Journals
2009 EN
Michael Fakhri
This paper explicates competing conceptions of the WTO by examining the relationship between the perceived legitimacy crisis of the WTO and the emergence of development onto the global trade agenda. The general argument is that the WTO legitimacy debate in trade law literature can be understood as a proxy for a development debate. By reconstruing the legitimacy debate as a development debate, this paper shows how implicit within legitimacy arguments are competing conceptions of the WTO’s function and purpose and that these conceptions are embedded within a broader development framework. The unfortunate effect of the contestations and justifications of the WTO’s legitimacy has been the obscuring of normative assumptions underpinning conceptions of the WTO. One suspects that the more the discourse continues in this tug-of-war of legitimacy, the more entangled our understanding of the WTO will be. Gaining a better sense of what conceptions of the WTO are dominating legal thought allows for a more substantive and detailed debate as to what the function and purpose of the WTO should be.
Social Science Electronic Publishing
Journals
2009 EN
Fabio Fornari · Antonio Mele
Does capital markets uncertainty affect the business cycle? We find that financial volatility predicts 30% of post-war economic activity in the United States, and that during the Great Moderation, aggregate stock market volatility explains, alone, up to 55% of real growth. In out-of-sample tests, we find that stock volatility helps predict turning points over and above traditional financial variables such as credit or term spreads, and other leading indicators. Combining stock volatility and the term spread leads to a proxy for (i) aggregate risk, (ii) risk-premiums and (iii) monetary policy, which is found to track, and anticipate, the business cycle. At the heart of our analysis is a notion of volatility based on a slowly changing measure of return variability. This volatility is designed to capture long-run uncertainty in capital markets, and is particularly successful at explaining trends in the economic activity at horizons of six months and one year.
Social Science Electronic Publishing
Journals
2009 EN
M. Shahe Emran · Fenohasina Maret Rakotondrazaka · Stephen C. Smith
Using household data from Vietnam, we provide evidence on the effects of education on freedom of spouse choice. We use war disruptions and spatial indicators of schooling supply as instruments. The point estimates indicate that a year of additional schooling reduces the probability of an arranged marriage by about 14 percentage points for an individual with eight years of schooling. We also estimate bounds on the effect of education on arranged marriage when exclusion restrictions are violated locally (the lower bound is six to seven percentage points). The impact of education is strong for women, but significantly weaker for men.
Social Science Electronic Publishing
Journals
2009 EN
Hilke Brockmann
Does happiness vary with age? The evidence is inconclusive. Some studies show happiness to increase with age (Diener et al. 1999; Argyle 2001). Others hold that the association is U-shaped with either highest depression rates (Mroczek and Christian, 1998; Blanchflower and Oswald, 2008) or highest happiness levels occurring during middle age (Easterlin, 2006). Current studies suffer from two shortcomings. Firstly, they do not control for three confounding time variables: age, period and cohorteffects. Secondly, all empirical research lacks a theoretical explanation as to why age affects happiness. The purpose of our analysis is to contribute to closing both of these research gaps. A social investment model frames the dynamics of happiness across the life-span. The empirical test draws on West German panel data that followed individuals from 1984 to 2005. Descriptive analysis shows a cubic age function with the lowest level at middle age. However, hierarchical three-level variance component models (Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal, 2005), find significant differences across pre-war and post-war cohorts, baby boomers and offspring of the baby bust as well as deviations during reunification. Yet, cohort and period effects account for less than 10% of the variance. (Un)happiness in midlife is more strongly determined by gender-specific occasional influences and individual characteristics. Both define objective and subjective returns of professional and personal life investments. Thesesocial investment decisions date back to early adulthood and bear a high risk of failure during midlife. Unforeseen consequences and long-term private and professional commitments make it costly to adjust, but at the same time new investments may pay off in a pro-longed future. This dilemma turns many middle-aged people into "frustrated achievers".
Social Science Electronic Publishing
Journals
2009 EN
ZhongXiang Zhang
To date, border adjustment measures in the form of emissions allowance requirements (EAR) under the U.S. proposed cap-and-trade regime are the most concrete unilateral trade measure put forward to level the carbon playing field. If improperly implemented, such measures could disturb the world trade order and trigger a trade war. Because of these potentially far-reaching impacts, this paper focuses on this type of unilateral border adjustment, which requires importers to acquire and surrender emissions allowances corresponding to the embedded carbon contents in their goods from countries that have not taken climate actions comparable to that of home country. This discussion is mainly on the legality of unilateral EAR under the WTO rules. Given that the inclusion of border carbon adjustment measures is widely considered essential to secure passage of any U.S. legislation capping its greenhouse gas emissions, the paper argues that, on the U.S. side, in designing such trade measures, WTO rules need to be carefully scrutinised, and efforts need to be made early on to ensure that the proposed measures comply with them. After all, a conflict between the trade and climate regimes, if it breaks out, helps neither trade nor the global climate. The U.S. needs to explore, with its trading partners, cooperative sectoral approaches to advancing low-carbon technologies and/or concerted mitigation efforts in a given sector at an international level. Moreover, to increase the prospects for a successful WTO defence of the Waxman-Markey type of border adjustment provision, there should be: 1) a period of good faith efforts to reach agreements among the countries concerned before imposing such trade measures; 2) consideration of alternatives to trade provisions that could be reasonably expected to fulfill the same function but are not inconsistent or less inconsistent with the relevant WTO provisions; and 3) trade provisions that can refer to the designated special international reserve allowance pool, but should allow importers to submit equivalent emission reduction units that are recognized by international treaties to cover the carbon contents of imported products. The paper concludes by arguing that the major developing countries being targeted by such border carbon adjustment measures should make the best use of the forums provided under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol to effectively deal with the proposed border adjustment measures to their advantage.
Social Science Electronic Publishing
Journals
2009 EN
Michael Kvasnicka · Dirk Bethmann
In belligerent countries, male-to-female sex ratios at birth increased during and shortly after the two world wars. These rises still defy explanation. Several causes have been suggested (but not tested) in the literature. Many of these causes are proximate in nature, reflecting behavioral responses to the dramatically changed marriage market conditions for women and men that were induced by war-related declines in adult sex ratios. Based on county-level census data for the German state of Bavaria in the vicinity and aftermath of World War II, we explore the reduced-form relationship between changes in adult and off spring sex ratios. Our results suggest that war-induced shortfalls of men significantly increased the percentage of boys among newborns.
Social Science Electronic Publishing
Journals
2009 EN
Laura M. Olson
After the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 in Boumediene v. Bush that the detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility are entitled to the privilege of habeas corpus to challenge the legality of their detention, the D.C. District Court started to take action on the hundreds of petitions filed. In these habeas proceedings, the court has faced the threshold legal question of the scope of the government’s authority to detain pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force as informed by the law of war. This article reviews how the court has delimited the permissible bounds of the government’s detention authority, specifically focusing on whether the court’s decisions are consistent with the internment standards under the law of war, international humanitarian law (IHL). This analysis seeks to assess whether the court’s application of the Bush Administration’s definition of “enemy combatant” or the new definition provided by the Obama Administration is broader or narrower than the IHL standards.
Social Science Electronic Publishing
Journals
2009 EN
James D. Fearon · Macartan Humphreys · Jeremy M. Weinstein
Can brief, foreign-funded efforts to build local institutions have positive effects on local patterns of governance, cooperation, and well-being? Prior research suggests that such small-scale, externally driven interventions are unlikely to substantially alter patterns of social interaction in a community, and that the ability of a community to act collectively is the result of a slow and necessarily indigenous process. We address this question using a randomized field experiment to assess the effects of a community-driven reconstruction (CDR) project carried out by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in northern Liberia. The project attempted to build democratic, community-level institutions for making and implementing decisions about local public goods. We find powerful evidence that the program was successful in increasing social cohesion, some evidence that it reinforced democratic political attitudes and increased confidence in local decision-making procedures, but only weak evidence that material well-being was positively affected. There is essentially no evidence of adverse effects. *Jeremy Weinstein is on leave from the Center for Global Development.
Social Science Electronic Publishing
Journals
2009 EN
Stephanie BenIshai
During the Great Depression (1930-1933), over 9,000 banks failed in the United States, while not a single bank failed in Canada. In fact, there have been relatively few instances of bank bankruptcy proceedings in Canada from 1867 to present. Approximately eleven bank bankruptcies have been referenced in the case law to date. The first bank bankruptcy appears to be the Bank of Prince Edward Island (1882). Next came the Exchange Bank of Canada (1883), [FN3] followed by the Maritime Bank (1887), the Central Bank of Canada (1887), La Banque Ville Marie (1899), the Farmers Bank of Canada (1910), the Monarch Bank of Canada (1910), Ontario Bank (1910), [FN9] the Sovereign Bank of Canada (1911), the Bank of Vancouver (1916) and the Home Bank of Canada (1923). It would be another four decades before the next bank bankruptcy took place in 1967, when the Bank of Western Canada was wound up. The few Canadian banks that suffered financial difficulties through the Great Depression, World War II and its aftermath were absorbed into larger banks without creating significant difficulties for their creditors or depositors. Two decades later, Northland Bank (1985) was wound up, followed by the Canadian Commercial Bank (1985). The liquidation of both banks took over a decade to complete. Following the bankruptcies of these Western Canadian banks, Justice William Z. Estey led a commission examining the collapse of the Canadian Commercial Bank and Northland Bank (the “Estey Report”). In this 1986 report, the Commission described a set of circumstances involving severe corporate governance failures and a set of improvident lending procedures not unlike the current situation in the United States. Following the Estey Report, a number of changes were made to the regulatory framework for supervising banks in Canada. The most recent Canadian bank bankruptcy was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in 1991. This article provides an overview of the legal regime for bank bankruptcy in Canada. The Global Bank Insolvency Initiative: Legal, Institutional, and Regulatory Framework to Deal with Insolvent Banks (“GBI”) is used as the framework for locating the Canadian system within an international context. Surprisingly little has been written about bank bankruptcies in North America, with much of the academic focus on developing countries. An obvious explanation for this is that in North America governments do not let banks (or at least major banks) fail. Even if this explanation is accurate, government solutions will often be in the shadow of the formal options for bank failure. Accordingly, an understanding of these options is crucial to comprehending and predicting government action in this regard. An analogy may be drawn to the government bail out of the automobile industry which was set into motion in 2008 and was described as “orderly bankruptcy.”
Social Science Electronic Publishing
Journals
2009 EN
Mark Antaki
The articulation of crimes against humanity in positive international law is better understood when situated against the broader transformation of the laws of war into humanitarian law. This re-naming of the laws of war does not take place until the late 1970s with the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. However, this re-naming is made possible by the prior emergence, in the nineteenth century codification of the laws of war, of the principle of humanity as the ground of the laws of war. Two twin transformations make possible the emergence of humanity as the ground of the laws of war. First, charity, the love of God, is transformed into the sentiment of humanity, the love of man. Aquinas and the scholastics discussed war under the heading of charity. With Grotius and Pufendorf, charity slides into humanity. The transformation is complete with Rousseau. Second, pain is transformed from a potential spiritual good that could bring one closer to God into something unintelligible and unacceptable. For Rousseau, humanity is pity writ large and sympathy, suffering-with, is the “first sentiment of humanity.” Rousseau appears as one of the fathers of the modern laws of war, of humanitarian law. Humanitarian law thus belongs to modern humanitarianism, to what Nietzsche calls “the religion of human suffering.” Whereas the nineteenth century codification of the laws of war used the twin language of humanity and civilization, the transformation of civilization into a dirty word in the twentieth century made it that much easier for humanity to emerge as the ground of the laws of war, and for the laws of war to become “humanitarian.”
Social Science Electronic Publishing