An Institutional Analysis of Environmental Pollution Disputes in Taiwan: Cases of 'Self-Relief'

During the late 1980s and early 1990s in Taiwan, people's protests against environmental pollution often took the form of "self-relief," meaning that they attempted to fight polluters using their own resources, without relying on legal or administrative procedures. Why did such an extreme form of disputes become so widespread? What institutional changes did these movements bring about? These questions are analyzed using the analytical framework of "law and economics." Our research shows that "self-relief" functioned to a certain extent as a means of realizing quick compensation for victims, and for reflecting the opinions of local people concerning development projects; in addition, it served to promote the formulation of law and administrative systems. However, as it was based on direct negotiations between the parties concerned, the outcome of each dispute only reflected the transient balance of forces, and the experience gained in negotiations was not accumulated as a social norm.

Chairmanship in ASEAN+3:A Shared Rule of Behavior

ASEAN+3 is a cooperative framework among ASEAN members and the countries of Japan, China and Korea. It functions at the senior official, ministerial and summit levels. This article concerns how institutions in ASEAN+3 affect development of the direction and nature of this framework. ASEAN+3 is regarded as a loose framework that has regularized meetings as its main activity but has no organizational settings such as the secretariat. Little institutional analysis has been conducted on the development of this framework. This article introduces 'Chairmanship' as an analytical concept in which the chair or chairing member plays an important role in preparing and managing meetings. 'Chairmanship' is therefore an institution with an organizational element. It is also a shared rule of behavior among member states in that the chair's roles are not explicitly written in documents. Thus, it can be argued that the ASEAN+3 framework has an institution with an organizational element that affects development of its characteristics.

Institutional Development of Capital Markets in Nine Asian Economies

This paper is conducting a comparative analysis of the development of securities markets in nine Asian economies: Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and China. This study focuses on two aspects: the history and institutional development of securities market, such as legal systems, payment systems, etc. From the analyses, this paper reveals several common features of the development of securities markets in nine Asian economies. First, most economies had an informal capital market in the early period of their history. Second, the background of the foundation of their official markets was influenced by experiences of colonization. Third, most governments recognized the importance of the capital market for economic development and had a positive attitude in promoting the market. Fourth, statistics clearly showed that most economies experienced several booms in their capital market from the late 1980s.

The causal relationships in mean and variance between stock returns and foreign institutional investment in India

This paper examines the causalities in mean and variance between stock returns and Foreign Institutional Investment (FII) in India. The analysis in this paper applies the Cross Correlation Function approach from Cheung and Ng (1996), and uses daily data for the timeframe of January 1999 to March 2008 divided into two periods before and after May 2003. Empirical results showed that there are uni-directional causalities in mean and variance from stock returns to FII flows irrelevant of the sample periods, while the reverse causalities in mean and variance are only found in the period beginning with 2003. These results point to FII flows having exerted an impact on the movement of Indian stock prices during the more recent period.

Determinants of government consumption expenditure in developing countries : a panel data analysis

The paper focuses on the recent pattern of government consumption expenditure in developing countries and estimates the determinants which have influenced government expenditure. Using a panel data set for 111 developing countries from 1984 to 2004, this study finds evidence that political and institutional variables as well as governance variables significantly influence government expenditure. Among other results, the paper finds new evidence of Wagner's law which states that peoples' demand for service and willingness to pay is income-elastic hence the expansion of public economy is influenced by the greater economic affluence of a nation (Cameron1978). Corruption is found to be influential in explaining the public expenditure of developing countries. On the contrary, size of the economy and fractionalization are found to have significant negative association with government expenditure. In addition, the study finds evidence that public expenditure significantly shrinks under military dictatorship compared with other form of governance.

Inter-industry analysis and monetary policy evaluations in the Korean flow of funds accounts

This study mainly aims to provide an inter-industry analysis through the subdivision of various industries in flow of funds (FOF) accounts. Combined with the Financial Statement Analysis data from 2004 and 2005, the Korean FOF accounts are reconstructed to form "from-whom-to-whom" basis FOF tables, which are composed of 115 institutional sectors and correspond to tables and techniques of input–output (I–O) analysis. First, power of dispersion indices are obtained by applying the I–O analysis method. Most service and IT industries, construction, and light industries in manufacturing are included in the first quadrant group, whereas heavy and chemical industries are placed in the fourth quadrant since their power indices in the asset-oriented system are comparatively smaller than those of other institutional sectors. Second, investments and savings, which are induced by the central bank, are calculated for monetary policy evaluations. Industries are bifurcated into two groups to compare their features. The first group refers to industries whose power of dispersion in the asset-oriented system is greater than 1, whereas the second group indicates that their index is less than 1. We found that the net induced investments (NII)–total liabilities ratios of the first group show levels half those of the second group since the former's induced savings are obviously greater than the latter.