Corporate governance in Germany: The changing role of the banks

The article analyses the different channels ‐ industrial stakes, supervisory board mandates, proxy voting ‐ by which German banks can exert influence on industrial companies. The central thesis is that even where the banks have such influence they do not dominate the companies. A recent empirical study on the effects of the alleged bank dominance over industrial companies with detrimental effects on their performance is shown to contain major methodological mistakes. The relationship between banks and industry is undergoing some distinct changes. Banks have substantially reduced their industrial stakes as well as their representation on supervisory boards, which underlines that they are not striving for industrial leadership. Despite a clear trend in the German corporate sector to pay increasing attention to shareholder value and to provide more transparency in accounting, it seems premature to expect the German capital market, including the corporate governance system, to incorporate fully the Anglo‐Saxon model in the immediate future.     

How African States keep their people poor: The legal issues

Many of the problems of inequity and poverty in Africa are the result of the state's own policies and legal requirements that serve to marginalise the poor and hamper the access of communities to environmental and other assets. The article looks at case studies of the regulation of forest access in Cameroon and the allocation of public revenues in Uganda.     

The Arab‐Israeli peace process: A house built on sand?

While the Declaration of Principles agreed between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in September 1993 was widely welcomed as the major breakthrough in the seemingly intractable Arab‐Israeli conflict, progress proved to be difficult, uncertain and, at times, bloody. This article places the agreement in the context of previous peace endeavours in an attempt to explain why the apparent early promise proved so difficult to sustain.     

The Most Recent Input-Output Table: A Milestone in Soviet Statistics

The paper reproduces the 18 × 18 sector Soviet input-output table for 1988 which became available in the West in April 1990, but has not been published in the USSR. The layout (quadrants) and selected elements of the table are described and briefly analyzed. Because the hitherto unavailable statistics facilitate the analysts of a variety of critical issues such as the price reform, defense expenditures, and private incomes and taxation, the input-output table is regarded as an important contribution as well as a milestone in the gradual process of releasing economic data in accordance with the policies of glasnost'. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 027, 052, 222.     

Nuclear perceptions from radioactive blue to sustainable green: The EU taxonomy as reflection of a divided public

Following the Fukushima disaster, several European countries revisited their policies and decided to phase out nuclear energy production. More recently, however, the EU taxonomy proposed a classification system of environmentally sustainable economic activities and consequently reopened the debate regarding nuclear energy. This study analyses public comments about the inclusion or exclusion of nuclear energy as a response to climate change, in the conceptual frameworks of ecological modernization, sustainability and technological neutrality. The study highlights the challenge of shaping energy policies amid dynamic circumstances and diverse viewpoints. Proponents of nuclear energy emphasised its low-carbon emissions and climate change mitigation potential, while opponents focused on issues of radioactive waste and environmental risks. The study reveals that sustainability emerges as a potential reconciling framework to match arguments to influence the EU's decision-making, while it reflects the political primacy of this process. Finally, this research recommends improving feedback visibility and enhancing clear communication, and suggests further research directions to understand future EU nuclear energy policies.     

Haseki Women’s Hospital and the female destitute of nineteenth-century Istanbul

This article is on one of the longest-lived medical institutions of the Ottoman Empire, the Haseki Hospital. I will try to glimpse to the daily workings of the Haseki Hospital and the transformations it underwent in terms of the services it offered, its patients, its social functions, and its relevance for the urban lives of the destitute women of the empire for the period between the 1830s and 1893. During that period, the Haseki Women's Hospital was an institution hosting poor and destitute women as well as pregnant, ill, feeble-minded, convicted women, widows, prostitutes, and orphans. Although it has been called a hospital, it has been used as a women's hospital, lying-in clinic, madness asylum, widow's house, orphanage, and a women's prison. I submit that the Haseki Women's Hospital fulfilled a dual purpose by combining social relief services with medical care for female patients. Besides being a locus of medicine, the hospital was also a site where women in the margins were confined and isolated, but also received care otherwise denied to them. Along these lines, this article searches the vulnerability of the destitute women of nineteenth century Istanbul.     

Strategic or Principled? The Engagement of Civil Society Organizations with the EU

This article links the literature on the Europeanization of civil society organizations (CSOs) with the literature on the contribution CSOs can make to democracy in the EU. To do so, it asks which are the pull factors that support CSOs’ Europeanization: are they mostly strategic and linked to where law-making and the money are? Or are they likewise linked to a desire to contribute to EU democracy? To explore this question, the article looks at agricultural, environmental and anti-poverty groups and combines fresh qualitative with quantitative data. The findings suggest that we need to distinguish strategic Europeanization, on the one hand, from the identification with supranational democracy, on the other. They also show that the most Europeanized organizations need not be the most interested in EU democracy, whereas organizations with a comparatively low degree of Europeanization can still be interested in EU democracy.