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This long-awaited volume featuring contributions from top African international lawyers and voices from the continent critically explores the notion of international investment law from an African perspective. It does so by confronting some of the very hard questions with regard to the relationship between international investment and development that have either eluded or not been properly addressed in contemporary scholarships. After many years of popularity, investment treaties have recently caused increasing concern among States, most prominently for the unbalanced nature of their content, the often inadequate safeguard of the regulatory powers of the host State and the shortcomings of international investment arbitration. Some States have upgraded their investment treaties, others have revised their investment treaty model, and others have opted for facilitation agreements. This innovative monograph critically explores all these contentious issues from a multidisciplinary perspective.
abuses. The chapter projects the confluence of business with human rights as the platform for sustainable investment and development in Nigeria. We demonstrate the commitment of the business community to human rights values and informed local communities as cornerstones of a redefined human rights community. 1 Reforms and investment environment In the
Over more than thirty years of reform and opening, the Chinese Communist Party has pursued the gradual marketization of China’s economy alongside the preservation of a resiliently authoritarian political system, defying long-standing predictions that ‘transition’ to a market economy would catalyse deeper political transformation. In an era of deepening synergy between authoritarian politics and finance capitalism, Communists constructing capitalism offers a novel and important perspective on this central dilemma of contemporary Chinese development. This book challenges existing state–market paradigms of political economy and reveals the Eurocentric assumptions of liberal scepticism towards Chinese authoritarian resilience. It works with an alternative conceptual vocabulary for analysing the political economy of financial development as both the management and exploitation of socio-economic uncertainty. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and over sixty interviews with policymakers, bankers, and former party and state officials, the book delves into the role of China’s state-owned banking system since 1989. It shows how political control over capital has been central to China’s experience of capitalist development, enabling both rapid economic growth whilst preserving macroeconomic and political stability. Communists constructing capitalism will be of academic interest to scholars and graduate students in the fields of Chinese studies, social studies of finance, and international and comparative political economy. Beyond academia, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of Chinese capitalism and its implications for an increasingly central issue in contemporary global politics: the financial foundations of illiberal capitalism.
strongly influenced the discussions creating the AU were Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo. Mbeki was concerned that the international perception of the OAU protecting African dictators hurt its goal of achieving economic development, and he was most interested in transforming the international image of Africa in order to enhance investment and development. To do this Mbeki drew on the long history of pan-Africanism, calling on African states to conclude the work of earlier pan-Africanist movements and re-invent the African state to take its rightful place in
have pushed projects for investment and development on the basis of inadequate research and over-hopeful assessment’, producing a rhythm of boom and bust since its colonisation in 1829. 5 Although Western Australia was long the ‘Cinderella’ of the Australasian colonies as a result, the contributors to this collection demonstrate that it was not alone in what might be seen as a broader
without the means to finance takeovers and to grow. The fourth concerns moral contamination. There has always been some moral ambiguity about financial dealing. The essence of profit in financial business is often information not available to others. Insider trading is everywhere condemned – and everywhere practised. Moreover, the need of big firms for large amounts of credit, whether for investment and development or for a takeover – has opened wide new opportunities for big profits for investment banks and others who can arrange the finance. Big profits, ever more
an investment and development strategy, lies at the heart of this book. As a mode of expansion it constituted the primary means by which the metropolitan provinces of the pre-1815 British and Irish Isles accessed the eastern hemisphere of England and later Britain’s world empire. The emergence of this economy of human capital and its capacity to accumulate financial surpluses offers a number of interpretative perspectives. Firstly, it provides a holistic understanding of the scale of Ireland, Scotland and Wales’s participation in a part of the British Empire that
significant turning point in relations between the CWC and the state, was the initial proposal for Targeted Investment in Disadvantaged Areas (TIDA) or, as it became, Revitalising Areas through Planning, Investment and Development (RAPID), and the subsequent difficulties over its implementation. This is dealt with in detail because it marks the start of a long-term push to re-assert the prerogative of representative government – central and local – over what was by then a substantial parallel infrastructure of local development with ‘participative’ governance and
lack a concrete agenda and a regular monitoring system. An extraordinary dense network of multilevel dialogue forums between the two parties contrasts with decreasing interdependences in terms of trade and other interdependences (migration flows, investment and development co-operation). Today the EU remains top trading partner for only Cuba and Brazil – all other countries have either China or the US as their top trade partner. In an inter-regional context characterised by declining trade relations and a closer partnership between Latin America
-term investment and development programme for Europe. (DGB, 2012) Voluntaristic nonsense. (IG Metall leader Bertold Huber on the 14 November 2012 European Day of Action and Solidarity) Germany is the archetypal core Eurozone country. After the launch of the euro, wage moderation helped guarantee competitive advantage for the country within EMU. A number of authorities have associated this outcome with the efficacy of German sectoral bargaining (Hancké, 2013 ; Hassel, 2014 ; Johnston