A Cosmopolitan Court for Transnational Corporate Wrongdoing: Why Its Time Has Come

In the absence of any institution for imposing legal liability on global business, the idea of instituting a cosmopolitan court for international corporate offenses is advocated. The proposal is then critically examined and defended in light of a number of key objections. Having both civil and criminal jurisdiction, such a tribunal could benefit domestic and international legal systems, multinational corporations, and victims of transnational and international corporate misdeeds. By laying down minimal global standards of corporate liability, resolving conflicts between the regulatory activities of national legal systems, and affording redress for aggrieved parties in countries with inadequate legal infrastructures, the tribunal would promote the objectives of compensatory, distributive, procedural and retributive justice at the global level. Moreover, the court would assist corporations by translating compliance with minimum ethical standards to the bottom line. Ethical corporations will gain competitive advantage relative to unscrupulous firms, since the latter'ss activities will be sanctioned. The international community need not leave obedience to basic norms up to the voluntary good-will and discretion of multinational firms.     

Managing change in South Africa: developing people and organizations

The interaction of Western and non-Western management practices is a growing issue in transitional and emerging economies through the world, not least within the multicultural context of South Africa. This is characterized in this article as an antithesis between instrumental and humanistic views of people in organizations, which is fundamental to the way change is being managed. In order to better understand how the management of people and change may be related to this antithesis, the results of an exploratory study, involving focus-group methods with thirty managers, and of a survey of some 200 employees in participating organizations are presented. Indicative results suggest that, despite best efforts from organizations which may represent best management and development practice, issues concerning the value attached to people in these organizations are still not being properly addressed. It may be only through understanding and reconciling this antithesis that change concerning the development of people, in South Africa as well as in other emerging economies, may be successfully achieved.     

The interchangeability of alternative measures of permanent income in regression analysis

Recent years have witnessed a sharp rise in crime levels in most of the societies across the world. Apart from the increasing direct costs involved in the containment/control of crime, the subject societies also bear considerable psychic costs (results of fear of crime or the after effects of crime). These costs of crime are perceived to be higher in developing economies. Economists consider crime to be rational behaviour under specific scenarios is sparse. In this paper, we characterize the rising-crime scenarios in terms of several demographic and economic variables. Regression models relating different types of crime to these societal variables are fitted, using crime data from Malaysia (from published records of the Government of Malaysia). The model fit is found to be extremely good with most of these observational data.