EU FTA negotiations with India: The question of liberalisation of public procurement

The proposed bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) between India and the European Union has thrown up many contentious issues among which public procurement is an important one. While India is reluctant to include public procurement in FTA, the European Union (EU) has been insisting that FTA without liberalisation of public procurement is not on the negotiating table. What makes India particularly attractive to the EU is not only the size of its public procurement market but also its rapidly growing economy and demand for infrastructure which presents EU firms with an opportunity to gain market access into this sector under the FTA setting. The EU is insisting on national treatment and non-discrimination as also transparency in Indian procurement system. Indian companies aspire to crack open public procurement market in the EU by entering it through the services sector. However, they are finding EU procedures for ‘data adequacy’ and policies relating to work visa difficult. India’s reluctance to negotiate government procurement under the FTA framework is also attributed partly to administrative costs required for making changes to existing framework and for establishing institutions to implement bilateral obligations. Though several deadlines have been missed, an agreement that could bring mutual benefit for both the EU and India is not out of reach.     

A Viewpoint on Research for Social Business Entrepreneurship

This Viewpoint essay outlines key considerations for research on entrepreneurship, and for social business entrepreneurship specifically, considering the wide range of forms and essentially heterogeneous nature of this broad set of businesses. Themes related to practical research and key questions are outlined, along with considerations for researchers as the social business entrepreneurship space continues to evolve.     

Libertarian Paternalism,Externalities, and the “Spirit of Liberty”: How Thaler and Sunstein Are Nudging Us toward an “Overlapping Consensus”

In their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein use research from psychology and behavioral economics to argue that people suffer from systematic cognitive biases. They propose that policy makers mitigate these biases by framing people's choices in ways that help people act in their own self‐interest. Thaler and Sunstein call this approach “libertarian paternalism,” and they market it as “the Real Third Way.” In this essay, I argue that the book is a brilliant contribution to thinking about policy making but that “choice architecture” is not just a solution to the problem of cognitive biases. Rather, it is a means of approaching any kind of policy making. I further argue that policy makers must take externalities into account, even when using choice architecture. Finally, I argue that libertarian paternalism can best be seen as motivated by what Sunstein has celebrated in his work on constitutional theory: a humility about the possibility of policy‐maker error embodied in Learned Hand's famous aphorism about the “spirit of liberty” and an attempt to reduce social conflicts by searching for what John Rawls called an “overlapping consensus.”     

Development of an information sheet providing rapport advice for interpreters in police interviews

Abstract

The present paper reports the development of an information sheet designed to aid interpreters in police interviews in recognizing, conveying and inadvertently obstructing rapport-building efforts by police interviewers. The contents of this sheet were informed by past research defining rapport, and rapport uses in police interviews. We used a mixed experimental design to test the information sheet. One group (Intervention, n = 35) was randomly assigned to read an information sheet before responding to short vignettes of police interviewing foreign non-English speaking suspects about international crimes, while another (Control) group (n = 37) simply responded to the vignettes. Perceptions of rapport cues by the intervention group exceeded that of the control group. However, the groups performed equally well at identifying appropriate methods to convey/avoid obstructing rapport. Feedback from the intervention group on the helpfulness of the information sheet was largely positive. The findings were used to improve the information sheet which can be used to alert interpreters to the importance of rapport in suspect interviews.     

Community control and pricing patterns of nonprofit hospitals: An antitrust analysis

Traditional control of nonprofit hospitals by the communities they serve has been offered as justification for restraining antitrust enforcement of mergers that involve nonprofit hospitals. The community is arguably a constraint on a nonprofit's inclination to exercise market power in the form of higher prices; however, community control is likely to be attenuated for hospitals that through merger or acquisition become members of hospital systems--particularly those that operate on a regional or multiregional basis. We report findings from a study in which we examined empirically the relationship between market concentration and pricing patterns for three types of nonprofit hospitals that are distinguishable based on degree of community control: an independent hospital, a member of a local hospital system, and a member of a nonlocal hospital system. Study results indicated that when conditions existed to create a more concentrated market, (1) all three types of nonprofit hospitals exercised market power in the form of higher prices, and (2) hospitals that were members of nonlocal systems were more aggressive in exercising market power than were either independent or local system hospitals. The results have important implications for antitrust enforcement policy.