The Contested Sovereignty of the Firm

This paper suggests that the firm can be analysed as a regulated system of contested sovereignty. The economic literature on the firm is categorised in terms of four different perspectives on sovereignty identified using the twin factors of power and authority. But rather than any single perspective being identified as analytically superior, it is argued that a system of contested sovereignty should be based on all four perspectives. Following this, a Polanyi-inspired analysis of firm regulation is presented in which the regulation of the firm emerges to control the costs of free markets. However, this regulation depicts firm sovereignty as complex and contested rather than simply an optimal response to market failures.     

Mixed Legacies in Contested Borderlands: Skardu and the Kashmir Dispute

The article explores the sense of belonging of people from Skardu, a border town located in the Gilgit-Baltistan region, a territory administered by Pakistan but which is disputed by India for its being part of the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. Neither full Pakistani citizens, nor identifying themselves with Kashmiri nationalism, the people of Gilgit-Baltistan lack of a common sense of belonging. The uncertain future of the territorial entity contributes to this, despite transformations already at work there. By examining the social and material landscape of Skardu town, and therefore using a micro-level perspective, the article aims to address issues of identity and security connected with broader constructed narratives of intrastate or interstate conflict, such as the Kashmir dispute within the wider geopolitical imaginary of India–Pakistan rivalry.     

Contested Continuity: Competing Explanations of the Evolution of the Corporate Form

The history of the electric utility industry provides the occasion for testing competing explanations of the emergence and persistence of the corporate form. This industry, characterized by capital intensity, intense competition, and attractive investment opportunities — along with rapid technological change as well as legal and regulatory changes — provides lessons for newer industries with network externalities. Drawing on the work of institutional economics and business history, I examine the evolution of the electric power industry in the US to test competing explanations of choices of finance and technology.     

The Use of Intangible Benefits for Promoting Contested Policies: The Case of Geopolitical Benefits and the Israeli Gas Policy

ABSTRACT

The evaluation of many contested projects and policies often includes intangible benefits. Geopolitics represents one type of intangible benefit. Despite a few examples on the use of geopolitics to promote contested projects, there is a gap in the literature on how geopolitical argumentation is constructed for the purpose of promoting resource-based policies. Hence, the aim of this study is to use an Israeli case study to examine how geopolitical constructs are used to promote competing energy policies concerning recent gas discoveries and to provide rudimentary insights on the implications for policy making. It was found that the geopolitical rationale was an appealing rhetorical device for all players as it is both unquantifiable and hence difficult to disprove and is rooted in the Israeli societal context. As a result, coalitions built their own geopolitical rationales, each with its own rhetorical tools. These literary tools were often embedded in narratives of power and geographical language with emotional resonance. Yet, the Israeli case demonstrates that geopolitical constructs come at a detrimental price as they promote censorship and exclusion of the public from the process.     

Reflections on Werner Bonefeld's ‘Freedom and the Strong State: On German Ordoliberalism' and the Continuing Importance of the Ideas of Ordoliberalism to Understand Germany's (Contested) Role in Resolving the Eurozone Crisis

A historian and a political scientist take issue with Bonefeld's interpretation of ordoliberalism from the viewpoint of our historical knowledge of the Freiburg School. Our major disagreement is with Bonefeld's underlying assumption that the ideas of the Freiburgers on strong state authority were very durable and continued to be so across a divide as great as that of 1945 when a more strictly chronological use of the sources would have shown significant transformations. The earlier quasi proto-fascist ideas of the strong state were replaced with a much more muted role for the state in providing a constitutional framework in which the market forces could develop. It is through this break with their own initial sympathy with Hitler's strong state that the ideas of the Freiburger Ordnungspolitik underwent profound changes to a constitutional state as guarantor of economic stability, and only in this changed form do the ideas of a legal rule-based system of the Freiburger ordoliberals continue to play an important role in understanding Germany's role in resolving the Euro crisis. It is this significant shift, in the ideas of ordoliberals, that is missing in Bonefeld's article.     

Health, Wealth, Fertility, Education, and Inequality

The authors use a new cross-country dataset to estimate the strength of the links between different dimensions of social and economic development, including indicators of health, fertility, and education, as well as material wellbeing. This differs from previous studies in employing data for different income groups in each country in order to provide direct evidence on factors driving inequality, and in using a unique measure of material wellbeing that does not rely on PPP comparisons.     

Inflation,money, interest rate,exchange rate,and casuality: the case of Egypt,Morocco, and Tunisia

This study provides further evidence of the inflationary efects of the rates of growth of money supply, gross domestic product, efective exchange rate, and imported inflation for Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia using quarterly data from 1964 to 1990. In addition, it examines the Granger causality between inflation and money supply as well as between inflation and the real exchange rate in the countries under consideration. Most of the results are consistent with extant theory and empirical evidence.     

IPR,Trade, FDI,and Technology Transfer

In this survey, we discuss how intellectual property rights （IPR） protection in the South affects trade flows, foreign direct investment （FDI） flows, and technology transfers from the North to the South. We also discuss optimal IPR policies and their effect on innovation. Our discussion covers both theoretical studies and empirical evidence. This survey is both comprehensive and critical. It aims to give readers the current state of IPR and globalization literature. Some issues have been studied more thoroughly, whereas for others the surface has only been scratched upon. This survey gives readers a clearer picture of the literature and may help them find future research topics.     

Trade,Remittances, Institutions,and Economic Growth

This paper empirically investigates the role of trade, remittances, and institutions in economic development in a large sample of developing countries using recently developed instruments for all these variables. Both cross-country (over 30 years) and dynamic panel data (over 5-year periods) regressions of growth rates on instrumented trade, remittances, and institutions provide evidence of a significant impact of trade, institutions, and remittances on growth. While institutions foster growth, remittances hamper it. The effect of trade on growth is positive in cross-sectional regressions but ambiguous in dynamic panel data regressions. These results are indicative of a more important role for trade in explaining growth in the very long run compared with over shorter horizons.