Suchergebnisse

Discussion of investment facilitation at the WTO should enhance the development dimension of the Trade Facilitation Agreement. It should be focused, open-ended, inclusive, and allow for individual country implementation capacity. It should engage trading partners in capacity building of weaker members. It should envisage a counterpart Investment Facilitation Agreement.

Empirical tests of the human capital hypothesis—that education
increases an individual's income—have been undertaken in several
countries with favourable results [13]. These results show that (1)
income differentials between individuals of different educational levels
are wide; (2) the differentials establish shortly after the initial
years of work and maintain through the duration of the life cycle; (3)
the differentials are greater in developing countries than in developed
countries; (4) the returns to education, after allowing for educational
costs, exceed the returns to physical capital investment in developing
countries; (5) the highest returns are to primary education; and (6)
private returns exceed social returns. Which, if not all, of these
results are true for Pakistan is not known. This paper yields such
comparative results through an application of the human capital
hypothesis to Rawalpindi City. The data for Rawalpindi are for males and
derive from a socio-economic survey conducted by the Pakistan Institute
of Development Economics in 1975.

This is a straightforward, scholarly, and fairly complete
treatment of the case for adopting used machinery in economic
development. As Pakistan does not at present officially encourage the
import of used machinery it is worthwhile to state James's case in
summary form.

An increasingly important issue of trade and development is
the high cost of the transfer of technology from the developed countries
to the develop¬ing world. Rough estimates suggest that payments by
developing countries for the use of patents, licenses, trademarks, and
managerial and technical services amounted to about SI.5 billion in 1968
[19]. For Pakistan, the issue is of particular importance.1 Based on
conservative estimates by Mahbub ul Haq, Pakistan's annual payments for
technology transfer in 1965-70 averaged $102 million; this
magnitude—again reflecting payments for the use of patented knowledge
and technical services only—represents a payment rate of almost 16
percent of annual export receipts [19]. If other costs such as profit
repatria¬tion and transfer pricing are included, the payment rate is
substantially higher.

1. The United Nations Centre on transnational corporations -- 2. The transnational corporation : separating fact from fiction -- 3. Code of conduct : attempting an international regulatory framework -- 4. Transparency and disclosure : lifting the veil from corporate reporting -- 5. Activism and engagement : setting standards for corporate behavior -- 6. Country policies : maximizing the positive, minimizing the negative -- 7. Corporate conduct and the public interest.

The United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) was established in 1975 and abolished in 1992. It was an early effort by the UN to address the overlapping issues of national sovereignty, corporate responsibility and global governance. These issues have since multiplied and deepened with globalization. This book recounts the UNCTC experience and its lessons for international organizations. This book is not only an insider perspective by two former staff but also a collective memoir of the UNCTC as an international organization that attempted with varying success to defuse the clash between corporates and states that erupted in the turbulent 1970s. This personal account of the UNCTC is a mixture of history, analysis, reflections, and critical commentaries, told in different voices that penetrate the bland persona of international civil service. In this retelling, the authors seek to address misconceptions amongst the more general literature and to seek to provide accounts of both its positive and negative features. The UNCTC experience recounted in this book holds valuable lessons for international organization and will be of interest to student, scholars and practitioners alike.

The global challenges of poverty, sustainable development, and climate change are being tackled with renewed vigour in international negotiations of sustainable development goals for 2016–2030. New commitments also mean increased demands for investment—quantitatively more and qualitatively more sustainable. The latter depends on unleashing the inherent package of benefits embedded in capital and on creating shared value for all stakeholders. Much evidence suggests that sustainability can be commercially viable under appropriate policy frameworks. Hence, the need to put such frameworks in place, globally and nationally, to ensure meeting the increased investment demands of the future. Actions at the national level will require international support. This note advances the case for an international support programme for sustainable investment facilitation. As it explains, potentially all investments are sustainable, but the appropriate policy frameworks need definition, often in novel ways and increasingly in partnership with multiple stakeholders, domestic and foreign. Facilitating investment for future needs, therefore, is not a matter of promotion-as-usual, but a process of discovery and diffusion of new approaches and applications, a process that needs nurturing and support by the international community. Ways in which such backing can be provided to an international support programme for sustainable investment facilitation are discussed in detail, including making use of the World Trade Organization- (WTO) led Aid-for-Trade Initiative and the recently adopted WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement. The issues mentioned for possible inclusion in the support programme, as well as the options outlined on how such a programme could be put in place, are illustrative. The key premise is the importance—and urgency—of creating more favourable conditions for sustainable FDI flows to meet the investment needs of the future. As governments and the private sector increasingly share this view, they will hopefully muster the political will and find the appropriate venue to put an international support programme for sustainable investment facilitation in place.

Four studies [2, 3, 7, and 11] and a comment [1] on the demand
for fertilizer have appeared in this Review: All fit similar demand
specifications to aggregate data for roughly the same time period.
Surprisingly, each presents distinctly different results. Together, the
studies provide 28 estimates of the price elasticity of fertilizer
demand of which only seven are significant and even these range from -
1.21 to 0.46.1 The studies are split evenly on the policy issue of price
subsidization. The implications of these results are difficult to
assess. If little consensus is possible among researchers on empirical
estimates from the same data, the policy implications of the estimates
can be seriously discounted. Whether this is a necessary or extreme
assessment is the principal question of interest posed by the current
state of research on the demand for fertilizer. The aim of this paper is
to review the past research with the intention to assess the conflicting
estimates. We begin with a brief statement of the underlying
methodology; we then critically review each past study; and, finally, we
conclude with an over-all assessment of past research on the demand for
fertilizer.