Intellectual property provisions and support for US trade agreements

Intellectual property rights are a key piece of the expanded trade agenda, and the United States has pushed hard to strengthen protections beyond WTO standards in its trade agreements. While agreement provisions governing intellectual property are commonly thought to be an important driver of corporate preferences over US trade policy, systematic empirical evidence for this proposition, especially in comparison to other determinants of trade policy, is generally lacking. To fill this void, this paper examines variation in reliance on intellectual property across US industries to explain attitudes and lobbying on US trade agreements. The effects of IP provisions on support for US trade agreements are politically substantial, though trade remains the primary determinant of preferences over trade agreements.     

Environmental Security and New Middle Powers: The Case of South Korea

This article considers the role of new middle powers in the climate change debate. We focus on the issue of “green growth.” We argue that new middle powers such as South Korea are increasingly proactive in promoting this green growth agenda and, as a result, challenging conventional realist and liberal approaches and expectations to new middle powers. This diplomacy is aiming to bridge states, great and small, by leading to strategic breakthroughs in the current climate change negotiation deadlock. The article discusses South Korea’s green growth initiative and identifies how this initiative affects South Korea’s middle power role in the global environmental debate with respect to its inclusion in the Environment Integrity Group and its initiative the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI).     

Rational Choice and Politics

The rational-choice approach brings scientific deductive methods to bear on politics. Appropriate methods are derived from physics, when actors interact probabilistically but non-rationally, and from game theory when they interact rationally. Collective action problems occur in the provision of public goods. As policies are themselves public goods, this leads to the game-theoretic analysis of voting, bureaucracy and lobbies. It is inconsistent to believe that economic actors are basically self-interested but that political actors are not. Rather, one should treat people as equally (not necessarily wholly) self-interested in each sphere. The paradoxes of social choice are then shown to have important implications for political science.     

The forensic and investigative significance of reverse paternity testing with absent maternal sample

The authors are involved in the extraction of DNA material from calcified tissues, oftentimes teeth, and analysis of such material to assist the investigative process, frequently by confirming the identity of the victim. Biologic or molecular techniques for the purposes of human identification have evolved to allow increasingly discriminating tests for use in criminal and noncriminal death investigations, as well as paternity disputes. The goal of such tests is to either include 2 samples (ie, they are from the same person, or in the case of paternity, they are from related individuals) or exclude 2 samples (ie, they are from different people or from unrelated individuals). Regardless of the system used and when data error has been eliminated, an exclusionary conclusion is irrefutable. The probability of excluding the falsely accused has steadily increased over the years as new methods are developed. Conventional ABO blood typing, for example, has a probability of exclusion (PE) of only 17%. This value increases to 53% with the inclusion of the Rh and MN systems. Additional serological markers can provide a probability of exclusion of greater than 99%. Today, the current method of choice for human identification is the polymerase chain reaction for the amplification of short tandem repeat (STR) multiplexes. This paper discusses the implications of nonpaternity in reverse paternity testing when only paternal DNA is available.     

Private equity: the UK regulatory response

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. Key points

• Rapid growth in private equity in recent years hasgenerated a public debate over the possibility of regulation.The Financial Services Authority (FSA), British Venture CapitalAssociation (BVCA), Treasury and the Treasury Select Committeehave all been active on this front in recent months.
• This briefingnote provides an overview of the current state of play in theUK, taking account of the final guidelines published by SirDavid Walker and the changes to capital gains tax that havebeen announced by the Treasury.
• The BVCA guidelines will bringwithin its enhanced disclosure regime around 65 portfolio companiesand will operate on a ‘comply or explain’ basis.
• TheFSA has indicated that it will focus on the risks of marketabuse and conflicts of interest arising from private equitytransactions, but it does not envisage a discrete regulatoryregime for the sector.