The dynamism of emerging economies in recent years has sparked an impressive shift in economic power and in growth expectations from West to East and from North to South. The rise of new players has made the increasingly integrated and multipolar world even more complex. It has also posed many questions in regard to the existing model of global governance, including the WTO Dispute Settlement System. Gaining an importance in the world economy, how have new economic powerhouses fared in the System? This paper focuses on systematically significant emerging economies forming a part of the G20. Increasing involvement of the majority of these countries in the WTO Dispute Settlements can serve as evidence of their increasing role in comparison to the old GATT. However, what lies behind those numbers? The paper takes an empirical approach, describing participation levels of G20 emerging countries in the WTO Dispute Settlement based on statistical analysis. It will also look at what triggers participation as complainants domestically. Further, it will assess the precedential impact of WTO reports where G20 emerging countries were involved.
We develop a model of cross-border acquisitions in which the foreign acquirer's ownership choice reflects a trade-off between easing the target's credit constraints and the costs of operating in an environment with weak institutions. Data on domestic and foreign acquisitions in emerging markets over the period 1990–2007 support the model predictions. The share of full foreign acquisitions is higher in sectors more reliant on external finance, in countries with lower financial development, and in countries with higher institutional quality. Sectoral external finance dependence accentuates the effect of country-level financial development and institutional quality. By contrast, the level of foreign ownership in partial acquisitions is insensitive to institutional factors and depends weakly on financial factors.
The last few decades witnessed a dramatic change in public opinion towards gay people. This paper uses a difference-in-difference empirical strategy to investigate the hypothesis that the AIDS epidemic and the ensuing endogenous political process led to this transformation. We show that the process of change was discontinuous over time and show suggestive evidence that the '92 presidential election followed by the "don't ask, don't tell" debate led to a change in attitudes. In accordance with our hypothesis, this change was greater in states with high-AIDS rate. Our analysis suggests that if individuals in low-AIDS states had experienced the same average AIDS rate as a high-AIDS state, the change in their approval rate from the '70s to the '90s would have been 50 percent greater.