New capitalist processes,interdependence and the Asia–US private equity relationship

Abstract

Private equity has had a short but eventful history in East Asia, characterized first by US firm dominance and then by a nationalistic backlash. This article charts these earlier patterns, but argues that significant developments have taken place since the early 2000s, which have strengthened the position of private equity capital in the Asian political economy. As private equity deal-making has returned to Asia, new linkages have been formed between US private equity funds and local private equity players. Of particular importance have been US–Asian joint ventures, Asian nationals returning to domestic firms from US private equity houses and supportive local elites in the banking and pension fund sectors. The significance is two-fold. First, the spread of private equity has been founded on interdependent relationships between US actors and local actors, which have more successfully grounded the private equity industry in national political economies than its origins in the Asian crisis period. Second, despite the relative localization of Asian private equity, industry practices are still largely shaped by the US model of private equity and the merger and acquisition activity that it entails, rather than a distinct Asian private equity model. The findings of the article contribute to calls that have been made for research on the changing global economy that comprehensively integrates domestic and international levels of analysis.     

全球金融动荡背景下中国证券行业发展趋势

美国"次贷危机"以惊人的速度愈演愈烈,震惊了全球金融行业。在短短几个月的时间内,华尔街排名前五名的投行依次倒下,或倒闭,或被收购,甚至收归国有。此次发生在大洋彼岸的金融危机对我国证券行业具有重要的参考意义。本文从本次危机成因分析出发,结合国内证券行业的历史及现状,展望今后我国证券行业的发展趋势。     

Trump's Jerusalem Move

The Trump administration’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognise that city as Israel's capital appears to be strongly influenced by US domestic political considerations. Though welcomed by the Israeli right, the move has attracted widespread regional and international condemnation and outraged the Palestinian leadership. It is unlikely to lead to promising Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the final status of the Palestinian territories, and could significantly degrade security in the region.     

我国民用航空非法干扰行为的立法完善

按照国际法和国内法的规定分析非法干扰行为,准确界定"非法干扰行为"的内涵和外延,是完善非法干扰行为立法的前提和基础。对非法干扰行为的内涵缺乏统一的认识、非法干扰行为多元立法以及国际法向国内法转化存在的问题等成为制约我国民用航空非法干扰行为立法完善的主要因素。完善我国民用航空非法干扰行为的立法,首先要明确非法干扰行为的法律内涵,其次要加强非法干扰行为系统化立法以及立法的现代化进程。     

Industry effects of medical device regulation: the case of diagnostic imaging equipment.

In 1976 Congress passed legislation authorizing the regulation of all medical devices. Some observers predicted that this regulation would have adverse effects on the newly regulated industries. This paper examines the major features of the medical device regulatory program and investigates how the regulation has affected the diagnostic imaging equipment industry. The results indicate that medical device regulation has not materially affected competition or innovation within established product classes in this industry. This suggests that, by choosing methods of regulation that differentiate among levels of potential risk to consumers, the goal of consumer protection can be achieved with fewer undesirable effects on the regulated industry.     

Rent seeking and the welfare cost of trade barriers

This paper estimates the potential social cost of trade barriers using the Harberger and the Tullock/Posner approaches for a sample of U.S. food and tobacco manufacturing industries. In addition, it tests the relationship between the computed welfare losses and special-interest political activity (PAC contributions). If all rents were dissipated through rent seeking, the social cost of trade barriers would be about 12.5 percent of domestic consumption and would be particularly large for sugar and milk products where quotas are the main instrument of protection. Furthermore, the results indicate that welfare losses are positively associated with industry lobbying but the strength of such association is strongly dependent on industry concentration.     

Sex Trafficking and the State: Applying Domestic Abuse Interventions to Serve Victims of Sex Trafficking

Advocacy and scholarship addressing sex trafficking as a human rights issue has become a transnational effort, but there has been less attention to sub-national efficacy. Through analyzing progressive justice system responses to domestic violence in Duluth, Minnesota that have been adopted worldwide, this paper demonstrates how to effectively apply these local advances in order to address sex trafficking on a global scale. This paper makes a theoretical contribution to understanding the intersections between domestic abuse and sex trafficking. A key empirical finding is that a coordinated community response (including the justice system and women’s organizations) is crucial for advancing domestic abuse training, monitoring, and legislation—and this coordination can also be productively utilized for improving responsiveness to victims of sex trafficking across a diverse range of socio-legal and economic contexts.     

Transnational advocacy networks in global supply chains: a study of civil society organizations’ sugar movements in Cambodia

As a contribution to the growing literature on transnational advocacy networks (TANs) in the global production networks, this article examines how civil society organizations (CSOs), which have adopted the TAN approach, influence the sugar industry in Cambodia. Due to ineffective domestic influencing strategies, the CSOs adopted the TAN approach and escalated to an international supply chain movement approach (ISCMA) aiming to influence international stakeholders at each stage of the sugar supply chain in order to leverage boomerang pressure on the sugar producing companies and the Government of Cambodia. Despite its resourceful networking strategies, the ISCMA failed to leverage significant influence on the sugar companies and the government to achieve its demands. The failure was not due to weak networks, but was in part due to the political nexus between the government and the sugar companies. This article suggests that to ensure the effectiveness of CSOs’ actions within the TAN framework in the global production networks, one should take into account the power of the government in relation to local politico-commercial elites.     

United States democracy assistance in Malaysia: the nature and impact of concurrent strategy

This exploratory article seeks to analyze the nature and impact of one of the main democracy promoters in Malaysia i.e. the United States (US). The US is a promoter that is often being alleged with interfering with Malaysian domestic affairs, especially since the sacking of former Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim in 1998. This article argues that the US democracy promotion in Malaysia can be conceptualized under the framework of a concurrent democracy assistance strategy. This is due to the fact that while the US is supporting the non-regime compatible program, it is also concurrently channeling bigger aid for regime-compatible program to Malaysia from 1999–2015. The improvement of diplomatic ties between both countries since post-Mahathir era and the prioritization of security issues have led to a more engaging conduct of democracy promotion. Despite the US continuous funding of non-regime-compatible programs through non-state actors, this approach was nevertheless balanced by cordial relations at the state level. Nevertheless, the effect of US democracy assistance and promotion on Malaysia’s democratic development has been minimal, reinforcing the views on the difficulty to promote democracy in a semi-authoritarian regime.     

How domestic contexts shape international private governance: The case of the European Accord and American Alliance in Bangladesh

The international nature of supply chains has led to the rise of private authority in regulating the environmental and social impacts of production, which companies frequently address through corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the form of private governance (PG). Despite its claim to establish “global” rules, PG usually has national origins, and multiple efforts to address the same issue from different national perspectives frequently coexist. Numerous studies have explored the impact of national business systems on companies' domestic CSR practices, yet little is known about what factors shape CSR practices like PG internationally. Therefore, this study seeks to understand how differing domestic contexts shape approaches to CSR in the form of PG in host countries. I explore this empirically through the comparative case study of competing PG initiatives in the post-Rana Plaza Bangladesh garment industry, uniquely conceived to govern companies' practices rather than certify products. It combines empirical findings with the comparative CSR literature to hypothesize about ideal types of PG organizing in US and European contexts. It extends the analysis to also account for other influential factors, such as stakeholder pressure, thus demonstrating how institutional and agentic factors amalgamate to shape firms' choices. By explicating linkages between international PG and its domestic context, as well as between the comparative CSR and PG literature studies, this study extends our understanding of how and why international PG practices and preferences vary for firms originating from different environments.     

Obama’s Human Rights Policy: Déjà vu with a Twist

In US history, much human rights policy developed in four waves during the twentieth century. These waves were triggered by similar circumstances, but all proved short-lived as structural constraints such as limited US power over other countries’ domestic actions, competing US policy priorities, a US hesitance to join multilateral institutions, and the continued domestic political weakness of human rights advocates led to setbacks. As Barack Obama took office, his campaign comments and the past patterns led to widespread expectations that he would introduce new human rights initiatives. His policies, though, would continue to face the structural constraints and would be affected by the Bush administration’s legacy. It was predictable that many of Obama’s initiatives would be only partially implemented and only partially successful. As expected, Obama’s first years have seen mixed results, but the Obama administration has advanced US human rights policies sufficiently in half-dozen key areas to say that a fifth wave of human rights policy development is underway.     

An alternative route of European integration: The community's railways policy

The process of European integration and policy‐making is sometimes rather puzzling. On the one hand, it is well documented that with respect to the implementation of European legislation member states tend to do less than they are supposed to do. On the other hand, it is striking that with respect to the implementation of the Council Directive 91/440 on the development of the Community's railways many member states went far beyond the minimum required by the European legislation. We argue that these differing evaluations of implementation success can be traced to different implementation approaches, which may be termed the ‘compliance approach’ and the ‘support‐building approach’. While the first is directed at prescribing domestic reforms from above’, the latter aims at triggering European integration within the existing political context at the national level. Here, successful implementation refers to the extent to which European legislation triggers domestic changes by stimulating and strengthening support for European reform ideas at the national level. In this respect, European legislation can influence the domestic arenas in basically three ways: by providing legitimisation for political leadership, concepts for the solution of national problems, and strategic constraints for domestic actors opposing domestic reforms.     

To Engage or Not to Engage? Explaining the Logic of the US’s China Strategy in the Post-Cold War Era

The United States’ (US) changing policy towards China has become one of the most attractive issues in contemporary international politics. To explore the reasons underlying these changes, existing studies adopt four schools of explanation, i.e., status competition, institutional competition, failure of engagement, and domestic factors. Each school provides valuable theoretical insights. However, existing studies have obvious problems with single attribution and, thus, fail to formulate a causal mechanism explaining the long-term trajectory of the US’s China strategy. By recategorizing America’s unilateral perception of China as reformist, revolutionary, status quo and positionalist, which extends beyond the revisionist-status quo dichotomy, this article develops a systemic explanatory model and process tracing of the transition of US’s China policy during the post-Cold War period to explain the theoretical logic underlying the changes. This article argues that the positional change and the US’s unilateral perception of China are the two main factors triggering changes in the US’s China strategy. China’s foreign behavior, as the intervening variable, strengthens or weakens the government’s perception of China and, thus, determines the US’s strategic choices, i.e., whether to pursue a policy of containment, competition, precaution, congagement, engagement, or accommodation. Four comparative case studies are presented to demonstrate how this article’s explanatory model can be applied.

     

Competency Costs in Foreign Affairs: Presidential Performance in International Conflicts and Domestic Legislative Success, 1953–2001

Numerous prominent theories have relied on the concept of “audience costs” as a central causal mechanism in their arguments about international conflict, but scholars have had greater difficulty in demonstrating the efficacy and even the existence of such costs outside the bounds of game theory and the political psychology laboratory. We suggest that the audience costs argument focuses too narrowly on the likelihood that leaders will be removed from office by domestic constituencies for failing to make good on threats. Instead, we argue that scholars should ground these arguments on Alastair Smith's ( 1998 ) broader concept of “competency costs.” Our analysis of presidential legislative success from 1953 to 2001 demonstrates the existence of foreign policy competency costs by showing that public disapproval of presidential handling of militarized interstate disputes has a significant and substantial negative impact on the president's ability to move legislation on domestic issues through Congress.     

全面二孩视域下我国推进就业性别平等的立法构建

男女两性就业机会、获取报酬、晋升等平权是男女平等原则在经济领域的具体体现。一直以来,女性在孕、产、哺乳期阶段的就业、酬劳、晋升仍面临不同程度的困难。虽然我国立法对女性就业保障有系列规定,尤其是2018年针对女性在孕、产、哺乳期的就业歧视,有关部门颁布了具体细致的“禁令”,其核心要义是让全面二孩政策付诸落实。但专门立法的缺失、现行立法的零散及层级低下无法有效应对当下生育意愿低迷,进而影响人口出生率低下的现象。应当以人口红利衍生的性别红利理论为导向,结合我国港台地区推进就业平等的立法经验,以此构建推进性别平等、追求性别红利,最终提升人口数量的法律制度。     

The Bureaucratic Approach to the Financial Revolution: Japan's Ministry of Finance and Financial System Reform

While all industrialized countries have enacted financial reforms over the past decade, Japan's Ministry of Finance (MoF) officials have crafted a distinctive approach to reform. They have managed to pursue their own agenda while at the same time responding to international market pressures and domestic political demands. This article examines Japan's "financial system reform," the process by which the MoF has recast the regulatory barriers between different types of financial institutions, such as banks and securities houses. Financial system reform represents an extreme case of a common Japanese policy pattern—the bureaucratic-led bargain—in which Japan's bureaucrats, rather than its politicians, organize the bargains that eventually emerge as policy. Two ministry policy councils deliberated for seven years before the Diet passed comprehensive reform legislation in 1992, and the ministry continues to redefine the reform at the stage of implementation today. While MoF officials have been forced to make concessions to industry groups and to adjust to unforeseen developments along the way, they have maintained overall control of the reform process. In fact, this article suggests that they have been remarkably successful in promoting their own peculiar interpretation of the public interest and in preserving and, in some cases, enhancing their own power.     

Building bridges over troubled waters: Administrative change at the regional level in European,multilevel water management

The European Commission is promoting more decentralized forms of multilevel administration, without having its own administrative capacity on the ground. This article examines the role of ground-level administration in this multilevel system, by analysing why and how administrative change at sub-national levels comes about in connection with the implementation of European Union (EU) legislation. Despite their similar unitary state systems, Sweden and Norway have implemented the administrative requirements of the Water Framework Directive differently. While Sweden has delegated decision-making authority to novel regional-level bodies, triggering frictions in the hierarchical structure of government, Norway established networked, interdependent structures. Enquiring into the causes, the study finds that complementary use of instrumental, power-oriented and historical institutionalism shed light on the conditions under which European multilevel administration develops. In complex political-administrative systems, domestic legacies and time-specific events provide ‘turfs’ for Europeanization-processes shaping domestic administrative systems from within.     

Federalism, Preemption, and Implementation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act

This essay provides a positive analysis of regulatory federalismin the dynamic telecommunications industry since the 1996 federalTelecommunications Act. While the 1996 legislation clarifiedsome contentious issues, and established a framework for resolvingothers, implementation by the FCC has not been as smooth asmany participants originally assumed. State regulators havecontinued to play an important role in the industry, which courtdecisions have often upheld. As some jurisdictional issues doget resolved, others that were not anticipated in the legislationare emerging, largely related to regulation of Internet services.     

Indigenous peoples and non-ferrous metals mining in the Philippines

Abstract

The Philippines is a developing country well endowed with mineral resources. In recent years, the government has made substantial efforts to encourage the exploitation of these resources. This mining-based development paradigm has come into conflict with the indigenous peoples of this nation. This conflict has entailed disputes between the mining industry and indigenous peoples about the validity of the Philippines indigenous peoples rights legislation and alleged human rights abuses on the behalf of the mining industry. The Philippines strong civil society has assisted the indigenous peoples in regard to this conflict. Possible solutions to this conflict are examined.     

论个人信息保护模式

对于个人信息的保护问题,当代世界大致可分为两种模式:一是以美国为代表的行业自律与单行立法相结合模式,二是以欧洲为代表的立法综合规制模式。这两种模式的差别导致的结果是,国家对个人信息保护的侧重点具有很大不同。这种差异的原因追根溯源在于,美国与欧洲的历史文化与政治哲学传统不同。我国对个人信息的保护不应当采用单一模式,而应实行立法规制与行业自律相结合的综合模式。