For multiple decades, activists have sought to institute an international legal regime that limits the ability of despotic governments to borrow money and then shift those obligations onto more democratic successor governments. Our goal in this article is to raise the possibility of an alternate legal path to raising the costs of borrowing for despotic regimes. All countries have systems of domestic laws that regulate agency relationships and try to deter corruption; otherwise the domestic economy would not function. Despotic governments, we conjecture, are especially likely to engage in transactions that are legally problematic. The reason being that despotic governments, by definition, lack the support of the populace; meaning that there is a high likelihood that actions that they take on behalf of the populace can be challenged as unrepresentative and contrary to the interests of the true principals. The foregoing conditions, if one translates them into the context of an ordinary principal-agent relationship, would constitute a voidable transaction in most modern legal systems. That means that if opposition parties in countries with despotic governments today were to monitor and make public the potential problems with debt issuances by their despotic rulers under their own local laws, it would raise the cost of capital for those despots. To support our argument, we use both the concrete example of the debt issuance shenanigans of the Maduro government in Venezuela and a more general analysis of the relationship between corruption, democracy and a nation's borrowing costs.
This case study discusses the complex socio-cultural and political dynamics of the Tibetan Diaspora in Switzerland from a multilayer perspective of history, human rights, law, international business, social and developmental economics. We focus on the village Rikon in Tösstal, Canton Zurich as an example of social embeddedness for refugees driven by the Kuhn-Rikon industry and discuss the conditions under which the Tibetan Community has been embedded and is today considered as one of the most successful diaspora communities in Switzerland. We further discuss social embeddedness and sustainability in the industrial context taking into account controversies and the historic, socio-cultural and political dimensions. This is a desk research.
The past five decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth in population. This has led to an ever-growing housing demand. It has been proposed that the use of bio-based materials, and specifically bamboo, can help alleviate the housing demand in a sustainable manner. The present paper aims to assess the environmental impact caused by using four different construction materials (bamboo, brick, concrete hollow block, and engineered bamboo) in buildings. A comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) was carried out to measure the environmental impact of the different construction materials in the construction of single and multi-storey buildings. The LCA considered the extraction, production, transport, and use of the construction materials. The IPCC2013 evaluation method from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC2013 was used for the calculations of CO2 emissions. The assessment was geographically located in Colombia, South America, and estimates the transport distances of the construction materials. The results show that transportation and reinforcing materials significantly contribute to the environmental impact, whereas the engineered bamboo construction system has the lowest environmental impact. The adoption of bamboo-based construction systems has a significant potential to support the regenerative development of regions where they could be used and might lead to long-lasting improvements to economies, environments, and livelihoods.
Die Agrarvorlagen, über die wir am 23. September abstimmen, gehen von einer Welt aus, die funktioniert wie im Globi-Buch – oder wie in den Klischees linker Geografielehrer.
Angesichts des Gezerres um die Auslieferung von Carles Puigdemont setzt sich in der europäischen Öffentlichkeit immer mehr das Narrativ durch, dass Katalonien ein Opfer des spanischen Imperialismus sei. Dabei erzählen die politisch demokratischen Realitäten mit Autonomierechten für die Regionen eine andere Geschichte.
Angesichts des Gezerres um die Auslieferung von Carles Puigdemont setzt sich in der europäischen Öffentlichkeit immer mehr das Narrativ durch, dass Katalonien ein Opfer des spanischen Imperialismus sei. Dabei erzählen die politisch demokratischen Realitäten mit Autonomierechten für die Regionen eine andere Geschichte.
The use of small diameter whole-culm (bars) and/or split bamboo (a.k.a. splints or round strips) has often been proposed as an alternative to relatively expensive reinforcing steel in reinforced concrete. The motivation for such replacement is typically cost—bamboo is readily available in many tropical and sub-tropical locations, whereas steel reinforcement is relatively more expensive—and more recently, the drive to find more sustainable alternatives in the construction industry. This review addresses such ‘bamboo-reinforced concrete’ and assesses its structural and environmental performance as an alternative to steel reinforced concrete. A prototype three bay portal frame, that would not be uncommon in regions of the world where bamboo-reinforced concrete may be considered, is used to illustrate bamboo reinforced concrete design and as a basis for a life cycle assessment of the same. The authors conclude that, although bamboo is a material with extraordinary mechanical properties, its use in bamboo-reinforced concrete is an ill-considered concept, having significant durability, strength and stiffness issues, and does not meet the environmentally friendly credentials often attributed to it.
This paper reviews the economic and historical literature on debt mutualization in Europe with reference to pre-1914 guaranteed bonds and current Eurobonds debate. We emphasize that, notwithstanding the differences in scale and nature, debt mutualization solutions similar to Eurobonds were tried before, and the closest historical examples to the present debate are the pre-1914 guaranteed bonds. We highlight three key characteristics of debt mutualization, which are apparent both in the current debate and in history: moral hazard, debt dilution and conditionality. We show that the fears about short-run dilution and moral hazard were not unknown to pre-1914 market participants. These problems were partly addressed by mechanisms of conditionality such as international financial control. The historical evidence suggests that the dilution of outstanding obligations may be overplayed in the current debate. On the contrary, creditors' moral hazard (ignored in current debt mutualization proposals) was as problematic as the usual debtor's moral hazard –especially when the groups of countries guaranteeing the bonds and the creditor nations did not overlap entirely.
