Sharing Power: The Case for Public Consultations in Trade

Since the 1960s, public consultation has emerged as an important democratic tool, allowing governments to inform, debate, and learn from the general public. Since the 1980s, international trade agreements have wielded significant influence over domestic law making, as an ever more ‘comprehensive’ set of topics are regulated via treaty. In Canada, these two trends have yet to meet. Neither public nor Parliament is involved in trade policy making raising concerns about the democratic legitimacy of expansive trade agreements. Through the lens of the recent Canada-EU CETA, this article examines whether trade law’s consultation practices can be aligned with those of other federal government departments. We identify five key values that make consultations successful—diversity, education, commitment, accountability, and transparency—and consider the viability of their inclusion in trade consultations.

The EU Deep Trade Agenda: Law and Policy

Providing the first comprehensive examination of the key regulatory disciplines included in the new generation of EU free trade agreements (FTAs), this book investigates the EU's supposed deep trade agenda through a legal analysis of these FTAs. In doing so, Billy A. Melo Araujo determines whether there is any substance behind the EU's foreign policy rhetoric regarding the need to introduce regulatory issues within the remit of international trade law.

At a time when the EU is busily negotiating so-called 'mega-FTAs', such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the plurilateral Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), Melo Araujo offers a timely insight into the important questions raised by such FTAs, in particular concerning the future of the multilateral trade system, the loss of policy autonomy, and the democratic legitimacy of regulating through treaty-making. The book provides a detailed analysis of the regulatory disciplines included in the more recent EU FTAs and explores the possible implications of such disciplines. Offering a significant contribution to a wider debate, this is a must read for those interested in the legal dimension of the EU's deep trade agenda.

Employers, trade unions and concession bargaining in the Irish recession

The issue of concession bargaining between employers and unions during the Great Recession has received little attention in the research literature. This article presents a systematic analysis of the conduct of concession bargaining during the recession in Ireland in the context of three forms of concession bargaining identified in the international literature: integrative concession bargaining, distributive concession bargaining and ultra concession bargaining – each with different but overlapping sets of institutional foundations and implications for employers and trade unions. Drawing on focus groups of managers and union officials and a representative survey of employers, the article shows that distributive concession bargaining has been the predominant form in the Irish recession. This form of concession bargaining is likely to have few lasting direct effects on employer or union roles in collective bargaining but nevertheless appears to have significant indirect implications for the silent marginalization of unions in workplaces.

Trade union responses to ageing workforces in the UK and Germany

Ageing workforces are placing conflicting pressures on European trade unions in order to, on the one hand, protect pensions and early retirement routes, and, on the other, promote human resource management (HRM) policies geared towards enabling their older members to extend working life. Using interviews from German and United Kingdom (UK) trade unions, we discuss how unions are both constrained and enabled by pre-existing institutional structures in advocating approaches to age management. In Germany, some unions use their strong institutional role to affect public policy and industrial change at national and sectoral levels. UK unions have taken a more defensive approach, focused on protecting pension rights. The contrasting varieties of capitalism, welfare systems and trade unions’ own orientations are creating different pressures and
mechanisms to which unions need to respond. While the German inclusive system is providing unions with mechanisms for negotiating collectively at the national level, UK unions’ activism remains localized.

Energy versus data integrity trade-offs in embedded high-density logic compatible dynamic memories

Current variation aware design methodologies, tuned for worst-case scenarios, are becoming increasingly pessimistic from the perspective of power and performance. A good example of such pessimism is setting the refresh rate of DRAMs according to the worst-case access statistics, thereby resulting in very frequent refresh cycles, which are responsible for the majority of the standby power consumption of these memories. However, such a high refresh rate may not be required, either due to extremely low probability of the actual occurrence of such a worst-case, or due to the inherent error resilient nature of many applications that can tolerate a certain number of potential failures. In this paper, we exploit and quantify the possibilities that exist in dynamic memory design by shifting to the so-called approximate computing paradigm in order to save power and enhance yield at no cost. The statistical characteristics of the retention time in dynamic memories were revealed by studying a fabricated 2kb CMOS compatible embedded DRAM (eDRAM) memory array based on gain-cells. Measurements show that up to 73% of the retention power can be saved by altering the refresh time and setting it such that a small number of failures is allowed. We show that these savings can be further increased by utilizing known circuit techniques, such as body biasing, which can help, not only in extending, but also in preferably shaping the retention time distribution. Our approach is one of the first attempts to access the data integrity and energy tradeoffs achieved in eDRAMs for utilizing them in error resilient applications and can prove helpful in the anticipated shift to approximate computing.

Avoiding Negligence and Profusion: The failure of the Joint-Stock form in the Anglo-Indian Tea Trade, 1840-1870

In the 19th century, firms operating in the Anglo-Indian tea trade were organised using a variety ownership forms including the partnership, joint-stock and a combination of the two known as the Managing agency. Faced with both an increasing need for fixed capital and high agency costs caused by the distance between owners and managers, the firms adapted and increasingly adopted the hybrid managing agency model to overcome these problems. Using new data from Calcutta and Bengal Commercial Registers and detailed case studies of the Assam Company and Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co, this paper demonstrates that British entrepreneurs did not see the choice of ownership as a dichotomy or firm boundaries as fixed, but instead innovatively drew on the strengths of different forms of ownership to compete and grow successfully.

Executing bag of distributed tasks on the cloud: Investigating the trade-offs between performance and cost

Bag of Distributed Tasks (BoDT) can benefit from decentralised execution on the Cloud. However, there is a trade-off between the performance that can be achieved by employing a large number of Cloud VMs for the tasks and the monetary constraints that are often placed by a user. The research reported in this paper is motivated towards investigating this trade-off so that an optimal plan for deploying BoDT applications on the cloud can be generated. A heuristic algorithm, which considers the user's preference of performance and cost is proposed and implemented. The feasibility of the algorithm is demonstrated by generating execution plans for a sample application. The key result is that the algorithm generates optimal execution plans for the application over 91% of the time.

Movement of Capital and Trade in Services:Distinguishing Myth from Reality Regarding the GATS and the Liberalization of the Capital Account

This article will analyze the interplay between capital movements and trade
in services as structured in World Trade Organization (WTO) law, and it will
assess the implications of the capital account liberalization for the freedom of
WTO Members to pursue their economic policies. Although the movement
of capital is largely confined to the domain of international financial or monetary
policy, it is regulated by WTO law due to its role in the process of
financial services liberalization, which generally requires liberalized capital
flows. From a legal perspective, the interplay between capital movements
and trade in services requires striking a delicate balance between the right
of market access and the parallel right of economic stability. Indeed, a liberalized
regime for capital movements could pose serious stability problems
during times of crisis. For this reason, it is necessary that Members are able
to derogate from their obligations and adopt emergency measures.
Regulating the movement of capital in the General Agreement on Trade in
Services (GATS) requires stretching the regulatory oversight of WTO law
over different aspects of international economic policy. Indeed, capital movements are a fundamental component of the balance of payments and have a
major role in shaping monetary, fiscal, and financial policies. This article will
analyze how the discipline provided by the GATS on capital movements will
affect not only trade in services, but also the Members’ policy space on
monetary and fiscal policy. The article will conclude that while the GATS offers enough policy space for the maintenance of financial stability, it does
not fully take into consideration the need of Members to control capital
movements in order to conduct monetary policies.