents see ICIs as important bridging devices towards more ambitious climate policy, in particular up to 2020, critical observers note that the voluntary nature of ICIs makes it difficult to assess their contribution to climate change mitigation. This article scrutinizes the potential of ICIs to meaningfully contribute to closing the emissions gap along the criteria of effectiveness, legitimacy and institutional fit. As means of illustration, the analytical framework is applied to a random sample of nine ICIs (out of a total of 45 listed on the UNFCCC Secretariat's website). We find that while potential technical effectiveness is high, legitimacy and institutional fit should be improved with a view towards integrating ICIs into the emerging post-2015 climate governance architecture. -- Wiley available free -- downloaded pdf to Note

China and India’s low-carbon development is crucial for global sustainability and domestic welfare. However, embedded political and economic obstacles have prevented a smooth and effective transition towards a low-carbon future in the two emerging countries. This article analyzes China and India’s energy efficiency policies as a lens into this question. We argue that the existing energy efficiency and broader low-carbon development pathways – India’s market-oriented approach and China’s target-driven paradigm – are not sufficient to address the challenges. Policymakers should reflect on and fix the shortcomings of the current pathways by paying close attention to the various forms of maneuvers of low-carbon policies in the given political and economic environments in China and India. -- part of Global Policy "Juxtaposition" program re comparative work on China and India -- didn't download paper

This article revisits a number of familiar debates about climate change mitigation yet draws some unorthodox conclusions. First, that progress towards a renewable small-scale energy future in environmentally conscious countries such as Germany and Sweden may take the world as a whole further away from climate stability by reducing the political pressure to finance breakthrough innovation. Second, that without such game-changing innovations, developing countries will continue to deploy whatever technologies are domestically available, scalable and affordable, including thermal coal power in most instances. Third and finally, that as any realistic hope of achieving climate stability hinges on the innovation of breakthrough technologies, the urgency of climate change calls not so much for the domestic deployment of existing energy technologies but rather a concentrated effort to develop technologies that will be adopted globally. These arguments imply that national innovation policy, and an international treaty establishing a ‘Low-Emissions Technology Commitment’ should be the central focus of climate policy. -- added to Wiley profile

...a recent examination by Sean McFate, a former Army paratrooper who later served in Africa working for Dyncorp International and is now an associate professor at the National Defense University, suggests that the Pentagon’s dependence on contractors to help wage its wars has unleashed a new era of warfare in which a multitude of freshly founded private military companies are meeting the demand of an exploding global market for conflict. “Now that the United States has opened the Pandora’s Box of mercenarianism,” McFate writes in The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order, “private warriors of all stripes are coming out of the shadows to engage in for-profit warfare.” It is a menacing thought. McFate said this coincides with what he and others have called a current shift from global dominance by nation-state power to a “polycentric” environment in which state authority competes with transnational corporations, global governing bodies, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), regional and ethnic interests, and terror organizations in the chess game of international relations. New access to professional private arms, McFate further argues, has cut into the traditional states’ monopoly on force, and hastened the dawn of this new era. McFate calls it neomedievalism, the “non-state-centric and multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances.” States will not disappear, “but they will matter less than they did a century ago.” - copied to Pocket

Boediono served as Vice President of Indonesia from 2009 to October 20, 2014, when President Joko Widodo was elected and took office with Vice President Jusuf Kalla. In the following piece, Jeffrey A. Sheehan of Sheehan Advisory LLC — and former associate dean for international relations at Wharton — writes about Boediono, who he has known for 22 years. The material, which draws on public and private discussions, is excerpted from the manuscript of Sheehan’s forthcoming book, tentatively titled, “There Are No Foreign Lands.”

Key Findings - (1) India’s Look East Policy has shaped its engagement with the Asia-Pacific for over two decades, and, in recent years, has been driven by an external balancing strategy against China’s influence in the Indian Ocean, as well as India’s desire for a greater global role. * (2) The BJP’s overwhelming electoral mandate will provide Prime Minister Modi with the opportunity to transform India into a serious strategic player in East and Southeast Asia. Announced shift from "Look East" to "Act East". * (3) The Modi Government will pursue a greater role in the Asia-Pacific in line with India’s growing economic and strategic interests, based on practical partnerships with Japan, Vietnam, Australia, and ASEAN.

Nice defense of what Basle doing and why a "simple" leverage ratio is neither simple nor adequate - but is useful as a checksum that minimizes risk of gaming Risk Weighted Assets

The BEPS Project aims to provide governments with clear international solutions for fighting corporate tax planning strategies that exploit gaps and loopholes of the current system to artificially shift profits to locations where they are subject to more favourable tax treatment. The OECD work is based on a BEPS Action Plan endorsed by the G20 in July 2013, which identified 15 key areas to be addressed by 2015; with 7 actions to be delivered in September 2014. This Explanatory Statement provides an overview of the seven BEPS reports delivered in 2014, which were arrived at through consensus of 44 countries on an equal footing (including all OECD members, OECD accession countries, and G20 countries) and extensive consultation of developing countries, business, NGOs and other stakeholders. It describes the context for the BEPS project and outlines the process for the work to date. It also describes the status of the 2014 reports in the context of the overall BEPS project, including remaining technical issues and potential interaction with the remaining BEPS work. Finally, it outlines the next steps for the BEPS work. -- downloaded pdf to Note

The OECD's Committee on Fiscal Affairs consults with business and other interested parties through a variety of means to inform its work in the tax area. One important way of obtaining such input is through the release of papers or discussion drafts for public comment. Below is a list of past discussion drafts for comments: -- list with links to papers and comments regularly updated

24/10/2014 - The OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project and the move to automatic exchange of financial account information took centre stage when Heads of Tax Administration met on 23-24 October in Dublin, Ireland. Nearly forty delegations, including international and regional tax organisations, participated in the Ninth Meeting of the OECD Forum on Tax Administration (FTA) and agreed that ever greater co-operation will be necessary to implement the results of the BEPS project and automatic exchange of information. Specifically they agreed: ** A strategy for systematic and enhanced co-operation between tax administrations; ** To invest the resources needed to implement the new standard on automatic exchange of information; and ** To improve the practical operation of the mutual agreement process. The communiqué contains links to the following publications that have just been released by the FTA: ** Increasing Taxpayers’ Use of Self-service Channels ** Working Smarter in Tax Debt Management ** Tax Compliance by Design – Achieving improved SME Tax Compliance by Adopting a System Perspective ** Measures of Tax Compliance Outcomes – A Practical Guide -- The FTA is the leading international body concerned with tax administration, bringing together the heads of tax administrations from the OECD, members of the G20 and large emerging economies.

The spread of the digital economy poses challenges for international taxation. This report sets out an analysis of these tax challenges. It notes that because the digital economy is increasingly becoming the economy itself, it would not be feasible to ring-fence the digital economy from the rest of the economy for tax purposes. The report notes, however, that certain business models and key features of the digital economy may exacerbate BEPS risks. These BEPS risks will be addressed by the work on the other Actions in the BEPS Action Plan, which will take the relevant features of the digital economy into account. The report also analyses a number of broader tax challenges raised by the digital economy, and discusses potential options to address them, noting the need for further work during 2015 to evaluate these broader challenges and potential option. - Report can be read online or $ for download

The OECD Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, July 2013, identifies 15 actions to address BEPS in a comprehensive manner and sets deadlines to implement these actions. Action 7 – Prevent the Artificial Avoidance of PE (permanent establishment) Status -- including through the use of commissionnaire arrangements and the specific activity exemptions. Work on these issues will also address related profit attribution issues. -- Public comments are invited on a discussion draft which ... includes proposals for changes to the definition of PE in the OECD Model Tax Convention. -- The Action Plan also notes that MNCs may artificially fragment their operations among multiple group entities to qualify for the exceptions to PE status for preparatory and auxiliary activities. -- Further, the Report Addressing the Tax Challenges of the Digital Economy has identified issues in the digital economy that need to be taken into account in the course of the work on Action 7, namely ensuring that core activities cannot inappropriately benefit from the exception from PE status and that artificial arrangements relating to sales of goods and services cannot be used to avoid PE status.

From OECD - "The debate over base erosion and profit shifting (‘BEPS’) has reached the highest political level and has become an issue on the agenda of several OECD and non-OECD countries… The G20 leaders’ meeting in Los Cabos on 18-19 June 2012 explicitly referred to “the need to prevent base erosion and profit shifting” in their final declaration. G20 finance ministers, triggered by a joint statement of UK Chancellor Osborne and German Finance Minister Shaüble, have asked the OECD to report on this issue by their meeting in February 2013. Such a concern was also voiced by US President Obama in his Framework for Business Tax Reform, where it is stated that “the empirical evidence suggests that income-shifting behaviour by multinational corporations is a significant concern that should be addressed through tax reform”." -- The BEPS project is essentially a bunch of working groups, composed of officials from the world’s largest economies, that are tasked with the job of trying to figure out how the international tax landscape for corporations should be changed. They are focusing on a few specific areas, including but not limited to: ** Tax avoidance by digital companies: Do different rules need to be created to specifically address the digital economy? ** Financial loopholes: What changes need to be made to prevent companies from using financial instruments like intercompany loans to avoid paying tax on some of their income? ** Intangibles: Should international transfer pricing norms be revised to make it harder for companies to reduce their taxes simply by moving their intangibles to low-tax jurisdictions? ** Documentation: What sort of international reporting standards could be imposed to make it harder for global companies to shift their income into low-tax jurisdictions?

UN predicts global population will level off by 2050 at approximately 9.15 billion from a bit under 7 billion today. Assuming we can avoid environmental catastrophe, the big demographic shifts will be more than half the population will be in cities and the growth will have been concentrated in younger cohorts of less developed regions, especially countries with low quality health, education and infrastructure, lack of economic opportunities to absorb the youth population (especially young, easily radicalized males) with the current wealthy economies both relatively older and smaller, requiring immigration to maintain growth and income levels. These trends will require a wholesale makeover in global governance. -- didn't download

Looks legitimately interesting - U of Ottawa Press, distribution by U of Toronto Press

Countries' concerns about the value of their currency have been studied and documented extensively in the literature. Capital controls can be--and often are--used as a tool to manage exchange rate fluctuations. This paper investigates whether countries can benefit from using such a tool. We develop a welfare-based analysis of whether (or, in fact, how) countries should tax international borrowing. Our results suggest that restricting international capital flows through the use of these taxes can be beneficial for individual countries, although it would limit cross-border pooling of risk. The reason is because, while consumption risk-pooling is important, individual countries also care about domestic output fluctuations. Moreover, the results show that countries decide to restrict the international flow of capital exactly when this flow is crucial to ensure cross-border risk sharing. Our findings point to the possibility of costly "capital control wars" and thus to significant gains from international policy coordination. -- enfin! We're making progress in clearing away the accumulated layers of free market ideology. Not sure about the likelihood of "capital control wars" so have to read the thing to see if their global cross-border risk-pooling ("consumption risk-pooling? ) is a significant "common good" for anybody other than financial institutions or the beneficiaries of windfall surpluses like Saudi petrodollars that need recycling. Downloaded pdf to Note

States over the past 500 years have become the dominant institutions throughout the world, exercising vast and varied authority over the economic well-being, health, welfare, and very lives of their citizens. This concise and engaging book explains how power became centralized in states at the expense of the myriad of other polities that had battled one another over previous millennia. Richard Lachmann traces the contested and historically contingent struggles by which subjects began to see themselves as citizens of nations and came to associate their interests and identities with states. He explains why the civil rights and benefits they achieved, and the taxes and military service they in turn rendered to their nations, varied so much. Looking forward, Lachmann examines the future in store for states: will they gain or lose strength as they are buffeted by globalization, terrorism, economic crisis, and environmental disaster? This stimulating book offers a comprehensive evaluation of the social science literature that addresses these issues, and situates the state at the center of the world history of capitalism, nationalism, and democracy. It will be essential reading for scholars and students across the social and political sciences. -- reviews all the main theoretical approaches to rise of the nation-state, state-building, and various speculations on the demise or transformation of the state in the era of globalization and transnational actors and issues. -- looks extremely helpful, if for nothing than the lit review and bibliography

Introduction: "Globalization" and the Nation-State in the Modern World-System (pp. 253-258) - Denis O'Hearn and Thomas M. Wilson. *--* Nationalism in a Post-Hegemonic Era (pp. 259-283) - Richard Lachmann. *--* The State of States in International Organizations: From the WHO to the Global Fund (pp. 285-310) - Nitsan Chorev, Tatiana Andia Rey and David Ciplet. *--* On the Study of Social Optics: Foucault, Counter-Surveillance, and the Political Underground in Northern Peru (pp. 311-331) - David Nugent -- lots of interesting bibliography

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has emerged as the most terrifying and brutal of extreme jihadist groups (and that is against tough competition, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al-Shabaab in Somalia). Why have such extreme Islamist groups emerged in so many places in recent years? Odd as this may sound, it is not because of the appeal of extreme Islam itself. A study of fighters in Syria by Mironova, Mrie, and Whitt found that most fighters join ISIS and similar groups because (1) they want vengeance against the Assad regime and (2) they found from experience that the Islamist groups take the best care of their fighters — caring for the wounded, supporting them in battle. In situations of social breakdown — which are generally NOT caused by the Islamist groups themselves, but by problems of finances, elite divisions, and popular unrest due to oppressive or arbitrary actions by the state – extremists tend to have major advantages. This has always been the case throughout the history of revolutions: moderates are usually outflanked and outmaneuvered and out-recruited by radicals; so much so that the triumph of radicals over moderates is a staple of academic work on the trajectory of revolutions, from Crane Brinton to my own.

Smart people in the 20th century thought we could tackle climate change with a treaty in which the world’s nations agreed to “targets and timetables” for reducing emissions. These reductions would be implemented by top-down, national mandates and government support for clean energy technologies. But 22 years after the original climate agreement, emissions continue to rise and threats of significant harm loom larger. As one of those who, as an official at the Environmental Protection Agency, negotiated that first United Nations treaty in 1992, I believe we need to shift gears and try something new. Relying on national governments alone to deliver results is not enough, as the last two decades have shown. The real action on climate change around the world is coming from governors, mayors, corporate chief executives and community leaders. They are the ones best positioned to make change happen on the ground. Accordingly, we need to move from a top-down strategy to a bottom-up approach.

The arm’s-length standard assumes that related entities are unrelated and seeks to find the price at which they would have bought and sold in the marketplace. A MNE, however, exists as an integrated firm precisely to avoid marketplace transactions. Disregarding that irreconcilable conflict may not have mattered in avoiding double taxation a half-century ago. But today the fiction of unrelated parties and market transactions not just obfuscates reality but can also compound the double nontaxation problem. This is especially true of intangibles that by definition have no physical situs and can therefore be deemed to have been created almost anywhere. Increasingly, an MNE’s profits are derived from intangibles and reinvested in research that develops and refines these virtual assets. As long as the OECD retains the blinkers of the arm’s-length standard, it is unlikely to see most cross-border research endeavors for what they truly are—cynical attempts at gaming the international tax regime. Treasury’s export of Surrey’s arm’s-length standard was perhaps the most successful case of ideological conversion in the arena of international tax policy. But the United States itself has been inching away from that construct. In 1986 Congress amended section 482 to require a "commensurate with income” standard for transfers of intangibles. Treasury proposed the profit-split method in 1988 and more recently finalized the cost-sharing regulations. Each of those attempts at reform rejects the simple-minded notion of market transactions between unrelated parties. The OECD, however, clings to the gospel of the arm’s-length standard with a zeal befitting a convert. It seems that Treasury will have to renounce the dogma of Surrey’s infallibility before a true reformation in transfer pricing can finally get underway.

350.org was founded by a group of university friends in the U.S. along with author Bill McKibben, who wrote one of the first books on global warming for the general public. When we started organizing in 2008, we saw climate change as the most important issue facing humanity — but climate action was mired in politics and all but stalled. We didn’t know how to fix things, but we knew that one missing ingredient was a climate movement that reflected the scale of the crisis. So we started organizing coordinated days of action that linked activists and organizations around the world, including the International Day of Climate Action in 2009, the Global Work Party in 2010, Moving Planet in 2011, and Climate Impacts Day in 2012. We held the “world’s biggest art installation” and “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.” We figured that if we were going to be a movement, then we had to start acting like one. Click here to watch videos of these global mobilisations. Today, 350.org works in almost every country in the world on campaigns like fighting coal power plants in India, stopping the Keystone XL pipeline in the U.S, and divesting public institutions everywhere from fossil fuels. All of our work leverages people power to dismantle the influence and infrastructure of the fossil fuel industry, and to develop people-centric solutions to the climate crisis.

C About

Mobilizing the world’s capital is essential for the transition to a sustainable, low-carbon economy. Today, however, too little capital is supporting the transition, and too much continues to be invested in a high-carbon and resource-intensive, polluting economy. Market participants and others recognize that prevailing rules and incentives governing financial markets can disadvantage long-term, sustainable behavior. Long-term environmental risks are not being effectively counted and green opportunities are inadequately valued. Such distortions can lead to a misallocation of capital and a danger of systemic risks to the economy and the natural environment. The UNEP Inquiry is intended to support such actions by identifying best practice, and exploring financial market policy and regulatory innovations that would support the development of a green financial system. Building on the twin pillars of UNEP’s strong track record through its Green Economy initiative and the UNEP-Finance Initiative, it will assemble the world`s best practice and forward-looking expert knowledge through an advisory council, practitioner dialogue and research. The Inquiry will produce a final options report as well as technical papers throughout its 18-24 month life from January 2014. The Inquiry`s current set up phase will ensure it is designed with guidance from practitioners and experts, and establish a network of world-class advisors and researchers. Engaging with existing initiatives will ensure that it can effectively convene and catalyze broad debate that supports the crystallization of options for advancing a more systematic approach to developing a green financial system. -- summary downloaded pdf to Note

UNEP is an Implementing Agency of the GEF with the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and is the only GEF Agency whose core business is the environment. UNEP plays a key role in supporting countries to develop and execute GEF projects that fit within its comparative advantage. UNEP’s comparative advantage within the GEF has been defined as: ** Scientific assessments, monitoring, early warning; ** Linking science to policy (Capacity Building, Enabling Activities) at national, regional and global levels; ** Innovation, technology transfer and lifting barriers; ** Regional and global cooperation; ** Awareness raising, advocacy, and Knowledge Management

Last week, US financial regulators took a step toward reining in some of the Wall Street risk-taking that led to the financial crisis by finalizing the Volcker Rule, designed to stop banks from engaging in risky, hedge-fund-like bets for their own profit. But this week, EU and US trade negotiators could move in the opposite direction, pursuing an agenda that could thwart such efforts to re-regulate Wall Street. Negotiators from both sides of the Atlantic are converging in Washington, D.C. this week for a third round of talks on the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA). What is TAFTA? A “trade” deal only in name, TAFTA would require the United States and EU to conform domestic financial laws and regulations, climate policies, food and product safety standards, data privacy protections and other non-trade policies to TAFTA rules. We profiled recently the top ten threats this deal poses to U.S. consumers. One area of particular concern is how TAFTA's expansive agenda implicates regulations to promote financial stability. Here's a synopsis. -- professionally done eviseration with lots of links

In the face of fierce opposition to its plan to enshrine far-reaching rights for foreign investors in the EU-US trade deal, the Commission is trying to appease the critics with a ‘reform’ agenda for investor-state arbitration. The reforms are remarkable in line with the big business lobby agenda. -- 4 page chart comparing business group positions, EC lingo and Corporate Europe's comments on each position -- downloaded pdf to Note

FastTrackinDisguiseNearly 600 organizations, together representing millions of Americans, have sent a joint letter to Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) expressing their steadfast opposition to Fast Track and outlining the minimum requirements for a new, democratic and accountable trade policy-making process. Earlier this year, Senator Wyden announced he is working on new “Smart Track” legislation to replace the expired Fast Track process that allows harmful trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to be rushed through Congress circumventing ordinary review, amendment and debate procedures. The sign-on letter promoted by CTC members such as the Sierra Club, Communications Workers of America, the Teamsters and Public Citizen, among others both inside and outside CTC, urges that Fast Track be eliminated and replaced with a new model of trade authority that includes transparency in trade negotiations, a Congressional role in selecting trade partners, a clear set of negotiating mandates and Congressional certification that mandates have been met before negotiations can conclude. -- downloaded pdf to Note

The European Commission’s public consultation on the inclusion of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in the investment chapter of the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is clearly a result of growing citizen concern and civil society pressure. Even though the scope of the Commission’s consultation has come in for severe criticism from civil society groups, the high profile that this issue has garnered in Europe in recent months represents a unique opportunity for campaigners. In order to facilitate a strategy conversation among activists and civil society groups on ISDS in the TTIP campaign, the Network for Justice in Global Investment – a core Democracy Center project – recently interviewed two people at the center of campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic: Pia Eberhardt from the Corporate Europe Observatory and Arthur Stamoulis from the Citizen’s Trade Campaign in the United States. (The complete interview transcripts can be found here and here.) We began by asking them what strategic opportunities and challenges they see for campaigners given the current high profile of investment rules and ISDS in Europe.

This paper from the Democracy Center sheds an urgent public light on the system of international investment rules and arbitration tribunals that is being used by corporations to undermine citizen and government action on a range of urgent social and environmental issues. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Unprecedented risks to the global economy make this a challenging time for the 21st century investor—institutional asset owners and their investment managers—most of which have multi-generational obligations to beneficiaries. Climate change, resource scarcity, population growth, energy demand, ensuring the human rights of workers across global supply chains, and access to fresh water are some of the major issues challenging our ability to build a sustainable economy, one that meets the needs of people today without compromising the needs of future generations. -- This Blueprint is written for the 21st Century investor— institutional asset owners and their investment managers—who need to understand and manage the growing risks posed by climate change, resource scarcity, population growth, human and labor rights, energy demand and access to water—risks that will challenge businesses and affect investment returns in the years and decades to come. -- section of Ceres website devoted to investor related initiatives - proxy voting guides, etc - and corporate and public finance isuues, such as sustainability risk disclosure, listing srandards, Climate Bonds Principles -- downloaded pdf of executive summary of report

Downloaded pdf to Note

Last week, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published its Global Risk Report (GRR) for 2014/15. The report is an exercise conducted by the WEF since 2006, but this year’s issue is particularly interesting because it adopts an historical perspective, offering insights on how the world has changed in respondents’ eyes and concerns. The GRR assesses risks that are global in nature and have the potential to cause significant negative impact across entire countries and industries if they take place over a time frame of up to 10 years. 31 such risks are identified in the report and grouped under five categories – economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological. *-* Economic Risks include fiscal and liquidity crises, failure of a major financial mechanism or institution, oil-price shocks, chronic unemployment and failure of physical infrastructure on which economic activity depends. *-* Environmental Risks encompass both natural disasters and man-made risks such as collapsing ecosystems, freshwater shortages, nuclear accidents and failure to mitigate or adapt to climate change. *-* Geopolitical Risks cover politics, diplomacy, conflict, crime and global governance. These risks range from terrorism, disputes over resources and war to governance being undermined by corruption, organized crime and illicit trade. *-* Societal Risks are intended to capture risks related to social stability – such as severe income disparities, food crises and dysfunctional cities – and public health, such as pandemics, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the rising burden of chronic disease. *-* Technological Risks covers major risks related to the centrality of information and communication technologies to individuals, businesses and governments (such as cyber attacks, infrastructure disruptions and data loss). -- excellent network chart showing how risks are interrelated within and across categories -- downloaded pdf to Note

Downloaded pdf to Note

OECD (2013), Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, Paris: OECD Publishing. Downloaded pdf to Note

IMF experience in developing countries points to some distinctive policy issues. Over the past 2 decades, developing countries have signed a huge number of tax treaties. But the evidence on whether they actually affect FDI (plagued by endogeneity issues) is mixed at best. What we do see in our country work are sometimes significant revenue losses, reinforced by the ability of MNCs to route and structure their intra-group payments to exploit treaty arrangements. This has for some while led IMF staff to (cautiously) urge caution in signing treaties – a view... included in the G20-OECD Action Plan of the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project. [A less prominent but important issue] is the tax treatment of capital gains on the transfer of interest in assets, such as telecoms or mineral licenses – it may be possible to avoid tax in the country where these assets are inherently located by holding them through a chain of offshore companies, and then selling the claim to a low-tax jurisdiction. This has emerged as a macro-relevant concern in several low-income countries (such as Mauritania and Uganda). *-* The underlying policy issue is one of spillovers in international taxation – the effects that, through the ways in which business reacts, one country’s tax decisions have an impact on others. A low or zero tax rate on income arising in a country is only the most obvious route. Network externalities also arise from the signing of treaties (if A, which has a treaty with B, signs another with C, in effect creating a treaty between B and C without consent from B); and countries can compete over tax bases by special regimes for types of income or activities. *-* one has to start by looking at the basic architecture of international taxation. -- closer to where the world may be heading, is moving toward a combination of arm’s-length pricing on transactions where this is relatively easy (such as for most tangibles) and a formulaic profit split where it is not (such as for most intangibles). And there are other suggestions for fundamentally different international tax policies, such as that for destination-based corporate tax, which mimics a VAT but with a deduction for the cost of labour.

Re unholy alliance in US, Europe and Japan between advocates for the destitute, fiscal realists and post-materialists -- I argue the success of the "advocates for the destitute" is the result of a coalition of strange bedfellows that actually bring the political heft in rich countries and use the rhetoric of the "advocates" as cover. The fiscal realists and post-materialists like penurious poverty lines not because they put more attention on the poor [the advocates' rationalization of using the poorest of the poor as a PR target], but because they take income gains to everyone else off the table by making a small deal of big differences in incomes between the “middle class” in Ethiopia or India and those of the rich countries. Reframing the “center” of the development agenda around an arbitrary poverty measure that eliminates 5 billion people from “development” is a political master-stroke for the fiscal realists. The advocates of penurious poverty lines create political space for fiscal realists to posture as “pro-development” (and not just hard-hearted or fiscally strapped) while arguing that “development assistance” hasn’t gone to “the poor” (by this new arbitrary measure) and hence with “focus,” agencies need less resources. “Extreme poverty” is a boon for post-materialists in promoting their goals as it manages to take the concerns of large majorities in developing countries in favor of rapid material progress (prioritized at their existing material conditions over other legitimate goals) off the table as their income gains don’t “count” as development progress as they are not “poor.”

There are three good reasons why gains to those between the 40th and 80th percentile of the income/consumption distribution need to be central to a global development agenda. -- 1. there is at least a rhetorical consensus on two points: one, that aid effectiveness is requires “country ownership,” and two, governments should reflect the wishes of their citizens (some would simplify this to “democracy”). How can a democratically elected government be expected to “own” a global development agenda centered on a goal that excludes their middle class .. and not on policies that promote the general well-being of all citizens. 2. the consumption of the median person in developing countries is itself a good development target. Birdsall and Meyer (2014) show that, compared to even the poorest in rich countries, the median in developing countries have very low consumption - the poorest income quintile in the USA is 15 times higher than the consumption of the median person in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Nigeria and almost 10 times higher than even the median person in “middle income” countries like Egypt or China. No one in US politics claims the consumption of the US median household at $39 dollars a day is “too rich” to merit concern. 3. many have argued that having a functional and prospering “middle class” is instrumentally essential to development and functioning governance and hence benefitting the poor (e.g., Easterly 2000). Given the central role that “good governance” and “building institutions” has acquired in development discourse, try to imagine a successful strategy for strengthening governance or institutions that deliberately excluded the middle class. How exactly does one build “political momentum” to center a global development agenda on a goal that is not the center of the development agenda of any major developing country? And why? That is for part II.

Estimate it will be healed back to 1980 status by 2050 -- It's worth emphasizing what a close call we had with the ozone layer. When scientists first began measuring ozone concentrations in the Antarctic region in the 1960s and 1970s, the readings were so unexpectedly low that researchers thought the instruments were simply wrong. It wasn't until 1974 that chemists Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland published a paper linking the depleted ozone levels with the fact that concentrations of CFCs were lingering in the atmosphere for a long time. But this connection was difficult to prove — and it was fiercely disputed by Dupont, the world's biggest manufacturer of CFCs, for years. -- Fortunately, that didn't happen. As part of the Montreal Protocol of 1987, the nations of the world agreed to ban the production of CFCs used in refrigerators, spray cans, insulation foam and fire suppression — and eventually phase out their use. -- in many cases, companies and countries stopped using CFCs and started using HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons) as a replacement. As it turns out, HCFCs are a potent greenhouse gas that can contribute to global warming. So, in a sense, we've swapped out one problem for another. -- Currently, there's a push to revisit the Montreal Protocol and phase out HFCs and HCFCs in favor of chemicals that neither hurt the ozone layer nor contribute to global warming.

Zhijie Chen - The University of Hong Kong (PhD Student) -- Jing Zhuo - University of Macau. -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No 2014/07. **--** The trade and culture debate has been a long tension without a definite result. It has been widely argued that neither the existing WTO regulatory framework nor the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression can address the debate. More recently, some emerging domains in the digital age, including digital technology and intellectual property rights, have posed crucial challenges These trends invite the careful reconsideration of the role of law, the dominant legal responses and regulatory approaches; however they have not been paid due attention. This paper investigates a possibly more adaptive regulatory approach for the trade and culture debate under the changed regulatory environment. Compared with cultural industries, it appears that creative industries tend to more properly reflect the status quo of the current economy, and the concept of creative economy could be employed as the concept to design a new regulatory approach for the debate in the digital age. For the WTO regulatory framework, a two-steps approach could be considered. The first step is to formulae the ‘creative economy’ as a legal concept, followed by the second step of introducing the concept into the WTO regulatory framework. It is suggested that such approach could be a more adaptive and coherent regulatory approach for the trade and culture debate in the digital age. -- Number of Pages: 41 - downloaded pdf to Note

"The UNESCO Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions as a Coordination Framework to Promote Regulatory Coherence in the Creative Economy" -- Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/03. **--** [The paper looks at] business convergence in creative industries from the perspective of cultural diversity. It is based on the premise that the recognition of the creative and innovative component of the so-called “creative industries” or the “creative economy” confirms the need for non-economic factors and particularly cultural concerns to be taken into account in regulatory efforts addressing those industries. It examines the way new technologies and business convergence may affect the “trade and culture debate” vis-à-vis the WTO, and how the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (CDCE) may respond in a relevant manner to those challenges. Despite its weakly binding language, the CDCE contains principles, objectives and rules that set a comprehensive framework for policy “related to the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions” at the national, regional and international levels. -- By prioritizing policy and regulatory coordination, ... the main elements enshrined in the CDCE should be employed to contribute to greater coherence ...vis-à-vis the WTO and other IOs. - Number of Pages: 23 - downloaded pdf to Note

University of Macau - Faculty of Law, E32 -- Fourth Biennial Global conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/05. **--** From a macroeconomic perspective, the historical evolution of trade and commerce has been closely entangled in a two-way or paradoxical relationship with the evolution of laws, where one is inextricably linked to the other and both mutually influence each other. At the microeconomic level, the same can be said about the relationship between businesses or industries and their underlying technologies. Recent changes, and notably the accelerated pace by which we recognize change, has led to a widespread trend of “convergence”. Convergence has been recognised in different contexts, namely in languages, technologies, and industries as well as regulatory matters. The objective of this article is thus to first trace and describe convergence from a linguistic, technological and industrial perspective. Subsequently, in order to ponder the future regulatory challenges in the regulation of global trade under the aegis of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it will focus on the question of whether technological and industrial convergence should be met by a similar trend towards regulatory convergence through regulatory harmonisation. Put differently, it will critically evaluate the present situation of regulatory divergence in the form of regulatory diversity and regulatory competition with a view of contributing to the debate of improving global trade regulation in the 21st century. - Number of Pages: 21 -- didn't download

American University - Washington College of Law -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/11 **--** The debate about currency misalignments (CMs) and trade is not new. It was already being discussed in the 1940s. What is new is that the existing mechanisms to deal with CMs at the IMF, under its Article IV, and at the WTO, under its Article XV, have proven to be ineffective. This article seeks to show the problems with these mechanisms, understand the reasons of why so, explore available options to resolve them and suggest a path to a lasting sustainable solution. - downloaded pdf to Note

Institute of International Economic Law, Georgetown University Law Center -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) - Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/10. *&--** As countries seek to promote growth in the aftermath of the financial crisis, currency intervention has become more prevalent and distortions in exchange rates with their resulting imbalances in trade flows have prompted call for new initiatives to address them, including in the negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Both economic and legal experts have brought new insight into the impact of currency intervention on trade and a fresh legal perspective on the application of the rules in the WTO against measures that frustrate the intent of the GATT/WTO agreements. This paper reviews the underlying legal and policy issues and provides possible language for inclusion in the TPP or TTIP, and eventually in the WTO, that would build on the existing disciplines in the WTO and IMF agreements by authorizing remedial action in the form of safeguard and countervailing duties in response to a finding of actionable currency intervention. -- Number of Pages: 10 -- downloaded pdf to Note

University of Cambridge - Faculty of Law; Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014-21 - Max Planck Institute for Innovation & Competition Research Paper No. 14-13. **--** Enforcing intellectual property rights abroad is difficult. International treaties have generally not created directly enforceable IP rights. Usually, the protection they confer cannot be directly invoked in national courts. Because of the territorial nature of IP protection, right holders must proceed in local courts based on local laws. Litigating IP rights abroad hence faces several hurdles. International investment law offers some options to overcome these hurdles: -- This article focusses on the investment interface aspect of IP: Compared to domestic proceedings (where international standards usually cannot be invoked), WTO dispute settlement (where right holders have no legal standing), and the protection of property under human rights instruments (where protection is limited to specific human rights standards), investor-state arbitration may be the only forum where right holders can litigate international IP norms such as the TRIPS Agreement. This may have significant effects on the autonomy of host states in responding to public interest concerns (such as access to medicines or reducing smoking) once measures affect IP rights of foreign investors. Reviewing the options for litigating international IP norms in investment disputes, I conclude that most routes pursued by right holders are unlikely to be successful. Ironically, it is only clauses in investment treaties which aim to safeguard flexibilities in the international IP system that are likely to open a door for challenging compliance with international IP obligations in investor-state arbitration. - Number of Pages: 44 - downloaded pdf to Note

Junianto James Losari - National University of Singapore (NUS) - Centre for International Law -- Michael Ewing-Chow - National University of Singapore (NUS) - Faculty of Law -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/18. *--* Countermeasures are well recognized under Customary International Law and have been incorporated into the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding as a mechanism to facilitate compliance, subject to an authorization by the WTO Dispute Settlement Body. However, such a countermeasure — increased tariffs, quantitative restrictions and permission to breach intellectual property rights — may also affect private investors. When there is an investment treaty between two WTO Members and one of the Members is subject to WTO countermeasures by the other Member, a clash of treaties may arise. This happened in the Sugar Dispute between Mexico and the United States. Mexico claimed that their measures on High Fructose Corn Syrup were trade countermeasures under the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in retaliation for a US breach of NAFTA. US investors affected by these measures brought claims against Mexico for breach of NAFTA Chapter 11 — the Investment Chapter. All three International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes tribunals held for different reasons, that a countermeasure that affects the rights of investors would not be valid. In contrary, this paper argues that a legitimate trade countermeasure should also be legitimate in the investment regime. A failure to consider the need for such coherence between the regimes could lead to a clash between the regimes and limit states’ ability to enforce its legitimate trade interests. - Number of Pages: 37 -- didn't download

University of California, Irvine - School of Law -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/29. *--* The World Trade Organization (WTO) arguably shapes regulatory governance in more countries to a greater extent than any other international organization. This chapter provides a new framework for assessing the broader regulatory implications of the WTO within nation states, as opposed to viewing the WTO as a form of global governance above the nation state. It first examines seven types of changes required for national law and legal practice, which affect how the state raises revenue, how the state spends it, and the principles the state applies to regulation. The chapter then assesses four broader dimensions of regulatory change catalyzed by WTO rules: (i) changes in the boundary between the market and the state (involving concomitantly market liberalization and growth of the administrative state); (ii) changes in the relative authority of institutions within the state (promoting bureaucratized and judicialized governance); (iii) changes in professional expertise engaging with state regulation (such as the role of lawyers); and (iv) changes in normative frames and accountability mechanisms for national regulation (which are trade liberal and transnational in scope). In practice, these four dimensions of change interact and build on each other. The chapter presents what we know to date and a framework for conducting further empirical study. - Number of Pages: 43 -- Keywords: WTO, World Trade Organization, Regulation, Regulatory governance, Market liberalization - downloaded pdf to Note

Singapore Management University - School of Law -- Singapore Management University School of Law Research Paper No. 30/201 -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL), pp 2-14, June 2014, Working Paper No. 2014/13. *--* Regulatory issues relating to public health, including regulation of access to medicines and tobacco control have increasingly been the source of tension in recent trade and investment negotiations, treaties and disputes. The ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, which include a number of developing Asian states, are an example that brings some of these issues to the fore and show a divergence of negotiating views. The intersection between public health regulation and trade and investment treaties has given some Asian states significant pause for thought; -- This intersection and resulting tension have led the WTO, WHO and WIPO to work together in an unprecedented manner to address some of the issues at the global level. The law evolving around these issues is demonstrating a deep divergence, in the manner that related disputes are being handled, and in terms of regulatory as well as negotiating stances. As an example, the debate on access to medicines demonstrates a divergence of approaches and proposed global solutions, as numerous proposals for reform of the existing construct (comprising patents and their “progeny” in the form of related commercial rights) are canvassed. Meanwhile, some countries such as India have begun to move ahead to embrace solutions such as compulsory licensing. -- It is suggested that a convergence of purpose(s) is needed, for a convergence of solutions to be found. Until then, the current divergences will continue to feed regulatory tension. -- Keywords: Convergence, divergence, trade, investment, public health, tobacco, pharmceuticals, FTAs, Asia, ASEAN -- downloaded pdf to Note

University of the Witwatersrand - School of Law -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/12. *--* When South Africa decided late last year to terminate a number of bilateral investment agreements with European Union countries, it did so at a time when global regulatory governance has come under scrutiny for their disposition to the domestic economic policies of states and the idea of state sovereignty in the regulation of its own economic affairs is fast declining. The prevailing global regulatory governance regime institutionalizes neo-liberalism which has given birth to various economic institutions and rules including bilateral investment treaties (BITs). The policy interest behind BITs is to some extent the suspension of domestic regulation in the governance of foreign investment. With this suspension in place, the regulatory sphere is filled by a supra-national regime that is rigid and restrains state conduct. In this paper, I intend to apply the emerging legal framework of global administrative law (GAL) to investor state arbitration in order to dispel the resistance towards this dispute settlement mechanism found in BITs for its perceived inability to adequately handle disputes that deal with public interest issues that fall outside standard investment protection but are relevant to the resolution of the investment dispute. I propose the application of domestic law concepts in an international sphere and make the argument that a statutory interpretation based on administrative law principles anchors the BIT regime to the domestic policy space of states and builds up the much needed legitimacy for investor state arbitration. The focus of GAL on the procedural elements of administrative law enables the implementation of substantive norms of liberalized trade which also promotes the rule of law, encourage a broader range of social and economic actors to scrutinize decision making and promote a democratic element in global regulatory governance. This democratic element includes public participation, greater transparency as well as an interpretive approach founded on GAL principles. - Pages in PDF File: 52 -- Keywords: Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs), Global Administrative Law (GAL), Deference, Public Interest, Investment Arbitration - downloaded pdf to Note

Max Planck Institute for International Law -- Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) Working Paper No. 2014/02. *--* In reaction to a summary of five different paths for investment law reform made by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in June 2013, which focused on institutional reforms of investor-State dispute settlement, the present paper sketches out a sixth path for investment law reform that is based on a system-internal reconceptualization of investor-State arbitration as a form of public law-based judicial review. It can be reformed, the paper argues, by arbitrators and parties making increasing use of comparative public law methodology that allows them to draw on the experience of more sophisticated systems of public law adjudication at the national and international level without the need for institutional reform to investor-State arbitration. First, the paper points out the benefits of the existing system of investor-State arbitration, in order to show that investor-State arbitration is an institution worth reforming from within. Second, the paper lays out the basic framework to reconceptualize investment law as a system of public law and governance and point out shortcomings in the currently prevailing approaches to understanding investor-State arbitration. Third, the paper indicates the methodological consequences of a reconceptualization of investor-State arbitration as a public law system of governance, namely the need for arbitrators to make increased use of comparative public law in resolving disputes. Finally, the paper shows how public law ideas and comparative public law methodology can be brought into investment arbitration in its present form and why arbitrators have an interest in conforming to these standards even without fundamental institutional reform. - Number of Pages in PDF File: 25 - Keywords: investment treaties, international investment law, investor-state arbitration, investment law - downloaded pdf to Note

The Fourth Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) was held in Bern and hosted by the World Trade Institute (WTI) of the University of Bern, from 10-12 July 2014. You can browse all SIEL Fourth Biennial Global Conference abstracts in the SSRN eLibrary. The Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) is a new organization aimed at academics and academically-minded practitioners and officials in the field of IEL, in all parts of the world. The broad goals and objectives of the organization include: building links and networks between and among IEL academics and academically-minded practitioners and officials; fostering the development of local IEL expertise and IEL organizations where needed; representing the discipline of international economic law as appropriate in global, regional and national fora; and encouraging research, practice, service and teaching in the field of IEL.

Five Nobel Prize winners discuss what they each see as the biggest problem facing the global economy of the future -- George Akerlof -climate change; Krugman - demand side; Solow - secular stagnation in developed economies (if that happens, will and means to solve even catastrophic problems like climate won't be forthcoming) Michael Spence (inclusiveness of global economic development to allow adjustments that keep benefiting rich countries but extend beneficiaries of growth - stress on getting basics right like managing limited natural resources): Stiglitz - inequality -- downloaded pdf to Note