Market structure and disempowering regulatory intermediaries: Insights from U.S. trade surveillance

Public agencies outsource a wide variety of tasks to nonstate actors, or what can be referred to as regulatory intermediaries. In certain circumstances, these agencies may seek to disempower those regulatory intermediaries by reclaiming, duplicating, or transferring the outsourced task. When will these disempowerment attempts be successful? This article presents the Market Structure Hypothesis, which contends that the level of competition between regulatory intermediaries will, all things equal, determine whether disempowerment attempts succeed. To test this hypothesis, this article examines the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's attempts to acquire the independent capacity to conduct nationwide trade surveillance in the 1980s (Market Oversight Surveillance System) and 2010s (Consolidated Audit Trail). Evidence derives from archival materials, a Freedom of Information Act Request, and 60 interviews in Oxford, London, Toronto, New York City, and Washington, DC. The empirical results corroborate the hypothesis' expectations, contributing to our understanding of public-private partnerships and shedding new empirical light on an understudied topic of securities regulation.     

The Politics of Discontinuity and Its Medium Term Policy Outcomes: Evidence from Ghana

ABSTRACT

It is common knowledge in Ghana that during political transitions, programs set in previous Medium Term Development Plans (MTDP) by prior governments are abandoned without regard for their wider national implications. While the economic impacts of these political transitions have been researched, till date no known studies have taken a holistic look at the relation between political transition and the level of MTDP target achievement. This article attempts to fill this research gap using Ghana as a case and the policy learning and political business cycle literatures as organizing frames. Using annual MTDP data and semi-structured interviews with 25 officials who were involved in the implementation of MDTPs at the national and local government levels, this article finds that aberrations in target achievements across the entire period between 2001 and 2016 were the result of financial constraints and the pressures to adjust to political change.     

The Echo of a Sentimental Jurisprudence

This article revisits what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed the ‘rage of metaphysics’, the grand intellectual engagement that defined the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Enlightenment. It does so in order to retrieve an alternative jurisprudence, one that described itself as much in terms of sentiment as of sense. It is suggested that one of the most striking expressions of this jurisprudence can be found in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. This attempt to retrieve a sentimental jurisprudence chimes with a wider intellectual movement, headed by the likes of Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, which seeks to reinvest a ‘new’ humanism in both domestic and trans-national legal and political order. It speaks more particularly to recent debates surrounding the nature of human and civil rights, and enjoys an added resonance in the context of recent attempts to fashion a jurisprudence of ‘reconciliation’ in South Africa and elsewhere. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

土地关系宏观调控规范若干问题探讨

由于我国没有宏观调控法 ,土地关系中的宏观调控规范欠缺基本指引。我国现行土地法规范、土地规划制度、土地用途管理制度都有待探讨完善 ,而对土地法中的宏观调控问题理论上鲜有涉及 ,必须加强研究探讨 ,促进土地宏观调控规范的制定和实施 ,尤其要根据目前的新情况 ,关注、重视土地关系宏观调控决策的民主性 ,以完善土地法规范。     

Toxicity in the Details: The History of the Women's Office Worker Movement and Occupational Health in the Late-Capitalist Office

In the early years of the twentieth century Japanese employers, like their counterparts in the various Western countries, experimented with programs of firm-based social welfare and social insurance, often collectively identified as welfare capitalism. This essay examines these programs, focusing on those operated by the national railroad system. It argues that these programs were neither a distinctive emanation of traditional values nor simply a result of mimicry of Western-inspired programs. They were instead an instance of a global effort by employers everywhere to cope with rapidly changing conditions and the challenges of modern economic development. The essay also argues that these Japanese programs, like those in Western countries, influenced and helped to set the parameters of state-based health and welfare systems that emerged in the first half of the century.     

“O me! O me! How i love the earth”: William Morris’s News from Nowhere and the birth of sustainable society

Arguing from an ecocritical perspective, in this article I seek to show that Morris, in his ‘green’ utopia News from Nowhere, envisaged a new social order in which communities are socially just, participatory, independent, economically viable and environmentally sustainable. I will argue that Morris, by stressing the need for a decentralized and polycentric country and by showing how co‐operation, as opposed to competition, can form a symbiosis between the members of the society, effectively linked the local with the global. I will show that Morris, turning against systematized globalization as portrayed in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, gives an example of a ‘sustainable’ globalization that shares much common ground with the current politics of bioregionalism. I will finally suggest that Morris’s vision of London as an ecological city, where waste has been abolished and human beings live in harmony with nature while respecting social justice, is more urgent than ever and can be instrumental as a vision for our future life.     

论经济社会发展规划与规划法制建设

经济与社会发展规划是政策和法律相耦合的社会规范表现形式,它对我国经济与社会发展发挥了积极促进与指导作用。在推进规划体制改革过程中,为科学编制与实施规划,要处理好经济社会发展规划与发展规划法的关系,应当完善与拓展政策与法律相耦合的形式,明确政府规划行为的公定力,提高公众参与度,健全经济与社会发展规划法制,完善国家宏观调控体系。     

“同舟共济”与适应性变革:经济增长、权力转移及中美关系

由于经济增长的差异,新兴市场日益崛起,亚太地区日益崛起,其中中国崛起尤为瞩目。纵观权力转移历史、理论与现实,中国积极寻求融入当前美国主导的国际制度安排,在战略上是正确的,中国成为这一制度的得利较多者,也是满意者和维护者。因此综合长期战略和当前金融危机冲击下的策略,除了积极推动美国对当前制度进行适应性变革外,对于美国目前的困境,中国应该量力积极帮助,共同促进全球经济早日复苏和全球善治,与美国"同舟共济"符合中国战略利益,中国需要战略规划;同时,需要面向未来,准备好美国经济复苏后的策略变化。美国凭其发达的金融业在全球财富再分配中占领制高点,金融业的发展意味着可以在财富的再分配中获得竞争优势,因此中国需要大力发展现代金融业。     

行政协力范畴探略——行政协力的概念与若干相关问题

行政协力是符合行政民主化、法治化的制度选择,已成为当今行政实践重要的行政手段和行为形式。准确界定行政协力概念是行政协力制度化建设首先要解决的问题。行政协力的内涵、特征、分类也是讨论行政协力概念不可缺少的要素,而行政协力与行政协助、行政参与人协助(力)义务、社会协助、行政委托等概念既有联系也有区别,有必要在辨析中明确行政协力的内涵和外延。正确解读行政协力的法律性质问题,对于把握行政协力的本质也至关重要。