The benefits of non-radial vs. radial super-efficiency DEA: an application to burden-sharing amongst NATO member nations

Using radial super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) has improved the discriminating performance across efficient decision-making units (DMUs). This paper extends the super-efficiency approach to a non-radial super-efficiency DEA (NRSE-DEA) index. NRSE-DEA is shown to be invariant to units of input (output) measurement. NRSE-DEA is illustrated here via an application to NATO burden-sharing assessment in which the DMUs are the member nations of NATO. The NRSE-DEA provides additional insights into the ranking of efficient countries, suggesting which are absorbing a particularly large share of NATO responsibilities. The NRSE-DEA generates a smaller set of efficient DMUs. This, in turn, provides more discriminatory power, a more accurate measure of super-efficiency, a more meaningful ranking of the efficient burden sharing countries, and a more reliable assessment of contributions by NATO members, amongst other policy issues.     

Business interests versus geopolitics: The case of the Siberian pipeline in the 1980s

In the years 1979–1984, the Soviet authorities and various coalitions of Western European companies, some of them subsidiaries of US corporations or benefiting from licences and patents, supported by state authorities, negotiated several agreements to provide credit and equipment for the building of a 3,500-mile-long gas pipeline between Northern Central Siberia and Western Europe. There was a fierce controversy between the US and European states and firms whether to honour such contracts or not amid renewed geopolitical tensions between East and West. Business history was thus intimately mixed with geopolitics and corporate commercial and industrial tactics were challenged by diplomatic ethics. While the rules of capitalism can once more be discussed, the numerous lobbying circuits are reconstituted in this article as a way to determine the potential freedom of action of day-to-day business when confronted with high-level politics.     

Prospective NATO or EU membership and institutional change in transition countries1

This article quantifies the impact of incentives related to potential membership on institutional change as measured by the World Bank Governance Indicators. Based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2008, we show that pre‐accession incentives provided by EU and NATO clearly matter for institutional development. In addition, path‐dependency determined by cultural norms may be overcome by economic liberalization, while foreign aid hampers institutional development.     

北约军事转型述评

冷战后推动北约军事转型的主要因素有结构性因素、观念性因素和功能性因素。北约军事转型主要包括安全观念更新、军事战略转变和军事体系改造三个方面,但北约军事转型仍存在一系列矛盾和难题,由于成员扩展、目标膨胀增大了转型难度,军事实践—跨区域军事行动是北约军事转型成败的"试金石"。积极、稳妥地同北约开展交流与合作符合中国的战略利益。     

Intergovernmental Organisations and Economic Freedom: Wise Technocrats or Black Helicopters?

This article explores the relationship between country membership in major intergovernmental organisations and economic freedom. While it makes no claims to have found any broad theoretically bound, robust causal mechanism, baseline fixed effects models establish relationships amongst economic freedom and membership in the EU, NATO, WTO, UN, OECD, World Bank, and IMF. Though the results are not simple, the strongest findings are negative relationships with the UN, IMF, and WTO, and positive relationships with the World Bank and possibly the EU.