Interview with James Zhan
Foreign investment holds enormous potential for women’s empowerment through the creation of formal jobs and business linkages – and this is good for development. But a recent study by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) finds that the operations of multinational companies can also increase women’s vulnerability in the workplace. The World Financial Review quizzes UNCTAD’s Investment and Enterprise Director, James Zhan, who guided the study, about its findings and the policy directions it suggests to guide firms in the right direction.
Due to Russia’s geographic scale and military might, it amplifies typical problems of many petrostates from Venezuela to Nigeria to Iran. In an attempt to theorise these multiple problems Alexander Etkind introduces the concept of a hyper-extractive state, whose elite gets their wealth directly from natural resources with miniscule participation from the people. Is demise inevitable for these hyper-extractive states?
By Kaoru Hosono and Daisuke Miyakawa
Below Kaoru Hosono and Daisuke Miyakawa examine the impacts of financial shocks arising from two earthquakes in Japan on firms’ financing and activities. On one hand, they find that bank damages from the 1995 Kobe earthquake significantly lowered the investment and export of undamaged firms transacting with damaged banks. On the other hand, they find that bank damages from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake did not affect bank borrowing, even reduced the probability of firms’ bankruptcy, and further weakened the tendency for more efficient firms to be less likely to go bankrupt. Their results suggest temporary and modest government support after a disaster is desirable.
By Andrew I Gavil and Harry First
For three decades Microsoft has been engaged with the global system for enforcing competition policy. In an excerpt from their new book The Microsoft Antitrust Cases, the authors Andrew I. Gavil and Harry First examine the remedies put in place and the further lessons we can learn from these antitrust cases.
Asia Development Politics Cheap and Clean: Attitudes to Energy in a USA Concerned with Climate Change Russia Banking Regulation
China
China Looks West: What Is at Stake in Beijing’s “New Silk Road” Project
Flynt Leverett, Hillary Mann Leverett
and Wu Bingbing
Transformation of Financial Services in Northeast Asian Banks: An Unexpected, but Pleasant, Cultural Surprise
Jung Kee Hong and You-il Lee
“Empowering Women Makes Economic Sense”
Interview with James Zhan
Failed Statebuilding versus Peace Formation: The Consequences and Implication over the Last 25 Years
Oliver P. RichmondEnergy
Global Energy Dilemmas: Revisited
Michael Bradshaw
Stephen Ansolabehere and David Konisky
Putin’s Russia: An Exemplary Case of Hyper-Extractive State
Alexander Etkind
Natural Disasters, Bank Damages, and Firm Activities
Kaoru Hosono and Daisuke Miyakawa
Lessons from the Microsoft Antitrust Cases
Andrew I Gavil and Harry First
By Joe Studwell
Deregulating finance for short-term gains may work in developed Western economies, and even then only at times, but premature deregulation has wreaked havoc in many poorer nations. Here Joe Studwell looks to East Asian economic history to argue that what developing economies really need is tight central-government financial control to support industrial and agricultural development.
By Henrietta Morris
In the early 1960s, developing countries began to raise concerns regarding their place in international trade, calling for a conference whose specific focus would be addressing these concerns. And thus the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was born. Its mission, as stated in 1964, to create “a better and more effective system of international economic co-operation, whereby the division of the world into areas of poverty and plenty may be banished and prosperity achieved by all”.
