广东—东盟贸易投资存在的问题与对策研究

本文在全球金融危机的背景下,阐述了加强广东与东盟贸易、投资合作的必要性和迫切性;进而从广东经济结构调整需要的视角,分析了广东与东盟在贸易、投资合作中存在的问题及成因;并据此提出构建广东-东盟贸易投资综合平台的设想,论证构建该平台的基本条件,最后提出促进平台建设的相应政策建议.     

Audit for Whom? Time to Review Roles of Independent Auditors in Hong Kong

The Hong Kong government has been reforming its laws regarding accounting practices in recent years, to pre-empt problems similar to that of Enron. It correctly recognizes an opportunity to enhance and distinguish the financial system in Hong Kong and create a competitive advantage for Hong Kong. The sixty-five billion dollar question is: what is the right approach for accounting practice reform? One obvious approach is to model reform after the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX). The SOX increases personal liabilities of senior management and introduces extremely cumbersome compliance processes (s 3 (b)(ix) of Minutes of Bills Committee of Financial Reporting Council Bill. (19 July 2005)). While this approach may be the right move for the United States, because rescuing investor confidence is paramount, a similar approach may not be optimal for Hong Kong. Hong Kong relies, to a great degree, on foreign investments and a heavy-handed approach may scare investments away (Charles E. Schumer &; Michael R. Bloomberg To Save New York, Learn from London, Wall Street Journal 1 Nov 2006). This paper, argues that failure of independent auditors was mainly caused by bad incentives. In particular, auditors were hired by and responsible to the management of companies. Thus, there is no surprise that auditors were less diligent in finding problems caused by management. Furthermore, proposing of an alternate to the SOA’s approach. Specifically, a new legal approach should be enforced that allows shareholders to sue auditors when failure to uncover accounting issues causes loss of shareholders’ values.     

试论唐至清初潮州的海外贸易与海上走私

潮州与海外诸国的贸易往来很早就有,但在唐至清初这一时段里,潮州诸港从未成为官府承认的、合法的、正式的对外贸易港口。潮州通番走私贸易从内容上看,有非法地从事贸易与非法地从事违禁物品贸易之分;从形式上看又有下海通番与坐地通番之别。长期从事违禁贸易进一步助长了潮州人蔑视官府,视违禁为快速致富之路的不良风气,此种风气可以说是于今余绪犹存。     

A nexus between labour movement and labour movement: the Knights of Labor and the financial side of global labour history

The rise of global and transnational labour history has revolutionised the study of working-class movements and individuals and the global forces that shaped them. Some of the more mundane considerations of these movements, however, have so far been neglected in this rapidly growing field. One of the most important of these considerations was money, or in other words the financial affairs of transnational movements such as trade unions and political parties. This article is a call to write the financial side of global labour history. It focuses on a global working-class movement that is itself often neglected in the historical literature, the Knights of Labor, and their outposts in Britain and Ireland. It examines the history of the British and Irish Knights through the prism of their financial history, so far as we can reconstruct it from the scanty sources that are available. This article argues that their financial ties with the United States and a series of embezzlement cases became major causes of their decline and, ultimately, their dissolution. Finally, this article draws conclusions from the financial misadventures of the British and Irish Knights of Labor that are relevant to the study of other international working-class movements and to the writing of global labour history in general.     

两岸投资争端解决机制的制度创新及其完善

投资争端解决机制是《海峡两岸投资保障和促进协议》（简称《两岸投资协议》）中体现两岸特色的重要制度创新之一。相较于传统双边投资协议中的投资争端解决机制而言,两岸投资争端解决机制除了引入两岸私人投资争端解决方式,还规定了投资者与投资所在地一方投资争端的协调、协处和调解等多元化机制,实现了单方规定的协议化和国际实践的两岸化,从而有效降低了两岸投资争端的“泛政治化”风险。未来,应进一步完善两岸投资补偿争端的调解程序,确保调解协议的法律约束力和执行力。     

“We feel that our strength is on the factory floor”: Dualism,shop-floor power,and labor law reform in late apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores the transformation of South African labor relations during the 1980s. In 1979, prompted by new shop-floor militancy, the Wiehahn Commission recommended that black workers, previously excluded from state labor machinery, be permitted to join recognized trade unions. Most discussions of this shift in apartheid labor relations focus on the ensuing debate within the black unions, torn between preserving their independence or securing state legitimation. This article looks instead at the related debate about ‘levels of bargaining’: should emergent black unions demand to negotiate at the factory level, where they had secured shop-floor strength through organizing and democratic practice, or pursue the benefits of the corporatist bargaining structures that had long excluded them and had privileged white workers? The eventual drift towards corporatism, I argue, imprinted the character of the South African labor movement into the post-apartheid era. An understandable desire to wield influence at the level of the national political economy eroded the tradition of workers’ control, shop floor democracy, and struggle unionism that black unions had forged during the 1970s and 1980s.     

Divergent fates: company unions and employee involvement committees under the railway labor and national labor relations acts

Well known is that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, 1935) in the United States places a largely per se ban on nonunion employee representation (ER) groups which deal with employers over a term or condition of employment. Much less well known is that America’s other labor law, the Railway Labor Act (RLA, 1926), takes a different approach and permits employers to operate such councils and committees as long as they do not perform a collective bargaining function or interfere with workers’ free choice of a bargaining agent. Thus, under the RLA Delta Air Lines is able to operate what is today the closest living approximation to a 1920s-style ER plan while hundreds of other companies (e.g. Polaroid) under the jurisdiction of the NLRA have been forced over the years to disband similar groups on grounds they are a proscribed company union. No study to date has explored the history behind the RLA and NLRA’s divergent treatment of nonunion ER groups so this article takes a first look. The main part of the story covers the 1920–1935 period and examines the events, people, and experiences associated with company unions and ER in, respectively, the rail and manufacturing industries and why the legislative outcome in the former was a permissive stance on nonunion committees but prohibitive in the latter. The last part of the paper fast-forwards the RLA-NLRA story from the 1930s to contemporary law and practice in order to demonstrate how “history matters” when it comes to what employers can and cannot do with nonunion representation groups, such as works councils, participation and involvement committees, and dispute resolution forums.     

Look at Detroit: The United Auto Workers and the Battle to Organize Volkswagen in Chattanooga

ABSTRACT

On February 14, 2014, workers at Volkswagen’s new plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted 712 to 626 against being represented by the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW). The result capped one of the most high-profile organizing campaigns of recent years, with most media accounts anticipating a UAW victory, especially as VW had declared that it would not oppose the union. The VW election is also now attracting scholarly interest, with accounts stressing the role of external opposition – especially from conservative politicians and lobby groups – along with the UAW’s over-reliance on partnerships with German actors. Providing a detailed analysis of the campaign, this article recognizes the importance of these factors, but also argues that an important role was played by the UAW’s strong association with the domestic automakers, and especially with Detroit, their historic base. Citing the fact that foreign automakers had expanded since the 1980s while the domestics had contracted, opponents effectively linked the UAW with economic decline. These arguments swayed many workers. Placing the VW story within the broader struggle of the UAW to organize a foreign-owned auto plant, the article also stresses structural obstacles, especially the location of Greenfield plants in areas of low union density.     

The Governance of Cross-Border Data Flows in Trade Agreements: Is the Cptpp Framework an Ideal Way Out?

The regulations of cross-border data flows is a growing challenge for the international community. International trade agreements, however, appear to be pioneering legal methods to cope, as they have grappled with this issue since the 1990s. The World Trade Organization (WTO) rules system offers a partial solution under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which covers aspects related to cross-border data flows. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) have also been perceived to provide forward-looking resolutions. In this context, this article analyzes why a resolution to this issue may be illusory. While they regulate cross-border data flows in various ways, the structure and wording of exception articles of both the CPTPP and USMCA have the potential to pose significant challenges to the international legal system. The new system, attempting to weigh societal values and economic development, is imbalanced, often valuing free trade more than individual online privacy and cybersecurity. Furthermore, the inclusion of poison-pill clauses is, by nature, antithetical to cooperation. Thus, for the international community generally, and China in particular, cross-border data flows would best be regulated under the WTO-centered multilateral trade law system.     

Peace in Northern Ireland and the Remaining Issue of the “On-the-Runs”

The return of devolution to Northern Ireland in May 2007 marks an important turning point in the Northern Ireland peace process, but there remains the issue of the “on-the-runs”—a term used to describe persons suspected of committing a range of terrorist acts during the Troubles, who were never arrested, charged, prosecuted, or tried. It is thought that the On-the-Runs want to return to Northern Ireland, but determining the conditions for their return is a difficult and controversial issue, raising legal and moral concerns and causing strong and painful reactions among the victims of terrorist violence on all sides of the Northern Ireland conflict. It is also an issue that is complicated by the fact that while the Belfast Agreement of 1998 did not address expressly the situation of the On-the-Runs, it did provide for the accelerated release of a significant number of paramilitaries, both republican and loyalist, from prisons in both Ireland and Northern Ireland. This paper reviews the possible options in law for addressing the situation of the On-the-Runs, including extradition and prosecution, as well as trial and amnesty, and pardons. While the paper makes clear that the political offence exception to extradition is no longer the obstacle it once was, it also concludes that politics, rather than law, or simply the passage of time is more likely to offer the solution to the problem posed by the On-the-Runs.