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Taliban's return to power in August of 2021 caused everyone to ask why the two decades of institution building in Afghanistan failed. This book investigates the root causes of failed reforms in an important area of reform: trade and credit institutions. It explains why the efforts to reform and regulate the economic institutions in Afghanistan failed and what we can learn from their failure. It draws on more than eighty interviews with Afghan merchants, business leaders, money dealers, and government officials in five major provinces of Afghanistan to identify the barriers to access to credit and to understand the performance of formal institutions (banks) and their informal counterparts. Th...
"Taliban's return to power in August of 2021 caused everyone to ask why the two decades of institution building in Afghanistan failed. This book investigates the root causes of failed reforms in an important area of reform: trade and credit institutions. It explains why the efforts to reform and regulate the economic institutions in Afghanistan failed and what we can learn from their failure. It draws on more than eighty interviews with Afghan merchants, business leaders, money dealers, and government officials in five major provinces of Afghanistan to identify the barriers to access to credit and to understand the performance of formal institutions (banks) and their informal counterparts. T...
On the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, this book presents the first monographic study of the Hong Kong Basic Law as an economic document. The Basic Law codifies what Gonzalo Villalta Puig and Eric C Ip call free market constitutionalism, the logic of Hong Kong’s economic liberty as the freest market economy in the world. This book, which is the outcome of several years of study with the financial support of the General Research Fund of Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council, evaluates the public choice rationale of the Basic Law and its projection on the Hong Kong economy, with a focus on the policy de...
This book explores the adaptating process of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to a constantly changing trade and policy context. The adoption of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), a multilateral agreement with stand-alone rules and principles for the governance of trade and investment in services, represented a watershedin the history of global trade governance. Over three decades after the drafting of the Agreement, WTO Members struggle to deliver on the GATS’ mandate to achieve progressively higher levels of trade liberalisation in a radically different trade and policy landscape. Against this background, this book examines the contribution of the WTO neg...
Comparative law is a common subject-matter of research and teaching in many universities around the world, and the twenty-first century has aptly been termed 'the era of comparative law'. This Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Law presents a truly global perspective of comparative law today. The contributors are drawn from all parts of the world to provide different perspectives on how we understand the 'law' and how it operates in practice. In substance, the Handbook contains 36 chapters covering a broad range of topics, divided under the following headings: 'Methods of Comparative Law' (Part I), 'Legal Families and Geographical Comparisons' (Part II), 'Central Themes in Comparative Law' (Part III); and 'Comparative Law beyond the State' (Part IV).
This book investigates the cross-border trade in illicit drug crops in the global south. It exposes an important paradox: despite all the dangers and negative consequences of these criminal networks, in many cases, they also provide marginalised and excluded communities with important private sources of protection, investment, and employment. This book reconstructs and compares socioeconomic contexts, criminal careers, and changes in farmgate prices of illicit coca and opium poppy crops in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Colombia, and Bolivia. It investigates the politics of strange bedfellows; informal bankers-without-suits providing cross-border financial services to the undocumented and the unbanke...
No region in the world has been more hostile to democracy, more dominated by military and security institutions, or weaker on economic development and inclusive governance than the Middle East. Why have Arab states been so oppressively strong in some areas but so devastatingly weak in others? How do those patterns affect politics, economics, and society across the region? The state stands at the center of the analysis of politics in the Middle East, but has rarely been the primary focus of systematic theoretical analysis. Making Sense of the Arab State brings together top scholars from diverse theoretical orientations to address some of the most critically important questions facing the region today. The authors grapple with enduring questions such as the uneven development of state capacity, the failures of developmentalism and governance, the centrality of regime security and survival concerns, the excesses of surveillance and control, and the increasing personalization of power. Making Sense of the Arab State will be a must-read for scholars of the Middle East and of comparative politics more broadly.
The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was the result of declining active support for the government, and of waste and inefficiency in aid delivery. Yet, while corrosive, these problems were not in themselves sufficient to have brought about a collapse. To a significant degree, they were the result of early failings in institutional design, reflecting an American inclination to pursue short-term policy approaches that created perverse incentives—thus interfering with the long-term objective of stability. This book exposes the true factors underpinning Kabul’s fall. The Afghan Republic came under relentless attack from Taliban insurgents who depended critically on Pakistani support. It also suffered a creeping invasion that put the government on the back foot as the US tried and failed to deal with Pakistan’s perfidy. The fatal blow came when bored US leaders naively cut an exit deal with the enemy, fatally compromising the operation of the Afghan army and air force and triggering the final collapse, with top leaders at odds over whether to make a final stand in Kabul. The Afghan Republic did not simply decline and fall. It was betrayed.
These two groundbreaking volumes look at complex legal issues in the changing global economy from the perspective of Asia and/or Japan. Contributors scrutinize the past, present, and future and discuss what the global legal order in economic fields could be like by navigating uncertain and turbulent times. The books address six main themes: (1) Polarization and diversification of values, progress of regionalism and restructuring of multilateral rules, (2) Full-scale arrival of the digital economy and its impact, (3) Empowerment of private persons/entities, (4) Reconsideration of the concept of “territorial jurisdiction”, (5) Law of national security and rule in emergency situations, and (6) Values of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in trade and investment liberalization rules. The book also examines various legal problems under the COVID-19 crisis and suggests how the post COVID-19 global economic order will be from the perspective of Asia and/or Japan. This comprehensive insight will shed light on the intertwined and complex phenomena of the world economy and allow readers of business law and international law to have a better understanding of this volatile era.
Prabhash Ranjan explores the two competing narratives of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) and focuses on the six ISDS cases India lost. On the one hand, ISDS is chastised for affronting the State’s sovereign regulatory power – the Philip Morris narrative. On the other hand, ISDS allows investors to hold States accountable for abuse of public power – the Yukos narrative. This book argues that India’s ISDS story resembles the Yukos narrative. With a focus on six case studies, this book examines the reasons that led to foreign investors suing India and the following developments. These ISDS claims are divided into four categories: a case arising from judicial actions, claims bro...