International institutions and market expectations: Stock price responses to the WTO ruling on the 2002 U.S. steel tariffs

Many scholars assert that international institutions have little power to enforce laws, punish offenders, or force compliance. Others stress that international institutions are important actors, specifically in the regulation of international trade. In this paper, I show that the recent trade dispute over U.S. steel protection provides us with a critical case to evaluate the role of the World Trade Organization in settling trade disputes and specifically stabilizing expectations of market actors over future steel policy. I argue that stock prices can serve as an important tool in answering these questions. In an empirical analysis using daily steel stock prices, I find that during the 2002 WTO steel case, the WTO dispute mechanism helped market actors stabilize expectations of future trade policy.

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.     

The Relational Dynamics of World Bank Survey Missions

This article demonstrates that World Bank internal learning has led to significant changes in how the organization interacts with government officials through survey missions. Reviewing evidence of institutional learning and associated changes in practice and focusing on the relational modes being manifest in technical assistance, the article identifies three main phases of World Bank survey missions: general survey missions (1940s–1960s), country assistance strategies (1990s–2000s), and country partnership frameworks (2010s). Overall, World Bank reviews have repeatedly highlighted the importance of non-hierarchical interactions between Bank staff and country officials. In recent years, practice has begun to catch up with these operational insights.     

Brexit: A Cliff Edge or a Small Bump in the Road?

It is becoming increasingly accepted, not least by the Prime Minister and opposition leadership, that the negotiation of a comprehensive trade relationship with the EU is necessary to prevent the UK economy falling off a ‘cliff edge’. This concern is shaping the UK's strategy towards negotiations with the EU and has provided at least part of the motivation for the UK to consider requesting a transition period to facilitate the Brexit process. But how accurate are these fears? What evidence is there for the existence of a ‘cliff edge’? How disastrous would it be for the UK to revert to trading with the EU on the same basis as most other countries in the world, namely according to World Trade Organisation rules? This article seeks to address these issues and it highlights a number of implications for policy makers which flow from understanding the available evidence a little more clearly.     

The impact of the Second World War on postwar social spending

The huge quantitative literature on postwar social spending almost entirely neglected war as a possible explanatory factor of social spending dynamics. Given the mass carnage and the enormous social needs caused by the Second World War, this is quite astonishing. This article examines for the first time, whether, and in what ways, the Second World War affected cross‐national differences in public social spending of 18 Western welfare states over the course of the Golden Age. Using panel regressions, it is found that the war strongly affected social spending until the late 1960s. The evidence demonstrates that the Second World War is not simply a temporal watershed structuring different phases of welfare state development, but rather a crucial factor for understanding cross‐national differences in welfare efforts and social expenditure dynamics in the postwar period.     

Gender and Vernaculars in Digital Humanities and World Literature

Abstract

This article discusses the large-scale and world-encompassing aspirations of digital humanities and world literature and their methodological accordance with the analysis of literature in smaller languages and of texts understood in social, transnational, and gendered contexts. Are Digital Humanities and World Literature establishing themselves as fields utilizing analytical tools that are at odds with the aims and perspectives of feminist literary history and reception history as a part of literary history? We argue that gender research and theory is insufficiently developed in both computational literary history and World Literature. An unproblematic understanding of translations, canonization, English as a global language, and the use of large-scale computational methods and formalized interpretive models is in many cases not beneficial for the understanding of texts by women writers or from feminist perspectives. Drawing on feminist criticism of computational methods and arguments for specialized rather than generalized knowledge about literary history, we propose that digitization in some form, be it a bibliographical database or digitization of a corpus of texts, may be thought of as part of the research process in projects oriented towards gender and cultural exchange.     

国际组织对公共养老保险改革的影响

本文采用文献法和历史分析法,研究了国际组织在不同阶段对各国公共养老保险改革施加影响的途径和方式,尤其是国际组织在我国养老保险"统账结合"制度的建立与发展过程中发挥的作用。在此基础上,提出了针对我国养老保险制度改革的政策建议。     

Explaining variation and change in supervisory confidentiality in the European Union

Abstract

Some European Union member states’ financial regulators choose to make some of the data they routinely collect on individual banks publicly available. Others treat this data as confidential. What explains this difference? This paper considers the possible effects of crises, path-dependent legal institutions, and the design of deposit insurance schemes. At the national level, the paper focuses on contrasting German and Dutch cases. After the recent economic crisis, the Dutch released more data while the German authorities maintained strict confidentiality rules. The design of deposit insurance schemes provides a key reason why the level of secrecy varies, with the Dutch move from an ex post to an ex ante scheme where the government served as the ultimate backstop leading to questions about the accounts of individual banks while the German system favoured continued secrecy. The paper also describes the level of transparency at the EU level. Multilevel legal restrictions and bureaucratic capacity tilt EU banking union practices towards member states that treat financial supervisory data as confidential.     

The Pyu Ancient Cities World Heritage application: lessons from Myanmar on transnational advocacy networks

The announcement of 22 June 2014 from the World Heritage Committee that Pyu Ancient Cities had been added to the World Heritage List was significant for Myanmar, since it represented the country’s first World Heritage site. The World Heritage listing was the culmination of a process driven by a convergence of forces originating from within and outside of Myanmar. An interpretation of Pyu Ancient Cities as involving a transnational network of supporters echoes the work on transnational advocacy networks, which looks to phenomena involving transnational efforts to advance particular issues on behalf of activists against their government. This study examines Pyu Ancient Cities by producing a model that helps to illuminate the efficacy of its social network to engage in transnational advocacy.