Since its establishment in 1957, the European Union or, to be more precise, the European Economic Community was motivated by the vision of a single market, where the peoples of Europe would be able to conduct economic transactions without suffering from barriers to trade. EU law, EU legislation, and its interpretation by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are aimed at promoting the single market vision, based on the four freedoms, one of which is the free movement of persons. These legally-established freedoms aim at removing obstacles to trade. Obstacles to the free movement of persons may include direct or indirect discrimination of employees at work. Discrimination may be based on grounds of religion, race, or sex. This book concentrates on the last.
Michael Gazzaniga's brilliant study of neuropsychology of split-brain patients was based on the analysis of the condition of a tiny sample of subjects. Some aphasia studies produce convincing results working with two or three subjects: more are simply difficult to find. It is generally accepted, however, that in order to reach sound conclusions a representative sample of subjects is usually needed. Samantha Currie's book, claiming to be 'of a socio-legal nature' (at 4) uses a sample of 44 Poles working in the UK (at 211) to back 'socio-legal research' on the condition of half a billion European citizens, should one judge the book by what is on the cover. Constant references to the 'empirical data generated for the research which forms the basis of this book' (at 38), i.e. references to the 44 interviews conducted, sound like misplaced irony when used to agree with the findings based on infinitely more substantial samples, like UK Government statistics including 715,000 registrations (at 69).
Arranging the newly arrived items, the book-seller is confronted with the conundrum of where to place the books under review here. At first glance, both dwell on similar subjects: rule of law here, rule of law there. Indeed, they deal with related questions: how can the rule of law be conceptualized and how is it put into meaningful practice within the conglomerate of European institutions? Furthermore, what is the specific role of this 'elusive' (Wennerström, at 41) concept? Both contribute to the emerging field of research on the rule of law. They enrich the debate on cross-fertilization of legal regimes as well as on how to balance commonality and difference in European cooperation. Moreover, both books promise the reader an insider's insight, Francis G. Jacobs being a former Advocate General at the ECJ, and Erik O. Wennerström having worked at the European Commission.
International Development Association (IDA) donors and others operating a country performance-based allocation system face two difficult problems: how to strengthen incentives to produce and document development results and how to increase flexibility for fragile states. Fragile states have the greatest need for projects, but their projects tend to rate poorly in performance-based allocations systems, which provide little incentive to produce successful projects in fragile states or other countries.
Over the last 25 years, the international community has pursued a series of measures to address unsustainable debt burdens in low-income countries. Early actions focused on debt relief for official bilateral claims—initially by rescheduling—followed by increasing levels of debt stock reduction. During this period, the Paris Club repeatedly reduced or rescheduled the debts of a number of countries.
The Jubilee 2000 movement, which called for the cancellation of the foreign debts of the poorest nations, reached its zenith in the late 1990s and 2000-and then, by design, shut down. In the space of a few years, it became one of the most successful international, nongovernmental movements in history. As part of a larger, ongoing project to understand the consequences and lessons of the episode, David Roodman provides thumbnail assessments of Jubilee 2000 from several perspectives, deemphasizing anecdotes and statistics in favor of major themes.
Topic:
Debt, Development, Economics, and Non-Governmental Organization
The paper seeks to explain state failures. To do so, we focus on non-market forms of interactions in the public sector that allow officials to move into high or low effort levels, a kind of state tendency to bipolarity or manic depression. The activity level actually 'chosen' will have important consequences for the overall non-state economy. The paper outlines reasons why low effort and high corruption levels are likely to go together and increase the risks for possible rise in violent conflicts. It further describes mechanisms that show how non-formal institutions may impact corruption, state activity levels and possible economic gains from joining violent rebellion.
Using a world trade model with India subdivided into states, the paper examines how regional disparities are affected by domestic inter-state trade as well as international trade. According to the analysis, international liberalisation promotes decentralisation and convergence, not divergence, so trade is not to blame for India's growing regional disparities. High economic growth within India makes domestic markets more important and the geographical effect of this is opposite to that of globalisation. This may counterbalance the geographical impact of international liberalisation and explain why recent changes in geographical clustering in India are limited. The empirical results are consistent with this. They also indicate that Indian services expansion is largely driven by increases in domestic demand due to growth, and that domestic market integration is essential for India's manufacturing sector. We argue that for larger nations, the domestic inter-regional trade is important and India should have a trade policy that addresses domestic as well as international market integration.
Topic:
Development, Globalization, and International Trade and Finance
The recent economic crisis, 2008–2009,is commonly characterized as the worst since the Great Depression of 1929–1933. This recent crisis, called also the Great Recession, seems to form a turning-point in the global economic governance and the development of the world economy.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, International Trade and Finance, and Financial Crisis