The influence of foreign direct investment on contracting confidence in developing countries

This paper examines whether foreign direct investment (FDI) influences confidence in commercial contracts in developing countries. While the research on how host countries’ policy environments encourage FDI inflows has flourished, scholars have paid less attention to how the policy environment and local actors’ beliefs might, in turn, be affected by FDI. This is surprising because multinational enterprises are well‐recognized political and economic actors across the world. We expect that their increasing economic salience will influence the policy environments in which they function. By employing an innovative measure of property rights protection – contract‐intensive money – we examine how foreign direct investment influences host countries’ contract‐intensive money ratio in a large panel time series of both developed and developing countries from 1980 to 2002. Our analysis suggests that higher levels of FDI inflows are associated with greater confidence in commercial contracts and, by extension, the protection of property rights in developing countries.     

Overprovision and the licensing (Scotland) act 1976

This paper examines Scottish licensing law, in particular the granting of licenses to supply alcoholic liquor. Any application for a license must be granted unless one or more of four conditions are fulfilled. One of these, that the award would lead to overprovision, is the central concern of this study. The paper does not investigate why the consumption and distribution of alcohol are regulated nor why regulatory control takes the form it does. ¹ The starting point is rather that regulation exists and takes a particular form. Attention is focused on the operation of this regulatory control and with how it might be improved.In the next section, some of the key features of the licensing law and its appeals are reviewed, establishing the importance of evidence of the presence or otherwise of overprovision. Section II discusses the use of density of licensed premises as a measure of provision, indicates the problems, and argues that a measure might be refined and validated by entering it in an equation explaining the retail price of alcoholic beverages. Section III examines empirically the relationship between price and licensing density.     

International Law Book Facility Officially Launched

There has been growing international consensus on issues related to child labour – evident in various declarations, platforms, conventions, programmes of action etc. Child labour is the economic exploitation of children, or performance of any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development. Poverty is the principal cause of child labour. Mostly the children work to support their families and also for their own survival. Paradoxically, however, child labour further aggravates the poverty syndrome as it usually deprives the children of education and opportunity to acquire skills for developing earning potentials. Other causes of child labour include family indebtedness, the lack or poor quality of schooling or non‐formal education, breakdown of extended family, uneducated parents, local cultural setting, and consumerism. It goes beyond economic exploitation or hazardous employment to include forced labour, trafficking, sexual exploitation and the use of children for the production and trafficking of illegal drugs. This article will ponder the socio‐legal situation of child labour and the large number of legislative enactments regarding labour in India, as well as their realities on the ground.     

Present but not prevalent: identifying the organizational correlates of researcher-practitioner partnerships in U.S. Law Enforcement

ABSTRACT

Federal funding streams, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and policing executives and scholars alike have advocated for more researcher-practitioner partnerships in American law enforcement. While a few studies have explored the growth and prevalence of research partnerships in policing, less attention has been placed on the organizational correlates of such collaborative relationships. Using a nationally representative sample of US law enforcement agencies, the current study investigated participation in what we term ‘rigorous partnerships’ – more formal, long-term relationships between researchers and practitioners with increased opportunity for interactive knowledge exchange. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed, with a specific focus on the barriers and impediments that both parties face for successful collaborative efforts and research translation.