Voluntary Programs Potoski, Matthew; Prakash, Aseem; Baron, David P ...
2009, 20090101
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A conceptual framework and empirical case studies of the policy effect of voluntary programs sponsored by industry, government, and nongovernmental organizations.
This article examines the distinctiveness of Brazil, India and China in international regulatory governance by asking whether the European Union (EU)'s dedicated antitrust agreements (ATAs) with ...Brazil, India and China (BICs) differ significantly from the EU's other ATAs, and whether observable differences are attributable to these emergent powers' increased influence in global regulatory governance. We address these questions through a multi-method comparative analysis, using an original dataset of international ATAs. These bilateral inter- and trans-governmental agreements seek to avoid or ameliorate conflicts and establish cooperation between government agencies responsible for competition law and policy. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses both point to a striking ability of the BICs (and Russia) to insist on quite distinctive agreements with regard to both what is covered by these agreements and how any mutual commitments to conflict resolution and regulatory cooperation are articulated. This finding is based on various overall metrics and a computer-assisted comparative textual analysis of all dedicated ATAs to which the EU is a signatory, using inter alia plagiarism detection software, complemented by qualitative content analyses of the agreements and information drawn from interviews with regulatory officials, to gain a better understanding of similarities and differences between the agreements and thus address in more detail the question how unique the BICs are in their ability to pursue distinctive regulatory objectives in the realm of competition law and policy. We conclude that the distinctiveness of the BIC R agreements is indeed indicative of these emergent economies' increased power in global economic governance-and, more tentatively, that the increased influence of Brazil, China, and India in global regulatory governance is unlikely to be fully matched by other developing countries.
Import Safety Cary Coglianese, Adam M. Finkel, David Zaring / Cary Coglianese, Adam M. Finkel, David Zaring
09/2011
eBook
On World Food Day in October 2008, former president Bill Clinton finally accepted decade-old criticism directed at his administration's pursuit of free-trade deals with little regard for food safety, ...child labor, or workers' rights. "We all blew it, including me when I was president. We blew it. We were wrong to believe that food was like some other product in international trade." Clinton's public admission came at a time when consumers in the United States were hearing unsettling stories about contaminated food, toys, and medical products from China, and the first real calls were being made for more regulation of imported products.Import Safetycomes at a moment when public interest is engaged with the subject and the government is receptive to the idea of consumer protections that were not instituted when many of the Clinton era's free-trade pacts were drafted.
Written by leading scholars and analysts, the chapters inImport Safetyprovide background and policy guidance on improving consumer safety in imported food, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and toys and other products aimed at children. Together, they consider whether policymakers should approach import safety issues through better funding of traditional interventions-such as regulatory oversight and product liability-or whether this problem poses a different kind of governance challenge, requiring wholly new methods.
How are rules for global markets set? in this book, we focus on rule-making in private bodies, each of which is, in its particular issue area, largely uncontested as the forum for setting ...international standards—a form of governance that is tremendously important for global product and financial markets but has so far attracted little sustained analytical attention. We take seriously the distinctive institutional features of thisnongovernmentalform of global governance but also recognize, and indeed emphasize, its fundamentally conflictual, and hence political, nature.
To put this form of private regulation in context, we distinguish four modes of global
We have, in this book, explored a hitherto little studied or understood type of regulation in the world economy: global rule-making by private-sector focal institutions. The prominence and economic ...significance of this type of regulation has risen sharply over the last decade or two. We have sought to shed light on the global regulatory organizations by asking: Who exactly gets to write the rules in these private bodies? What is the process of rule-writing? Who are the winners and losers in this process, and why?
To answer these questions and gain a better understanding of the nonmarket type of global
In April 2009, as the global financial crisis was quickly deepening, the leaders of the G-20 group of industrialized and developing nations met in London to take urgent steps to prevent a further ...downward spiral of the world economy and avert a new Great Depression. Among the measures on which they agreed at the conclusion of their meeting was to call on the International Accounting Standards Board, IASB, “to improve standards on valuation and provisioning and achieve a single set of high-quality global accounting standards” to bring greater stability to global financial markets and thus lay the foundation for the
International standardization almost always entails distributional conflicts. As the examples in the previous chapters illustrate, standardization implies the harmonization of differing prior ...practices and therefore adjustment costs, at least for some. Consequently, it involves conflicts of interest over the distribution of those adjustment costs—even when the benefits of convergence on a single international standard clearly exceed the adjustment costs for each country or even each affected user.¹ Moreover, standardization can increase or decrease the value of patents and open up profitable business opportunities for some while foreclosing them for others. When the member bodies of ISO voted to adopt
In August 2000, the American National Standards Institute issued a stern warning: “The standardization world has changed. We can’t assume that U.S. technology and practices will automatically be ...adopted everywhere anymore.”¹ The concern was in fact not new. A decade earlier, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress had observed: “Many American companies . . . have yet to recognize the implications of international product standards in a global economy. By the time they come to appreciate the potential consequences, the damage to the national economy may already have been done.”²
To illustrate what was at stake, the
Our empirical investigation of private rule-making in transnational focal institutions—based on quantitative analyses of hundreds of responses from two multi-industry business surveys, complemented ...by qualitative analyses of a wealth of additional sources—lends strong support to the institutional complementarity theory that we presented in chapter 3. In this chapter, aimed primarily at readers who are interested in the theoretical issues raised by our argument and analysis, we summarize what is distinct and novel about institutional complementarity, then discuss the contributions of our analytical framework to current scholarly debates in political science, sociology, law, and economics/business studies.
Throughout this book,
Iasb’s short history provides ample anecdotal evidence for the predominance of U.S. interests and the crucial role of FASB in ensuring U.S. influence in international rule-making. In several recent ...projects, for instance, the IASB has adopted U.S. standards as international standards virtually without change, even in the face of European opposition. Such U.S. predominance is all the more remarkable since “Realist” scholars have argued that the EU increasingly equals the United States on various measures of raw economic power, such as GDP and market capitalization; some other scholars even argue that the EU has governmental regulatory power over financial markets
