Legitimacy dilemmas: the IMF's pursuit of country ownership

There can be little doubt that the International Monetary Fund is currently facing a serious challenge to its legitimacy. Such criticisms echo similar debates that have surrounded other international organisations, including the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. As these different institutions seek to respond to this challenge, the Fund's efforts to respond to its critics provide a number of interesting lessons and warnings. In this article I examine the Fund's response to challenges to its legitimacy by focusing on one of the often overlooked aspects the institution's recent reforms: the IMF's efforts to change its relationship with borrowing countries by revising its conditionality guidelines and pursuing greater domestic ‘ownership’ over the reforms that it requires. While this response helps to resolve a number of legitimacy gaps that have emerged in the past decades, this strategy has also produced a number of new legitimacy dilemmas that raise questions about the sustainability of the IMF's current reform efforts. Chief among them is the limit to the Fund's ability to obtain the deeper political legitimacy that it seeks by using the same narrowly technical economic strategies that it has relied on in the past.     

Trends in teaching public administration: a view from the proceedings of the national conferences on teaching public administration

This article identifies trends in research on teaching public administration. Topics receiving substantial amounts of attention within years, within multiple years, and across time are identified. Cumulation of research on certain topics is identified. This study is based on data from the Proceedings of the National Conferences on Teaching Public Administration between 1978 and 1989.     

The doctrine of ultra vires and the protection of shareholders,creditors and third parties in Ghana: a balancing act

The doctrine of ultra vires was at common law invoked to frustrate expectations of innocent parties that entered into transactions with companies outside their object clause. The common law doctrine of ultra vires is applicable in Ghana but with necessary modification under the Companies Code and it is an effective tool for the protection of shareholders, creditors and third party's interest in the company. Whilst third parties acting in good faith and without notice are protected under the law, shareholders and creditors may restrain the company from dealing with the third party in the case of future transactions. This ensures balance and in any event when an action is instituted the court is obliged to look at the equities involved.     

Outside looking in: non-accession to the WTO

Since its institutional birth in 1947, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) / World Trade Organization (WTO) has mushroomed from 23 original contracting parties to 157 members as of September 2012. Another 28 countries are currently observers, each at varying stages of the accession process. WTO members and observers cover some 99 per cent of the world's population and over 99 per cent of global trade. However, there are still 13 states outside the multilateral rules-based trading system. This paper argues that existing explanations of membership and accession do not fully explain why these states remain outside the WTO, with implications for membership in international institutions generally. The paper tests hypotheses of non-membership based on a lack of willingness (domestic support), ability (technical capacity) or external pressure, and augments these statistical findings with a comparative country-level narrative of WTO (non-)accession decision-making in two small island countries.     

Interdisciplinarity and the Authority Paradigm: Should Law Be Taken Seriously by Scientists and Social Scientists?

This article questions whether those outside law should take law seriously as an intellectual discipline capable of contributing to the development of epistemological thinking in the natural and social sciences. The discipline is approached from a diachronic and synchronic position with emphasis on the civil law tradition. It will be shown that the governing paradigm in legal studies has always been the 'authority paradigm', which results in law being closer to theology than to the social sciences. Its principal actors (judges) make assertions free from the normal constraints of scientific method; accordingly, the idea of a 'legal science' (imported into the common law tradition after 1846) must be treated with great caution. It is not a science dedicated to enquiring about the nature of the physical world, society or social relations. Its epistemological development remains trapped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: thus, as a discipline, law has little to offer other social sciences.     

Utility of immunoassay in drug screening in skeletal tissues: sampling considerations in detection of ketamine exposure in femoral bone and bone marrow following acute administration using ELISA

Detection of ketamine exposure in skeletal tissues by automated enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and gas chromatography with electron capture detection (GC-ECD) is described. Rats (n = 18) received 0, 15, 30, or 75 mg/kg ketamine hydrochloride acutely (i.p.), and were euthanized within 15 min or 1 h. Ketamine was extracted from ground femoral bone by methanolic incubation followed by liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), while marrow was homogenized in alkaline solution, and then underwent LLE. Extracts were analyzed by ELISA, and subsequently by GC-ECD following derivatization with trifluoroacetic acid anhydride. The effect of tissue type (i.e., diaphyseal bone vs. epiphyseal bone vs. bone marrow) on the immunoassay response was examined through determination of binary classification test sensitivity (S) and measurement of the relative decrease in absorbance (%DA, drug-positive tissues vs. drug-free controls) in each tissue type. The %DA varied significantly between different tissues examined under a given dose condition, and generally decreased in the order marrow > epiphyseal bone > diaphyseal bone, at all dose levels examined. Measured S values for marrow, epiphyseal bone, and diaphyseal bone were 100%, 77%, and 23%, respectively (75 mg/kg dose). These results suggest that the type of skeletal tissue sampled and position sampled within a given bone (diaphyses vs. epiphyses) are important parameters in drug screening of skeletal tissues.