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.
The article analyses the manner of implementation of the prohibition of negationism into the legal systems of EU member states. Negationism is an important social topic which describes the phenomenon ...of denying, condoning or trivializing certain historical crimes, such as genocide. EU adopted a Framework Decision that obligated member states to introduce the crime of negationism in their legislation. The Framework Decision connects negationism with racism and xenophobia and provides for standardized elements of crime. The main hypothesis of the article is that the progressive conceptualization of negationism in the Decision enabled the further differentiation among legislative responses of the member states because of their various historical experiences of certain crimes. The aim of this research is to analyse these differences and point to their consequences. For this purpose, a comparative method of member states' legislations on negationism and ceratin characteristic examples from the jurisprudence is used. Member states are grouped by common features that define their approach to negationism. Certain member states were formally noticed for the failure to implement the Decision, while many more were not although at least 6 of them failed completely to implement it. Partial implementation can be found in those member states that prohibit only Holocaust negationism, or implement the Decision but without all the neccessary elements of crime which impact the criminal proceedings. Certain states are going against the purpose of the Decision and equally treat communist and nazi-fascist crimes. The constitutionality of the ban of negationism has been reviewed due to the limits it places on the freedom of expression. Conclusions confirm the primary hypothesis.
The European Union's role in the region and in the world is changing rapidly due to several internal dynamics and external crises and challenges. EU's project of integration remains a role model for ...peace and stability in the region and beyond. The EU Integration has emerged as a shared key priority for the EU institutions and Western Balkan countries that are in different trajectories of the accession process due to several dynamics and developments within the Western Balkan countries, regional dynamics, and enlargement skepticism among EU member states. While a comprehensive academic thinking exists about the EU's enlargement policy at its approach to this region, this study aims to understand the internal/regional dynamics in the EU integration path of Western Balkan countries through an overview of their history of integration as well as the EC Progress Reports (2022) for each country. It combines theoretical and empirical knowledge to offer a descriptive analysis of internal and regional dynamics in the Western Balkans affecting their EU integration paths.
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.
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