International authority and its politicization

The article focuses on the politicization of international authority as a thus far little understood development in world politics. We first define the concept and show that there is an empirical trend towards politicization of international institutions. We then argue that the increasing authority of international institutions has led to their politicization and we relate this hypothesis to alternative explanations. The validity of the authority–politicization nexus is illustrated by the rise of international authority in parallel to politicization. We go on to distinguish different policy functions such as rule definition, monitoring, interpretation, and enforcement in order to show that especially those international institutions with a high level of authority meet with strong contestation of their competencies. We conclude the article by exploring various avenues for future politicization research.

The Cold War and its aftermath in the Americas: the search for a synthetic interpretation of U.S. policy

More than two decades have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transfer of the Cold War file from a daily preoccupation of policy makers to a more detached assessment by historians. Scholars of U.S.-Latin American relations are beginning to take advantage both of the distance in time and of newly opened archives to reflect on the four decades that, from the 1940s to the 1980s, divided the Americas, as they did much of the world. Others are seeking to understand U.S. policy and inter-American relations in the post-Cold War era, a period that not only lacks a clear definition but also still has no name. Still others have turned their gaze forward to offer policies in regard to the region for the new Obama administration. Numerous books and review essays have addressed these three subjects—the Cold War, the post-Cold War era, and current and future issues on the inter-American agenda. Few of these studies attempt, however, to connect the three subjects or to offer new and comprehensive theories to explain the course of U.S. policies from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present. Indeed, some works and policy makers continue to use the mind-sets of the Cold War as though that conflict were still being fought. With the benefit of newly opened archives, some scholars have nevertheless drawn insights from the depths of the Cold War that improve our understanding of U.S. policies and inter-American relations, but they do not address the question as to whether the United States has escaped the longer cycle of intervention followed by neglect that has characterized its relations with Latin America. Another question is whether U.S. policies differ markedly before, during, and after the Cold War. In what follows, we ask whether the books reviewed here provide any insights in this regard and whether they offer a compass for the future of inter-American relations. We also offer our own thoughts as to how their various perspectives could be synthesized to address these questions more comprehensively.

The politics of fiscal policy during economic downturns, 1981-2010

This article investigates fiscal policy responses to the Great Recession in historical perspective. We explore general trends in the frequency, size and composition of fiscal stimulus as well as the impact of government partisanship on fiscal policy outputs during the four international recessions of 1980-81, 1990-91, 2001-02 and 2008-09. Encompassing 17-23 OECD countries, our analysis calls into question the idea of a general retreat from fiscal policy activism since the early 1980s. The propensity of governments to respond to economic downturns by engaging in fiscal stimulus has increased over time and we do not observe any secular trend in the size of stimulus measures. At the same time, OECD governments have relied more on tax cuts to stimulate demand in the two recessions of the 2000s than they did in the early 1980s or early 1990s. Regarding government partisanship, we do not find any significant direct partisan effects on either the size or the composition of fiscal stimulus for any of the four recession episodes. However, the size of the welfare state conditioned the impact of government partisanship in the two recessions of the 2000s, with Left-leaning governments distinctly more prone to engage in discretionary fiscal stimulus and/or spending increases in large welfare states, but not in small welfare states.

Formal validation of automated policy refinement in the management of network security systems

Policy hierarchies and automated policy refinement are powerful approaches to simplify administration of security services in complex network environments. A crucial issue for the practical use of these approaches is to ensure the validity of the policy hierarchy, i.e. since the policy sets for the lower levels are automatically derived from the abstract policies (defined by the modeller), we must be sure that the derived policies uphold the high-level ones. This paper builds upon previous work on Model-based Management, particularly on the Diagram of Abstract Subsystems approach, and goes further to propose a formal validation approach for the policy hierarchies yielded by the automated policy refinement process. We establish general validation conditions for a multi-layered policy model, i.e. necessary and sufficient conditions that a policy hierarchy must satisfy so that the lower-level policy sets are valid refinements of the higher-level policies according to the criteria of consistency and completeness. Relying upon the validation conditions and upon axioms about the model representativeness, two theorems are proved to ensure compliance between the resulting system behaviour and the abstract policies that are modelled.

Can France really stop them? : A study grounded on the realist perspective about the French foreign policy towards Syria as the root cause of the Phenomenon of French Foreign Fighters

During the Syrian conflict the number of European Foreign Fighters has increased exponentially and has become an ever-growing concern for European policymakers. This phenomenon presents host of major security challenges for European policymakers and governments. Among European countries, France provides the highest number of citizens who have gone to Syria to fight against Assad´s regime. The French authorities have estimated that by mid-2014, over 700 French citizens have left France and travelled to Syria to fight. Historically France has had a relationship with Syria which started with its role as a border-drawing colonial power. Grounded in a framework of realism, that emphasizes nation-states as the primary actor within the international system, the analysis concentrates on the role of France´s foreign policy on the Syria as push factor for terrorism and radicalization. This paper attempts to determinate a specific correlation between the policy that France has been conducting towards Syria between 2000 and 2015, and the phenomenon of French Foreign Fighters. Findings suggest that France´s foreign policy towards Syria is the main root cause of the French Foreign Fighters phenomenon.

Implementing Policy Management through BDI

The requirement for Grid middleware to be largely transparent to individual users and at the same time act in accordance with their personal needs is a difficult challenge. In e-science scenarios, users cannot be repeatedly interrogated for each operational decision made when enacting experiments on the Grid. It is thus important to specify and enforce policies that enable the environment to be configured to take user preferences into account automatically. In particular, we need to consider the context in which these policies are applied, because decisions are based not only on the rules of the policy but also on the current state of the system. Consideration of context is explicitly addressed, in the agent perspective, when deciding how to balance the achievement of goals and reaction to the environment. One commonly-applied abstraction that balances reaction to multiple events with context-based reasoning in the way suggested by our requirements is the belief-desire-intention (BDI) architecture, which has proven successful in many applications. In this paper, we argue that BDI is an appropriate model for policy enforcement, and describe the application of BDI to policy enforcement in personalising Grid service discovery. We show how this has been implemented in the myGrid registry to provide bioinformaticians with control over the services returned to them by the service discovery process.

Are CGE Models still useful in economic policy making?

This paper develops background considerations to help better framing the results of a CGE exercise. Three main criticisms are usually addressed to CGE efforts. First, they are too aggregate, their conclusions failing to shed light on relevant sectors or issues. Second, they imply huge data requirements. Timeliness is frequently jeopardised by out-dated sources, benchmarks referring to realities gone by. Finally, results are meaningless, as they answer wrong or ill-posed questions. Modelling demands end up by creating a rather artificial context, where the original questions lose content. In spite of a positive outlook on the first two, crucial questions lie in the third point. After elaborating such questions, and trying to answer some, the text argues that CGE models can come closer to reality. If their use is still scarce to give way to a fruitful symbiosis between negotiations and simulation results, they remain the only available technique providing a global, inter-related way of capturing economy-wide effects of several different policies. International organisations can play a major role supporting and encouraging improvements. They are also uniquely positioned to enhance information and data sharing, as well as putting people from various origins together, to share their experiences. A serious and complex homework is however required, to correct, at least, the most dangerous present shortcomings of the technique.

Essays on international finance, default and inflation

This thesis is composed by three papers, each one of them corresponding to one chapter. The first and the second chapters are essays on international finance appraising default and inflation as equilibrium outcomes for crisis time, in particular, for confidence crisis time that leads to speculative attack on the external public debt issued by emerging economies. With this background in mind, welfare effects from adopting common currency (chapter 1) and welfare effects from increasing the degree of economic openness (chapter 2) are analyzed in numerical exercises, based on DSGE framework. Cross-countries results obtained are then presented to be compared with empirical evidence and to help on understanding past policy decisions. Some policy prescriptions are also suggested. In the third chapter we look to the inflation targeting regime applied to emerging economies that are subject to adverse shocks, like the external debt crisis presented in the previous chapters. Based on a more theoretical approach, we appraise how pre commitment framework should be used to coordinate expectations when policymaker announcement has no full credibility and self fulfilling inflation may be possible.

Relations between regulation, competition policy and consumer protection in telecommunications, electricity and water supply

The purpose of this article is to discuss the relations between regulation, competition policy and consumer protection these relations in three key sectors of Brazil’s infrastructure: telecommunications, electricity and water supply. A study of the literature points to two general principles. First, the need for consumer protection depends on the “degree of sovereignty” enjoyed by consumers, defined in terms of the cost of consumer organization, consumers’ ability to evaluate services, and the level of competition in each sector. Second, the less sovereignty consumers enjoy the more consumer protection institutions are involved with regulation agencies. The evidence for the Brazilian case apparently corroborates these points. In addition, it is important to stress that consumer complaints in regulated sectors seem to have increased more intensely than in others. The article is divided into three sections. Section 1 presents theoretical elements and aspects of the relations between regulation, competition policy and consumer protection evidenced by international experience. Section 2 analyzes the Brazilian experience and in particular the available statistics on consumer complaints about telecommunications, electricity and water supply, submitted to Fundação Procon-SP during the nineties. The last section points to possible configurations of the institutional relations between competition policy, regulation and consumer protection, showing how the existing configuration of these areas in the three infrastructure sectors discussed confirms that the theoretical framework proposed has reasonable predictive power.

Gender in international economic development projects: how is gender being institutionalized in the Inter-American Development Bank?

O Banco Interamericano de Desenvolvimento, o Banco Mundial, e outras organizações financiam iniciativas para acelerar o desenvolvimento da região da América Latina e Caribe. Antes do final da década de 80, vários projetos e políticas dessas instituições careciam de considerações ligadas à gênero e foram criticadas por essa falta (Flora, 1998). Em 1987, o BID publicou um documento sobre uma nova política operacional sobre mulheres e desenvolvimento e vem desde então buscando institucionalizar gênero e criar indicadores para medir os impactos relacionados à gênero em seus projetos. O objetivo dessa dissertação é explorar o tema de gênero no contexto do desenvolvimento internacional através de uma análise de como o Banco Interamericano de Desenvolvimento inclui gênero em suas operações. Após uma revisão literária sobre a importância de gênero e de bancos de desenvolvimento, essa dissertação irá analisar de que maneira gênero é incluído nas discussões dos projetos do Banco à nível institucional. A pesquisa será feita através de documentação disponível para o público geral, documentos internos e entrevistas em vídeo com pessoal do BID. Após uma análise dos dados coletados, recomendações para ações futuras serão dadas.

Financial constraints and house prices: an international perspective

In this paper, we show substantial empirical evidence that house prices are more sensitive to shocks to percapita income, in countries where housing finance is more developed. This result is consistent with the theoretical framework developed in the paper, where we study the impact ofprogressive relaxation of financiai constraints on housing demand and equilibrium house prices. Our results are consistent with recent literature on financiai constraints and business investment, which argues that the investment of less constrained firms can be more sensitive to changes in cash flow. More broadly, our results challenge the traditional view that financiai development leads to smaller fluctuations in key economic variables. The policy implications are c1ear and important. Even iffinancial development is desirable for other reasons, the potential associated increase in volatility should be an explicit policy concern.