We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
At the end of 1995, the global economic environment appeared far more favourable to Australia than at the beginning of the decade. The worst fears of the early 1990s had failed to materialise. The Uruguay Round of negotiations in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) had been concluded and GATT’s successor, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), established. With a successful outcome to the GATT negotiations, the threat of the global-trading system fragmenting into rival regional trading blocs largely receded. The establishment of the Single Internal Market in 1992 and the conversion of the European Community into the European Union with the Maastricht Treaty of the following year came and went with no evidence of adverse impact on its trading partners: ’Fortress Europe’ did not eventuate. Even agriculture, very much the orphan child of the world community’s postwar moves towards liberalised trade, was brought under WTO auspices; the requirement that barriers protecting agriculture be converted into tariffs by the end of the century promises to bring greater transparency in agricultural trade and, with it, the possibility of more effective pressure for liberalisation.
Why do firms demand antidumping protectionism? Contemporary literature highlights a plethora of causal mechanisms within the data-generating process, including retaliatory motives, exchange rate appreciations, business cycles, and deindustrialization. I argue that countries that are economically integrated into global markets should be associated with less demand for antidumping trade remedies. In particular, countries with higher levels of trade and financial flows should receive fewer petitions for antidumping trade remedies from firms overall, ceteris paribus. I test this theoretical argument with a series of de facto globalization indicators collected from thirty-three countries between 1978 and 2022, finding support for these arguments.
This article presents results of a Dutch randomised experiment, challenging the ‘workfare’ paradigm, which is dominant in many countries. We study whether social assistance (SA) schemes with fewer conditions and more autonomy for recipients stimulate valuable but often overlooked unpaid socio-economic activities (USEA), which are not classified as work. In the qualitative part of the mixed method study, we generated new hypotheses stating that particularly recipients who are older, higher educated, have a migration background, have relatively poor health, or have young children, will spend more time on USEA in less conditional and more autonomous regimes. The quantitative part of the study, where two experimental conditions are compared with the usual treatment of SA recipients, does not show convincing average treatment effects, but does reveal that a less conditional and more autonomy-oriented SA scheme translates into more USEA for older people, people with a migration background and people with relatively poor mental health.
Since the late first millennium CE, Maritime Southeast Asia has been an inter-connected zone, with its societies and states maintaining economic and diplomatic relations with both China and Japan on the east, and the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East on the west. This global connectedness was facilitated by merchant and shipping networks that originated from within and outside Southeast Asia, resulting in a trans-regional economy developing by the early second millennium CE. Sojourning populations began to appear in Maritime Southeast Asia, culminating in records of Chinese and Indian settlers in such places as Sumatra, Malay Peninsula and the Gulf of Siam by the mid-first millennium CE. At the same time, information of products that were harvested in Southeast Asia began to be appropriated by pockets of society in China, the India and the Middle East, resulting in the production of new knowledge and usages for these products in these markets.
It appears likely that at its peak the classical economy was almost as large as that of Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution. The following review of the archeological and document evidence indicates that three events occurring in the first half of the first millennium BC trigger the emergence of a specialized and integrated classical economy after 500 BC: (i) growth in demand for silver as a medium of exchange in economies in the Near East; (ii) technical breakthroughs in hull construction and sailing rig in merchant shipping of the late Bronze Age; (iii) perfection of ferrous metallurgy into the European hinterland. This last event raised agricultural productivity to a level capable of supporting the occupational specialization needed to sustain a vigorous trading economy. To these initial causes may be added the diffusion of alphabetic writing. While it did not create opportunities for long-distance trade, the diffusion of writing supplied the means of responding on a scale large enough economically to matter.
When dealing with autonomous regions, states may utilize Unionist Economic Integration (UEI) programs to forge a stronger sense of unionism. However, the literature has not been able to explain why UEIs work differently across regions. With the identical UEI implemented in Macau and Hong Kong, Macau seems to be firmly within Beijing's grasp, yet protests in Hong Kong are still intensive. Why is economic integration effective in appeasing some regions, but not others in the same polity?
I argue that what makes UEI effective in appeasing a region is the region's economic dependence on the national center. UEIs add to the expected cost of contention, and thus high economic dependence sets that baseline to a higher degree, leading to effective appeasement with UEIs. I illustrate my argument with empirical analyses of two original datasets of protest counts and discontent with authoritarian institutions in Hong Kong, Macau, and Chinese provinces.
With international trade increasingly undertaken within vertically fragmented supply chains, this paper considers the impact of changes in trade costs on domestic output. In the context of the UK’s exit from the EU we show that the negative impact on UK output will depend on changes in both domestic and export competitiveness. Since for many firms the majority of their sales are to the domestic market, the domestic competitiveness impact may be quantitatively more important. The impact on output will be more significant the greater the integration of firms in international supply chains, and the greater the asymmetric impact of leaving the EU on UK firms relative to EU firms.
The EU is an example of an orderly confidence-building process enabling governments to gradually yield elements of national prerogative to supranational institutions. Seeking to establish a foundation for greater integration to make future wars in Europe impossible, a gradual approach was adopted, starting with the European Coal and Steel Community as an area where the benefits of cooperation after the war were most obvious. Building on this, the Treaties of Rome were signed in 1957 establishing the European Economic Community. A 1978 decision of the European Court of Justice established the principle of mutual recognition of decisions in any one state among all other European states. The Single European Act of 1987 removed the requirement for unanimity in decisions, followed by the Europe 1992 program, which streamlined and then eliminated border controls. The European Parliament evolved from an advisory group of national parliamentarians to a directly elected body. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty called for a common currency and gave legal meaning to the concept of union citizenship. The 2009 Treaty of Lisbon expanded European competences, strengthening the European Parliament. There have been ups and downs, and countries advancing at different paces, yet the Union has expanded to 28 members.
The chapter puts forward a theory on how to apply Art. V GATS to federal states. It advances the understanding that in federal states services trade should be liberalized on all levels of government.
The chapter opens Part II of the book, which focuses on services trade liberalization in federal states. It explains some of the central issues and problems that relate to services liberalization by federal states. Special attention is paid to the EU, Canada and the United States.
The chapter gives a detailed account of the GATS rules on economic integration agreements, which refers to preferential trade agreements in the area of services. It goes through all the criteria of Art. V GATS but focuses on the first criterion, which is the elimination of discrimination.
What is ‘ASEAN’ exactly? Is it a collective noun for describing ten states in Southeast Asia, or is ASEAN something more than that – and if so, what? These deceptively simple questions need answering to understand what has been achieved and what is achievable within and by ASEAN for consumers. This chapter therefore examines what is meant by the so-called ‘ASEAN way’ – a term frequently adopted by key players to explain and justify ASEAN’s role and existence. It also explores the influences of the European Union’s structures and instruments on ASEAN’s use of formal governance mechanisms and its use of concepts such as an ‘economic community’ to define itself. The chapter also considers ASEAN’s meaning and purpose from a range of theoretical perspectives, including: new regionalism; game theory and reciprocity; collective action; and social networks and the networked polity. The chapter further explores ways ASEAN can become more effective in advancing consumer interests through transgovernmentalism, ‘trading up’ and legal transplantation. Some of these perspectives are adopted when examining the topics covered in the following chapters in this volume.
This chapter introduces the backdrop to the achievements and challenges experienced as ASEAN has intensified its program of harmonising minimum standards of consumer protection across Southeast Asia, especially over the last decade. A key factor outlined is economic integration both among ASEAN member states and with their wider regional and global economies. Yet diversity among member states (demographics, economic development, legal and political systems, NGOs and press freedom) can influence the timing and extent of consumer law reform and implementation in each country. The chapter ends with summaries of the scope and key lessons of the remaining substantive chapters (examining product safety regulation, consumer contracts, financial and health services, and interaction of consumer law with competition law) as well as the concluding chapter (adding proposals for enhancing more public-private ‘shared regional value’).
This is the first Western-language research monograph detailing significant developments in consumer law and policy across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), underpinned by a growing middle class and implementation of the ASEAN Economic Community from 2016. Eight chapters examine consumer law topics within ASEAN member states (such as product safety and consumer contracts) and across them (financial and health services), as well as the interface with competition law and the nature of ASEAN as a unique and evolving international organisation. The authors include insights from extensive fieldwork, partly through consultancies for the ASEAN Secretariat, to provide a reliable, contextual and up-to-date analysis of consumer law and policy development across the region. The volume also draws on and contributes to theories of law and development in multiple fields, including comparative law, political economy and regional studies.
This article discusses the legal regimes for enforcing foreign arbitral awards within the East African Community (EAC). It focuses specifically on the enforcement of awards from partner states as well as from the East African Court of Justice (EACJ), which, although a supranational court, has jurisdiction to accept parties’ designation to act as an arbitral tribunal. The EAC has not yet developed a supranational community law based regime for enforcing foreign arbitral awards. The current dominant regime for enforcing such awards is the New York Convention. The article examines how the convention has been applied in the partner states and discusses aspects of the existing jurisprudence that demand reconsideration. It examines the suitability of applying the convention regime to awards from the EACJ, and the case for harmonizing the legal regimes for enforcing foreign arbitral awards within the EAC.
On 31 December 2015, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) announced the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). In theory, this agreement has produced association-wide economic integration. However, following the announcement and for the foreseeable future, ASEAN member states will continue to have significantly less than full regional economic integration. Why? Some observers believe that the AEC plans involve an overly ambitious timeline and too many ill-thought-out initiatives. Others point to ASEAN's traditional aversion to legally binding agreements. While progress has been made in reducing or eliminating intra-ASEAN trade tariffs, substantial non-tariff barriers to trade persist. However, for most member states, the ASEAN market is relatively small, while external markets, especially China, are growing rapidly. Given this outward orientation for ASEAN trade, is the lack of an unhindered regional market really a problem?
This paper considers the agenda for UK trade negotiations over the post-Brexit period. There are several groups of countries that will need to be dealt with and we consider the priorities among them. Negotiations with the WTO and the EU are the most important and the most pressing in time, and should be pursued simultaneously. On the former, the UK must try quickly to establish its independent WTO status, which will be greatly facilitated by minimising the changes it proposes to its tariffs schedules. On the EU the UK needs to consider the choices between remaining in the customs union, creating an FTA with the EU and maintaining the ‘regulatory union’ that is the European Economic Area (EEA). Only when relations with the EU and WTO are clear will it be feasible to negotiate trade deals of various sorts with other countries, ranging from those with which we already have deals via the EU to those that currently trade with us on ‘WTO rules’. All of this takes time and we argue that it may be worth pursuing transitional arrangements to extend certain current trading arrangements a few years beyond Brexit in order to make time for serious negotiations.
Current economic and political developments spotlight the relationship between domestic and global governance and the impact of globalization on both. A key question is whether a sovereign state system, democratic governments, and an integrated global marketplace can coexist. The paper assesses analytic materialist arguments for their incompatibility and the key assumptions on which they rest. The paper describes the extant pressures operating to limit each of the three: how sovereignty and democracy work to constrain globalization, how globalization and sovereignty generate a democratic deficit, and how globalization and democracy lead to limitations upon, and even the transcendence of, sovereignty. How to make the three compatible, and failing that, which facet to restrain, characterizes political contestation in a globalizing age. Global and domestic governance reflect the need to reconcile the combined implications of globalization, sovereignty, and democracy, and to do so by restraining, limiting, or transforming one or more of these features.
This article discusses Africa’s deepening marginalization in the globalization of production, finance, and labor. It underscores critical development issues that result from, and are exacerbated by, globalization in the context of unequal global distribution of economic and political power: illicit financial flows and tax evasion, the brain drain, an increasing incidence of noncommunicable diseases, and the disproportionate burden of environmental degradation that is shouldered by the African continent. It also offers some policy suggestions to address these issues at national and regional levels.
Mobility across countries is often suspected to affect the coexistence of different social insurance systems. A wide variety of social protection systems exist within the EU. Some are of Beveridgean inspiration (with universal and more or less flat benefits), while others are mainly Bismarckian (with benefits related to past contributions). Concerns about the sustainability of the most generous and redistributive (Beveridgean) insurance systems are often based on the assumption of (near) perfect and costless mobility. In reality, labor mobility remains limited. Such low levels of migration rates could, mistakenly, lead to the conclusion that migration would currently not be affecting the redistributive social insurance systems. We address this issue in a two-country setting, where mobility is costly and where individuals differ in mobility cost (attachment to their native country). A Bismarckian insurance system is not affected by migration while a Beveridgean one is. Our results suggest that the race-to-the-bottom affecting tax rates may be more important under Beveridge-Beveridge competition than under Beveridge-Bismarck competition. Finally, we study the strategic choice of the type of social protection. We show that Bismarckian governments may find it beneficial to adopt a Beveridgean insurance system.