This empirical study extends the public choice literature on the allocation of death during war by examining the political economy of foreign fighter deaths in the Russo-Ukrainian War since the 24 February 2022 invasion. The study explores the roles played by various demographic factors, military institutions, and international trade relations in determining the number of foreign fighters from a variety of countries who have died in support of either Ukraine or Russia during the Russo-Ukrainian War. Unlike other related studies, this study also investigates the importance of, and finds evidence in support of, both economic freedom and a robust democracy in shaping the choices made by individuals around the globe to venture to, and die fighting on, the battlefields of Ukraine.

Samsung has largely shifted its electronics manufacturing out of China, and mostly to Vietnam. In that process, it has, to date, avoided local labour market (LLM) difficulties faced by its subsidiaries in industrial parks in China: in particular, pervasive skill shortages among the electronics assembly workers on whom Samsung’s manufacturing depends. Labour retention problems in China had significantly challenged its commitment to invest in necessary employee training. By contrast, Samsung’s domination of foreign direct investment (FDI) within particular Vietnamese industrial parks has removed the inter-employer competition it experienced in China. A deeper explanation involves Samsung’s development – as Vietnam’s largest single source of FDI, and major producer of that country’s exports – of synergistic and symbiotic relationships with Vietnam’s national and subnational governments. These relationships have allowed Samsung to influence development strategies for industrial parks and their LLMs. Samsung has invests expansively in forms of education and training whose benefits extend beyond the areas in which its manufacturing facilities operate, to populations that the company does not employ. Providing benefits beyond typical success criteria for FDI in developing economies, Samsung has helped Vietnam’s party-state meet its own legitimacy needs with its internal constituencies, contributing to a broader practical consensus in favour of the party-state’s development policies. This article therefore widens the perspective of FDI to embed it in national and subnational business–government relations.

In an era where legally binding international trade agreements are increasingly shaping domestic regulation in a wide range of areas, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement between the US, Australia, Japan and nine other Pacific Rim Countries, representing over 40% of world trade, has been described as setting the standards for 21st century trade agreements. This article analyses why the negotiations have dragged on for 5 years, and the resistance to the potential impacts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement on national democratic decision-making on health, environmental and other public interest regulation.

This article explores the UK vote in 2016 to exit the European Union, colloquially known as ‘Brexit’. Brexit has been portrayed as a British backlash against globalisation and a desire for a reassertion of sovereignty by the UK as a nation-state. In this context, a vote to leave the European Union has been regarded by its protagonists as a vote to ‘take back control’ to ‘make our own laws’ and ‘let in [only] who we want’. We take a particular interest in the stance of key ‘Brexiteers’ in the UK towards regulation, with the example of the labour market. The article commences by assessing the notion of Brexit as a means to secure further market liberalisation. This analysis is then followed by an account of migration as a key issue, the withdrawal process and likely future trajectory of Brexit. We argue that in contrast to the expectations of those who voted Leave in 2016, the UK as a mid-sized open economy will be a rule-taker and will either remain in the European regulatory orbit, or otherwise drift into the American one.

Brexit has both increased the momentum towards Scottish independence and complicated what it could mean in practice, especially if Scotland rejoins the European Union (EU). EU accession would re-open the flow of goods, people, services and capital between Scotland and other EU member-states; a corollary of this, however, would be new restrictions on movement between Scotland and its non-EU neighbours. Effective border management entails a variety of ‘at the border’ and ‘behind the border’ processes. As much as these would require dedicated infrastructure and trained personnel, they would ultimately depend upon reliable data/information and good communication among myriad agencies, including on the other side of the border. Fundamentally, the nature and form of the border controls would be determined largely by the relationship that an independent Scotland had with the remainder of the UK—and, principally, on the relationship that the UK develops with the EU.

The existing literature shows that transparency and monitoring reduce trade costs, improve regulatory practices and build and sustain trust. In this paper, using 555 specific trade concerns (STCs) raised by the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) committee in the period 1995–2018, we develop a novel classification of STCs. We distinguish between STCs aiming to exchange information (transparency STCs) and those aiming to monitor compliance with the TBT agreement (monitoring STCs). We show that: (i) when STCs intend to foster transparency, they are mainly used in relation to notified measures, thus suggesting that they are used to acquire not only new but also higher quality information than that provided merely by notifications; (ii) when STCs intend to challenge the compliance of WTO members with the TBT Agreement, they primarily address draft measures, thus suggesting that they are used to promote accountability and improve good regulatory practices; and (iii) STCs raised at the draft stage are less likely to escalate to a dispute than those raised on adopted measures. Guided by these findings, we suggest the potential for some reforms to improve the efficiency of the system. These include: introducing a reporting system on the outcome of STCs; using STCs raised in committees to fill the gap of missing notifications; systematically using the STC mechanism at the stage of draft measures; and building in the dispute settlement system the requirement to raise the matter and discuss it within the relevant committee before filing a formal dispute settlement case.

The Latin American debt crisis consumed the 1980s and was not restricted to Latin America. Starting from the August 1982 Mexican weekend, the crisis had three phases: Concerted Lending (1982-5), Baker Plan (1985-9) and Brady Plan (1989 to mid 1990s). This article describes the evolution of the debt strategy and the road to embracing debt write-downs at the end of the decade. In the absence of an external coordinating mechanism, four groups of parties had to reach agreement on any change in the strategy: the borrowing countries, their commercial bank lenders, the home-country authorities of those lenders, and the International Monetary Fund as the principal international institution. Each group could effectively veto any change in the strategy. This need for consensus is lesson number one from the 1980s for today. Lesson number two is that political economy aspects dictated that the strategy be implemented on a case-by-case basis. The article concludes with an application of these lessons to a similar, but even more global, potential debt crisis in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

This article analyses the economic, political and cultural factors that influenced the decision of policy-makers in Yugoslavia to join the gold exchange standard in the midst of the Great Depression in June 1931. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, the economic reasons why policy elites and interest groups endeavoured to adopt the gold exchange standard are examined by looking at debates in Yugoslavia's central bank, correspondence between governmental institutions and the views of policy elites as depicted in various economic newspapers. Subsequently, the article analyses how the beliefs in economic benefits analysed in the previous part were formed, considering the state of economic knowledge in the country, as well as pressures exerted by foreign lenders such as the Bank of England, the Banque de France and the Bank for International Settlements. The third part analyses reasons for legal stabilisation that go beyond economic rationales, considering how the government employed the prestige involved in legal stabilisation for its political agenda, and how cultural attachments to ‘gold core countries’ made sharing their monetary system a matter of cultural integration.

The European Union budget is small and fulfils only a limited range of functions, yet it provokes regular disputes among the Member States and institutions of the Union. This paper describes the structure of the budget and shows that standard theories, such as fiscal federalism, are not well-suited to analysing how the EU budget operates or the political economy behind it. The paper then looks at how much the UK contributes towards the EU budget and explains why some of the claims made about it in the public discourse are inaccurate.