This article presents a case study of the effectiveness of the US unilateral trade and financial sanctions on Iran. To assess the trade sanctions’ effect, the US–Iran historical trade data are examined, and the economic cost of trade sanctions is measured by applying the concept of welfare loss. The financial sanctions’ impacts are evaluated by assessing the extra charges Iran has paid on its foreign debt obligations and for financing its oil development projects. At the end, the efficacy of the US sanctions policy towards Iran is evaluated. It is found that the financial sanctions have had a more powerful impact than the trade sanctions. The analysis also shows that the unilateral import sanctions on the fungible crude oil have been ineffective. It is concluded that, overall, the sanctions’ economic effect has been significant, while its political effect has been minimal. This article suggests that targeting the sanctions towards the ruling clergy can improve their effectiveness while lessening their side effects on the Iranian population. Precise smart sanctions to force the ruling clerics to step down will calm down Islamic fundamentalisms throughout the region and will contribute to peace and better relations with the West. 相似文献
This paper argues that despite Indonesia’s implementation of public sector reforms, the impact of these reforms has yet to achieve the goal of improving governance and preventing corruption. The obvious place to lay blame would be a lack of state capacity, but this study presents evidence to argue that the legacy of General Suharto’s authoritarian regime and the cultural ecology of Indonesian bureaucracy has compromised the government’s capacity to implement these public sector reforms in a meaningful way.
IMPACT
This paper highlights some fundamental points for public policy-makers using NPM techniques to improve accountability and to counter fraud. First, the cultural context and costs of reforms should be taken into account before implementing new accounting technology. Second, policy-makers should consult academic work on the implementation of new reporting systems and other NPM policies. Finally, the powers of local politicians (for example mayors or district heads) need to be controlled to ensure they do not undermine the role of accounting and auditing for better transparency, governance and corruption eradication. 相似文献
Quality & Quantity - This paper documents the cycles in corporate investments around national elections in Pakistan from 2000 to 2016. It employed the investment-Q model as the baseline... 相似文献
Government bonds are usually traded between the financial institutions and the Fed during the open market operations. These operations impact the bank reserves, subsequently influencing the monetary base. The monetary base and government bonds may portray a common trend and government debt could potentially bind the central bank to debt monetization. This paper, using monthly data on federal government debt and the monetary base from 1947:1 to 2018:10, investigates the presence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between the two variables and as to how the long-run equilibrium relationship vary in the short-run. Threshold cointegration tests find evidence of a long-run equilibrium relationship. Estimates of the threshold vector error-correction model find statistically significant evidence of contraction in the monetary base growth in the short-run in regime 1. In regime 2, the growth in the monetary base does not adjust to accommodate faster government debt growth. These estimates find no evidence of debt monetization or otherwise in either of the regimes in the United States. The Fed, by reducing the monetary base, perhaps focuses more on the inflation target. The findings also suggest a potential scenario where the Fed and the fiscal authority are not conjoined with each other in their operations. 相似文献
Regional trade in South America since independence has long been much smaller than would be expected if geography were the only constraint on trade. Several potential explanations exist, including low technological and demand complementarities; low productivity; and high natural and policy barriers to trade. Focusing on the latter explanations, policy makers have long advocated a South American/Southern Cone Free Trade Area—proposed as early as 1889. Would reductions in trade costs have been sufficient to raise trade significantly, or was trade low for other reasons? We study bilateral trade between 1910 and 1950, when large external shocks altered global supply and demand. These shocks help us show that intra‐regional trade could have been boosted by reductions in trade costs. Trade among Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru could have benefited from more benign trade policies or better infrastructure. Regional trade in textiles, which took off from the 1930s, supports our argument that trade improved when trade costs fell. 相似文献
We investigate and measure how a shift from a regime of common property to one of private ownership of fishing rights affected the safety of commercial fishing activity. To deal with overfishing and stock depletion of red snapper and grouper‐tilefish in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), various regulatory controls, most notably common quotas and seasonal closures, were introduced in the early 1990s. The resulting “fishing derbies” led to an increased number of accidents and fatalities. We show that the subsequently implemented individual fishing quota programs led to a sharp reduction in the number of fatalities, in large part because of lower pressure to make risky trip decisions, in particular under adverse weather conditions. 相似文献