Northern Exposure

正Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s latest visit to China occurs at a time when bilateral relationship is attracting attention in some unusual quarters For American politicians,especially those campaigning for the presidency,Canada usually is an afterthought.But Canada’s     

GENDER ISSUES IN FAMILY LAW

Family mediation has been the target of criticism from feminists, the legal profession, and mental health professionals. Although this article will primarily address the concerns of feminists, it will, to a limited extent, address some of the concerns put forth by the other groups because of the similarities in their perspectives. Many of the concerns and issues expressed by feminists are valid on one hand, yet contradictory on the other. By exploring the gains made by women and how these gains were incorporated in the Ontario Family Law Act, the contradictions inherent in their arguments will be revisited and discussed in relation to a feminist-informed mediation process. This article will explore seven aspects of the feminist critique of family mediation: protection of women and children's rights, spousal and child support, equal distribution of marital property, negotiations, empowerment, custody, and spousal abuse. Many of these issues are intertwined and therefore will occasionally be discussed in relation to other issues.     

Post-colonial trade between Russia and former Soviet republics: back to big brother?

We examine the developments in trade patterns between the former Soviet republics in the years following the initial breakup shock. After a huge fall following the Soviet breakup of the early 1990s, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) trade with Russia began improving, and there have been recent formal efforts at Eurasian Economic Integration. This might be taken, a priori, as contrary to the hypothesis of gradual decline in Head, Mayer and Ries (HMR in J Int Econ 81(1):1–14, 2010)—or perhaps as evidence of the power of restored trade agreements, such as the incipient Eurasian Economic Union. We decompose the region’s trade into theory-consistent ‘gravity’ components, in order to analyze dynamic changes in the components since the Soviet era. Despite the sharp falls after 1991, trade in 1995 still shows strong ties, consistent with high dyadic (country pair) components linked to trade specialization. By contrast, in the second decade, the ties (dyads) began to weaken significantly and calibrated trade costs tend to rise, despite attempts at renewed integration. Rather, the sharp improvement in trade volumes was mainly due to the sharp recoveries in GDP levels for both Russia and many of the Central Asian Countries, associated with improvements in the global economy and economic ties with the World (especially with EU and China). We would therefore conclude that the recovery in trade between Russia and Central Asia reflects monadic factors (i.e., the regional economic recovery) and does not contradict the HMR (2010) hypothesis. Nevertheless, further, dynamic analysis shows that there are strong long-run ties within the CIS and Russia, which are not declining, and that sticky post-colonial adjustment does not appear set to eliminate the current bias of trade between these republics.