Principal-Agent Theory and the World Trade Organization: Complex Agency and ‘Missing Delegation’

This paper analyses the World Trade Organization within a principal-agent framework. The concept of complex agency is introduced to focus on the variety of actors that comprise an international organization. Special attention is paid to the relationship between contracting parties’ representatives and the Secretariat. In the empirical part, the paper analyses the role of the Secretariat in assisting negotiations and presents evidence of declining influence. It is shown how principal-agent theory can contribute to addressing this ‘puzzle of missing delegation’. The paper concludes with a cautionary note as to the ‘location’ of international organizations’ emerging pathologies and calls for additional research to address the relationship between material and social sources to explain behaviour of the key actors within the complex agency.

Trade versus Culture : The Policy of Cultural Exception and the World Trade Organization

This chapter is a contribution to the Palgrave Handbook of European Media Policy (co-edited by Pauwels, Donders & Loisen). It is the chapter’s purpose to examine the proponents of the cultural exception policy, their strategies and demands, and to explore how they came to be reflected in the law and policy of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The chapter also looks at the current state of affairs, as although WTO law has not undergone any substantial amendments since its entry into force in 1995, the media landscape has in the meantime been truly transformed, in some aspects in a revolutionary manner. The broader picture of global governance has not remained still either, with new and emergent powers, changing mechanisms of rule-making and taking.

Famine responses in the world food crisis 1972–5 and the World Food Conference of 1974

In the early 1970s, there was scarcity in the world grain market, soaring prices and famines in several countries of Asia and Africa. The commercial grain trade was expanded at the expense of food aid. After a brief look at policies addressing the situation in terms of modernised methods of agricultural production for small producers, the article sketches how such policies also affected relief efforts, from the low availability for food aid, the provision of food that was not useful and late deliveries through efforts to tie food aid to local changes in agricultural production and settlement patterns. In part, food aid thus reinforced processes of social differentiation that had contributed to causing the famines in the first place.

Conventionalism and the World as Bare Sense-Data

We are confident of many of the judgements we make as to what sorts of alterations the members of nature’s kinds can survive, and what sorts of events mark the ends of their existences. But is our confidence based on empirical observation of nature’s kinds and their members? Conventionalists deny that we can learn empirically which properties are essential to the members of nature’s kinds. Judgements of sameness in kind between members, and of numerical sameness of a member across time, merely project our conventions of individuation. Our confidence is warranted because apart from those conventions there are no phenomena of kind-sameness or of numerical sameness across time. There is just “stuff” displaying properties. This paper argues that conventionalists can assign no properties to the “stuff” beyond immediate phenomenal properties. Consequently they cannot explain how each of us comes to be able to wield “our conventions”.

Inflation targeting in Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines : the impact on business cycle synchronization between each country and the world

This paper empirically analyzes whether and to what extent the adoption of inflation targeting (IT) in Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines has affected their business cycle synchronization with the rest of the world. By employing the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) model developed by Engle (2002), we find that IT in Asia has little effect on international business cycle synchronization and the effect is positive in some of the countries, if any. These findings basically seem to be consistent with the evidence from relevant literature.

Europe and the World or Snow White and the Seven Fallacies. Egmont Paper No. 61, October 2013

None.