ASEAN countries are considered significant contributors to global pollution, particularly concerning marine plastic pollution (MPP), which has emerged as a critical concern in the region. To address ...this issue, ASEAN has established three specific instruments: the Bangkok Declaration on Combating Marine Debris in 2019, the ASEAN Framework of Action on Marine Debris 2019, and the ASEAN Regional Action Plan for Combating Marine Debris in the ASEAN Member States 2021-2025. However, being soft laws, these instruments lack legally binding force, allowing states to choose not to implement them effectively and promptly, leading to low compliance rates. The root cause of this compliance challenge lies in the ASEAN Way’s foundational principle, which promotes non-intervention, resulting in non-legally binding instruments. This raises genuine concerns about the potential inefficacy of implementing ASEAN instruments. Nonetheless, the issue of marine plastic pollution is considered a contemporary environmental catastrophe in the region, demanding Member States to prioritize compliance. Hence, this study delves into two key issues: (1) the ASEAN Way and compliance and (2) regional mechanisms to bolster Member States’ adherence in combating marine plastic pollution.
The staggering rise in global temperature and abrupt change of climate are the responses of nature alerting humanity to limit the emissions of hazardous gases and adopt environmentally-benign life ...style. The present study explores empirically whether any changes in environmental policy stringency (EPSI), political risk (PR), and the interaction term of EPSI*PR result in any alteration of consumption-based carbon emissions (CBCE) of the 24 advanced OECD economies over the period of 1990–2020. Prior to the empirical estimations, various diagnostic tests are employed. The empirical techniques include, panel cointegration check, Cross-sectional Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lags (CS-ARDL), and Dumitrescu & Hurlin panel causality test. The findings confirm that imports, gross domestic product, and stringency of environment policies activate CBCE in short-run. Whereas, a unit improvement in political risk and its interaction with environmental policy stringency give rise to 0.231 MtCO2 of CBCE in long run. Interestingly, the squared term of environmental policy stringency effectively tackles such emissions. Based on the findings, we conclude that the present environment related policies of OECD member states does not effectively limit CBCE. In order to achieve genuine emissions reduction goals, the selected nations should restructure their environment related policies by prioritizing increments in environmental policy stringency along with minimizing the risks involved in the political system.
•The present environmental policies of OECD nations are not targeting consumption-based emissions.•The Lower the political risk, the minor the consumption-based carbon emissions.•Lower political risk along with efficient environmental policies curb such emissions.•Interestingly, augmenting the current environmental policies tackles the emissions.
Why do governments form institutions devoted to emigrants and their descendants in the diaspora? Such institutions have become a regular feature of political life in many parts of the world: Over ...half all United Nations Member States now have one. Diaspora institutions merit research because they connect new developments in the global governance of migration with new patterns of national and transnational sovereignty and citizenship, and new ways of constructing individual identity in relation to new collectivities. But these institutions are generally overlooked. Migration policy is still understood as immigration policy, and research on diaspora institutions has been fragmented, case‐study dominated, and largely descriptive. In this article, I review and extend the relevant theoretical literature and highlight empirical research priorities. I argue that existing studies focus too exclusively on national‐level interests and ideas to explain how individual states tap diaspora resources and embrace these groups within the nation‐state. However, these approaches cannot explain the global spread of diaspora institutions. This, I argue, requires a comparative approach and greater attention to the role of efforts to create a coherent but decentralized system of global governance in the area of international migration.
Liberal intergovernmentalism explains the politics to cope with the euro area crisis by the constellation of national preferences and bargaining power and by institutional choices designed to commit ...euro area countries credibly to the currency union. National preferences resulted from high negative interdependence in the euro area and the fiscal position of its member states: a common preference for the preservation of the euro was accompanied by divergent preferences regarding the distribution of adjustment costs. These mixed motives constituted a 'chicken game' situation characterized by hard intergovernmental bargaining and brinkmanship. Whereas negotiations produced a co-operative solution averting the breakdown of the euro area and strengthening the credibility of member state commitments, asymmetrical interdependence resulted in a burden-sharing and institutional design that reflected German preferences predominantly.
We analyze the financial integration of the new European Union (EU) member states’ stock markets using the negative (positive) coexceedance variable that counts the number of large negative (large ...positive) returns on a given day across the countries. A similar analysis is performed for the old EU countries. We use a multinomial logit model to investigate how persistence, asset classes, and volatility are related to the coexceedance variables. We find that the effects differ (a) between negative and positive coexceedance variables (b) between old and new EU member states, and (c) before and after the EU enlargement in 2004, suggesting a closer connection of new EU stock markets to those in Western Europe.
This study investigates the extent of compliance with international accounting standards (IASs) by companies in the Gulf Co-Operation Council (GCC) member states (Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi ...Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). Based on a sample of 137 companies (436 company-years) we find that compliance increased over time, from 68% in 1996 to 82% in 2002. Despite strong economic and cultural ties between the GCC states, there was significant between-country variation in compliance and among companies based on size, leverage, internationality, and industry. The study provides evidence of de jure but not de facto harmonization in the region. Noncompliance reflected some ineffectiveness in the functions of external auditors and enforcement bodies, which may be of interest to countries that have adopted IASs recently.
This paper deals with the efficiency of the 28 European Union (EU) Member States for the years 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014 by employing Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and directional distance function ...to tackle undesirable outputs. Eight parameters are used, namely municipal solid waste (MSW) generation, employment rate, capital formation, gross domestic product (GDP), population density and for the first time sulphur oxide (SOx), nitrogen oxide (NOx) and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from the waste sector for the relevant countries. The innovation of this paper lies in the fact that both new parameters are taken into account and that diverse modelling techniques have been employed in terms of the outputs and inputs used. The empirical results obtained were bias corrected in order to get the correct efficiency scores for each country studied. Overall the most efficient countries were shown to be Germany, Ireland and the UK. These results were then reviewed against the recycling rate of each country for the examined time periods. The recycling rate actually depicts the DEA results, namely more efficient countries seem to have a higher recycling rate too. Moreover the DEA efficiency results were contrasted to the overall treatment options used in the countries under consideration. Overall it is noticed that countries employing all four treatment options with high use of more sustainable ones and decrease in the use of landfill are the ones that also proved to be efficient according to DEA. These results resemble the image of a financial crisis hit Europe which tried to take advantage of the more sustainable treatment options in order to achieve a transition to a circular economy, whereas the value of products, materials and resources needs to be maintained in the economy for as long as possible and the generation of waste minimised. This can be a valuable lesson for policy makers in the design and application of national and EU legislations and directives in order to achieve also the targets towards a circular economy driven Europe.
•Employing DEA to assess national waste generation.•Three novel environmental production frameworks designed.•Directional distance function to tackle undesirable outputs.•Comparison of results with treatment options and recycling rates.•Policy implications under a circular economy approach.
Of the multiple narratives EU policymakers could have chosen at the onset of the euro crisis, why did austerity and structural reform win out over other plausible cures for member states' problems? ...Arguably, sovereign debt pooling or more federalized economic governance would have been a solution to member states' national deficits and competitiveness woes. To understand this puzzle, we draw on the sociology of knowledge literature. We argue that the response to the euro crisis was heavily informed by broader social logics that constructed the problem and the solution heavily toward ordoliberal and neoliberal ideas. Mapping the fate of the Eurobond proposals allows us to trace the complex entanglement of economic policy-making and parse out the ways in which social realities are shaped to make particular policy choices seem inevitable, even as they are themselves the product of social processes.
This study aimed to evaluate the status of organic farming in the member states of the European Union, drawing on its potential and selected elements of the organic agri-food products market. To this ...end, we used several partial indicators and a synthetic measure, which allowed us to create a ranking of the member states depending on the development level of organic farming. The survey showed a 50% increase in the utilised agricultural area allocated for organic farming in the EU from 2015 to 2021 and a 69% increase from 2012 to 2021. So far, the only member state to meet the target set by the Green Deal, that is, 25% of organic UAA, has been Austria. Considering the synthetic index, Portugal is a leader of organic farming development. In addition, differences exist between EU member states in consumers’ expenditure on organic products.
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