This book offers a compelling new interpretation of the proliferation of regional trade agreements (RTAs) at the end of the twentieth century. Challenging the widespread assumption that RTAs should ...be seen as fundamentally similar economic initiatives to pursue free trade, Francesco Duina proposes that the world is reorganizing itself into regions that are highly distinctive and enduring. With evidence from Europe, North America, and South America, he challenges our understanding of globalization, the nature of markets, and the spread of neoliberalism.
The pursuit of free trade is a profoundly social process and, as such, a unique endeavor wherever it takes place. In an unprecedented comparative analysis, the book offers striking evidence of differences in the legal architectures erected to standardize the worldview of market participants and the reaction of key societal organizations--interest groups, businesses, and national administrations--to a broader marketplace. The author gives special attention to developments in three key areas of economic life: women in the workplace, the dairy industry, and labor rights. With its bold and original approach and its impressive range of data,The Social Construction of Free Traderepresents a major advance in the growing fields of economic sociology and comparative regional integration.
In 1992 David Owen was appointed the EU Co-Chairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, working alongside the UN’s Co-Chairman, Cyrus Vance. The papers collected here provide ...fascinating primary source material and an insider’s account of the intense international political activity at that time, which culminated in the Vance-Owen Peace Plan (VOPP). At a time when the international community is looking again at whether and how the Dayton Accords and the 1995 division into two entities should be adjusted in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Owen highlights elements of the VOPP which are of continuing relevance and which can guide political debate and decisions in 2012 and thereafter. Sadly, Bosnia-Herzegovina is still deeply divided, a direct consequence of not imposing the VOPP. The book reminds the international community and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that a unified structure for their country is still achievable.
Empirically rich with highly detailed case studies on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), this comprehensive volume studies the relationship between regionalism and state behavior. The ...traditional pattern of past studies of regionalism and regional integration has been to understand how state strategies molded the dynamics of an integration process. This study examines the impact of regionalism on the policy preferences of member states. This volume offers three theoretical contributions: ? an empirical test of the convergence hypothesis ? studies of institutions and their impact on domestic politics ? an examination of foreign policy preferences and the neo-functionalist concept of 'spill-over' Recommended reading for students of regionalism, international political economy, international trade, foreign policy and North American studies.
We perform a comparative spatial analysis of inter-seismic earthquake production of rupture area and volume in southern California using observed seismicity and basic scaling relations from ...earthquake phenomenology and fracture mechanics. The analysis employs background events from a declustered catalog in the magnitude range 2≤M<4 to get temporally stable results representing activity during a typical inter-seismic period on all faults. Regions of high relative inter-seismic damage production include the San Jacinto fault, South Central Transverse Ranges especially near major fault junctions (Cajon Pass and San Gorgonio Pass), Eastern CA Shear Zone (ECSZ) and the Imperial Valley – Brawley seismic zone area. These regions are correlated with low velocity zones in detailed tomography studies. A quasi-linear zone with ongoing damage production extends between the Imperial fault and ECSZ and may indicate a possible future location of the main plate boundary in the area. The regions around the 1992 M6.1 Joshua Tree, M7.3 Landers and M6.3 Big Bear earthquakes have background seismic activity before 1990. This may represent a regional weakening process by damage production in future rupture zones. The depth of background seismicity and damage production decreases steadily from SW of the coastline to NE of the San Andreas fault, and also to the SE near the US–Mexico border. The seismicity and rock damage become more pronounced and continuous along-strike of main faults with increasing depth.
•We analyze inter-seismic earthquake production of rock damage in southern California.•Regions with ongoing activity beyond fluctuations associated with large events are highlighted.•The results can help separating rock damage and composition in seismic imaging studies.•Regions around several M>6 earthquakes have background damage production before their occurrence.
I study the overstatement of economic growth in autocracies by comparing self-reported GDP figures to night-time light recorded by satellites from outer space. I show that the night-time-light ...elasticity of GDP is larger in authoritarian regimes, even accounting for differences in multiple country characteristics. This autocracy gradient in the elasticity is greater when the incentive to exaggerate economic growth is stronger or when the constraints on exaggeration are weaker. The results suggest that autocracies overstate yearly GDP growth by approximately 35%. Adjusting the data for manipulation leads to a more nuanced view on the recent economic success of autocracies.
Even as the evidence of global warming mounts, the international response to this serious threat is coming unraveled. The United States has formally withdrawn from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol; other key ...nations are facing difficulty in meeting their Kyoto commitments; and developing countries face no limit on their emissions of the gases that cause global warming. In this clear and cogent book-reissued in paperback with an afterword that comments on recent events--David Victor explains why the Kyoto Protocol was never likely to become an effective legal instrument. He explores how its collapse offers opportunities to establish a more realistic alternative.
Everyday Revolutionariesprovides a longitudinal and rigorous analysis of the legacies of war in a community racked by political violence. By exploring political processes in one of El Salvador's ...former war zones-a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation-Irina Carlota Silber offers a searing portrait of the entangled aftermaths of confrontation and displacement, aftermaths that have produced continued deception and marginalization.Silber provides one of the first rubrics for understanding and contextualizing postwar disillusionment, drawing on her ethnographic fieldwork and research on immigration to the United States by former insurgents. With an eye for gendered experiences, she unmasks how community members are asked, contradictorily and in different contexts, to relinquish their identities as "revolutionaries" and to develop a new sense of themselves as productive yet marginal postwar citizens via the same "participation" that fueled their revolutionary action. Beautifully written and offering rich stories of hope and despair,Everyday Revolutionariescontributes to important debates in public anthropology and the ethics of engaged research practices.
We document a positive relation between firm‐specific investor sentiment (FSIS) and the value of cash. We also show that FSIS has a stronger positive effect on the value of cash than the value of ...other types of assets, suggesting that our finding is not a simple reflection of firm‐level overvaluation. Our finding is robust to alternative measures of change in cash, different cash regimes, FSIS measured by order imbalance, news sentiment and the tone of earnings conference call transcripts and controlling for market‐wide sentiment, institutional monitoring, corporate governance and endogeneity. Cross‐sectional analyses suggest that the positive relation between FSIS and the value of cash is stronger for firms with better future growth opportunities, larger investment, more innovation activities, higher information asymmetry and more liquid stocks. Overall, our paper sheds light on the important role of FSIS in corporate outcomes.
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